A “quale” (singular form) is a brain state with the following properties: (a) like the abnormal activation of a colorblind synesthete’s color pathways in the occipital lobe, or like the first-ever feeling of sexual desire, it is in principle an objectively measurable event with detectable correlates in brain and body, and (b) it’s incommunicable.
Ahh, I was fully on board until the ‘incommunicable’. Not even sure what it means to say something’s uncommunicable by definition, except that it seems to introduce a brand new element of mystery. Is the ‘quale’, then, the element of the redness that doesn’t go across when I tell the other person about the letterbox? Sounds like putting a name on ‘the stuff we don’t fully understand yet’ - not helpful.
To be honest though, it’s not a particularly interesting question. We are physics. All we’re doing is shedding light on the particular oddities that arise from experiencing the brain from the inside—there are no deep insights here for me.
First, I disagree that qualia are inherently incommunicable, they just always have been.
As children, we learn what a tree is when someone points to a tree and says, “tree”. In this way, “what a tree is” is communicable.
Red is communicable too. However, what you experience when you experience redness has not been communicable, because it happens inside the brain. When someone says they observe something red, you can only assume that they have some experience analogous to your own experience.
But there’s no reason why we can’t observe the experience indirectly, eventually, as neuroscience develops. Hooked up to the right machine, it could indicate if I’m “experiencing redness”, either because I’m observing something red or imagining something red.
As children, we learn what a tree is when someone points to a tree and says, “tree”. In this way, “what a tree is” is communicable.
No. This means that the label “tree” is communicable, and that with any luck, native ability to separate natural kinds will fill in what the label is meant to contain. The definition of “tree” is also communicable, but it doesn’t involve pointing and isn’t closely wedded to the internal mental understanding of treeness. (My mental understanding of treeness is something like “plant that holds its leaves or needles a ways off the ground with a large stick of wood”. The definition involves exciting things like “apical dominance”.)
As a general strategy for considering a black box, great. As a vehicle for defining a mysterious ‘something’ you want to understand, potentially useful but dangerous. Labelling can make a job harder in cases where the ‘thing’ isn’t a thing at all but a result of your confusion. ‘Free will’ is a good example. It’s like naming an animal you plan to eat: makes it harder to kill.
Ahh, I was fully on board until the ‘incommunicable’. Not even sure what it means to say something’s uncommunicable by definition, except that it seems to introduce a brand new element of mystery. Is the ‘quale’, then, the element of the redness that doesn’t go across when I tell the other person about the letterbox? Sounds like putting a name on ‘the stuff we don’t fully understand yet’ - not helpful.
To be honest though, it’s not a particularly interesting question. We are physics. All we’re doing is shedding light on the particular oddities that arise from experiencing the brain from the inside—there are no deep insights here for me.
On the incommunicability of qualia:
First, I disagree that qualia are inherently incommunicable, they just always have been.
As children, we learn what a tree is when someone points to a tree and says, “tree”. In this way, “what a tree is” is communicable.
Red is communicable too. However, what you experience when you experience redness has not been communicable, because it happens inside the brain. When someone says they observe something red, you can only assume that they have some experience analogous to your own experience.
But there’s no reason why we can’t observe the experience indirectly, eventually, as neuroscience develops. Hooked up to the right machine, it could indicate if I’m “experiencing redness”, either because I’m observing something red or imagining something red.
No. This means that the label “tree” is communicable, and that with any luck, native ability to separate natural kinds will fill in what the label is meant to contain. The definition of “tree” is also communicable, but it doesn’t involve pointing and isn’t closely wedded to the internal mental understanding of treeness. (My mental understanding of treeness is something like “plant that holds its leaves or needles a ways off the ground with a large stick of wood”. The definition involves exciting things like “apical dominance”.)
Helpful. We need to put labels on Stuff We Don’t Understand yet so that we know what we are talking about when we try t understand it.
Peter,
As a general strategy for considering a black box, great. As a vehicle for defining a mysterious ‘something’ you want to understand, potentially useful but dangerous. Labelling can make a job harder in cases where the ‘thing’ isn’t a thing at all but a result of your confusion. ‘Free will’ is a good example. It’s like naming an animal you plan to eat: makes it harder to kill.
Ben
But we don’t know that qualia aren;t anything and we don’t know that about free will either.