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.)
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.)