Using a noun is, by default, reification. Or, at the very least, should be presumed so in the absence of some statement along the lines of “of course when I’m asking you to agree that people have qualia, I am not asking you to commit yourself to there being any such things as qualia”.
I’ve already said that I’m using “qualia” in an ontologically non committal way.
I note from your 2016 comment that you use the word noncommittally yourself.
“Qualia are what happens in our brains (or our immaterial souls, or wherever we have experiences) in response to external stimulation, or similar things that arise in other ways (e.g., in dreams).”
Qualia without reification seem to me to amount to “people have experiences”.
As I have explained, equating qualia and experiences doesn’t sufficiently emphasise the subjective aspects.
“Experience” can be used in contexts like “experience a sunset” where the thing experienced is entirely objective, or contexts like “experience existential despair” ,where it’s a subjective feeling. Only the second kind of use overlaps with “qualia”. Hence, “qualia” is often briefly defined as “subjective experience”.
Note that “experience” is just as much of a noun as “quale”, so it has just as much of reification issue.
None.
I am still trying to avoid needless reification,
Then dont reify. The reification issue exists only in your imagination.
I understand that it doesn’t seem that way to you, but I don’t understand why; I don’t yet understand just what you mean by “qualia”,
How do you know it’s different from what you mean? You were comfortable using the word in 2016.
This conversation started when I used a series of examples to define “qualia”, which you objected to as not being a real definition.
“It’s easy to give examples of things we think of as qualia. I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition of “qualia”.′
But when I asked you to define “matter”...you started off with a listof examples!
“First, purely handwavily and to give some informal idea of the boundaries, here are some things that I would call “matter” and some possibly-similar things that I would not. Matter: electrons, neutrons, bricks, stars, air, people, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a particular bunch of particular people). Not matter: photons, electric fields, empty space (to whatever extent such a thing exists), the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a thing whose detailed composition changes over time), the god believed in by Christians (should he exist), minds. Doubtful: black holes; the gods believed in by the ancient Greeks (should they exist).”
The only thing I’m doing that is different is going for a minimal and common sense approach, rather than a technical definition on the lines of “that which is ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable. Hence why the list of examples: it’s hard to deny that ones pains feel like something, even when one can quibble about incorrigibility or whatever.
and the one thing you’ve said that seems to be an attempt to explain why you want something that goes beyond “people have experiences” in the direction you’re calling “qualia”—the business about perception being a complex multi-stage process involving filtering and processing and whatnot—didn’t help me, for the reasons I’ve already given.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition, not a complete theory. Again, you shouldn’t be rejecting evidence because you don’t like it’s theoretical implications.
Splendid! I believe, like Alice, that people have experience. I am not a naïve realist.
Naive realism is not the denial of experience: it’s treating experience as objective.
At least, I think I am not a naïve realist. But—I’m sorry if this seems to be becoming a theme—I don’t really understand exactly what you mean by “naïve realist”
You can look up definitions, just as you can for “qualia”.
so maybe I’m wrong in thinking I’m not one. At any rate, I agree with what you said in apparent criticism of naïve realism, namely that when we perceive things it happens by means of a complicated process in which lots of things happen along the way.)
Which have an objective aspect -- things happen differently in the brains of different perceivers—and a subjective aspect—things seem different to different observers. Again, the subjective aspect is what’s relevant.
It occurs to me that maybe you’re taking “things” in “people experience things” to be e.g. sunsets, and “people experience things” to mean something like “a straightforward X-experiences-Y relation holds between people and sunsets”, which might explain why you are accusing me of naïve realism. That isn’t what I mean; the difficulty I am having here is that the language we have available for talking about this stuff is full of implicit reifications
No, it just seems to you that way.
they [sc. qualia] are supposed to be subjectively experienced ways of perceiving
Well, for sure I agree that perceiving happens, and that how that feels to us is subjective (because how anything feels to us is subjective, because that’s what “subjective” means).
No, it doesn’t mean anything so vacuous. If two people perform mental arithmetic , that is not subjective because maths is objective...they get the same answer, or one of them is wrong. “Subjective” doesn’t just mean that individual apprehensions vary, it means there is no right or wrong about the variation Some people like the way marmite tastes to them, others don’t. Neither is right or wrong, but the marmite is always the exact same substance.
Does that mean that I agree with what you mean when you say “we have qualia”, or not?
Well, you seem to be having trouble understanding what “subjective” means.
Yup, I used the term “qualia” in 2016 (in response to someone else making an argument that used the term). I don’t always pick every possible fight :-).
(In that case, turchin was making another specific argument and used the word “qualia” in passing. I disagreed with the other specific argument and argued against that. The specific word “qualia” was a side issue at most. Here, the specific point at issue is whether everyone needs to agree that “we have qualia”.)
You asked for a definition of “matter” and I (1) gave a list of examples and counterexamples and near-the-boundary examples, (2) prefaced with an explicit note that this was preliminary handwaving, (3) followed by an attempt at a precise definition distinguishing matter from not-matter. You haven’t done any of that for “qualia”, just given a list of examples, and that (not the fact that you did give a list of examples) is what I was complaining about. “It’s easy to give examples … I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition”.
Your accusations of wilful ignorance and/or laziness
Yes, I could look up definitions of “naïve realism” or of “qualia”. As it happens, I have. They don’t tell me what you mean by those terms, and definitions of them do not always agree with one another. Which is why I keep asking you what you mean by terms you are using, and get frustrated when you seem reluctant to tell me.
For instance, here we read that “the naïve realist claims that, when we successfully see a tomato, that tomato is literally a constituent of that experience, such that an experience of that fundamental kind could not have occurred in the absence of that object”. Here we read that “naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased”. In a comment of yours elsewhere in this thread you say “People generally and incorrectly assume that colours are objective properties (hence the consternation caused, amongst some, by the dress illusion). That’s called naive realism, and it’s scientifically wrong.”
(I remark in passing that you also said that the difference between two people who agree that people experience things, one of whom says that we have qualia and one of whom doesn’t, is that the latter has to be a naïve realist; if you are in fact claiming that “we have qualia” means something that is straightforwardly implied by “colours are not objective properties of the objects whose colours they are” then, yay, it turns out that I believe that we have qualia and we can stop arguing. But I’m pretty sure this will not in fact be enough.)
These three things are not entirely unlike one another, but no two of them are the same. Your comment is offering an example rather than a definition, but it is not in fact an example of the first definition and I’m doubtful about its being an example of the second.
Or I could look up “qualia” in, say, the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, whose entry for that subject begins as follows—my annotations in square brackets.
The terms quale and qualia (pl.) are most commonly used [“most commonly”, so plainly what is about to follow is acknowledged not to be a definition that covers everyone’s use of the terms—gjm] to characterize the qualitative, experiential, or felt properties of mental states. [“most commonly used to characterize” is quite a long way from defining anything—gjm] Some philosophers take qualia to be essential features of all conscious mental states; others only of sensations and perceptions. [Again, not everyone uses the word the same way. -- gjm]
Here we have clear acknowledgement that the term is used differently by different people, and (I think deliberately) something that falls short of an actual clear definition.
Or I could go to an ordinary dictionary, say the superlative Oxford English Dictionary, the relevant part of whose definition reads: “a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person”. Which seems to presuppose (at least one version of) “naïve realism”: these qualities or properties are presumably of things in the external world and this definition seems at risk of importing the objects themselves into our qualia.
(But: people have experiences; often those experiences are “of” qualities or properties of objects in the world around them; if you don’t consider that to be acknowledging that “people have qualia”, what do you think is missing other than a specific shibboleth-phrasing?)
Actual discussion of the issues
I’m not sure whether “that which is ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable” is a (presumably very partial) description of what you mean when you talk about qualia, rather than just a random list of adjectives. If it is, then it’s a nice illustration of why I am reluctant to say (as I think you want me to) “yes, sure, I agree that there are qualia”. I strongly suspect that what most people who talk about “qualia” mean when they use that word goes way beyond the specific handwavy examples they offer, and I don’t want to be thought (by them or by others) to be endorsing any of the other stuff until we’ve talked about that other stuff explicitly. I agree with you that people experience things; I do not think it’s clear that they have experiences, or equivalence-classes-of-experiences, or whatever, that are ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable. Maybe they do. I’m not saying they definitely don’t. Just that those further claims are substantial claims, and that I think they are the sort of thing that “qualia” commonly means even to people who say “oh, no, all I mean by qualia is that stuff that happens when you look at a red thing”, and that part of the difference between “I agree that people experience things” and I agree that people have qualia” is that the latter is liable to give the impression that I endorse those substantial claims, and that if you want my assent to those claims then we actually need to discuss them.
Saying that you’re going for a minimal and common-sense approach is all very well, but in practice people are not that great at using words that have connotations in ways that abandon those connotations. This is also why I don’t think an atheist should play along if a certain kind of theist says “well, let’s just take ‘God’ as a sort of shorthand for humanity’s highest and best aspirations”, and I don’t think a creationist should play along if a biologist says “look, all ‘evolution’ means is change of allele frequencies in populations”.
You distinguish (I think this is the nearest you get to answering my question about what exactly you mean by qualia) between two kinds of things we might say about experience: “objective” (things happen differently in the brains of different people) and “subjective” (things seem different to different people) and say it’s the subjective side you’re concerned with. I am not actually convinced that “things seem different to different people” is a very meaningful proposition—that seems to presuppose some way of comparing experiences across people, and while obviously it’s easy to say that my experience of looking at a green thing is not the same as your experience of being struck gently on the head with a golf club I don’t really know what it would mean to say that my experience of looking at a green thing is or isn’t the same as your experience of looking at a green thing, and I strongly suspect that there is no answer.
Still, for sure people experience things and we can e.g. ask someone what they feel like. Does that mean that I agree that “people have qualia”? If not, what do you think is missing other than a specific shibboleth-phrasing?
I’ve already said that I’m using “qualia” in an ontologically non committal way.
I note from your 2016 comment that you use the word noncommittally yourself.
“Qualia are what happens in our brains (or our immaterial souls, or wherever we have experiences) in response to external stimulation, or similar things that arise in other ways (e.g., in dreams).”
As I have explained, equating qualia and experiences doesn’t sufficiently emphasise the subjective aspects.
“Experience” can be used in contexts like “experience a sunset” where the thing experienced is entirely objective, or contexts like “experience existential despair” ,where it’s a subjective feeling. Only the second kind of use overlaps with “qualia”. Hence, “qualia” is often briefly defined as “subjective experience”.
Note that “experience” is just as much of a noun as “quale”, so it has just as much of reification issue.
None.
Then dont reify. The reification issue exists only in your imagination.
How do you know it’s different from what you mean? You were comfortable using the word in 2016. This conversation started when I used a series of examples to define “qualia”, which you objected to as not being a real definition.
“It’s easy to give examples of things we think of as qualia. I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition of “qualia”.′
But when I asked you to define “matter”...you started off with a listof examples!
“First, purely handwavily and to give some informal idea of the boundaries, here are some things that I would call “matter” and some possibly-similar things that I would not. Matter: electrons, neutrons, bricks, stars, air, people, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a particular bunch of particular people). Not matter: photons, electric fields, empty space (to whatever extent such a thing exists), the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a thing whose detailed composition changes over time), the god believed in by Christians (should he exist), minds. Doubtful: black holes; the gods believed in by the ancient Greeks (should they exist).”
The only thing I’m doing that is different is going for a minimal and common sense approach, rather than a technical definition on the lines of “that which is ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable. Hence why the list of examples: it’s hard to deny that ones pains feel like something, even when one can quibble about incorrigibility or whatever.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition, not a complete theory. Again, you shouldn’t be rejecting evidence because you don’t like it’s theoretical implications.
Naive realism is not the denial of experience: it’s treating experience as objective.
You can look up definitions, just as you can for “qualia”.
Which have an objective aspect -- things happen differently in the brains of different perceivers—and a subjective aspect—things seem different to different observers. Again, the subjective aspect is what’s relevant.
No, it just seems to you that way.
No, it doesn’t mean anything so vacuous. If two people perform mental arithmetic , that is not subjective because maths is objective...they get the same answer, or one of them is wrong. “Subjective” doesn’t just mean that individual apprehensions vary, it means there is no right or wrong about the variation Some people like the way marmite tastes to them, others don’t. Neither is right or wrong, but the marmite is always the exact same substance.
Well, you seem to be having trouble understanding what “subjective” means.
Your accusations of inconsistency
Yup, I used the term “qualia” in 2016 (in response to someone else making an argument that used the term). I don’t always pick every possible fight :-).
(In that case, turchin was making another specific argument and used the word “qualia” in passing. I disagreed with the other specific argument and argued against that. The specific word “qualia” was a side issue at most. Here, the specific point at issue is whether everyone needs to agree that “we have qualia”.)
You asked for a definition of “matter” and I (1) gave a list of examples and counterexamples and near-the-boundary examples, (2) prefaced with an explicit note that this was preliminary handwaving, (3) followed by an attempt at a precise definition distinguishing matter from not-matter. You haven’t done any of that for “qualia”, just given a list of examples, and that (not the fact that you did give a list of examples) is what I was complaining about. “It’s easy to give examples … I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition”.
Your accusations of wilful ignorance and/or laziness
Yes, I could look up definitions of “naïve realism” or of “qualia”. As it happens, I have. They don’t tell me what you mean by those terms, and definitions of them do not always agree with one another. Which is why I keep asking you what you mean by terms you are using, and get frustrated when you seem reluctant to tell me.
For instance, here we read that “the naïve realist claims that, when we successfully see a tomato, that tomato is literally a constituent of that experience, such that an experience of that fundamental kind could not have occurred in the absence of that object”. Here we read that “naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased”. In a comment of yours elsewhere in this thread you say “People generally and incorrectly assume that colours are objective properties (hence the consternation caused, amongst some, by the dress illusion). That’s called naive realism, and it’s scientifically wrong.”
(I remark in passing that you also said that the difference between two people who agree that people experience things, one of whom says that we have qualia and one of whom doesn’t, is that the latter has to be a naïve realist; if you are in fact claiming that “we have qualia” means something that is straightforwardly implied by “colours are not objective properties of the objects whose colours they are” then, yay, it turns out that I believe that we have qualia and we can stop arguing. But I’m pretty sure this will not in fact be enough.)
These three things are not entirely unlike one another, but no two of them are the same. Your comment is offering an example rather than a definition, but it is not in fact an example of the first definition and I’m doubtful about its being an example of the second.
Or I could look up “qualia” in, say, the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, whose entry for that subject begins as follows—my annotations in square brackets.
Here we have clear acknowledgement that the term is used differently by different people, and (I think deliberately) something that falls short of an actual clear definition.
Or I could go to an ordinary dictionary, say the superlative Oxford English Dictionary, the relevant part of whose definition reads: “a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person”. Which seems to presuppose (at least one version of) “naïve realism”: these qualities or properties are presumably of things in the external world and this definition seems at risk of importing the objects themselves into our qualia.
(But: people have experiences; often those experiences are “of” qualities or properties of objects in the world around them; if you don’t consider that to be acknowledging that “people have qualia”, what do you think is missing other than a specific shibboleth-phrasing?)
Actual discussion of the issues
I’m not sure whether “that which is ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable” is a (presumably very partial) description of what you mean when you talk about qualia, rather than just a random list of adjectives. If it is, then it’s a nice illustration of why I am reluctant to say (as I think you want me to) “yes, sure, I agree that there are qualia”. I strongly suspect that what most people who talk about “qualia” mean when they use that word goes way beyond the specific handwavy examples they offer, and I don’t want to be thought (by them or by others) to be endorsing any of the other stuff until we’ve talked about that other stuff explicitly. I agree with you that people experience things; I do not think it’s clear that they have experiences, or equivalence-classes-of-experiences, or whatever, that are ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable. Maybe they do. I’m not saying they definitely don’t. Just that those further claims are substantial claims, and that I think they are the sort of thing that “qualia” commonly means even to people who say “oh, no, all I mean by qualia is that stuff that happens when you look at a red thing”, and that part of the difference between “I agree that people experience things” and I agree that people have qualia” is that the latter is liable to give the impression that I endorse those substantial claims, and that if you want my assent to those claims then we actually need to discuss them.
Saying that you’re going for a minimal and common-sense approach is all very well, but in practice people are not that great at using words that have connotations in ways that abandon those connotations. This is also why I don’t think an atheist should play along if a certain kind of theist says “well, let’s just take ‘God’ as a sort of shorthand for humanity’s highest and best aspirations”, and I don’t think a creationist should play along if a biologist says “look, all ‘evolution’ means is change of allele frequencies in populations”.
You distinguish (I think this is the nearest you get to answering my question about what exactly you mean by qualia) between two kinds of things we might say about experience: “objective” (things happen differently in the brains of different people) and “subjective” (things seem different to different people) and say it’s the subjective side you’re concerned with. I am not actually convinced that “things seem different to different people” is a very meaningful proposition—that seems to presuppose some way of comparing experiences across people, and while obviously it’s easy to say that my experience of looking at a green thing is not the same as your experience of being struck gently on the head with a golf club I don’t really know what it would mean to say that my experience of looking at a green thing is or isn’t the same as your experience of looking at a green thing, and I strongly suspect that there is no answer.
Still, for sure people experience things and we can e.g. ask someone what they feel like. Does that mean that I agree that “people have qualia”? If not, what do you think is missing other than a specific shibboleth-phrasing?