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”.
Satisfactory for whom? I use examples because they are sufficient to get the point across to people who aren’t too biased. Someone night have some genuine reason to need a more rigourous definition...but they might not, they might instead be making a selective demand for rigour, out of bias. Where are the calls for rigourous definitions of “matter”, “computation”, etc?
I can give lots of examples of people, but there’s scope for endless debate about exactly what counts as a person and what doesn’t. (Newly born children? 16-week-old foetuses? Aliens or AIs, should any exist now or in the future, with abilities comparable to ours but very different brains and minds? Beings like gods, angels, demons, etc., should any exist, with abilities in some ways comparable to ours but not made out of matter at all?)
If my purpose is to demonstrate that people exist, all I need to do is point to a few uncontentious examples of people...I don’t need to solve every edge case.
And “endless debate” needs to be avoided. People who make selective demands for rigour don’t to change their minds, and endless debate is a great way of achieving that
(E.g., if you and I look at the same red object and both have normal colour vision, do we have “the same” quale of seeing-a-red-thing or not
Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist, or lack a reductive explanation?
(I’m ignoring those parts of your reply that seem to have no purpose other than implicitly accusing me of arguing in bad faith. I have seldom known anything useful to come out of engaging with that sort of thing. These discussions would be more enjoyable, for me at least, if you weren’t so relentlessly adversarial about them.)
Satisfactory for whom? For me, obviously :-).
There is at least one eminent philosopher, namely Daniel Dennett, who has made something of a speciality of this area and who flatly denies that qualia “exist”, and who doesn’t appear to me to be either a dimwit or a crackpot. That is already sufficient reason for me to want to be careful about saying “duh, of course qualia exist”.
Of course if all you mean by that is that people have experience, then I agree with that, but if that’s all you mean then what need is there to talk about “qualia” at all? And if it’s not all you mean, then before agreeing I need to know what else is being implicitly brought in.
Now, in the present instance it’s Jemist who introduced “qualia” to the discussion (so, in particular, you are under no obligation to be able to tell me precisely what Jemist means by the term). And Jemist talks e.g. about experience being “turned into qualia”, and I don’t see how your examples help to understand what that means, or what distinction between “experience” and “qualia” Jemist is trying to draw.
The general idea seems to be something like this: people and chickens alike have some sort of stream or sea of experiences, and humans (and maybe chickens or maybe not) “turn these experiences into qualia”, and having not merely experiences but qualia is what justifies calling an entity “conscious” and/or seeing that entity as of moral significance.
I’m sympathetic to the general idea that there’s something that’s kinda-the-same about chickens’ sensory input and ours, and something that’s maybe different about the early stages of processing that sensory input, and that that has something to do with possible moral differences between us and chickens. But I don’t see any reason to think that filling in that picture in detail, if we knew how to do it, would look much like identifying things (“qualia”) that we “have” and chickens maybe “don’t have”. And one way to resist the so-far-unjustified slide from “there may be something importantly different between how we process our sensory input and how chickens process theirs” to “maybe we have qualia and chickens don’t” is to remain mindful of the fact that we don’t have—or, at least, I don’t have and I haven’t seen much evidence that others have—a very clear idea of exactly what “qualia” are supposed to be, and of how “having qualia” is supposed to go beyond “having experience”.
Here’s another example of how the leap to “having qualia” may bring in unacknowledged baggage. You say “Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist” (so far so good, I guess) “or lack a reductive explanation?”. Where did that come from? It certainly doesn’t seem to be something that follows from the fact that people experience things. If you’re somehow inferring that from “having qualia” then I think there’s got to be something in your concept of “qualia” that is very much not an obvious consequence of having experience, and I don’t want to just nod wisely when someone says “of course we have qualia” because it may turn out that part of what they mean by “qualia” involves some sort of in-principle irreducibility, and I want to see some actual argument before agreeing to that!
(“Lack a reductive explanation” is ambiguous between “we don’t have one yet” and “we are probably never going to have one” and “we are definitely never going to have one” and “it is in principle impossible for us ever to have one”. I don’t like this because it’s too easy to slide between those meanings without explicitly noting that that’s happening and offering any justification. I don’t know whether I have guessed correctly at what combination of those things you meant; if you think I haven’t, feel free to clarify.)
There is at least one eminent philosopher, namely Daniel Dennett, who has made something of a speciality of this area and who flatly denies that qualia “exist”, and who doesn’t appear to me to be either a dimwit or a crackpot. That is already sufficient reason for me to want to be careful about saying “duh, of course qualia exist”.
By that standard, there is no satisfactory definition of anything, since there are philosophers who doubt their own existence, your existence, the existence of an external world, the existence of matter and so on.
But a definition is not supposed to count as a proof all by itself. A definition of X should allow two people who are having a conversation about X to understand each other. A definition that is satisfactory for that purpose does not need to constitute a proof or settle every possible edge case.
The general idea seems to be something like this: people and chickens alike have some sort of stream or sea of experiences, and humans (and maybe chickens or maybe not) “turn these experiences into qualia”, and having not merely experiences but qualia is what justifies calling an entity “conscious” and/or seeing that entity as of moral significance.
I’m not sure why it’s my job to explain what Jemist means.
If you want a hint as to what an “experience” could be other than a quale, then look at what qualia sceptics think an experience is...apparently some sort of disposition to answer “yes I see red” when asked what they see.
If you are anything like most people, you probably have no compunction against destroying machinery, or the virtual characters in a game. And you probably don’t care too much if the characters say “aaagh!” or the machinery reports damage. So it’s as if you think there is something about living organisms that goes beyond damage and reports of damage … something like pain, maybe?
and having not merely experiences but qualia is what justifies calling an entity “conscious” and/or seeing that entity as of moral significance.
More than one thing could make an entity morally significant, and there are arguments for the existence of qualia other than moral significance.
But I don’t see any reason to think that filling in that picture in detail, if we knew how to do it, would look much like identifying things (“qualia”) that we “have” and chickens maybe “don’t have”.
Well, if we fill in the picture by adding in more fine grained structure and function, we are probably not going to find the qualia for the same reason that we haven’t already. Nonetheless, we have good reason to think that our qualia are there, and rather less good reason to believe that the from-the-outside approach is literally everything, so that qualia have to be disregarded if they cannot be located on that particular map.
and I don’t want to just nod wisely when someone says “of course we have qualia” because it may turn out that part of what they mean by “qualia” involves some sort of in-principle irreducibility, and I want to see some actual argument before agreeing to that!
I just quoted a definition of qualia which says nothing about in-principle irreducibility. Do agree with that defintion?
Is it reasonable to to reject X, for which there is evidence, on the basis that someone might be smuggling in Y? Have you noticed that creationists do this—they don’t accept random mutation and natural selection because they are afraid they might end up agreeing that there is no god?
Here’s another example of how the leap to “having qualia” may bring in unacknowledged baggage. You say “Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist” (so far so good, I guess) “or lack a reductive explanation?”. Where did that come from?
“Lack a reductive explanation” is a separate claim, not an implication of “have qualia”.
“Lack a reductive explanation” is ambiguous between “we don’t have one yet” and “we are probably never going to have one” and “we are definitely never going to have one” and “it is in principle impossible for us ever to have one”.
The obvious interpretation is “we don’t have one yet”. Moreover , it is also true, so charitableness recommends it as the interpretation.
it’s too easy to slide between those meanings without explicitly noting that that’s happening and offering any justification.
I don’t do that.
What I would like to be able to do is be able to build up a step-by-step argument. But that can only work with a reader who is willing to judge each step on its own merits.
By that standard, there is no satisfactory definition of anything
I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. (My fault, no doubt, for not being clearer and more explicit.) I was not arguing that because some eminent philosophers deny the “existence” of “qualia” it follows that the term has no satisfactory definition. (I do say that I’ve not seen a really satisfactory definition, but that’s a separate claim.) But it seemed that you were saying that the “existence” of “qualia” is just obvious and I was explaining one reason why I can’t agree.
(Why all the scare-quotes? Because if I just say “it is not obvious that qualia exist” then someone may take “qualia exist” to mean the same thing as “people experience things” and think that I am saying it isn’t obvious that people experience things. That is not what I’m doubtful about. I am doubtful about the wisdom of reifying that experience into things-called-qualia, and I am doubtful about some of the philosophical baggage that “qualia” sometimes seem to be carrying.)
A definition of X should allow two people who are having a conversation about X to understand one another.
Yup. But (unless I’ve misunderstood you) you’re wanting to define “qualia” by pointing to some examples of people having experience, and that is definitely not sufficient for me to understand exactly what you mean by “qualia” and by “having qualia”.
I’m not sure why it’s my job to explain what Jemist means.
It isn’t, and in the comment to which you were replying I explicitly said that it isn’t. I’m not sure why you think I think it’s your job to explain what Jemist means, and if it’s because I said something that implies that or looks like it did then I hope you will accept my apologies, because I didn’t intend to do any such thing.
If you want a hint [...] something like pain, maybe?
It seems to me that the comment to which you were replying already sketched exactly the argument you’re making, and then went on to explain why I don’t find that argument sufficient reason to say that we “have qualia”, even though (of course!) I agree that it indicates that there is something going on that has something to do with what people are pointing at when they talk about qualia.
(Perhaps the following analogy will help. Suppose you were instead arguing that people “have souls”. I say I’m not convinced that that’s true, and it’s not entirely clear just what “souls” are meant to be. You say: of course there are souls, they’re what make us us, they’re what enable us to have moral values and appreciate beauty. I say: of course I agree that we are who we are and that we have moral values and appreciate beauty, but I don’t see any good reason to think that those things are best explained by postulating things that we call “souls”, and some of the specific things people say about “souls”—e.g., that they are inherently immortal and persist after our brains decompose—seem probably false. I don’t know how you feel about souls, but if like me you are skeptical about them then it might be helpful to know that what you’re actually saying about “qualia” seems very much like my imaginary-you is saying about “souls”.)
I just quoted a definition of qualia which says nothing about in-principle irreducibility. Do you agree with that definition?
I think you’re referring here to what you quoted from Wikipedia several comments back. (If not, my apologies, and please let me know what you meant instead.) I’m not sure what you mean by “agree with”. I generally avoid using the term “qualia”, in part because I don’t think it’s always clear what people mean by it, so I can’t “agree with” any definition of it in the sense of using that definition myself. If you mean do I think it’s a definition that a reasonable person might use, then I guess kinda—except that there isn’t actually a definition in what you quoted. You could extract from it something like “qualia are perceived sensations” (from the list of examples) or “qualia are qualitative characters of sensation” (from something later in what you quoted), but those two seem to me like they’re different things. If I have a headache, is the quale (1) my “perceived sensation” of pain in my head, or (2) the “qualitative character” of that sensation?
I’ve no problem with any of this if it’s taken informally. I might talk about “having a headache”, and you might say that in that case I “have a quale of headachiness”, and in some sense we’re referring to the same thing, and this is all fine. But “quale” is meant to be a technical philosophical term, to be deployed with precision, and for that purpose I worry that it assumes too much. I believe in headaches, in the sense that of course sometimes people’s heads hurt. I am not so sure that I want an ontology that actually literally has things called headaches in it; it might be more accurate to treat having-a-headache as an intransitive verb, for instance. “Qualia” might b e like “headaches” in this sense.
I agree, for the avoidance of doubt, that “qualia are perceived sensations” and “qualia are qualitative characters of sensation” do not imply that they are in principle irreducible.
Is it reasonable to to reject X, for which there is evidence, on the basis that someone might be smuggling in Y?
Nope. But it might be reasonable to be cautious about X and want it very precisely defined, to make sure such smuggling doesn’t happen. If you’re talking about evolution with a fundamentalist, then you should be very careful not to slide between “evolution means change of allele frequencies in a population” and “evolution means mutation and natural selection” and “evolution means mutation and natural selection, all happening through purely natural processes”. (And I think sometimes people do slide between those, and if they do then the creationists are right to complain.)
What I would like to be able to do is to build up a step-by-step argument. But that can only work with a reader who is willing to judge each step on its own merits.
Fine with me, with of course the proviso that sometimes it’s perfectly reasonable to say things like “oh, I hadn’t realised you meant that or “hmm, that inference seems valid, so let me reconsider something I agreed to before—yeah, on reflection I shouldn’t have been so quick to agree, and I now think it’s probably wrong”.
I agree that people experience things. You are apparently very keen that I should say not only that but also that people have qualia. Before agreeing with that, I want to know precisely what you mean by “having qualia” and how it goes beyond “experiencing things”. The thing you quoted from Wikipedia doesn’t really help me understand that. Could you be more explicit about what it is that you think I should be more confident of than I am? It surely isn’t just that you specifically want me to say the particular words “we have qualia”.
But it seemed that you were saying that the “existence” of “qualia” is just obvious and I was explaining one reason why I can’t agree.
But you weren’t disagreeing with anything actually in the definition. You have been saying that the definition doesn’t make it explicit enough that qualia aren’t irreducible, immaterial, etc. Merely failing to mention reducibility, etc, one way or the other isn’t enough for you.
I am doubtful about some of the philosophical baggage that “qualia” sometimes seem to be carrying.
“Seem” to whom? From my perspective, you keep insisting that I have smuggled in non-materialistic assumptions … but I don’t even see how that would work.
If I offer you one definition, then swap it for another, isn’t that a blatant cheat on my part? And if it is , why worry?
Or if I argue that qualia are immaterial based on other evidence and theories and whatever. … so that the conclusion isn’t begged by definition alone … that’s legitimate argumentation.
Suppose you were instead arguing that people “have souls”. I say I’m not convinced that that’s true, and it’s not entirely clear just what “souls” are meant to be. You say: of course there are souls, they’re what make us us, they’re what enable us to have moral values and appreciate beauty. I say: of course I agree that we are who we are and that we have moral values and appreciate beauty, but I don’t see any good reason to think that those things are best explained by postulating things that we call “souls”, and some of the specific things people say about “souls”—e.g., that they are inherently immortal and persist after our brains decompose—seem probably false. I don’t know how you feel about souls, but if like me you are skeptical about them then it might be helpful to know that what you’re actually saying about “qualia” seems very much like my imaginary-you is saying about “souls”.
You are asking me to tell you what qualia are ontologically. But thats not a definition , that’s a theory. Theories explain evidence. Evidence has to be spoken about separately from theories. When I define qualia, I am defining something that needs to be explained, not offering an explanation. I want the definition to be ontologically non committal so that the process of theory building can procede without bias. But neutrality isn’t enough for you: you are committed to a theory, and you won’t consider something as relevant evidence unless you can be guaranteed that it won’t disrupt the theory.
I agree that people experience things. You are apparently very keen that I should say not only that but also that people have qualia
“Experience things” doesn’t convey enough information, because it can too easily be taken in a naive realist sense.
The point isn’t that you are seeing a tomato, it is that you are seeing it in a certain way.
According to science , our senses are not an open window on the world that portrays it exactly as it is. Instead , the sensory centres of our brains are connected the outside world by a complex causal chain, during which information, already limited by our sensory modalities, is filtered and reprocessed in various ways.
So scientific accounts of perception require there to be a way-we-perceive-things...quite possibly , an individual one. Which might as well be called “qualia” as anything else.
[I] have been saying that the definition doesn’t make it explicit enough that qualia aren’t irreducible, immaterial, etc.
I have been saying that the things you offer by way of defining “qualia” don’t make it clear enough what the term means. And that I don’t want to affirm the existence of something whose meaning is not clear to me, one reason (not the only one) being that that opens the way for bait-and-switch moves where I say “sure, X exists” and then the person I’m talking to says “aha, so you agree that Y” where Y is something that now turns out to be part of what they meant by X that hadn’t been made explicit before.
That doesn’t mean that I need a definition that says “these things aren’t irreducible or immaterial”. It means I need a definition clear enough that I can tell whether irreducibility, or immateriality, or a dozen other things, are part of what the term means.
So far, you’ve (1) pointed to a few things and said “look, these are qualia” (which obviously doesn’t enable me to tell what is and isn’t part of what you mean by the term), and (2) cited a definition in a Wikipedia article which, as I explained above, seems actually to be at least two different definitions that say different things. And, in your latest comment, (3) said some things about the processes of perception that don’t help me understand what you mean by “qualia” for reasons I’ll get to below.
It’s very likely that what you mean by “qualia” doesn’t in fact presuppose immateriality or irreducibility or whatever! But I can’t tell because you have so far not chosen to tell me, in terms I am able to understand with confidence, just what you mean by the term.
you keep insisting that I have smuggled in non-materialistic assumptions
Nope. I keep insisting that I can’t tell what assumptions, if any, you might have smuggled in or might smuggle in later, because I can’t tell exactly what you mean by the term. Which is problematic for all sorts of reasons other than possible assumption-smuggling.
If I offer you one definition, then swap it for another, isn’t that a blatant cheat on my part?
Yup, and as you say that would be fine because then I could just say “look, you cheated and here’s how”. But what you’re actually doing is offering me no definitions concrete enough to tell what exactly you mean. And, again, the problem with that isn’t just that if you were inclined to be dishonest you could smuggle things in. It’s that you’re getting cross at me for not saying “yes, I agree that there are qualia” even though I still don’t know exactly what you would take that affirmation to mean.
(I remark that that really is the full extent of my denial. I haven’t said “there are no qualia” or “your alleged notion of qualia is incoherent” or anything of the sort. I have merely explained why I am not positively affirming that there are qualia, and from this you make extravagant deductions about how I am inflexibly attached to some theory—you don’t say what theory—which might possibly be troubled by the implications of qualia—you don’t say what implications. I think it is entirely possible that at some point in this discussion I will say “OK, I believe that by having qualia you mean X, and I completely agree that in that sense we have qualia”. To the best of my knowledge I am not committed to any theory that would make that impossible.)
I agree that there is nothing illegitimate about arguing from actual evidence on which we agree that qualia are immaterial, or whatever. That’s fine. But obviously we first need to figure out what evidence we agree on. You would like “qualia exist” to be one piece of evidence. Before I agree with that I need to know exactly what you mean by it. I am trying to find out, so far with less success than I’d like.
In the next bit of what you write it seems to me that you’re doing two things that I don’t see how to square with one another, while accusing me of bad faith for allegedly doing something that it looks to me as if you are doing. It would be nice to clear this up. So, first of all, the two things I don’t see how to square with one another.
On the one hand, you insist that when you talk about “qualia” you’re doing so in a way that doesn’t have any sort of theory attached, that merely amounts to presenting “something that needs to be explained”, something ontologically non-committal.
On the other hand, you aren’t content with e.g. “people experience things”; you want something on top of that that’s denoted by the word “qualia”.
Now, it seems to me that what uncontroversially needs to be explained is simply that people experience things. (Which, at the risk of rererepeating myself, I agree that we do.) Maybe what-you-mean-by-qualia is another thing that uncontroversially needs to be explained, but (1) I still don’t know exactly what you mean by “qualia” and (2) it looks to me as if the term goes beyond what uncontroversially needs to be explained.
One thing that going from “people experience things” to “people have qualia” adds, I think, is a reification of ways-of-experiencing, an implicit assertion something along the lines of “all those times people experience red, there is some single common thing shared between them”. (Not necessarily exactly that, of course. But something along those lines.) But that’s all those things you say you aren’t doing: it introduces a theory to the effect that different experiences share the same quale, it introduces an ontological commitment to there being actual things for the term “qualia” to attach to, and in doing these things it assumes something that (it seems to me) you don’t get to demand an explanation for, to treat as part of what needs to be explained, until you’ve given reason to think it’s real. Which I don’t think you’ve done yet.
(You have pointed to examples of people experiencing things. I agree that they are examples of people experiencing things. Before agreeing that they are, beyond that, examples of “qualia”, I need to understand exactly what that means to you that goes beyond “people experiencing things”, and so far I do not.)
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by “qualia” and what it actually commits us to. That’s very possible. Because I keep trying to get you to be more explicit about it and you keep not being explicit about it.
So I’ll ask again. Please, please, could you have another go at being explicit and clear about what exactly you mean by “qualia” and what you consider someone is and isn’t committed to by saying that “qualia exist”? If Alice believes that there are qualia and Bob believes that people experience things but there aren’t qualia, can you describe what should be different between Alice’s world and Bob’s without needing the word “qualia”? In Bob-world, do you expect people not to say things like “what a beautifully red rose” or “that book cover is the exact same shade of blue as my lover’s eyes”? Or do you expect people to say and do the same things but not really experience those things they’re talking about? Or something else? (I think probably something else. But I would like a better understanding of what else.)
Finally, you offer (unless I misunderstand?) an argument for why “people experience things” isn’t enough and we need “people have qualia” instead. But I don’t understand the argument.
I agree (of course) that our perception of the external world is a complicated affair, with lots of processing and filtering along the way. But I have no inkling how you get from there to the assertion that in addition to saying “people experience things” we need a reification of ways-of-perceiving-things. (It seems almost as if you’re equivocating between “ways of” meaning “processes by which” and “ways of” meaning something like “varieties of”; the fact that our perception is complicated and indirect might[1] give reason to believe in processes-by-which-perception-happens, but that’s not the sort of “ways of perceiving” that qualia are supposed to be at all, surely?)
[1] Though I’m not 100% convinced those need reifying either.
(We haven’t been discussing matter. I haven’t been insisting that you affirm the existence of matter. There aren’t any circumstances parallel to those involving “qualia”.)
But, since you ask, here’s the best I can do on short notice.
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).
“Matter” is a kind of stuff rather than a kind of thing; that is, in general if some things are “matter” then so is what we get by considering them together, and so are whatever parts they might have. (This might need revision if e.g. it turns out that things I consider “matter” and things I don’t are somehow merely different arrangements of some more fundamental stuff.)
Conditional on the universe working roughly the way I currently model it as doing (or, more precisely, allow other people better at these things to model it as doing), I think the actually-existing things I call “matter” are coexistent with “things made from excitations of fermionic quantum fields”. If the way the universe works is very different from how I think it does, then depending on the details I might want (1) to continue to say that matter is excitations of fermionic quantum fields, and to declare that contrary to appearances some things we’ve all been thinking of as matter are something else, or (2) to continue to say that the things we naïvely think of as matter should be called matter, even though some of them are made of other things than excitations of fermionic quantum fields, or (3) to abandon the notion of “matter” as ill-adapted for the way the world actually turns out to be.
If faced with someone denying, or reluctant to positively affirm, the existence of “matter”, I would be interested to know whether they mean that some or all concrete things I regard as “matter” are fictions or simulations or imaginations or something, or whether they agree that those things are real but disagree somehow about their fundamental nature (in which case it would be nice to know what), or whether as in our case they don’t find my usage of the term clear enough to endorse or reject.
(In our case, I think the experiencing you point at when you refer to “qualia” is real; I do not know whether you are intending to point at something more noun-like, nor whether the things in question are real; I don’t think the term “qualia” generally presupposes any detailed view about the underlying nature of whatever-it-points-at but would want a clearer understanding of how my interlocutor is using the term before being confident of that in a specific case.)
But I have no inkling how you get from there to the assertion that in addition to saying “people experience things” we need a reification of ways-of-perceiving-things.
I didn’t say anything explicit about reification. And it’s not an implication, either. Merely using a noun is not reification. “Action”, “event”, “state” “property”, “process” and “nothingness” are all nouns, yet none of them refer to things.
a reification of ways-of-experiencing, an implicit assertion something along the lines of “all those times people experience red, there is some single common thing shared between them”.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition , not a complete theory. Again, your grounds for saying that the definition is inadequate is that it isn’t answering every question you might have—and that it might have implications you don’t. If the way qualia actually work, ontologically—a subject about which I have said nothing so far—involves the literal sharing of a universal between identical subjective sensations, then you should believe it, because it is true, and not object to it dogmatically. Definitions are supposed to have implications. It’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications … and it’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications you don’t like, because you are supposed to decide theories on the basis.
Notice that in raising the issue, you are already using a good-enough definition of qualia. To object to qualia on the basis that they involve a Platonic shared universal, rather than some other solution to the problem of universals, you have to be able to talk about them, even if without using the word “qualia”. But of course, you always have to have pre-theoretic definitions in order to build a theory.
It’s very likely that what you mean by “qualia” doesn’t in fact presuppose immateriality or irreducibility or whatever! But I can’t tell because you have so far not chosen to tell me, in terms I am able to understand with confidence, just what you mean by the term.
Whether qualia are immaterial or irreducible or whatever depends on all the evidence—on a theory. It should not be begged by a single definition. Question begging definitions are bad, m’kay.
I agree that there is nothing illegitimate about arguing from actual evidence on which we agree that qualia are immaterial
But we would first need to agree that qualia exist at all. That’s how theory building works ..step by step. Nobody could come to any conclusion about anything if they had to start with completely clear and exhaustive definitions. Ordinary definitions are not as exhaustive as encyclopedia articles, for instance. You are engaging in a selective demand for rigour.
If Alice believes that there are qualia and Bob believes that people experience things but there aren’t qualia, can you describe what should be different between Alice’s world and Bob’s without needing the word “qualia”?
I’ve already answered that: if Bob differs from Alice , he differs in being a naive realist.
give reason to believe in processes-by-which-perception-happens, but that’s not the sort of “ways of perceiving” that qualia are supposed to be at all, surely?)
No, they are supposed to be subjectively experienced ways of perceiving, as I have already said several times. I wasn’t putting forward ways-of-perceiving as an exhaustive definition, I was pointing out the inadequacy of your definition.
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”.
Qualia without reification seem to me to amount to “people have experiences”. 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”, 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.
I wish you would offer a definition. You are repeatedly declining to do so, and then complaining that I object to your definition (which you haven’t given) or have another definition of my own (which I don’t) or that I am immovably committed to some theory (you don’t say what) that conflicts (you don’t say how) with something (you don’t say what) about qualia. Maybe you’re right—for instance, I might be committed to some theory without even recognizing the fact, because it seems so obvious to me. But if so, the only way you’re going to correct my error (I assume, at least for the sake of argument, that if I am wrong you do want to help me get less wrong, rather than merely to gloat at how wrong I am) is by showing me what I’m doing wrong, which you seem very unwilling to do. You just want to keep saying that I’m wrong, which so far as I can see accomplishes nothing.
Definitions are supposed to have implications. It’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications
That’s OK, because I’m not doing that, as I already tried to make clear. My problem is that I can’t tell what implications your definition has. Because you won’t tell me what it is.
in raising the issue, you are already using a good-enough definition of qualia
It seems to me that in order for a definition I’m using to be good enough, a minimum requirement should be for me to have a reasonable idea what it is. In the present case, this requirement is not met.
Further, what I require to raise the issue is precisely the thing you are now saying is not part of what you mean by “qualia”, namely the understanding that insisting on the term “qualia” rather than merely saying that people experience things amounts to reifying whatever-it-is-”qualia”-is-about. You seem to be saying simultaneously (1) that speaking of “qualia” doesn’t commit one to reifying anything, and (2) that if I say “I don’t like the term ‘qualia’ because it seems like it may be reifying things that might be better not reified” I thereby demonstrate that I understand what you mean by “qualia” well enough. How can those possibly both be true?
Question begging definitions are bad, m’kay.
I’m glad you agree with me about that. But you seem to be … offended? … that I might be concerned at the possibility that you might be trying to make a question-begging definition. Do you consider that the way you’ve been conducting your side of this discussion demonstrates your bona fides so clearly that no reasonable person in my position could be concerned that there might be such an issue?
if Bob differs from Alice, he differs in being a naïve realist.
Splendid! I believe, like Alice, that people have experience. I am not a naïve realist. Therefore, apparently, I believe in qualia in whatever sense you have in mind, even though I don’t yet understand what that sense is. Problem solved!
(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”, 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.)
I wasn’t putting forward ways-of-perceiving as an exhaustive definition, I was pointing out the inadequacy of your definition.
Not possible, since I wasn’t proposing to define anything. I assume you mean the inadequacy of my proposal of “people experience things” as the uncontroversially-true-and-needing-explaining part of what you might possibly mean by “people have qualia”. But, for the reasons I already gave and which you seem to have simply ignored without comment, I do not understand how what you said about naïve realism and the complexity of perception does anything to explain how “people have qualia” is better than “people experience things”.
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 and the like. Perhaps just “people experience” would be better. What is uncontroversial is not that people directly-interact-perceptually-with sunsets, nor that people have actual-reified-experience-types-called qualia, but that experiencing-events (-processes? all these terms are still too commital if taken literally) of the kind we are describing when we say things like “I saw a lovely sunset” happen. All the details of just what objects are involved are, I think, up for grabs and one of the things that makes me uneasy about “people have qualia” is that it strongly suggests particular answers to some of those questions that—because “question-begging definitions are bad, m’kay”—would be better left un-suggested.
You are engaging in a selective demand for rigor.
Only in the following sense: you seem offended that I will not declare that people have qualia. (Again, that’s the full extent of what I’m doing, so if something else is what’s offending you then you might consider saying explicitly what it is.) So I want to know what you mean when you say that people have qualia, and how that differs from weaker propositions like “people experience things”.
So, sure, it’s selective: I am selectively seeking clarification of the things you’re talking about where I don’t understand what you mean. If you find that problematic, then I would like some help understanding why.
It is possible that something you say at the end of your comment above is intended to be an answer to my often-repeated question. (Of course you claim that you have “already said [it] several times”, and of course that is not true, but never mind.)
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). Does that mean that I agree with what you mean when you say “we have qualia”, or not?
(That isn’t meant to be some sort of gotcha-question. I genuinely don’t know what the answer is. I am still trying to avoid needless reification, and I suspect that for reasons I am not currently able to anticipate you will find it unsatisfactory that I don’t use the exact phrase “have qualia”; it seems to me that what I said above precisely captures what you get by taking “we have qualia” + “qualia are subjectively experienced ways of perceiving” and trying to change that as little as possible while avoiding the (apparent?) reification I’m worried about; but maybe I’m wrong. And a part of my brain still harbours the uncharitable suspicion that despite your assurances above the reification is actually the point and you will not accept any wording that doesn’t carry the ontological commitment you say you aren’t trying to beg the question of. Again, this is an uncharitable suspicion and I am aware that it is; but I am having trouble figuring out better explanations for why you’re so concerned that I specifically embrace “qualia”, in so many words.)
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?
Satisfactory for whom? I use examples because they are sufficient to get the point across to people who aren’t too biased.
It’s not satisfactory to me. Does this mean I am “too biased?” That seems like a potentially unjustified presumption to make, and not a fair way to have a discussion with others who might disagree with you.
Anyone could offer a definition then state in advance that anyone who doesn’t accept it is “too biased” then, when someone says they don’t accept it say “see, I told you so,” even if an unbiased person would judge the definition to be inadequate.
In any case, I’m not making a selective demand for rigor. Even if I were, I’d probably just shrug and raise the challenge, anyway. I don’t know what people talking about qualia are talking about. But I am also pretty confident they don’t know what they are talking about. I suspect qualia is a pseudoconcept invented by philosophers, and that to the extent that we adequately characterize it, it faces pretty serious challenges.
Where are the calls for rigourous definitions of “matter”, “computation”, etc?
The main person I discuss illusionism and consciousness with specializes in philosophy of computation and philosophy of science, with an emphasis on broad metaphysical questions. We both endorse illusionism, and have for years, so there’s little to say there. Instead, regularly we mostly discuss their views on computation and metaphysics, and I’m often asked to read their papers on these topics. So, in the past few years, I have read significantly more work on what computers and matter are than I have on consciousness.
Thus, ironically, I have more discussions about rigorous attempts to define computers and features of the external world than I do about consciousness. So if you think that, in denying qualia, I am somehow failing to apply a similar degree of rigor as I do to other ideas, you could not have picked worse examples. It is not the case that I’m especially tough on the notion of qualia.
Satisfactory for whom? I use examples because they are sufficient to get the point across to people who aren’t too biased. Someone night have some genuine reason to need a more rigourous definition...but they might not, they might instead be making a selective demand for rigour, out of bias. Where are the calls for rigourous definitions of “matter”, “computation”, etc?
If my purpose is to demonstrate that people exist, all I need to do is point to a few uncontentious examples of people...I don’t need to solve every edge case.
And “endless debate” needs to be avoided. People who make selective demands for rigour don’t to change their minds, and endless debate is a great way of achieving that
Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist, or lack a reductive explanation?
(I’m ignoring those parts of your reply that seem to have no purpose other than implicitly accusing me of arguing in bad faith. I have seldom known anything useful to come out of engaging with that sort of thing. These discussions would be more enjoyable, for me at least, if you weren’t so relentlessly adversarial about them.)
Satisfactory for whom? For me, obviously :-).
There is at least one eminent philosopher, namely Daniel Dennett, who has made something of a speciality of this area and who flatly denies that qualia “exist”, and who doesn’t appear to me to be either a dimwit or a crackpot. That is already sufficient reason for me to want to be careful about saying “duh, of course qualia exist”.
Of course if all you mean by that is that people have experience, then I agree with that, but if that’s all you mean then what need is there to talk about “qualia” at all? And if it’s not all you mean, then before agreeing I need to know what else is being implicitly brought in.
Now, in the present instance it’s Jemist who introduced “qualia” to the discussion (so, in particular, you are under no obligation to be able to tell me precisely what Jemist means by the term). And Jemist talks e.g. about experience being “turned into qualia”, and I don’t see how your examples help to understand what that means, or what distinction between “experience” and “qualia” Jemist is trying to draw.
The general idea seems to be something like this: people and chickens alike have some sort of stream or sea of experiences, and humans (and maybe chickens or maybe not) “turn these experiences into qualia”, and having not merely experiences but qualia is what justifies calling an entity “conscious” and/or seeing that entity as of moral significance.
I’m sympathetic to the general idea that there’s something that’s kinda-the-same about chickens’ sensory input and ours, and something that’s maybe different about the early stages of processing that sensory input, and that that has something to do with possible moral differences between us and chickens. But I don’t see any reason to think that filling in that picture in detail, if we knew how to do it, would look much like identifying things (“qualia”) that we “have” and chickens maybe “don’t have”. And one way to resist the so-far-unjustified slide from “there may be something importantly different between how we process our sensory input and how chickens process theirs” to “maybe we have qualia and chickens don’t” is to remain mindful of the fact that we don’t have—or, at least, I don’t have and I haven’t seen much evidence that others have—a very clear idea of exactly what “qualia” are supposed to be, and of how “having qualia” is supposed to go beyond “having experience”.
Here’s another example of how the leap to “having qualia” may bring in unacknowledged baggage. You say “Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist” (so far so good, I guess) “or lack a reductive explanation?”. Where did that come from? It certainly doesn’t seem to be something that follows from the fact that people experience things. If you’re somehow inferring that from “having qualia” then I think there’s got to be something in your concept of “qualia” that is very much not an obvious consequence of having experience, and I don’t want to just nod wisely when someone says “of course we have qualia” because it may turn out that part of what they mean by “qualia” involves some sort of in-principle irreducibility, and I want to see some actual argument before agreeing to that!
(“Lack a reductive explanation” is ambiguous between “we don’t have one yet” and “we are probably never going to have one” and “we are definitely never going to have one” and “it is in principle impossible for us ever to have one”. I don’t like this because it’s too easy to slide between those meanings without explicitly noting that that’s happening and offering any justification. I don’t know whether I have guessed correctly at what combination of those things you meant; if you think I haven’t, feel free to clarify.)
By that standard, there is no satisfactory definition of anything, since there are philosophers who doubt their own existence, your existence, the existence of an external world, the existence of matter and so on.
But a definition is not supposed to count as a proof all by itself. A definition of X should allow two people who are having a conversation about X to understand each other. A definition that is satisfactory for that purpose does not need to constitute a proof or settle every possible edge case.
I’m not sure why it’s my job to explain what Jemist means.
If you want a hint as to what an “experience” could be other than a quale, then look at what qualia sceptics think an experience is...apparently some sort of disposition to answer “yes I see red” when asked what they see.
If you are anything like most people, you probably have no compunction against destroying machinery, or the virtual characters in a game. And you probably don’t care too much if the characters say “aaagh!” or the machinery reports damage. So it’s as if you think there is something about living organisms that goes beyond damage and reports of damage … something like pain, maybe?
More than one thing could make an entity morally significant, and there are arguments for the existence of qualia other than moral significance.
Well, if we fill in the picture by adding in more fine grained structure and function, we are probably not going to find the qualia for the same reason that we haven’t already. Nonetheless, we have good reason to think that our qualia are there, and rather less good reason to believe that the from-the-outside approach is literally everything, so that qualia have to be disregarded if they cannot be located on that particular map.
I just quoted a definition of qualia which says nothing about in-principle irreducibility. Do agree with that defintion?
Is it reasonable to to reject X, for which there is evidence, on the basis that someone might be smuggling in Y? Have you noticed that creationists do this—they don’t accept random mutation and natural selection because they are afraid they might end up agreeing that there is no god?
“Lack a reductive explanation” is a separate claim, not an implication of “have qualia”.
The obvious interpretation is “we don’t have one yet”. Moreover , it is also true, so charitableness recommends it as the interpretation.
I don’t do that.
What I would like to be able to do is be able to build up a step-by-step argument. But that can only work with a reader who is willing to judge each step on its own merits.
I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. (My fault, no doubt, for not being clearer and more explicit.) I was not arguing that because some eminent philosophers deny the “existence” of “qualia” it follows that the term has no satisfactory definition. (I do say that I’ve not seen a really satisfactory definition, but that’s a separate claim.) But it seemed that you were saying that the “existence” of “qualia” is just obvious and I was explaining one reason why I can’t agree.
(Why all the scare-quotes? Because if I just say “it is not obvious that qualia exist” then someone may take “qualia exist” to mean the same thing as “people experience things” and think that I am saying it isn’t obvious that people experience things. That is not what I’m doubtful about. I am doubtful about the wisdom of reifying that experience into things-called-qualia, and I am doubtful about some of the philosophical baggage that “qualia” sometimes seem to be carrying.)
Yup. But (unless I’ve misunderstood you) you’re wanting to define “qualia” by pointing to some examples of people having experience, and that is definitely not sufficient for me to understand exactly what you mean by “qualia” and by “having qualia”.
It isn’t, and in the comment to which you were replying I explicitly said that it isn’t. I’m not sure why you think I think it’s your job to explain what Jemist means, and if it’s because I said something that implies that or looks like it did then I hope you will accept my apologies, because I didn’t intend to do any such thing.
It seems to me that the comment to which you were replying already sketched exactly the argument you’re making, and then went on to explain why I don’t find that argument sufficient reason to say that we “have qualia”, even though (of course!) I agree that it indicates that there is something going on that has something to do with what people are pointing at when they talk about qualia.
(Perhaps the following analogy will help. Suppose you were instead arguing that people “have souls”. I say I’m not convinced that that’s true, and it’s not entirely clear just what “souls” are meant to be. You say: of course there are souls, they’re what make us us, they’re what enable us to have moral values and appreciate beauty. I say: of course I agree that we are who we are and that we have moral values and appreciate beauty, but I don’t see any good reason to think that those things are best explained by postulating things that we call “souls”, and some of the specific things people say about “souls”—e.g., that they are inherently immortal and persist after our brains decompose—seem probably false. I don’t know how you feel about souls, but if like me you are skeptical about them then it might be helpful to know that what you’re actually saying about “qualia” seems very much like my imaginary-you is saying about “souls”.)
I think you’re referring here to what you quoted from Wikipedia several comments back. (If not, my apologies, and please let me know what you meant instead.) I’m not sure what you mean by “agree with”. I generally avoid using the term “qualia”, in part because I don’t think it’s always clear what people mean by it, so I can’t “agree with” any definition of it in the sense of using that definition myself. If you mean do I think it’s a definition that a reasonable person might use, then I guess kinda—except that there isn’t actually a definition in what you quoted. You could extract from it something like “qualia are perceived sensations” (from the list of examples) or “qualia are qualitative characters of sensation” (from something later in what you quoted), but those two seem to me like they’re different things. If I have a headache, is the quale (1) my “perceived sensation” of pain in my head, or (2) the “qualitative character” of that sensation?
I’ve no problem with any of this if it’s taken informally. I might talk about “having a headache”, and you might say that in that case I “have a quale of headachiness”, and in some sense we’re referring to the same thing, and this is all fine. But “quale” is meant to be a technical philosophical term, to be deployed with precision, and for that purpose I worry that it assumes too much. I believe in headaches, in the sense that of course sometimes people’s heads hurt. I am not so sure that I want an ontology that actually literally has things called headaches in it; it might be more accurate to treat having-a-headache as an intransitive verb, for instance. “Qualia” might b e like “headaches” in this sense.
I agree, for the avoidance of doubt, that “qualia are perceived sensations” and “qualia are qualitative characters of sensation” do not imply that they are in principle irreducible.
Nope. But it might be reasonable to be cautious about X and want it very precisely defined, to make sure such smuggling doesn’t happen. If you’re talking about evolution with a fundamentalist, then you should be very careful not to slide between “evolution means change of allele frequencies in a population” and “evolution means mutation and natural selection” and “evolution means mutation and natural selection, all happening through purely natural processes”. (And I think sometimes people do slide between those, and if they do then the creationists are right to complain.)
Fine with me, with of course the proviso that sometimes it’s perfectly reasonable to say things like “oh, I hadn’t realised you meant that or “hmm, that inference seems valid, so let me reconsider something I agreed to before—yeah, on reflection I shouldn’t have been so quick to agree, and I now think it’s probably wrong”.
I agree that people experience things. You are apparently very keen that I should say not only that but also that people have qualia. Before agreeing with that, I want to know precisely what you mean by “having qualia” and how it goes beyond “experiencing things”. The thing you quoted from Wikipedia doesn’t really help me understand that. Could you be more explicit about what it is that you think I should be more confident of than I am? It surely isn’t just that you specifically want me to say the particular words “we have qualia”.
But you weren’t disagreeing with anything actually in the definition. You have been saying that the definition doesn’t make it explicit enough that qualia aren’t irreducible, immaterial, etc. Merely failing to mention reducibility, etc, one way or the other isn’t enough for you.
“Seem” to whom? From my perspective, you keep insisting that I have smuggled in non-materialistic assumptions … but I don’t even see how that would work.
If I offer you one definition, then swap it for another, isn’t that a blatant cheat on my part? And if it is , why worry?
Or if I argue that qualia are immaterial based on other evidence and theories and whatever. … so that the conclusion isn’t begged by definition alone … that’s legitimate argumentation.
You are asking me to tell you what qualia are ontologically. But thats not a definition , that’s a theory. Theories explain evidence. Evidence has to be spoken about separately from theories. When I define qualia, I am defining something that needs to be explained, not offering an explanation. I want the definition to be ontologically non committal so that the process of theory building can procede without bias. But neutrality isn’t enough for you: you are committed to a theory, and you won’t consider something as relevant evidence unless you can be guaranteed that it won’t disrupt the theory.
“Experience things” doesn’t convey enough information, because it can too easily be taken in a naive realist sense.
The point isn’t that you are seeing a tomato, it is that you are seeing it in a certain way.
According to science , our senses are not an open window on the world that portrays it exactly as it is. Instead , the sensory centres of our brains are connected the outside world by a complex causal chain, during which information, already limited by our sensory modalities, is filtered and reprocessed in various ways.
So scientific accounts of perception require there to be a way-we-perceive-things...quite possibly , an individual one. Which might as well be called “qualia” as anything else.
It is simply not true that
I have been saying that the things you offer by way of defining “qualia” don’t make it clear enough what the term means. And that I don’t want to affirm the existence of something whose meaning is not clear to me, one reason (not the only one) being that that opens the way for bait-and-switch moves where I say “sure, X exists” and then the person I’m talking to says “aha, so you agree that Y” where Y is something that now turns out to be part of what they meant by X that hadn’t been made explicit before.
That doesn’t mean that I need a definition that says “these things aren’t irreducible or immaterial”. It means I need a definition clear enough that I can tell whether irreducibility, or immateriality, or a dozen other things, are part of what the term means.
So far, you’ve (1) pointed to a few things and said “look, these are qualia” (which obviously doesn’t enable me to tell what is and isn’t part of what you mean by the term), and (2) cited a definition in a Wikipedia article which, as I explained above, seems actually to be at least two different definitions that say different things. And, in your latest comment, (3) said some things about the processes of perception that don’t help me understand what you mean by “qualia” for reasons I’ll get to below.
It’s very likely that what you mean by “qualia” doesn’t in fact presuppose immateriality or irreducibility or whatever! But I can’t tell because you have so far not chosen to tell me, in terms I am able to understand with confidence, just what you mean by the term.
Nope. I keep insisting that I can’t tell what assumptions, if any, you might have smuggled in or might smuggle in later, because I can’t tell exactly what you mean by the term. Which is problematic for all sorts of reasons other than possible assumption-smuggling.
Yup, and as you say that would be fine because then I could just say “look, you cheated and here’s how”. But what you’re actually doing is offering me no definitions concrete enough to tell what exactly you mean. And, again, the problem with that isn’t just that if you were inclined to be dishonest you could smuggle things in. It’s that you’re getting cross at me for not saying “yes, I agree that there are qualia” even though I still don’t know exactly what you would take that affirmation to mean.
(I remark that that really is the full extent of my denial. I haven’t said “there are no qualia” or “your alleged notion of qualia is incoherent” or anything of the sort. I have merely explained why I am not positively affirming that there are qualia, and from this you make extravagant deductions about how I am inflexibly attached to some theory—you don’t say what theory—which might possibly be troubled by the implications of qualia—you don’t say what implications. I think it is entirely possible that at some point in this discussion I will say “OK, I believe that by having qualia you mean X, and I completely agree that in that sense we have qualia”. To the best of my knowledge I am not committed to any theory that would make that impossible.)
I agree that there is nothing illegitimate about arguing from actual evidence on which we agree that qualia are immaterial, or whatever. That’s fine. But obviously we first need to figure out what evidence we agree on. You would like “qualia exist” to be one piece of evidence. Before I agree with that I need to know exactly what you mean by it. I am trying to find out, so far with less success than I’d like.
In the next bit of what you write it seems to me that you’re doing two things that I don’t see how to square with one another, while accusing me of bad faith for allegedly doing something that it looks to me as if you are doing. It would be nice to clear this up. So, first of all, the two things I don’t see how to square with one another.
On the one hand, you insist that when you talk about “qualia” you’re doing so in a way that doesn’t have any sort of theory attached, that merely amounts to presenting “something that needs to be explained”, something ontologically non-committal.
On the other hand, you aren’t content with e.g. “people experience things”; you want something on top of that that’s denoted by the word “qualia”.
Now, it seems to me that what uncontroversially needs to be explained is simply that people experience things. (Which, at the risk of rererepeating myself, I agree that we do.) Maybe what-you-mean-by-qualia is another thing that uncontroversially needs to be explained, but (1) I still don’t know exactly what you mean by “qualia” and (2) it looks to me as if the term goes beyond what uncontroversially needs to be explained.
One thing that going from “people experience things” to “people have qualia” adds, I think, is a reification of ways-of-experiencing, an implicit assertion something along the lines of “all those times people experience red, there is some single common thing shared between them”. (Not necessarily exactly that, of course. But something along those lines.) But that’s all those things you say you aren’t doing: it introduces a theory to the effect that different experiences share the same quale, it introduces an ontological commitment to there being actual things for the term “qualia” to attach to, and in doing these things it assumes something that (it seems to me) you don’t get to demand an explanation for, to treat as part of what needs to be explained, until you’ve given reason to think it’s real. Which I don’t think you’ve done yet.
(You have pointed to examples of people experiencing things. I agree that they are examples of people experiencing things. Before agreeing that they are, beyond that, examples of “qualia”, I need to understand exactly what that means to you that goes beyond “people experiencing things”, and so far I do not.)
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by “qualia” and what it actually commits us to. That’s very possible. Because I keep trying to get you to be more explicit about it and you keep not being explicit about it.
So I’ll ask again. Please, please, could you have another go at being explicit and clear about what exactly you mean by “qualia” and what you consider someone is and isn’t committed to by saying that “qualia exist”? If Alice believes that there are qualia and Bob believes that people experience things but there aren’t qualia, can you describe what should be different between Alice’s world and Bob’s without needing the word “qualia”? In Bob-world, do you expect people not to say things like “what a beautifully red rose” or “that book cover is the exact same shade of blue as my lover’s eyes”? Or do you expect people to say and do the same things but not really experience those things they’re talking about? Or something else? (I think probably something else. But I would like a better understanding of what else.)
Finally, you offer (unless I misunderstand?) an argument for why “people experience things” isn’t enough and we need “people have qualia” instead. But I don’t understand the argument.
I agree (of course) that our perception of the external world is a complicated affair, with lots of processing and filtering along the way. But I have no inkling how you get from there to the assertion that in addition to saying “people experience things” we need a reification of ways-of-perceiving-things. (It seems almost as if you’re equivocating between “ways of” meaning “processes by which” and “ways of” meaning something like “varieties of”; the fact that our perception is complicated and indirect might[1] give reason to believe in processes-by-which-perception-happens, but that’s not the sort of “ways of perceiving” that qualia are supposed to be at all, surely?)
[1] Though I’m not 100% convinced those need reifying either.
Anyway,
Define “matter”.
Why?
(We haven’t been discussing matter. I haven’t been insisting that you affirm the existence of matter. There aren’t any circumstances parallel to those involving “qualia”.)
But, since you ask, here’s the best I can do on short notice.
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).
“Matter” is a kind of stuff rather than a kind of thing; that is, in general if some things are “matter” then so is what we get by considering them together, and so are whatever parts they might have. (This might need revision if e.g. it turns out that things I consider “matter” and things I don’t are somehow merely different arrangements of some more fundamental stuff.)
Conditional on the universe working roughly the way I currently model it as doing (or, more precisely, allow other people better at these things to model it as doing), I think the actually-existing things I call “matter” are coexistent with “things made from excitations of fermionic quantum fields”. If the way the universe works is very different from how I think it does, then depending on the details I might want (1) to continue to say that matter is excitations of fermionic quantum fields, and to declare that contrary to appearances some things we’ve all been thinking of as matter are something else, or (2) to continue to say that the things we naïvely think of as matter should be called matter, even though some of them are made of other things than excitations of fermionic quantum fields, or (3) to abandon the notion of “matter” as ill-adapted for the way the world actually turns out to be.
If faced with someone denying, or reluctant to positively affirm, the existence of “matter”, I would be interested to know whether they mean that some or all concrete things I regard as “matter” are fictions or simulations or imaginations or something, or whether they agree that those things are real but disagree somehow about their fundamental nature (in which case it would be nice to know what), or whether as in our case they don’t find my usage of the term clear enough to endorse or reject.
(In our case, I think the experiencing you point at when you refer to “qualia” is real; I do not know whether you are intending to point at something more noun-like, nor whether the things in question are real; I don’t think the term “qualia” generally presupposes any detailed view about the underlying nature of whatever-it-points-at but would want a clearer understanding of how my interlocutor is using the term before being confident of that in a specific case.)
I didn’t say anything explicit about reification. And it’s not an implication, either. Merely using a noun is not reification. “Action”, “event”, “state” “property”, “process” and “nothingness” are all nouns, yet none of them refer to things.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition , not a complete theory. Again, your grounds for saying that the definition is inadequate is that it isn’t answering every question you might have—and that it might have implications you don’t. If the way qualia actually work, ontologically—a subject about which I have said nothing so far—involves the literal sharing of a universal between identical subjective sensations, then you should believe it, because it is true, and not object to it dogmatically. Definitions are supposed to have implications. It’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications … and it’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications you don’t like, because you are supposed to decide theories on the basis.
Notice that in raising the issue, you are already using a good-enough definition of qualia. To object to qualia on the basis that they involve a Platonic shared universal, rather than some other solution to the problem of universals, you have to be able to talk about them, even if without using the word “qualia”. But of course, you always have to have pre-theoretic definitions in order to build a theory.
Whether qualia are immaterial or irreducible or whatever depends on all the evidence—on a theory. It should not be begged by a single definition. Question begging definitions are bad, m’kay.
But we would first need to agree that qualia exist at all. That’s how theory building works ..step by step. Nobody could come to any conclusion about anything if they had to start with completely clear and exhaustive definitions. Ordinary definitions are not as exhaustive as encyclopedia articles, for instance. You are engaging in a selective demand for rigour.
I’ve already answered that: if Bob differs from Alice , he differs in being a naive realist.
No, they are supposed to be subjectively experienced ways of perceiving, as I have already said several times. I wasn’t putting forward ways-of-perceiving as an exhaustive definition, I was pointing out the inadequacy of your definition.
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”.
Qualia without reification seem to me to amount to “people have experiences”. 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”, 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.
I wish you would offer a definition. You are repeatedly declining to do so, and then complaining that I object to your definition (which you haven’t given) or have another definition of my own (which I don’t) or that I am immovably committed to some theory (you don’t say what) that conflicts (you don’t say how) with something (you don’t say what) about qualia. Maybe you’re right—for instance, I might be committed to some theory without even recognizing the fact, because it seems so obvious to me. But if so, the only way you’re going to correct my error (I assume, at least for the sake of argument, that if I am wrong you do want to help me get less wrong, rather than merely to gloat at how wrong I am) is by showing me what I’m doing wrong, which you seem very unwilling to do. You just want to keep saying that I’m wrong, which so far as I can see accomplishes nothing.
That’s OK, because I’m not doing that, as I already tried to make clear. My problem is that I can’t tell what implications your definition has. Because you won’t tell me what it is.
It seems to me that in order for a definition I’m using to be good enough, a minimum requirement should be for me to have a reasonable idea what it is. In the present case, this requirement is not met.
Further, what I require to raise the issue is precisely the thing you are now saying is not part of what you mean by “qualia”, namely the understanding that insisting on the term “qualia” rather than merely saying that people experience things amounts to reifying whatever-it-is-”qualia”-is-about. You seem to be saying simultaneously (1) that speaking of “qualia” doesn’t commit one to reifying anything, and (2) that if I say “I don’t like the term ‘qualia’ because it seems like it may be reifying things that might be better not reified” I thereby demonstrate that I understand what you mean by “qualia” well enough. How can those possibly both be true?
I’m glad you agree with me about that. But you seem to be … offended? … that I might be concerned at the possibility that you might be trying to make a question-begging definition. Do you consider that the way you’ve been conducting your side of this discussion demonstrates your bona fides so clearly that no reasonable person in my position could be concerned that there might be such an issue?
Splendid! I believe, like Alice, that people have experience. I am not a naïve realist. Therefore, apparently, I believe in qualia in whatever sense you have in mind, even though I don’t yet understand what that sense is. Problem solved!
(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”, 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.)
Not possible, since I wasn’t proposing to define anything. I assume you mean the inadequacy of my proposal of “people experience things” as the uncontroversially-true-and-needing-explaining part of what you might possibly mean by “people have qualia”. But, for the reasons I already gave and which you seem to have simply ignored without comment, I do not understand how what you said about naïve realism and the complexity of perception does anything to explain how “people have qualia” is better than “people experience things”.
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 and the like. Perhaps just “people experience” would be better. What is uncontroversial is not that people directly-interact-perceptually-with sunsets, nor that people have actual-reified-experience-types-called qualia, but that experiencing-events (-processes? all these terms are still too commital if taken literally) of the kind we are describing when we say things like “I saw a lovely sunset” happen. All the details of just what objects are involved are, I think, up for grabs and one of the things that makes me uneasy about “people have qualia” is that it strongly suggests particular answers to some of those questions that—because “question-begging definitions are bad, m’kay”—would be better left un-suggested.
Only in the following sense: you seem offended that I will not declare that people have qualia. (Again, that’s the full extent of what I’m doing, so if something else is what’s offending you then you might consider saying explicitly what it is.) So I want to know what you mean when you say that people have qualia, and how that differs from weaker propositions like “people experience things”.
So, sure, it’s selective: I am selectively seeking clarification of the things you’re talking about where I don’t understand what you mean. If you find that problematic, then I would like some help understanding why.
It is possible that something you say at the end of your comment above is intended to be an answer to my often-repeated question. (Of course you claim that you have “already said [it] several times”, and of course that is not true, but never mind.)
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). Does that mean that I agree with what you mean when you say “we have qualia”, or not?
(That isn’t meant to be some sort of gotcha-question. I genuinely don’t know what the answer is. I am still trying to avoid needless reification, and I suspect that for reasons I am not currently able to anticipate you will find it unsatisfactory that I don’t use the exact phrase “have qualia”; it seems to me that what I said above precisely captures what you get by taking “we have qualia” + “qualia are subjectively experienced ways of perceiving” and trying to change that as little as possible while avoiding the (apparent?) reification I’m worried about; but maybe I’m wrong. And a part of my brain still harbours the uncharitable suspicion that despite your assurances above the reification is actually the point and you will not accept any wording that doesn’t carry the ontological commitment you say you aren’t trying to beg the question of. Again, this is an uncharitable suspicion and I am aware that it is; but I am having trouble figuring out better explanations for why you’re so concerned that I specifically embrace “qualia”, in so many words.)
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?
It’s not satisfactory to me. Does this mean I am “too biased?” That seems like a potentially unjustified presumption to make, and not a fair way to have a discussion with others who might disagree with you.
Anyone could offer a definition then state in advance that anyone who doesn’t accept it is “too biased” then, when someone says they don’t accept it say “see, I told you so,” even if an unbiased person would judge the definition to be inadequate.
In any case, I’m not making a selective demand for rigor. Even if I were, I’d probably just shrug and raise the challenge, anyway. I don’t know what people talking about qualia are talking about. But I am also pretty confident they don’t know what they are talking about. I suspect qualia is a pseudoconcept invented by philosophers, and that to the extent that we adequately characterize it, it faces pretty serious challenges.
The main person I discuss illusionism and consciousness with specializes in philosophy of computation and philosophy of science, with an emphasis on broad metaphysical questions. We both endorse illusionism, and have for years, so there’s little to say there. Instead, regularly we mostly discuss their views on computation and metaphysics, and I’m often asked to read their papers on these topics. So, in the past few years, I have read significantly more work on what computers and matter are than I have on consciousness.
Thus, ironically, I have more discussions about rigorous attempts to define computers and features of the external world than I do about consciousness. So if you think that, in denying qualia, I am somehow failing to apply a similar degree of rigor as I do to other ideas, you could not have picked worse examples. It is not the case that I’m especially tough on the notion of qualia.