It sounds like many of us agree: the experience of qualia is a real physical phenomenon. One that occurs in our brain somehow and is incommunicable because we don’t mutually observe what happens in each other’s brains. (Or even our own except in a limited way.)
So what’s the other point of view? Why do dualists want to insist that there is a non-physical aspect to qualia?
One such point of view is that currently all existing explanations for qualia—even the ones that try to be materialistic—are actually dualist. For instance, suppose we have a materialist-computational explanation of the brain, which explains how each neuron performs a certain type of computation, and how certain activity patterns in the neurons correspond to specific mental states. We find the model to be good and to accurately predict what people will do. So far, so good.
Yet here we run into a problem—we can now fully explain the brain and one’s doings in terms of the computational model, without needing to include actual qualia or subjective feelings in the explanation at all. The model works just as well regardless of whether or not we experience phenomenal consciousness, or are p-zombies. In trying to explain mental states, we have actually explained them away and created a theory that has no need for them.
Therefore, the argument goes, assuming we don’t deny the existence of qualia entirely, we must dualists. After all, we now have two models, one physical model which doesn’t include qualia, and one which assumes their existence but provides no physical explanation.
we can now fully explain the brain and one’s doings in terms of the computational model, without needing to include actual qualia or subjective feelings in the explanation at all.
No. We can now assume that we can fully explain the brain without qualia. If qualia are in fact reductionist, any full understanding of the brain will show how they exist and what causes them. “Assume we have a perfect model of how the brain works that doesn’t imply qualia” is no different from asking, “Assume that qualia are essentially dualist.” If you can actually generate this model, you have an overwhelming counterargument. But we can’t just suppose we have a perfect model of the brain without qualia, because whether such is actually possible is the exact question we are trying to answer.
To foresee a counterargument, this statement quoted (if I’m reading it correctly) also assumes that accurately predicting what people do is the same thing as fully explaining the brain. This creates the possibility that qualia exist, but if they are an effect of behaviour rather than a direct, independent cause, you can pretend they don’t by assumption. I think a full explanation of the brain needs to explain everything the brain actually does, rather than merely predicting behaviour. I’m not arguing that qualia have no causal effect; I think the word “cause” gets too muddied to break down at this point, given current science. Only that if they did not have a clear effect that is not explained by another proxy, you could exclude by definition and they could still very much exist.
If this is the dualist argument, then I wouldn’t find it compelling but just confused about what reductionism does.
In trying to explain mental states, we have actually explained them away and created a theory that has no need for them.
In the reductionist worldview, higher level things can be explained in terms of lower levels. For example, table salt can be explained in terms of the molecules sodium and chlorine, which in term can be explained in terms of electrons and protons, which in turn can be explained in terms of quarks, etc. Having explained table salt in terms of quarks doesn’t mean that its been explained away though; table salt exists just as well as it did before. (There is the argument that categories of things and our frameworks for things don’t really exist, but I don’t think that is what this debate is about.)
Instead, I’m pretty sure the dualists are asserting that there is some aspect of qualia that cannot be captured physically. So their idea is that the experience of qualia may occur via a physical process (neuron activity) but that it possesses some additional non-physical quality.
I suspect that our paradigm of what the world is like has changed so much that we can’t really relate to what the dualist/materialism debate used to be about. I hypothesize that in the past, we thought of “physical things” as the set of things we could touch and manipulate tactilely, but thoughts appeared to be a completely different category. We now all understand that thoughts occur in the brain and are neural activity. (For me, thoughts occur as sounds usually, so when I’m thinking I am activating different memories of sounds that I have, that are in turn associated with and handles for the ideas I’m thinking about. )
I think this view that thoughts = neural activity is pretty mainstream now … I wonder if dualism is really obsolete then?
Therefore, the argument goes, assuming we don’t deny the existence of qualia entirely, we must dualists. After all, we now have two models, one physical model which doesn’t include qualia, and one which assumes their existence but provides no physical explanation.
WTF? AFAICT that just means the whole notion of “qualia” is just begging the question, in precisely the same way that p-zombies and Chinese room arguments do.
The comments in this thread have been concerned with “the experience of redness” and whether this exists or not or is a real physical phenomenon or not. The answers appear to be straight-forward (yes, and yes) and I am left wondering what the dualism debate is all about. Below, I even argued that dualism may be obsolete.
Dualism is obsolete if dualism = {the experience of redness is a metaphysical phenomenon}. But then I remembered some ideas (15 years ago for me) from, “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”. Dualism is not really about whether neuronal activity can account for all subjective experience. (It can, and a dualist need not object to this.) It’s about whether redness exists.
Redness does exist, so redness is not the best example of qualia for understanding dualism. Consider the quale emphasized in Pirsig’s book, “quality”. We all agree quality exists in some sense (we’d all like to have quality posts on LW) but dualists want to think that “quality” exists in a real sense out in the territory. A quality book and a quality cheese have something in common; an essence of “quality” attached to them.
My two cents on the issue: I think that some qualia might exist in the territory, in some complicated way. But if they do, they’re physical and we just haven’t figured out how yet. I’ve babbled before about how I think qualia like “beauty” are concerned with the subjective experience of patterns, so these qualia are going to be more difficult to describe physically than, say, the experience of redness. We have no well-developed scientific theory for pattern recognition. We can write a code that recognizes a pattern (e.g., the letter “A”), but we don’t have any idea what a pattern is.
I think I’m beginning to remember...(from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which was 15 years ago, for me)...
Everyone, dualists and physical materialists alike, may agree that the experience of redness is a real physical phenomenon (as something that occurs in the brain). But isn’t the qualia/dualism debate about whether a red object possesses a property (quality) of “redness”?
Am I being down-voted because you don’t think objects can possess qualia (like redness or beauty, etc) or because you don’t agree this is what the debate between physical materialists and dualists is about? I think it’s important to remember what the debate is originally about, because the way it’s being framed here, it doesn’t seem like there would be one.
Not downvoting you, but the debate isn’t about that. It would be more about “even if you knew all the physical facts about the brain, how those things implement the various algorithms the brain implements, etc, would there still be some aspect of redness that ‘transcends’ that, an epiphenomenon that one needs ADDITIONAL facts to learn about from the outside?” (well, okay, I guess that isn’t exactly true of all flavors of dualism… Since the flavors of dualism that have the dual properties actually have physical effects and so on would be a bit different, but then arguably one could even rephrase that sort of belief so that it’s not even a form of dualism anymore, or becomes an epiphenomena style of dualism)
What you’ve described is consistent with what I find on the internet and what s being discussed on this thread. I just thought there might be more to it..
It sounds like many of us agree: the experience of qualia is a real physical phenomenon. One that occurs in our brain somehow and is incommunicable because we don’t mutually observe what happens in each other’s brains. (Or even our own except in a limited way.)
So what’s the other point of view? Why do dualists want to insist that there is a non-physical aspect to qualia?
One such point of view is that currently all existing explanations for qualia—even the ones that try to be materialistic—are actually dualist. For instance, suppose we have a materialist-computational explanation of the brain, which explains how each neuron performs a certain type of computation, and how certain activity patterns in the neurons correspond to specific mental states. We find the model to be good and to accurately predict what people will do. So far, so good.
Yet here we run into a problem—we can now fully explain the brain and one’s doings in terms of the computational model, without needing to include actual qualia or subjective feelings in the explanation at all. The model works just as well regardless of whether or not we experience phenomenal consciousness, or are p-zombies. In trying to explain mental states, we have actually explained them away and created a theory that has no need for them.
Therefore, the argument goes, assuming we don’t deny the existence of qualia entirely, we must dualists. After all, we now have two models, one physical model which doesn’t include qualia, and one which assumes their existence but provides no physical explanation.
No. We can now assume that we can fully explain the brain without qualia. If qualia are in fact reductionist, any full understanding of the brain will show how they exist and what causes them. “Assume we have a perfect model of how the brain works that doesn’t imply qualia” is no different from asking, “Assume that qualia are essentially dualist.” If you can actually generate this model, you have an overwhelming counterargument. But we can’t just suppose we have a perfect model of the brain without qualia, because whether such is actually possible is the exact question we are trying to answer.
To foresee a counterargument, this statement quoted (if I’m reading it correctly) also assumes that accurately predicting what people do is the same thing as fully explaining the brain. This creates the possibility that qualia exist, but if they are an effect of behaviour rather than a direct, independent cause, you can pretend they don’t by assumption. I think a full explanation of the brain needs to explain everything the brain actually does, rather than merely predicting behaviour. I’m not arguing that qualia have no causal effect; I think the word “cause” gets too muddied to break down at this point, given current science. Only that if they did not have a clear effect that is not explained by another proxy, you could exclude by definition and they could still very much exist.
If this is the dualist argument, then I wouldn’t find it compelling but just confused about what reductionism does.
In the reductionist worldview, higher level things can be explained in terms of lower levels. For example, table salt can be explained in terms of the molecules sodium and chlorine, which in term can be explained in terms of electrons and protons, which in turn can be explained in terms of quarks, etc. Having explained table salt in terms of quarks doesn’t mean that its been explained away though; table salt exists just as well as it did before. (There is the argument that categories of things and our frameworks for things don’t really exist, but I don’t think that is what this debate is about.)
Instead, I’m pretty sure the dualists are asserting that there is some aspect of qualia that cannot be captured physically. So their idea is that the experience of qualia may occur via a physical process (neuron activity) but that it possesses some additional non-physical quality.
I suspect that our paradigm of what the world is like has changed so much that we can’t really relate to what the dualist/materialism debate used to be about. I hypothesize that in the past, we thought of “physical things” as the set of things we could touch and manipulate tactilely, but thoughts appeared to be a completely different category. We now all understand that thoughts occur in the brain and are neural activity. (For me, thoughts occur as sounds usually, so when I’m thinking I am activating different memories of sounds that I have, that are in turn associated with and handles for the ideas I’m thinking about. )
I think this view that thoughts = neural activity is pretty mainstream now … I wonder if dualism is really obsolete then?
WTF? AFAICT that just means the whole notion of “qualia” is just begging the question, in precisely the same way that p-zombies and Chinese room arguments do.
You dont see colours or feel pains?
The comments in this thread have been concerned with “the experience of redness” and whether this exists or not or is a real physical phenomenon or not. The answers appear to be straight-forward (yes, and yes) and I am left wondering what the dualism debate is all about. Below, I even argued that dualism may be obsolete.
Dualism is obsolete if dualism = {the experience of redness is a metaphysical phenomenon}. But then I remembered some ideas (15 years ago for me) from, “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”. Dualism is not really about whether neuronal activity can account for all subjective experience. (It can, and a dualist need not object to this.) It’s about whether redness exists.
Redness does exist, so redness is not the best example of qualia for understanding dualism. Consider the quale emphasized in Pirsig’s book, “quality”. We all agree quality exists in some sense (we’d all like to have quality posts on LW) but dualists want to think that “quality” exists in a real sense out in the territory. A quality book and a quality cheese have something in common; an essence of “quality” attached to them.
My two cents on the issue: I think that some qualia might exist in the territory, in some complicated way. But if they do, they’re physical and we just haven’t figured out how yet. I’ve babbled before about how I think qualia like “beauty” are concerned with the subjective experience of patterns, so these qualia are going to be more difficult to describe physically than, say, the experience of redness. We have no well-developed scientific theory for pattern recognition. We can write a code that recognizes a pattern (e.g., the letter “A”), but we don’t have any idea what a pattern is.
I think I’m beginning to remember...(from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which was 15 years ago, for me)...
Everyone, dualists and physical materialists alike, may agree that the experience of redness is a real physical phenomenon (as something that occurs in the brain). But isn’t the qualia/dualism debate about whether a red object possesses a property (quality) of “redness”?
Am I being down-voted because you don’t think objects can possess qualia (like redness or beauty, etc) or because you don’t agree this is what the debate between physical materialists and dualists is about? I think it’s important to remember what the debate is originally about, because the way it’s being framed here, it doesn’t seem like there would be one.
Not downvoting you, but the debate isn’t about that. It would be more about “even if you knew all the physical facts about the brain, how those things implement the various algorithms the brain implements, etc, would there still be some aspect of redness that ‘transcends’ that, an epiphenomenon that one needs ADDITIONAL facts to learn about from the outside?” (well, okay, I guess that isn’t exactly true of all flavors of dualism… Since the flavors of dualism that have the dual properties actually have physical effects and so on would be a bit different, but then arguably one could even rephrase that sort of belief so that it’s not even a form of dualism anymore, or becomes an epiphenomena style of dualism)
What you’ve described is consistent with what I find on the internet and what s being discussed on this thread. I just thought there might be more to it..