No, I mean to argue that the existence of Newton’s equations is completely uncorrelated with whether Newton experienced any qualia
You misunderstood my argument. I wasn’t talking about qualia when I talked about Newton, I was talking about gravity, another phenomenon. Newton was affected by gravity—this was highly correlated with the fact he talked about gravity. We talk about qualia—this is therefore evidence in favour of us being affected by qualia.
How do they determine that humans “actually experience” qualia, rather than humans simulating the results of experience of qualia as a result of evolution?
What would be the evolutionary benefit of simulating the results of experience of qualia, in a world where nobody experiences qualia for real? That’s like an alien parrot simulating the voice of a human in a planet where there exist no humans. Highly unlikely to be stumbled upon coincidentally by evolution.
The Occam’s Razor result that “they act in a manner consistent with having qualia, therefore they probably experience qualia, therefore they are probably conscious” is immediately displaced by the Occam’s Razor result that “they act in a manner consistent with being conscious, therefore they probably are conscious”. The qualia aren’t necessary, and therefore drop out of the axiomization of a theory of consciousness.
What do you mean by “conscious”? Self-aware? Not sleeping or knocked out? These seem different and more complex constructs than qualia, who have the benefit of current seeming irreducability at some level (I might be able to reduce individidual color qualia to separate qualia of red/green/blue and brightness, but not further).
What makes qualia problematic—the only thing that makes it problematic—is that it’s tied up with the notion of subjectivity.
Subjective facts are not ‘objective’. Any attempt to define qualia objectively, as something a scientist could detect by careful study of your behaviour and/or neurophysiology, will give you a property X such that Chalmers’ hard question remains “and why does having property X feel like this from the inside?”
I think it’s helpful to consider the analogy (perhaps it’s more than an analogy) between subjectivity and indexicality. Obviously science is not going to explain why the universe views itself through my eyes, or why the year is 2011. It’s only by ‘borrowing’ the existence of something called ‘you’, who is ‘here’, that indexical statements can have truth values. I think that similarly, you need to ‘borrow’ the fact that red looks like this in order for red to look like this. The statements that you make in between ‘borrowing’ subjectivity and ‘paying it back’ simply do not belong to science—they are not “objectively true or false”.
Of course the question of who or what does the ‘borrowing’ is Deeply Mysterious—in fact it’s something that even in principle we can have no knowledge of, because it’s not something that happens within the universe. (Gee, this is getting dangerously theological. I guess I’m confused about something...)
(On this view, whatever kind of fact it is that ‘rabbits have colour qualia’, it cannot be a fact with an evolutionary explanation. It’s not really a fact at all, except from the perspective of a rabbit. And there isn’t even such a thing as ‘the perspective of a rabbit’ except from the perspective of a rabbit.)
You misunderstood my argument. I wasn’t talking about qualia when I talked about Newton, I was talking about gravity, another phenomenon. Newton was affected by gravity—this was highly correlated with the fact he talked about gravity. We talk about qualia—this is therefore evidence in favour of us being affected by qualia.
What would be the evolutionary benefit of simulating the results of experience of qualia, in a world where nobody experiences qualia for real? That’s like an alien parrot simulating the voice of a human in a planet where there exist no humans. Highly unlikely to be stumbled upon coincidentally by evolution.
What do you mean by “conscious”? Self-aware? Not sleeping or knocked out? These seem different and more complex constructs than qualia, who have the benefit of current seeming irreducability at some level (I might be able to reduce individidual color qualia to separate qualia of red/green/blue and brightness, but not further).
What makes qualia problematic—the only thing that makes it problematic—is that it’s tied up with the notion of subjectivity.
Subjective facts are not ‘objective’. Any attempt to define qualia objectively, as something a scientist could detect by careful study of your behaviour and/or neurophysiology, will give you a property X such that Chalmers’ hard question remains “and why does having property X feel like this from the inside?”
I think it’s helpful to consider the analogy (perhaps it’s more than an analogy) between subjectivity and indexicality. Obviously science is not going to explain why the universe views itself through my eyes, or why the year is 2011. It’s only by ‘borrowing’ the existence of something called ‘you’, who is ‘here’, that indexical statements can have truth values. I think that similarly, you need to ‘borrow’ the fact that red looks like this in order for red to look like this. The statements that you make in between ‘borrowing’ subjectivity and ‘paying it back’ simply do not belong to science—they are not “objectively true or false”.
Of course the question of who or what does the ‘borrowing’ is Deeply Mysterious—in fact it’s something that even in principle we can have no knowledge of, because it’s not something that happens within the universe. (Gee, this is getting dangerously theological. I guess I’m confused about something...)
(On this view, whatever kind of fact it is that ‘rabbits have colour qualia’, it cannot be a fact with an evolutionary explanation. It’s not really a fact at all, except from the perspective of a rabbit. And there isn’t even such a thing as ‘the perspective of a rabbit’ except from the perspective of a rabbit.)