Ok, I read your article as well as your comment, and found them very confusing. More on this in a minute.
As for arguing about qualia verbally, I hold qualia to be both entirely indefinable...
How is that different from saying, “I found qualia to be a meaningless concept” ? I may as well say, “I think that human consciousness can best be explained by asdfgh, where asdfgh is an undefinable concept”. That’s not much of an explanation. In addition, this makes it impossible to discuss qualia at all (with anyone other than yourself, that is), which once again hints at a kind of solipsism.
...and something that the vast majority of humans apprehend directly and believe very strongly to exist.
This is weak evidence at best. The vast majority of humans apprehend all kinds of stuff directly (or so they believe), including gods, demons, honest politicians, etc. At least some of these things have a very low probability of existing, so how are qualia any different ? In addition, regardless of what the vast majority of people believe, I personally disagree with this “consensus regarding the existence of this indefinable thing”, so you’ll need to convince me some other way other than stating the consensus.
Note that I agree with the statement, “humans appear to act as though they believe that they experience things, just as I do”—a statement which we may reduce to something like, “humans experience things” (with the usual understanding that there’s some non-zero probability of this being false). I just don’t see why we need a special name for these experiences, and why we have to treat them any differently from anything else that humans do (or that rocks do, for that matter).
Which brings me back to your article (and comment). In it, you describe qualia as being indefinable. You then proceed to discuss them at great length, which means that you must have some sort of a definition in mind, or else your article would be meaningless (or perhaps it would be meaningless to everyone other than yourself, which isn’t much better). Your central argument appears to rest on the assumption that qualia are irreducible, but I still don’t understand why you’d assume that in the first place.
In short, qualia appear to be a “mysterious answer to a mysterious question”: they are impossible to define, irreducible, and totally inexplicable—and thus impossible to study or even discuss. They are a kind of elan vital, and therefore not terribly useful as a concept.
Ok, I read your article as well as your comment, and found them very confusing. More on this in a minute.
How is that different from saying, “I found qualia to be a meaningless concept” ? I may as well say, “I think that human consciousness can best be explained by asdfgh, where asdfgh is an undefinable concept”. That’s not much of an explanation. In addition, this makes it impossible to discuss qualia at all (with anyone other than yourself, that is), which once again hints at a kind of solipsism.
This is weak evidence at best. The vast majority of humans apprehend all kinds of stuff directly (or so they believe), including gods, demons, honest politicians, etc. At least some of these things have a very low probability of existing, so how are qualia any different ? In addition, regardless of what the vast majority of people believe, I personally disagree with this “consensus regarding the existence of this indefinable thing”, so you’ll need to convince me some other way other than stating the consensus.
Note that I agree with the statement, “humans appear to act as though they believe that they experience things, just as I do”—a statement which we may reduce to something like, “humans experience things” (with the usual understanding that there’s some non-zero probability of this being false). I just don’t see why we need a special name for these experiences, and why we have to treat them any differently from anything else that humans do (or that rocks do, for that matter).
Which brings me back to your article (and comment). In it, you describe qualia as being indefinable. You then proceed to discuss them at great length, which means that you must have some sort of a definition in mind, or else your article would be meaningless (or perhaps it would be meaningless to everyone other than yourself, which isn’t much better). Your central argument appears to rest on the assumption that qualia are irreducible, but I still don’t understand why you’d assume that in the first place.
In short, qualia appear to be a “mysterious answer to a mysterious question”: they are impossible to define, irreducible, and totally inexplicable—and thus impossible to study or even discuss. They are a kind of elan vital, and therefore not terribly useful as a concept.