Note that it’s plausible to me that this is a Typical Mind thing and actually there’s just a lot of people going around without the perception of phenomenal consciousness.
Like, Lance, do you not feel like you experience that things seem ways? Or just that they don’t seem to be ways in ways that seem robustly meaningful or something?
Have we even checked tho? (Maybe the answer is yes, but it hadn’t occurred to me before just now that this was a dimension people might vary on. Or, actually I think it had, but I hadn’t had a person in front of me actually claiming it)
See above; I posted a link to a recent study. There hasn’t been much work on this. While my views may be atypical, so too might the views popular among contemporary analytic philosophers. A commitment to the notion that there is a legitimate hard problem of consciousness, that we “have qualia,” and so on might all be idiosyncrasies of the specific way philosophers think, and may even result from unique historical contingencies, such that, were there many more philosophers like Quine and Dennett in the field, such views might not be so popular.
Some philosophical positions seem to rise and fall over time. Moral realism was less popular a few decades ago, but as enjoyed a recent resurgence, for instance. This suggests that the perspectives of philosophers might result in part from trends or fashions distinctive of particular points in time.
Thanks for clarifying. Not all statistical claims in e.g., psychology are intended to generalize towards most people, so I didn’t want to assume you meant most people.
If the claim is that most people have a concept of qualia, that may be true, but I’m not confident that it is. That seems like an empirical question it’d be worth looking into.
Either way, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if most people had the concept, or (I think more likely) could readily acquire it on minimal introspection (though on my view I’d say that people are either duped or readily able to be duped into thinking they have the concept).
I don’t know if I am different, or if so, why. It’s possible I do have the concept but don’t recognize it, or am deceiving myself somehow.
It’s also possible I am somehow atypical neurologically. I went into philosophy precisely because I consistently found that I either didn’t have intuitions about conventional philosophical cases at all (e.g., Gettier problems), or had nonstandard or less common views (e.g. illusionism, normative antirealism, utilitarianism). That led me to study intuitions, the psychological underpinnings of philosophical thought, and a host of related topics. So there is no coincidence in my presenting the views expressed here. I got into these topics because everyone else struck me as having bizarre views.
If the claim is that most people have a concept of qualia, that may be true, but I’m not confident that it is
Most people don’t know the word “qualia”. Nonetheless, most people will state something equivalent....that they have feelings and seemings that they can’t fully describe. So it’s a “speaking prose” thing.
And something like that is implicit in Illusionism. Illusionism attempts to explain away reports of ineffable subjective sensations, reports of qualia like things. If no one had such beliefs, or made such reports, there would be nothing for Illusionism to address.
Trying to attack qualia from every possible angle is rather self-defeating. For instance, if you literally don’t know what “qualia” means, you can’t report that you have none. And if no one even seems to have qualia, there is nothing for Illusionism to do. And so on.
It’s also possible I am somehow atypical neurologically
But then , why insist that you are right? If you have something like colour blindness , then why insist that everyone else is deluded when they report colours?
Most people don’t know the word “qualia”. Nonetheless, most people will state something equivalent....that they have feelings and seemings that they can’t fully describe. So it’s a “speaking prose” thing.
There are many reasons why a person might struggle to describe their experiences that wouldn’t be due to them having qualia or having some implicit qualia-based theory, especially among laypeople who are not experienced at describing their mental states. It would be difficult to distinguish these other reasons from reasons having to do with qualia.
So I don’t agree that what you describe would necessarily be equivalent, and I don’t think it would be easy to provide empirical evidence specifically of the notion that people have or think they have qualia, or speak or think in a way best explained by them having qualia.
Even if it could be done, I don’t know of any empirical evidence that would support this claim. Maybe there is some. But I don’t have a high prior on any empirical investigation into how laypeople think turning out to support your claim, either.
And something like that is implicit in Illusionism. Illusionism attempts to explain away reports of ineffable subjective sensations, reports of qualia like things. If no one had such beliefs, or made such reports, there would be nothing for Illusionism to address.
You know, I think you’re right. And I believe the course of this discussion has clarified things for me sufficiently for me to recognize that I do not, strictly speaking, endorse illusionism.
Illusionism could be construed as the conjunction of two claims:
(1) On introspection, people systematically misrepresent their experiential states as having phenomenal properties.
(2) There are no such phenomenal properties.
For instance, Frankish (2016) defines (strong) illusionism as the view that:
“[...] phenomenal consciousness is illusory; experiences do not really have qualitative, ‘what-it’s-like’ properties, whether physical or non-physical” (p. 15)
Like illusionists, I deny that there are phenomenal properties, qualia, what-its-likeness, and so on. In that sense, I deny phenomenal realism (Mandik, 2016). As such, I agree with (2) above. Thus, I agree with the central claim of illusionism, that there are no phenomenal properties, and I deny that there are qualia, or that there’s “what it’s likeness” and so on. However, what I am less comfortable doing is presuming that things seem this way to nonphilosophers, and that they are all systematically subject to some kind of error. In that regard, I do not fully agree with illusionists.
To the extent that illusionists mistakenly suppose that people are subject to an illusion, we could call this meta-illusionism. Mandik distinguishes meta-illusionism from illusionism as follows:
“The gist of meta-illusionism is that it rejects phenomenal realism while also insisting that no one is actually under the illusion that there are so-called phenomenal properties” (pp. 140-141).
Mandik goes on to distance his position from illusionism, in reference to Frankish as follows:
“One thing Frankish and I have in common is that neither of us wants to assert that there are any properties instantiated that are referred to or picked out by the phrase ‘phenomenal properties’. One place where Frankish and I part ways is over whether that phrase is sufficiently meaningful for there to be a worthwhile research programme investigating how it comes to seem to people that their experiences instantiate any such properties. Like Frankish, I’m happy with terms like ‘experience’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘conscious experience’ and join Frankish in using what he calls ‘weak’ and functional construals of such terms. But, unlike Frankish, I see no use at all, not even an illusionist one, for the term ‘phenomenal’ and its ilk. The term ‘phenomenal’, as used in contemporary philosophy of mind, is a technical term. I am aware of no non-technical English word or phrase that is accepted as its direct analogue. Unlike technical terms in maths and physics, which are introduced with explicit definitions, ‘phenomenal’ has no such definition. What we find instead of an explicit definition are other technical terms treated as interchangeable synonyms. Frankish follows common practice in philosophy of mind when he treats ‘phenomenal’ as interchangeable with, for instance, ‘qualitative’ or, in scare-quotes, ‘“feely”’. (p. 141)
I can’t quote the whole article (though it’s short), but he concludes this point by stating that:
“We have then, in place of an explicit definition of ‘phenomenal properties’, a circular chain of interchangeable technical terms — a chain with very few links, and little to relate those links to nontechnical terminology. The circle, then, is vicious. I’m sceptical that any properties seem ‘phenomenal’ to anyone because this vicious circle gives me very little idea what seeming ‘phenomenal’ would be.” (p. 142)
Mandik is not so sure he wants to endorse meta-illusionism, since this might turn on concerns about what it means for something to be an illusion, and because he’s reluctant to state that illusionists are themselves subject to an illusionism. What he proposes instead is qualia quietism, the view that:
“the terms ‘qualia’, ‘phenomenal properties’, etc. lack sufficient content for anything informative to be said in either affirming or denying their existence. Affirming the existence of what? Denying the existence of what? Maintaining as illusory a representation of what? No comment. No comment. No comment” (p. 148)
This is much closer to what I think than illusionism proper. So, in addition to denying that there are qualia, or phenomenal properties, or whatever other set of terminology is used to characterize some putative set of special properties that spell trouble for those of us ill-disposed to believe in such things, I also deny that it seems this way to nonphilosophers.
My entire academic career has centered on critiquing work in experimental philosophy, and close scrutiny of this and related articles might reveal what I take to be significant methodological problems. Nevertheless, insofar as research has been conducted on the subject of whether nonphilosophers have phenomenal properties, or think about consciousness in the same way as philosophers, at least some of the results indicate that they may not. See here, for instance Sytsma & Machery (2010):
Abstract: “Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness.”
I doubt this one study is definitive evidence one way or the other. What I will say, though, is that whether people think of consciousness the way philosophers do is an empirical question. I suspect they don’t, and absent any good reasons to think that they do, I’m not inclined to accept without argument that they do.
Trying to attack qualia from every possible angle is rather self-defeating. For instance, if you literally don’t know what “qualia” means, you can’t report that you have none. And if no one even seems to have qualia, there is nothing for Illusionism to do. And so on.
I disagree. You can claim to both not know what something means, and claim to not have the thing in question.
In some cases, you might not know what something means because you’re ignorant of what is meant by the concept in question. For instance, someone might use the term “zown zair” to refer to brown hair. I might not know this, even if I do have brown hair. In that case, I would not know what they mean, even though I do have brown hair. It would be a mistake for me to think that because I don’t know what they mean, that I don’t have “zown zair.” And it would be foolish to insist both that “zown zair” is false, and that “zown zair” is meaningless. I would simply have failed to find out what they were referring to with the term.
But this is not the case with qualia. I am not merely claiming that I don’t understand the concept. I am claiming that nobody understands the concept, because it is fundamentally confused and meaningless.
First, in the course of an exchange, This is especially the case when one is responding to a host of people, over an extended period of time, who are incapable of explaining the putative concept in a way that isn’t circular or vacuous.
In the course of an exchange, people may employ a concept. They might say that, e.g. some objects have the property A. Yet when asked to explain what A is, they are unable to do so, or they provide unsatisfactory attempts. For instance, they might point to several objects, and say “all these objects have property A.” This is what was done earlier in this thread: I was given examples, as though this was independently helpful in understanding the concept. It’s not. If I pointed to a truck, a flock of geese, and a math textbook and said “these all have property A,” you wouldn’t be much closer to knowing what I was talking about. In other cases, they might use metaphors. But the metaphors may be unilluminating. In still other cases, they might appeal to other terms or concepts. Yet these terms or concepts might themselves be obscure or poorly defined, and if one asks for clarification, one begins the journey through an endless loop of mutual interdefinitions that never get you anywhere.
In such cases, it can become apparent that a person’s concepts are circular and self-referential, and don’t really describe anything about the way the world is. They might define A in terms of B, B in terms of C, and C in terms of A. And they might insist that A is a property we all have.
When numerous people all claim that we have property A, but they cannot define it, one may reasonably wonder whether all of these people are confused or mistaken. That is, one might conclude that property A is a pseudoconcept, something vague and meaningless.
In such cases, I am fine saying both that
(a) I don’t have property A
(b) I don’t know what people referring to property A are talking about
I can believe that (a), because it’s meaningless. I don’t have meaningless properties. And I can conclude that (b), because it’s meaningless. I can’t understand a meaningless concept, because there isn’t anything to understand.
Maybe that’s an awkward way of framing why one would reject circular concepts that ascribe meaningless properties to people, in which case I’d be happy to revise the way I frame my rejection of qualia.
But then , why insist that you are right? If you have something like colour blindness , then why insist that everyone else is deluded when they report colours?
There are very good reasons to think people can see colors, and one would have such reasons even if they were colorblind. We can point to the physical mechanisms involved in color detection, the properties of light, and so on. We can point to specific color words in our and other languages, and it would be fairly easy to determine that nonphilosophers can see colors. I don’t think any of these conditions apply to qualia. So, first, there’s that.
To emphasize just the last of these, I don’t think “everyone else” is deluded. I think philosophers are deluded, and that people who encounter the work of these philosophers often become deluded as well. I don’t think the notion of qualia is a psychological mistake so much as it is an intellectual mistake only a subset of people make.
I suspect such mistakes are endemic to philosophy. The same thing has occurred, to an alarming extent, in contemporary metaethics. Moral realists frequently invoke the notion of decisive or external reasons, irreducible normativity, categorical imperatives, stance-independent normative and evaluative facts, and so on. I reject all of these concepts as fundamentally confused. And yet philosophers like Parfit, Huemer, Cuneo, and others have not only tangled themselves into knots of confusion, their work has trickled out into the broader culture. I routinely encounter people who have come across their work claiming to “have” concepts that they are incapable of expressing. And these philosophers, when pressed, will fall back on claiming that the concepts in question are “brute” or “primitive” or “unanalyzable,” which is to say, they can’t give an account of them, and don’t think that they need to. Maybe they do “have” these concepts, but since I am very confident we can explain everything there is to now about the way the world is without invoking them, I suspect they’re vacuous nonsense, and that these philosophers are uniformly confused.
And, like the notion of qualia, philosophers have for a long time presumed that ordinary people tend to be moral realists (see e.g. Sinclair, 2012). My own academic work specifically focuses on this question. And like the question of what people think about consciousness, this, too, is an empirical question. So far, little empirical evidence supports the conclusion that ordinary people tend to be moral realists, or at least that they tend to be consistently and uniformly committed to some kind of moral realism. By and large, they struggle to understand what they are being asked (Bush & Moss, 2020). I suspect, instead, that something like Gill’s (2009) indeterminacy-variability thesis is much more likely: that people have variable but (I suspect mostly) indeterminate metaethical standards.
The same may turn out to be the case for the only other issue I looked into: free will. This has led me, in my own work, to point towards the broader possibility that many of the positions philosophers purport to be intuitive, and that they claim are widespread among nonphilosophers, simply aren’t. Rather, I suspect that philosophers are over-intellectualizing some initial pool of considerations, then generating theories that are neither implicitly nor explicitly part of the way ordinary people speak or think.
I don’t think this is a situation where I am color blind, while others have color vision. Rather, it’s more like recognizing that many of the people around you are subject to a collective, and contagious, hallucination. So I suspect, instead, that I have come to recognize over time that academic philosophy has played an alarming role in duping large numbers of people into a wide range of confusions, then duped them further by convincing them that these confusions are shared by nonphilosophers.
References
Bush, L. S., & Moss, D. (2020). Misunderstanding Metaethics: Difficulties Measuring Folk Objectivism and Relativism. Diametros, 17(64). 6-21
Frankish, K. (2016). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 11-39.
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.
Mandik, P. (2016). Meta-illusionism and qualia quietism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 140-148.
Sinclair, N. (2012). Moral realism, face-values and presumptions. Analytic Philosophy, 53(2). 158-179
When you sit alone in an empty room, do you have a sense of your own presence, your own self? Can you be aware, not only of your sensations, but of the sensation of having those sensations? Can you have thoughts, and be aware of having those thoughts? And be aware of having these awarenesses?
My answer to each of these questions is “yes”.
But for you, do these questions fail to point to anything in your experience?
Can you be aware, not only of your sensations, but of the sensation of having those sensations?
I’m not sure. I have sensations, but I don’t know what a sensation of a sensation would be.
Can you have thoughts, and be aware of having those thoughts?
Sure, but that just sounds like metacognition, and that doesn’t strike me as being identical with or indicative of having qualia. I can know that I know things, for instance.
And be aware of having these awarenesses?
I would describe this as third-order metacognition, or recursive cognition, or something like that. And yea, I can do that. I can think that Sam thinks that I think that he lied, for instance. Or I can know that my leg hurts and then think about the fact that I know that my leg hurts.
Having now had a lot of different conversations on consciousness I’m coming to a slightly disturbing belief that this might be the case. I have no idea what this implies for any of my downstream-of-consciousness views.
Like, Lance, do you not feel like you experience that things seem ways?
I don’t know what that means, so I’m not sure. What would it mean for something to seem a certain way?
Or just that they don’t seem to be ways in ways that seem robustly meaningful or something?
I don’t think it’s this. It’s more that when people try to push me to have qualia intuitions, I can introspect, report on the contents of my mental states, and then they want me to locate something extra. But there never is anything extra, and they can never explain what they’re talking about, other than to use examples that don’t help me at all, or metaphors that I don’t understand. Nobody seems capable of directly explaining what they mean. And when pressed, they insist that the concept in question is “unanalyzable” or inexplicable or otherwise maintain that they cannot explain it.
Despite his fame, the majority of students who take Dennett’s courses that I encountered do not accept his views at all, and take qualia quite seriously. I had conversations that would last well over an hour where I would have one or more of them try to get me to grok what they’re talking about, and they never succeeded. I’ve had people make the following kinds of claims:
(1) I am pretending to not get it so that I can signal my intellectual unconventionality.
(2) I do get it, but I don’t realize that I get it.
(3) I may be neurologically atypical.
(4) I am too “caught in the grip” of a philosophical theory, and this has rendered me unable to get it.
One or more of these could be true, but I’m not sure how I’d find out, or what I might do about it if I did. But I strangely drawn to a much more disturbing possibility, that an outside view would suggest is pretty unlikely:
(5) all of these people are confused, qualia is a pseudoconcept, and the whole discussion predicated on it is fundamentally misguided
I find myself drawn to this view, in spite of it entailing that a majority of people in academic philosophy, or who encounter it, are deeply mistaken.
I should note, though, that I specialize in metaethics in particular. Most moral philosophers are moral realists (about 60%) and I consider every version of moral realism I’m familiar with to be obviously confused, mistaken, or trivial in ways so transparent that I do think I am justified in thinking that, on this particular issue, most moral philosophers really are mistaken.
Given my confidence about moral realism, I’m not at all convinced that philosophers generally have things well-sorted on consciousness.
It’s more that when people try to push me to have qualia intuitions, I can introspect, report on the contents of my mental states, and then they want me to locate something extra.
Are they expecting qualia to be more than a mental state? If you’re reporting the contents of your mental states, isn’t that already enough? I’m not sure what extra there should be for qualia. Objects you touch can feel hot to you, and that’s exactly what you’d be reporting. Or would you say something like “I know it’s hot, but I don’t feel it’s hot”? How would you know it’s hot but not feel it’s hot, if your only information came from touching it? Where does the knowledge come from? Are you saying that what you’re reporting is only the verbal inner thought you had that it’s hot, and that happened without any conscious mental trigger?
If it’s only the verbal thought, on what basis would you believe that it’s actually hot? The verbal thought alone? (Suppose it’s also not hot enough to trigger a reflexive response.)
Doesn’t your inner monologue also sound like something? (FWIW, I think mine has one pitch and one volume, and I’m not sure it sounds like anyone’s voice in particular (even my own). It has my accent, or whatever accent I mimic.)
More generally, the contents of your mental states are richer than the ones you report on symbolically (verbally or otherwise) to yourself or others, right? Like you notice more details than you talk to yourself about in the moment, e.g. individual notes in songs, sounds, details in images, etc.. Isn’t this perceptual richness what people mean by qualia? I don’t mean to say that it’s richer than your attention, but you can attend to individual details without talking about them.
I don’t think I can replicate exactly the kinds of ways people framed the questions. But they might do something like this: they’d show me a red object. They’d ask me “What color is this?” I say red. Then they’d try to extract from me an appreciation for the red “being a certain way” independent of, e.g., my disposition to identify the object as red, or my attitudes about red, as a color, and so on. Everything about “seeing red” doesn’t to me indicate that there is a “what it’s like” to seeing red. I am simply … seeing red. Like, I can report that fact, and talk about it, and say things like “it isn’t blue” and “it is the same color as a typical apple” and such, but there’s nothing else. There’s no “what it’s likeness” for me, or, if there is, I’m not able to detect and report on this fact. The most common way people will frame this is to try to get me to agree that the red has a certain “redness” to it. That chocolate is “chocolatey” and so on.
I can be in an entire room of people insisting that red has the property of “redness” and that chocolate is “chocolately” and so on, and they all nod and agree that our experiences have these intrinsic what-its-likeness properties. This seems to be what people are talking about when they talk about qualia. To me, this makes no sense at all. It’s like saying seven has the property of “sevenness.” That seems vacuous to me.
I can look at something like Dennett’s account: that people report experiences as having some kind of intrinsic nonrelational properties that are ineffable and immediately apprehensible. I can understand all those words in combination, but I don’t see how anyone could access such a thing (if that’s what qualia are supposed to be), and I don’t think I do.
It may be that that I am something akin to a native functionalist. I don’t know. But part of the reason I was drawn to Dennett’s views is that they are literally the only views that have ever made any sense to me. Everything else seems like gibberish.
Or would you say something like “I know it’s hot, but I don’t feel it’s hot”?
Well, I would cash out it “feeling hot” in functional terms. That I feel a desire to move my hand away from the object, that I can distinguish it from something cold or at least not hot, and so on. There doesn’t seem to me to be anything else to touching a hot thing than its relational properties and the functional role it plays in relation to my behavior and the rest of my thoughts. What else would there be than this? It does seem to me that people who think there are qualia think there’s something else. They certainly seem insistent that there is after I describe my experience.
Are you saying that what you’re reporting is only the verbal inner thought you had that it’s hot, and that happened without any conscious mental trigger?
No, I think I have a conscious mental trigger, and I can and do say things like “that feels hot.” I respond to hot things in normal ways, can report on those responses, and so on. I can certainly distinguish hot from cold without having to say anything, but I’m not sure what else you might be going for, and all of that seems like something you could get a robot to do that I don’t think anyone would say “has qualia.” But this is a very superficial pass at everything that would be going on if I touched something hot and reacted to it. So, it might be something we’d need to dig into more.
Doesn’t your inner monologue also sound like something?
Nobody ever asked me that. That’s an awesome question. I think that no, it does not sound like anything. It’s in English, and it’s “my voice,” but it doesn’t “sound like” my actual speaking voice.
More generally, the contents of your mental states are richer than the ones you report on symbolically (verbally or otherwise) to yourself or others, right?
Yes.
Isn’t this perceptual richness what people mean by qualia?
I don’t think that it is. It sounds a bit like you’re gesturing towards block’s notion of access consciousness. I’m not sure though.
I can be in an entire room of people insisting that red has the property of “redness” and that chocolate is “chocolately” and so on, and they all nod and agree that our experiences have these intrinsic what-its-likeness properties. This seems to be what people are talking about when they talk about qualia. To me, this makes no sense at all. It’s like saying seven has the property of “sevenness.” That seems vacuous to me.
Hmm, I’m not sure it’s vacuous, since it’s not like they’re applying “redness” to only one thing; redness is a common feature of many different experiences. 14 could have “sevenness”, too.
Maybe we can think of examples of different experiences where it’s hard to come up with distinguishing functional properties, but you can still distinguish the experiences? Maybe the following questions will seem silly/naive, since I’m not used to thinking in functional terms. Feel free to only answer the ones you think are useful, since they’re somewhat repetitive.
What are the differences in functional properties between two slightly different shades of red that you can only tell apart when you see them next to each other? Or maybe there are none when separate, but seeing them next to each other just introduces another functional property? What functional property would this be?
What if you can tell them apart when they aren’t next to each other? How are you doing so?
How about higher and lower pitched sounds? Say the same note an octave apart?
Say you touch something a few degrees above room temperature, and you can tell that it’s hotter, but it doesn’t invoke any particular desire. How can you tell it’s hotter? How does this cash out in terms of functional properties?
Well, I would cash out it “feeling hot” in functional terms. That I feel a desire to move my hand away from the object, that I can distinguish it from something cold or at least not hot, and so on.
I’m guessing you would further define these in functional terms, since they too seem like the kinds of things people could insist qualia are involved in (desire, distinguishing). What would be basic functional properties that you wouldn’t cash out further? Do you have to go all the way down to physics, or are there higher-level basic functional properties? I think if you go all the way down to physics, this is below our awareness and what our brain actually has concepts of; it’s just implemented in them.
If you were experiencing sweetness in taste (or some other sensation) for the first time, what would be its functional properties that distinguish it from other things? Could this be before you formed attitudes about it, or are the attitudes simultaneous and built in as a necessary component of the experience?
I think that no, it does not sound like anything. It’s in English, and it’s “my voice,” but it doesn’t “sound like” my actual speaking voice.
What functional properties would you point to that your experiences of your actual speaking voice have, but your experiences of your inner voice don’t? And that can’t be controlled for? E.g. what if you were actually speaking out loud, but couldn’t hear your own voice, and “heard” your inner voice instead? How does this differ from actually hearing your voice?
Hmm, I’m not sure it’s vacuous, since it’s not like they’re applying “redness” to only one thing; redness is a common feature of many different experiences. 14 could have “sevenness”, too.
One can apply a vacuous term to multiple things, so pointing out that you could apply the term to more than one thing does not seem to me to indicate that it isn’t vacuous. I could even stipulate a concept that is vacuous by design: “smorf”, which doesn’t mean anything, and then I can say something like “potatoes are smorf.”
Maybe we can think of examples of different experiences where it’s hard to come up with distinguishing functional properties, but you can still distinguish the experiences?
The ability to distinguish the experiences in a way you can report on would be at least one functional difference, so this doesn’t seem to me like it would demonstrate much of anything.
Some of the questions you ask seem a bit obscure, like how I can tell something is hotter. Are you asking for a physiological explanation? Or the cognitive mechanisms involved? If so, I don’tknow, but I’m not sure what that would have to do with qualia. But maybe I’m not understanding the question, and I’m not sure how that could get me any closer to understanding what qualia are supposed to be.
What would be basic functional properties that you wouldn’t cash out further?
I don’t know. Likewise for most of the questions you ask. “What are the functional properties of X?” questions are very strange to me. I am not quite sure what I am being asked, or how I might answer, or if I’m supposed to be able to answer. Maybe you could help me out here, because I’d like to answer any questions I’m capable of answering, but I’m not sure what to do with these.
The ability to distinguish the experiences in a way you can report on would be at least one functional difference, so this doesn’t seem to me like it would demonstrate much of anything.
It is a functional difference, but there must be some further (conscious?) reason why we can do so, right? Where I want to go with this is that you can distinguish them because they feel different, and that’s what qualia refers to. This “feeling” in qualia, too, could be a functional property. The causal diagram I’m imagining is something like
Unconscious processes (+unconscious functional properties) → (“Qualia”, Other conscious functional properties) → More conscious functional properties
And I’m trying to control for “Other conscious functional properties” with my questions, so that the reason you can distinguish two particular experiences goes through “Qualia”. You can tell two musical notes apart because they feel (sound) different to you.
I don’t know. Likewise for most of the questions you ask. “What are the functional properties of X?” questions are very strange to me. I am not quite sure what I am being asked, or how I might answer, or if I’m supposed to be able to answer. Maybe you could help me out here, because I’d like to answer any questions I’m capable of answering, but I’m not sure what to do with these.
I’m not sure if what I wrote above will help clarify. You also wrote:
Well, I would cash out it “feeling hot” in functional terms. That I feel a desire to move my hand away from the object, that I can distinguish it from something cold or at least not hot, and so on. There doesn’t seem to me to be anything else to touching a hot thing than its relational properties and the functional role it plays in relation to my behavior and the rest of my thoughts.
How would you cash out “desire to move my hand away from the object” and “distinguish it from something cold or at least not hot” in functional terms? To me, both of these explanations could also pass through “qualia”. Doesn’t desire feel like something, too? I’m asking you cash out desire and distinguishing in functional terms, too, and if we keep doing this, do “qualia” come up somewhere?
It is a functional difference, but there must be some further (conscious?) reason why we can do so, right?
Do you mean like a causal reason? If so then of course, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with qualia.
Where I want to go with this is that you can distinguish them because they feel different, and that’s what qualia refers to.
I have access to the contents of my mental states, and that includes information that allows me to identify and draw distinctions between things, categorize things, label things, and so on. A “feeling” can be cashed out in such terms, and once it is, there’s nothing else to explain, and no other properties or phenomena to refer to.
I don’t know what work “qualia” is doing here. Of course things feel various ways to me, and of course they feel different. Touching a hot stove doesn’t feel the same as touching a block of ice.
But I could get a robot, that has no qualia, but has temperature detecting mechanisms, to say something like “I have detected heat in this location and cold in this location and they are different.” I don’t think my ability to distinguish between things is because they “feel” different; rather, I’d say that insofar as I can report that they “feel different” it’s because I can report differences between them. I think the invocation of qualia here is superfluous and may get the explanation backwards: I don’t distinguish things because they feel different; things “feel different” if and only if we can distinguish differences between them.
This “feeling” in qualia, too, could be a functional property.
Then I’m even more puzzled by what you think qualia are. Qualia are, I take it, ineffable, intrinsic qualitative properties of experiences, though depending on what someone is talking about they might include more or less features than these. I’m not sure qualia can be “functional” in the relevant sense.
How would you cash out “desire to move my hand away from the object” and “distinguish it from something cold or at least not hot” in functional terms?
I don’t know. I just want to know what qualia are. Either people can explain what qualia are or they can’t. My inability to explain something wouldn’t justify saying “therefore, qualia,” so I’m not sure what the purpose of the questions are. I’m sure you don’t intend to invoke “qualia of the gaps,” and presume qualia must figure into any situation in which I, personally, am not able to answer a question you’ve asked.
I’m asking you cash out desire and distinguishing in functional terms, too, and if we keep doing this, do “qualia” come up somewhere?
I don’t know what you think qualia are, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you. People keep invoking this concept, but nobody seems able to offer a substantive explanation of what it is, and why I should think I or anyone else has such things, or why such things would be important or necessary for anything in particular, and so on.
I hope I’m not coming off as stubborn here. I’m very much interested in answering any questions I’m able to answer, I’m just not sure precisely what you’re asking me or how I might go about answering it. “What are the functional properties of X?” doesn’t strike me as a very clear question.
But I could get a robot, that has no qualia, but has temperature detecting mechanisms, to say something like “I have detected heat in this location and cold in this location and they are different.” I don’t think my ability to distinguish between things is because they “feel” different; rather, I’d say that insofar as I can report that they “feel different” it’s because I can report differences between them. I think the invocation of qualia here is superfluous and may get the explanation backwards: I don’t distinguish things because they feel different; things “feel different” if and only if we can distinguish differences between them.
(...)
I have access to the contents of my mental states, and that includes information that allows me to identify and draw distinctions between things, categorize things, label things, and so on. A “feeling” can be cashed out in such terms, and once it is, there’s nothing else to explain, and no other properties or phenomena to refer to.
What’s the nature of these differences and this information, though? What exactly are you using to distinguish differences? Isn’t it experienced? The information isn’t itself a set of “symbols” (e.g. words, read or heard), or maybe sometimes it is, but those symbols aren’t then made up of further symbols. Things don’t feel hot or cold to you because there are different symbols assigned to them that you read off or hear, or to the extent that they are, you’re experiencing those symbols as being read or heard, and that experience is not further composed of symbols.
Then I’m even more puzzled by what you think qualia are. Qualia are, I take it, ineffable, intrinsic qualitative properties of experiences, though depending on what someone is talking about they might include more or less features than these. I’m not sure qualia can be “functional” in the relevant sense.
I might just be confused here. I was thinking that the illusion of ineffability, “seemingness”, could be a functional property, and that what you’re using to distinguish experiences are parts of these illusions. Maybe that doesn’t make sense.
I don’t know. I just want to know what qualia are. Either people can explain what qualia are or they can’t. My inability to explain something wouldn’t justify saying “therefore, qualia,” so I’m not sure what the purpose of the questions are. I’m sure you don’t intend to invoke “qualia of the gaps,” and presume qualia must figure into any situation in which I, personally, am not able to answer a question you’ve asked.
I might have been switching back and forth between something like “qualia of the gaps” and a more principled argument, but I’ll try to explain the more principled one clearly here:
For each of the functional properties you’ve pointed out so far, I would say they “feel like something”. You could keep naming things that “feel like something” (desires, attitudes, distinguishing, labelling or categorizing), and then explaining those further in terms of other things that “feel like something”, and so on. Of course, presumably some functional properties don’t feel like anything, but to the extent that they don’t, I’d claim you’re not aware of them, since everything you’re aware of feels like something. If you keep explaining further, eventually you have to hit an explanation that can’t be further explained even in principle by further facts you’re conscious of (eventually the reason is unconscious, since you’re only conscious of finitely many things at any moment). I can’t imagine what this final conscious explanation could be like if it doesn’t involve something like qualia, something just seeming some way. So, it’s not about there being gaps in any particular explanation you try to give in practice, it’s about there necessarily always being a gap. What is a solution supposed to look like?
Of course, this could just be a failure of my own imagination.
I don’t know the answer to these questions. I’m not sure the questions are sufficiently well-specified to be answerable, but I suspect if you rephrased them or we worked towards getting me to understand the questions, I’d just say “I don’t know.” But my not knowing how to answer a question does not give me any more insight into what you mean when you refer to qualia, or what it means to say that things “feel like something.”
I don’t think it means anything to say things “feel like something.” Every conversation I’ve had about this (and I’ve had a lot of them) goes in circles: what are qualia? How things feel. What does that mean? It’s just “what it’s like” to experience them. What does that mean? They just are a certain way, and so on. This is just an endless circle of obscure jargon and self-referential terms, all mutually interdefining one another.
I don’t notice or experience any sense of a gap. I don’t know what gap others are referring to. It sounds like people seem to think there is some characteristic or property their experiences have that can’t be explained. But this seems to me like it could be a kind of inferential error, the way people may have once insisted that there’s something intrinsic about living things that distinguishes from nonliving things, and living things just couldn’t be composed of conventional matter arranged in certain ways, that they just obviously had something else, some je ne sais quoi.
I suspect if I found myself feeling like there was some kind of inexplicable essence, or je ne sais quoi to some phenomena, I’d be more inclined to think I was confused than that there really was je ne sais quoiness. I’m not surprised philosophers go in for thinking there are qualia, but I’m surprised that people in the lesswrong community do. Why not think “I’m confused and probably wrong” as a first pass? Why are many people so confident that there is, what as far as I can tell, amounts to something that may be fundamentally incomprehensible, even magical? That is, it’s one thing to purport to have the concept of qualia; it’s another to endorse it. And it sounds not only like you claim to grok the notion of qualia, but to endorse it.
Hi, I was doing research on consciousness-related discussions, blah blah blah, 3 months old, would just like to reply to a few things you mentioned.
I know for certain that consciousness and qualia exist. I used to ‘fall for’ arguments that defined consciousness/qualia/free will as delusions or illusions because they were unobservable. Then, years later, I finally understood that I had some doublethink, and that these words actually were referring to something very simple and clear with my internal experience. I believed that the words were “meaningless” philosophy/morality words—for me, the lack of understanding WAS the ‘gap’ and they were referring to simple concepts all along.
The confusion of ‘defining’ these words even within philosophy creates lots of synonyms and jargon, though. I have gotten my definitions from the simplicity of what the concepts refer to, so I am almost certain I have not invented new complicated ways to refer to the concepts (as that would make communicating with others unnecessarily difficult and subjective).
These words refer to something that does indeed seem to be circular, because they all try to refer to something beyond the physical. I believe the people trying to define these words as something that relates to only physical things are the ones confused.
Why not think “I’m confused and probably wrong” as a first pass?
There is nothing confusing about what the concept is that the words are trying to communicate, but it’s impossible to get across because they are trying to describe something that can’t be replicated.
Part of the issue here is to avoid thinking of consciousness as either a discrete capacity one either has or doesn’t have, or even to think of it as existing a continuum, such that one could have “more” or “less” of it.
I’m not sure if you’re supporting/against this idea, but I know of consciousness as the sum of all of someone’s metaphysical experiences. Someone could have more or less amounts of senses/abilities, but it is metaphorical talk to say someone is “less conscious” because they are blind and deaf.
The relevancy of a metaphysical consciousness doesn’t come from philosophical mass mistakenness and navelgazing. It’s because it actually exists (but again, it’s individual, so I am never certain if it exists for anyone else).
I think the other replier did not answer the “redness”/”chocolateyness” question as I would have liked. Colors are the most common example because they seem to be the most ‘pure’ and consistent types of qualia. Are you familiar with the color-swapping thought questions like “if your senses of red and blue were switched, it would be a notably different experience just besides some words being used to refer to different concepts”, or “if you never saw green your entire life even if you read about green objects, then actually saw green, you gain new information”? Have they ever resonated or did they just seem confusing to you?
Its persistence could be due to quirks in the way human cognition works. If so, it may be difficult to dispel certain kinds of introspective illusions.
Yeah, it’s possible to imagine a gap that isn’t there (I mean, you’ve heard about people believing in spirits and magic and all that). Free will actually could be an illusion, although it strongly doesn’t feel like it. I know that from your perspective, unless you were extraordinarily confused and did have qualia, it seems you would still believe that other people were under illusions rather than experiencing something special.
If many individual people talked about feeling these experiences even without being excessively primed with other people’s philosophical discussions, would it make you ‘believe in qualia’, if you didn’t have it?
If many individual people talked about feeling these experiences even without being excessively primed with other people’s philosophical discussions, would it make you ‘believe in qualia’, if you didn’t have it?
No. Consider religion and belief in the supernatural. Due to the existence of pareidolia and other psychological phenomena, people may exhibit a shared set of psychological mechanisms that cause them to mistakenly infer the presence of nonphysical or supernatural entities where there are none. While I believe culture and experience play a significant role in shaping the spread and persistence of supernatural beliefs, such beliefs are built on the foundations of psychological systems people share in common. Even if culture and learning were wiped out, due to the nature of human psychology it is likely that such mistakes would emerge yet again. People would once again see faces in the clouds and think that there’s someone up there.
So too, I suspect, people would fall into the same phenomenological quicksand with respect to many of the problems in philosophy. Even if we stopped teaching philosophy and all discussion of qualia vanished, I would not be surprised to find the notion emerge once again. People are not good at making inferences about what the world is like based on their phenomenology. I mean no disrespect, but your account sounds far more like the testimony of a religious convert than a robust philosophical argument for the existence of qualia. Take this blunt remark:
I know for certain that consciousness and qualia exist.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing religion with theists, and one could readily swap out “consciousness and qualia” for “Jesus” our “God”: “I know for certain that [God] exist[s].” I don’t know for certain that qualia don’t exist. I don’t know for certain that God doesn’t exist. I don’t generally make a point of telling others that I know something “for certain,” and if I did, I think I would appreciate if someone else suggested to me, hopefully kindly, that perhaps my declaration that I know something for certain serves more to convince myself than to convince others.
I take the hallmark of a good idea to be its utility. The notion of qualia has no value. On the contrary, I see it as a product of confusions and mistakes born of overconfidence in our intuitions and phenomenology and to the poor methods of academic philosophy, which serve to anoint such errors with the superficial appearance that they are backed by intellectual rigor.
I’d believe in qualia if and when the concept appears meaningful and when it can figure into our best scientific explanations of what the world is like. That is, I’d accept it if it were a useful feature of our explanations/allowed use to make more accurate predictions than alternative models that didn’t posit qualia.
I take you’d likely disagree, and that’s totally fine with me. But if we survive this century and colonize the stars, it will be due to knowledge and discoveries that pay their way by allowing us to understand and anticipate the world around us, and augment it to our ends. It will not be due to the notion of qualia, which will be little more than a footnote buried deep in the pages of some galactic empire’s archives.
Hey, glad you saw my post and all that. Yes, I know about religion and people having unexplainable supernatural experiences. I don’t have anything like that, and I think people who daydreamed up a supernatural experience shouldn’t have literal certainty, just high confidence. (you’d also expect some high inconsistency in people who recount supernatural events. which unfortunately is probably true for qualia currently too, due to similar levels of how society spreads beliefs)
There is irony in using ‘convert’ when I was unconverted from believing these things by philosophical confusion, and then later untangled myself. Yes, you could go swap out any ‘certainty’ claim with any other words and mock the result. Sure, I guess no one can say ‘certain’ about anything.
“I think I would appreciate if someone else suggested to me, hopefully kindly, that perhaps my declaration that I know something for certain serves more to convince myself than to convince others.” My use of certainty is about honestly communicating strength of belief etc., not being hyperbolic or exaggerating. Yes I understand that many people exaggerate and lie about ‘certain’ things all the time so I trust other people’s “for certain” claims less. It doesn’t mean I should then reduce my own quality of claims to try to cater to the average, that makes no sense. (like, if I said it wasn’t certain, wouldn’t that be room for you to claim it’s a delusion anyway?) Like, the nature of consciousness/qualia is that someone who’s conscious/has qualia is never “uncertain” they are conscious (unlike with free will where there isn’t that level of certainty).
I think I mentioned it before but it seems perfectly rational if someone who doesn’t have qualia is confused by the whole thing. A “robust philosophical argument” isn’t possible, only some statistical one. (the same way that, if you didn’t understand some music’s appeal while a majority of other people did, the response to try to convince you could never be a robust philosophical argument.)
Despite that, I wish to convey that consciousness-related stuff is really about something meaningful and not a religious dream, and that it is very likely possible to make “more accurate predictions”, even though the actual topics relating to those predictions are usually really insignificant. (if consciousness had a major role to play in intelligence, for example, the world would still exhibit that with looking at intelligence only and there’d be likely other correlations to notice, although you might not be able to draw the connection to consciousness directly.)
It will not be due to the notion of qualia
debating this subject seems ultimately not very relevant to people’s actions or prosperity, yes.
, which will be little more than a footnote buried deep in the pages of some galactic empire’s archives.
I take the hallmark of a good idea to be its utility. The notion of qualia has no value
The idea that everything must be useful to explain something else doesn’t work unless you have a core things that need explaining, but are not themselves explanatory posits...basic facts...sometimes called.phenomena.
So qualia don’t have to sit in the category of things-that-do-explaining , because there is another category of things-that-need-explaining.
Even if we stopped teaching philosophy and all discussion of qualia vanished, I would not be surprised to find the notion emerge once again. People are not good at making inferences about what the world is like based on their phenomenology.
“Phenomena” (literally meaning appearances ) is a near synonym for “qualia”. And people aren’t good at making inferences from their qualia. People generally and incorrectly assume that colours are objective properties (hence rhe consternation caused , amongst some, by the
dress illusion
).
That’s called naive realism, and it’s scientifically wrong.
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. (Of course , such a scientific quale isn’t immaterial by definition. Despite what people keep saying, qualia aren’t defined as immaterial).
I wouldn’t expect a theory of colour qualia to re emerge out of nowhere, because naive realism about colour is so pervasive. On the other hand, no one is naively realistic about tastes, smells etc. Everyone knows that tastes vary.
(I haven’t caught up on the entire thread, apologies if this is a repeat)
Assuming the “qualia is a misguided pseudoconcept” is true, do you have a sense of why people think that it’s real? i.e. taking the evidence of “Somehow, people end up saying sentences about how they have a sense of what it is like to perceive things. Why is that? What process would generate people saying words like that?” (This is not meant to be a gotcha, it just seems like a good question to ask)
No worries, it’s not a gotcha at all, and I already have some thoughts about this.
I was more interested in this topic back about seven or eight years ago, when I was actually studying it. I moved on to psychology and metaethics, and haven’t been actively reading about this stuff since about 2014.
I’m not sure it’d be ideal to try to dredge all that up, but I can roughly point towards something like Robbins and Jack (2006) as an example of the kind of research I’d employ to develop a type of debunking explanation for qualia intuitions. I am not necessarily claiming their specific account is correct, or rigorous, or sufficient all on its own, but it points to the kind of work cognitive scientists and philosophers could do that is at least in the ballpark.
Roughly, they attempt to offer an empirical explanation for the persistent of the explanatory gap (the problem of accounting for the consciousness by appeal to physical or at least nonconscious phenomena). Its persistence could be due to quirks in the way human cognition works. If so, it may be difficult to dispel certain kinds of introspective illusions.
Roughly, suppose we have multiple, distinct “mapping systems” that each independently operate to populate their own maps of the territory. Each of these systems evolved and currently functions to facilitate adaptive behavior. However, we may discover that when we go to formulate comprehensive and rigorous theories about how the world is, these maps seem to provide us with conflicting or confusing information.
Suppose one of these mapping systems was a “physical stuff” map. It populates our world with objects, and we have the overwhelming impression that there is “physical stuff” out there, that we can detect using our senses.
But suppose also we have a “important agents that I need to treat well” system, that detects and highlights certain agents within the world for whom it would be important to treat appropriately, a kind of “VIP agency mapping system” that recruited a host of appropriate functional responses: emotional reactions, adopting the intentional stance, cheater-detection systems, and so on.
On reflecting on the first system, we might come to form the view that the external world really is just this stuff described by physics, whatever that is. And that includes the VIP agents we interact with: they’re bags of meat! But this butts up against the overwhelming impression that they just couldn’t be. They must be more than just bags of meat. They have feelings! We may find ourselves incapable of shaking this impression, no matter how much of a reductionist or naturalist or whatever we might like to be.
What could be going on here is simply the inability for these two mapping systems to adequately talk to one another. We are host to divided minds with balkanized mapping systems, and may find that we simply cannot grok some of the concepts contained in one of our mapping systems in terms of the mapping system in the other. You might call this something like “internal failure to grok.” It isn’t that, say, I cannot grok some other person’s concepts, but that some of the cognitive systems I possess cannot grok each other.
You might call this something like “conceptual incommensurability.” And if we’re stuck with a cognitive architecture like this, certain intuitions may seem incorrigible, even if we could come up with a good model, based on solid evidence, that would explain why things would seem this way to us, without us having to suppose that it is that way.
Note that it’s plausible to me that this is a Typical Mind thing and actually there’s just a lot of people going around without the perception of phenomenal consciousness.
Like, Lance, do you not feel like you experience that things seem ways? Or just that they don’t seem to be ways in ways that seem robustly meaningful or something?
But the qualiaphilic claim is typical, statistically. Even if Lance’s and Denett’s claims to zombiehood are sincere, they are not typical.
Have we even checked tho? (Maybe the answer is yes, but it hadn’t occurred to me before just now that this was a dimension people might vary on. Or, actually I think it had, but I hadn’t had a person in front of me actually claiming it)
See above; I posted a link to a recent study. There hasn’t been much work on this. While my views may be atypical, so too might the views popular among contemporary analytic philosophers. A commitment to the notion that there is a legitimate hard problem of consciousness, that we “have qualia,” and so on might all be idiosyncrasies of the specific way philosophers think, and may even result from unique historical contingencies, such that, were there many more philosophers like Quine and Dennett in the field, such views might not be so popular.
Some philosophical positions seem to rise and fall over time. Moral realism was less popular a few decades ago, but as enjoyed a recent resurgence, for instance. This suggests that the perspectives of philosophers might result in part from trends or fashions distinctive of particular points in time.
Typical of who?
“Statistically” , so “who” would be most people.
Thanks for clarifying. Not all statistical claims in e.g., psychology are intended to generalize towards most people, so I didn’t want to assume you meant most people.
If the claim is that most people have a concept of qualia, that may be true, but I’m not confident that it is. That seems like an empirical question it’d be worth looking into.
Either way, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if most people had the concept, or (I think more likely) could readily acquire it on minimal introspection (though on my view I’d say that people are either duped or readily able to be duped into thinking they have the concept).
I don’t know if I am different, or if so, why. It’s possible I do have the concept but don’t recognize it, or am deceiving myself somehow.
It’s also possible I am somehow atypical neurologically. I went into philosophy precisely because I consistently found that I either didn’t have intuitions about conventional philosophical cases at all (e.g., Gettier problems), or had nonstandard or less common views (e.g. illusionism, normative antirealism, utilitarianism). That led me to study intuitions, the psychological underpinnings of philosophical thought, and a host of related topics. So there is no coincidence in my presenting the views expressed here. I got into these topics because everyone else struck me as having bizarre views.
Most people don’t know the word “qualia”. Nonetheless, most people will state something equivalent....that they have feelings and seemings that they can’t fully describe. So it’s a “speaking prose” thing.
And something like that is implicit in Illusionism. Illusionism attempts to explain away reports of ineffable subjective sensations, reports of qualia like things. If no one had such beliefs, or made such reports, there would be nothing for Illusionism to address.
Trying to attack qualia from every possible angle is rather self-defeating. For instance, if you literally don’t know what “qualia” means, you can’t report that you have none. And if no one even seems to have qualia, there is nothing for Illusionism to do. And so on.
But then , why insist that you are right? If you have something like colour blindness , then why insist that everyone else is deluded when they report colours?
There are many reasons why a person might struggle to describe their experiences that wouldn’t be due to them having qualia or having some implicit qualia-based theory, especially among laypeople who are not experienced at describing their mental states. It would be difficult to distinguish these other reasons from reasons having to do with qualia.
So I don’t agree that what you describe would necessarily be equivalent, and I don’t think it would be easy to provide empirical evidence specifically of the notion that people have or think they have qualia, or speak or think in a way best explained by them having qualia.
Even if it could be done, I don’t know of any empirical evidence that would support this claim. Maybe there is some. But I don’t have a high prior on any empirical investigation into how laypeople think turning out to support your claim, either.
You know, I think you’re right. And I believe the course of this discussion has clarified things for me sufficiently for me to recognize that I do not, strictly speaking, endorse illusionism.
Illusionism could be construed as the conjunction of two claims:
(1) On introspection, people systematically misrepresent their experiential states as having phenomenal properties.
(2) There are no such phenomenal properties.
For instance, Frankish (2016) defines (strong) illusionism as the view that:
“[...] phenomenal consciousness is illusory; experiences do not really have qualitative, ‘what-it’s-like’ properties, whether physical or non-physical” (p. 15)
Like illusionists, I deny that there are phenomenal properties, qualia, what-its-likeness, and so on. In that sense, I deny phenomenal realism (Mandik, 2016). As such, I agree with (2) above. Thus, I agree with the central claim of illusionism, that there are no phenomenal properties, and I deny that there are qualia, or that there’s “what it’s likeness” and so on. However, what I am less comfortable doing is presuming that things seem this way to nonphilosophers, and that they are all systematically subject to some kind of error. In that regard, I do not fully agree with illusionists.
To the extent that illusionists mistakenly suppose that people are subject to an illusion, we could call this meta-illusionism. Mandik distinguishes meta-illusionism from illusionism as follows:
“The gist of meta-illusionism is that it rejects phenomenal realism while also insisting that no one is actually under the illusion that there are so-called phenomenal properties” (pp. 140-141).
Mandik goes on to distance his position from illusionism, in reference to Frankish as follows:
“One thing Frankish and I have in common is that neither of us wants to assert that there are any properties instantiated that are referred to or picked out by the phrase ‘phenomenal properties’. One place where Frankish and I part ways is over whether that phrase is sufficiently meaningful for there to be a worthwhile research programme investigating how it comes to seem to people that their experiences instantiate any such properties. Like Frankish, I’m happy with terms like ‘experience’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘conscious experience’ and join Frankish in using what he calls ‘weak’ and functional construals of such terms. But, unlike Frankish, I see no use at all, not even an illusionist one, for the term ‘phenomenal’ and its ilk. The term ‘phenomenal’, as used in contemporary philosophy of mind, is a technical term. I am aware of no non-technical English word or phrase that is accepted as its direct analogue. Unlike technical terms in maths and physics, which are introduced with explicit definitions, ‘phenomenal’ has no such definition. What we find instead of an explicit definition are other technical terms treated as interchangeable synonyms. Frankish follows common practice in philosophy of mind when he treats ‘phenomenal’ as interchangeable with, for instance, ‘qualitative’ or, in scare-quotes, ‘“feely”’. (p. 141)
I can’t quote the whole article (though it’s short), but he concludes this point by stating that:
“We have then, in place of an explicit definition of ‘phenomenal properties’, a circular chain of interchangeable technical terms — a chain with very few links, and little to relate those links to nontechnical terminology. The circle, then, is vicious. I’m sceptical that any properties seem ‘phenomenal’ to anyone because this vicious circle gives me very little idea what seeming ‘phenomenal’ would be.” (p. 142)
Mandik is not so sure he wants to endorse meta-illusionism, since this might turn on concerns about what it means for something to be an illusion, and because he’s reluctant to state that illusionists are themselves subject to an illusionism. What he proposes instead is qualia quietism, the view that:
“the terms ‘qualia’, ‘phenomenal properties’, etc. lack sufficient content for anything informative to be said in either affirming or denying their existence. Affirming the existence of what? Denying the existence of what? Maintaining as illusory a representation of what? No comment. No comment. No comment” (p. 148)
This is much closer to what I think than illusionism proper. So, in addition to denying that there are qualia, or phenomenal properties, or whatever other set of terminology is used to characterize some putative set of special properties that spell trouble for those of us ill-disposed to believe in such things, I also deny that it seems this way to nonphilosophers.
My entire academic career has centered on critiquing work in experimental philosophy, and close scrutiny of this and related articles might reveal what I take to be significant methodological problems. Nevertheless, insofar as research has been conducted on the subject of whether nonphilosophers have phenomenal properties, or think about consciousness in the same way as philosophers, at least some of the results indicate that they may not. See here, for instance Sytsma & Machery (2010):
I doubt this one study is definitive evidence one way or the other. What I will say, though, is that whether people think of consciousness the way philosophers do is an empirical question. I suspect they don’t, and absent any good reasons to think that they do, I’m not inclined to accept without argument that they do.
I disagree. You can claim to both not know what something means, and claim to not have the thing in question.
In some cases, you might not know what something means because you’re ignorant of what is meant by the concept in question. For instance, someone might use the term “zown zair” to refer to brown hair. I might not know this, even if I do have brown hair. In that case, I would not know what they mean, even though I do have brown hair. It would be a mistake for me to think that because I don’t know what they mean, that I don’t have “zown zair.” And it would be foolish to insist both that “zown zair” is false, and that “zown zair” is meaningless. I would simply have failed to find out what they were referring to with the term.
But this is not the case with qualia. I am not merely claiming that I don’t understand the concept. I am claiming that nobody understands the concept, because it is fundamentally confused and meaningless.
First, in the course of an exchange, This is especially the case when one is responding to a host of people, over an extended period of time, who are incapable of explaining the putative concept in a way that isn’t circular or vacuous.
In the course of an exchange, people may employ a concept. They might say that, e.g. some objects have the property A. Yet when asked to explain what A is, they are unable to do so, or they provide unsatisfactory attempts. For instance, they might point to several objects, and say “all these objects have property A.” This is what was done earlier in this thread: I was given examples, as though this was independently helpful in understanding the concept. It’s not. If I pointed to a truck, a flock of geese, and a math textbook and said “these all have property A,” you wouldn’t be much closer to knowing what I was talking about. In other cases, they might use metaphors. But the metaphors may be unilluminating. In still other cases, they might appeal to other terms or concepts. Yet these terms or concepts might themselves be obscure or poorly defined, and if one asks for clarification, one begins the journey through an endless loop of mutual interdefinitions that never get you anywhere.
In such cases, it can become apparent that a person’s concepts are circular and self-referential, and don’t really describe anything about the way the world is. They might define A in terms of B, B in terms of C, and C in terms of A. And they might insist that A is a property we all have.
When numerous people all claim that we have property A, but they cannot define it, one may reasonably wonder whether all of these people are confused or mistaken. That is, one might conclude that property A is a pseudoconcept, something vague and meaningless.
In such cases, I am fine saying both that
(a) I don’t have property A
(b) I don’t know what people referring to property A are talking about
I can believe that (a), because it’s meaningless. I don’t have meaningless properties. And I can conclude that (b), because it’s meaningless. I can’t understand a meaningless concept, because there isn’t anything to understand.
Maybe that’s an awkward way of framing why one would reject circular concepts that ascribe meaningless properties to people, in which case I’d be happy to revise the way I frame my rejection of qualia.
There are very good reasons to think people can see colors, and one would have such reasons even if they were colorblind. We can point to the physical mechanisms involved in color detection, the properties of light, and so on. We can point to specific color words in our and other languages, and it would be fairly easy to determine that nonphilosophers can see colors. I don’t think any of these conditions apply to qualia. So, first, there’s that.
To emphasize just the last of these, I don’t think “everyone else” is deluded. I think philosophers are deluded, and that people who encounter the work of these philosophers often become deluded as well. I don’t think the notion of qualia is a psychological mistake so much as it is an intellectual mistake only a subset of people make.
I suspect such mistakes are endemic to philosophy. The same thing has occurred, to an alarming extent, in contemporary metaethics. Moral realists frequently invoke the notion of decisive or external reasons, irreducible normativity, categorical imperatives, stance-independent normative and evaluative facts, and so on. I reject all of these concepts as fundamentally confused. And yet philosophers like Parfit, Huemer, Cuneo, and others have not only tangled themselves into knots of confusion, their work has trickled out into the broader culture. I routinely encounter people who have come across their work claiming to “have” concepts that they are incapable of expressing. And these philosophers, when pressed, will fall back on claiming that the concepts in question are “brute” or “primitive” or “unanalyzable,” which is to say, they can’t give an account of them, and don’t think that they need to. Maybe they do “have” these concepts, but since I am very confident we can explain everything there is to now about the way the world is without invoking them, I suspect they’re vacuous nonsense, and that these philosophers are uniformly confused.
And, like the notion of qualia, philosophers have for a long time presumed that ordinary people tend to be moral realists (see e.g. Sinclair, 2012). My own academic work specifically focuses on this question. And like the question of what people think about consciousness, this, too, is an empirical question. So far, little empirical evidence supports the conclusion that ordinary people tend to be moral realists, or at least that they tend to be consistently and uniformly committed to some kind of moral realism. By and large, they struggle to understand what they are being asked (Bush & Moss, 2020). I suspect, instead, that something like Gill’s (2009) indeterminacy-variability thesis is much more likely: that people have variable but (I suspect mostly) indeterminate metaethical standards.
The same may turn out to be the case for the only other issue I looked into: free will. This has led me, in my own work, to point towards the broader possibility that many of the positions philosophers purport to be intuitive, and that they claim are widespread among nonphilosophers, simply aren’t. Rather, I suspect that philosophers are over-intellectualizing some initial pool of considerations, then generating theories that are neither implicitly nor explicitly part of the way ordinary people speak or think.
I don’t think this is a situation where I am color blind, while others have color vision. Rather, it’s more like recognizing that many of the people around you are subject to a collective, and contagious, hallucination. So I suspect, instead, that I have come to recognize over time that academic philosophy has played an alarming role in duping large numbers of people into a wide range of confusions, then duped them further by convincing them that these confusions are shared by nonphilosophers.
References
Bush, L. S., & Moss, D. (2020). Misunderstanding Metaethics: Difficulties Measuring Folk Objectivism and Relativism. Diametros, 17(64). 6-21
Frankish, K. (2016). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 11-39.
Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.
Mandik, P. (2016). Meta-illusionism and qualia quietism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 140-148.
Sinclair, N. (2012). Moral realism, face-values and presumptions. Analytic Philosophy, 53(2). 158-179
When you sit alone in an empty room, do you have a sense of your own presence, your own self? Can you be aware, not only of your sensations, but of the sensation of having those sensations? Can you have thoughts, and be aware of having those thoughts? And be aware of having these awarenesses?
My answer to each of these questions is “yes”.
But for you, do these questions fail to point to anything in your experience?
I’m not sure. I have sensations, but I don’t know what a sensation of a sensation would be.
Sure, but that just sounds like metacognition, and that doesn’t strike me as being identical with or indicative of having qualia. I can know that I know things, for instance.
I would describe this as third-order metacognition, or recursive cognition, or something like that. And yea, I can do that. I can think that Sam thinks that I think that he lied, for instance. Or I can know that my leg hurts and then think about the fact that I know that my leg hurts.
Having now had a lot of different conversations on consciousness I’m coming to a slightly disturbing belief that this might be the case. I have no idea what this implies for any of my downstream-of-consciousness views.
I don’t know what that means, so I’m not sure. What would it mean for something to seem a certain way?
I don’t think it’s this. It’s more that when people try to push me to have qualia intuitions, I can introspect, report on the contents of my mental states, and then they want me to locate something extra. But there never is anything extra, and they can never explain what they’re talking about, other than to use examples that don’t help me at all, or metaphors that I don’t understand. Nobody seems capable of directly explaining what they mean. And when pressed, they insist that the concept in question is “unanalyzable” or inexplicable or otherwise maintain that they cannot explain it.
Despite his fame, the majority of students who take Dennett’s courses that I encountered do not accept his views at all, and take qualia quite seriously. I had conversations that would last well over an hour where I would have one or more of them try to get me to grok what they’re talking about, and they never succeeded. I’ve had people make the following kinds of claims:
(1) I am pretending to not get it so that I can signal my intellectual unconventionality.
(2) I do get it, but I don’t realize that I get it.
(3) I may be neurologically atypical.
(4) I am too “caught in the grip” of a philosophical theory, and this has rendered me unable to get it.
One or more of these could be true, but I’m not sure how I’d find out, or what I might do about it if I did. But I strangely drawn to a much more disturbing possibility, that an outside view would suggest is pretty unlikely:
(5) all of these people are confused, qualia is a pseudoconcept, and the whole discussion predicated on it is fundamentally misguided
I find myself drawn to this view, in spite of it entailing that a majority of people in academic philosophy, or who encounter it, are deeply mistaken.
I should note, though, that I specialize in metaethics in particular. Most moral philosophers are moral realists (about 60%) and I consider every version of moral realism I’m familiar with to be obviously confused, mistaken, or trivial in ways so transparent that I do think I am justified in thinking that, on this particular issue, most moral philosophers really are mistaken.
Given my confidence about moral realism, I’m not at all convinced that philosophers generally have things well-sorted on consciousness.
Are they expecting qualia to be more than a mental state? If you’re reporting the contents of your mental states, isn’t that already enough? I’m not sure what extra there should be for qualia. Objects you touch can feel hot to you, and that’s exactly what you’d be reporting. Or would you say something like “I know it’s hot, but I don’t feel it’s hot”? How would you know it’s hot but not feel it’s hot, if your only information came from touching it? Where does the knowledge come from? Are you saying that what you’re reporting is only the verbal inner thought you had that it’s hot, and that happened without any conscious mental trigger?
If it’s only the verbal thought, on what basis would you believe that it’s actually hot? The verbal thought alone? (Suppose it’s also not hot enough to trigger a reflexive response.)
Doesn’t your inner monologue also sound like something? (FWIW, I think mine has one pitch and one volume, and I’m not sure it sounds like anyone’s voice in particular (even my own). It has my accent, or whatever accent I mimic.)
More generally, the contents of your mental states are richer than the ones you report on symbolically (verbally or otherwise) to yourself or others, right? Like you notice more details than you talk to yourself about in the moment, e.g. individual notes in songs, sounds, details in images, etc.. Isn’t this perceptual richness what people mean by qualia? I don’t mean to say that it’s richer than your attention, but you can attend to individual details without talking about them.
I don’t think I can replicate exactly the kinds of ways people framed the questions. But they might do something like this: they’d show me a red object. They’d ask me “What color is this?” I say red. Then they’d try to extract from me an appreciation for the red “being a certain way” independent of, e.g., my disposition to identify the object as red, or my attitudes about red, as a color, and so on. Everything about “seeing red” doesn’t to me indicate that there is a “what it’s like” to seeing red. I am simply … seeing red. Like, I can report that fact, and talk about it, and say things like “it isn’t blue” and “it is the same color as a typical apple” and such, but there’s nothing else. There’s no “what it’s likeness” for me, or, if there is, I’m not able to detect and report on this fact. The most common way people will frame this is to try to get me to agree that the red has a certain “redness” to it. That chocolate is “chocolatey” and so on.
I can be in an entire room of people insisting that red has the property of “redness” and that chocolate is “chocolately” and so on, and they all nod and agree that our experiences have these intrinsic what-its-likeness properties. This seems to be what people are talking about when they talk about qualia. To me, this makes no sense at all. It’s like saying seven has the property of “sevenness.” That seems vacuous to me.
I can look at something like Dennett’s account: that people report experiences as having some kind of intrinsic nonrelational properties that are ineffable and immediately apprehensible. I can understand all those words in combination, but I don’t see how anyone could access such a thing (if that’s what qualia are supposed to be), and I don’t think I do.
It may be that that I am something akin to a native functionalist. I don’t know. But part of the reason I was drawn to Dennett’s views is that they are literally the only views that have ever made any sense to me. Everything else seems like gibberish.
Well, I would cash out it “feeling hot” in functional terms. That I feel a desire to move my hand away from the object, that I can distinguish it from something cold or at least not hot, and so on. There doesn’t seem to me to be anything else to touching a hot thing than its relational properties and the functional role it plays in relation to my behavior and the rest of my thoughts. What else would there be than this? It does seem to me that people who think there are qualia think there’s something else. They certainly seem insistent that there is after I describe my experience.
No, I think I have a conscious mental trigger, and I can and do say things like “that feels hot.” I respond to hot things in normal ways, can report on those responses, and so on. I can certainly distinguish hot from cold without having to say anything, but I’m not sure what else you might be going for, and all of that seems like something you could get a robot to do that I don’t think anyone would say “has qualia.” But this is a very superficial pass at everything that would be going on if I touched something hot and reacted to it. So, it might be something we’d need to dig into more.
Nobody ever asked me that. That’s an awesome question. I think that no, it does not sound like anything. It’s in English, and it’s “my voice,” but it doesn’t “sound like” my actual speaking voice.
Yes.
I don’t think that it is. It sounds a bit like you’re gesturing towards block’s notion of access consciousness. I’m not sure though.
Ok, I think I get the disagreement now.
Hmm, I’m not sure it’s vacuous, since it’s not like they’re applying “redness” to only one thing; redness is a common feature of many different experiences. 14 could have “sevenness”, too.
Maybe we can think of examples of different experiences where it’s hard to come up with distinguishing functional properties, but you can still distinguish the experiences? Maybe the following questions will seem silly/naive, since I’m not used to thinking in functional terms. Feel free to only answer the ones you think are useful, since they’re somewhat repetitive.
What are the differences in functional properties between two slightly different shades of red that you can only tell apart when you see them next to each other? Or maybe there are none when separate, but seeing them next to each other just introduces another functional property? What functional property would this be?
What if you can tell them apart when they aren’t next to each other? How are you doing so?
How about higher and lower pitched sounds? Say the same note an octave apart?
Say you touch something a few degrees above room temperature, and you can tell that it’s hotter, but it doesn’t invoke any particular desire. How can you tell it’s hotter? How does this cash out in terms of functional properties?
I’m guessing you would further define these in functional terms, since they too seem like the kinds of things people could insist qualia are involved in (desire, distinguishing). What would be basic functional properties that you wouldn’t cash out further? Do you have to go all the way down to physics, or are there higher-level basic functional properties? I think if you go all the way down to physics, this is below our awareness and what our brain actually has concepts of; it’s just implemented in them.
If you were experiencing sweetness in taste (or some other sensation) for the first time, what would be its functional properties that distinguish it from other things? Could this be before you formed attitudes about it, or are the attitudes simultaneous and built in as a necessary component of the experience?
What functional properties would you point to that your experiences of your actual speaking voice have, but your experiences of your inner voice don’t? And that can’t be controlled for? E.g. what if you were actually speaking out loud, but couldn’t hear your own voice, and “heard” your inner voice instead? How does this differ from actually hearing your voice?
One can apply a vacuous term to multiple things, so pointing out that you could apply the term to more than one thing does not seem to me to indicate that it isn’t vacuous. I could even stipulate a concept that is vacuous by design: “smorf”, which doesn’t mean anything, and then I can say something like “potatoes are smorf.”
The ability to distinguish the experiences in a way you can report on would be at least one functional difference, so this doesn’t seem to me like it would demonstrate much of anything.
Some of the questions you ask seem a bit obscure, like how I can tell something is hotter. Are you asking for a physiological explanation? Or the cognitive mechanisms involved? If so, I don’tknow, but I’m not sure what that would have to do with qualia. But maybe I’m not understanding the question, and I’m not sure how that could get me any closer to understanding what qualia are supposed to be.
I don’t know. Likewise for most of the questions you ask. “What are the functional properties of X?” questions are very strange to me. I am not quite sure what I am being asked, or how I might answer, or if I’m supposed to be able to answer. Maybe you could help me out here, because I’d like to answer any questions I’m capable of answering, but I’m not sure what to do with these.
It is a functional difference, but there must be some further (conscious?) reason why we can do so, right? Where I want to go with this is that you can distinguish them because they feel different, and that’s what qualia refers to. This “feeling” in qualia, too, could be a functional property. The causal diagram I’m imagining is something like
Unconscious processes (+unconscious functional properties) → (“Qualia”, Other conscious functional properties) → More conscious functional properties
And I’m trying to control for “Other conscious functional properties” with my questions, so that the reason you can distinguish two particular experiences goes through “Qualia”. You can tell two musical notes apart because they feel (sound) different to you.
I’m not sure if what I wrote above will help clarify. You also wrote:
How would you cash out “desire to move my hand away from the object” and “distinguish it from something cold or at least not hot” in functional terms? To me, both of these explanations could also pass through “qualia”. Doesn’t desire feel like something, too? I’m asking you cash out desire and distinguishing in functional terms, too, and if we keep doing this, do “qualia” come up somewhere?
Do you mean like a causal reason? If so then of course, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with qualia.
I have access to the contents of my mental states, and that includes information that allows me to identify and draw distinctions between things, categorize things, label things, and so on. A “feeling” can be cashed out in such terms, and once it is, there’s nothing else to explain, and no other properties or phenomena to refer to.
I don’t know what work “qualia” is doing here. Of course things feel various ways to me, and of course they feel different. Touching a hot stove doesn’t feel the same as touching a block of ice.
But I could get a robot, that has no qualia, but has temperature detecting mechanisms, to say something like “I have detected heat in this location and cold in this location and they are different.” I don’t think my ability to distinguish between things is because they “feel” different; rather, I’d say that insofar as I can report that they “feel different” it’s because I can report differences between them. I think the invocation of qualia here is superfluous and may get the explanation backwards: I don’t distinguish things because they feel different; things “feel different” if and only if we can distinguish differences between them.
Then I’m even more puzzled by what you think qualia are. Qualia are, I take it, ineffable, intrinsic qualitative properties of experiences, though depending on what someone is talking about they might include more or less features than these. I’m not sure qualia can be “functional” in the relevant sense.
I don’t know. I just want to know what qualia are. Either people can explain what qualia are or they can’t. My inability to explain something wouldn’t justify saying “therefore, qualia,” so I’m not sure what the purpose of the questions are. I’m sure you don’t intend to invoke “qualia of the gaps,” and presume qualia must figure into any situation in which I, personally, am not able to answer a question you’ve asked.
I don’t know what you think qualia are, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you. People keep invoking this concept, but nobody seems able to offer a substantive explanation of what it is, and why I should think I or anyone else has such things, or why such things would be important or necessary for anything in particular, and so on.
I hope I’m not coming off as stubborn here. I’m very much interested in answering any questions I’m able to answer, I’m just not sure precisely what you’re asking me or how I might go about answering it. “What are the functional properties of X?” doesn’t strike me as a very clear question.
What’s the nature of these differences and this information, though? What exactly are you using to distinguish differences? Isn’t it experienced? The information isn’t itself a set of “symbols” (e.g. words, read or heard), or maybe sometimes it is, but those symbols aren’t then made up of further symbols. Things don’t feel hot or cold to you because there are different symbols assigned to them that you read off or hear, or to the extent that they are, you’re experiencing those symbols as being read or heard, and that experience is not further composed of symbols.
I might just be confused here. I was thinking that the illusion of ineffability, “seemingness”, could be a functional property, and that what you’re using to distinguish experiences are parts of these illusions. Maybe that doesn’t make sense.
I might have been switching back and forth between something like “qualia of the gaps” and a more principled argument, but I’ll try to explain the more principled one clearly here:
For each of the functional properties you’ve pointed out so far, I would say they “feel like something”. You could keep naming things that “feel like something” (desires, attitudes, distinguishing, labelling or categorizing), and then explaining those further in terms of other things that “feel like something”, and so on. Of course, presumably some functional properties don’t feel like anything, but to the extent that they don’t, I’d claim you’re not aware of them, since everything you’re aware of feels like something. If you keep explaining further, eventually you have to hit an explanation that can’t be further explained even in principle by further facts you’re conscious of (eventually the reason is unconscious, since you’re only conscious of finitely many things at any moment). I can’t imagine what this final conscious explanation could be like if it doesn’t involve something like qualia, something just seeming some way. So, it’s not about there being gaps in any particular explanation you try to give in practice, it’s about there necessarily always being a gap. What is a solution supposed to look like?
Of course, this could just be a failure of my own imagination.
I don’t know the answer to these questions. I’m not sure the questions are sufficiently well-specified to be answerable, but I suspect if you rephrased them or we worked towards getting me to understand the questions, I’d just say “I don’t know.” But my not knowing how to answer a question does not give me any more insight into what you mean when you refer to qualia, or what it means to say that things “feel like something.”
I don’t think it means anything to say things “feel like something.” Every conversation I’ve had about this (and I’ve had a lot of them) goes in circles: what are qualia? How things feel. What does that mean? It’s just “what it’s like” to experience them. What does that mean? They just are a certain way, and so on. This is just an endless circle of obscure jargon and self-referential terms, all mutually interdefining one another.
I don’t notice or experience any sense of a gap. I don’t know what gap others are referring to. It sounds like people seem to think there is some characteristic or property their experiences have that can’t be explained. But this seems to me like it could be a kind of inferential error, the way people may have once insisted that there’s something intrinsic about living things that distinguishes from nonliving things, and living things just couldn’t be composed of conventional matter arranged in certain ways, that they just obviously had something else, some je ne sais quoi.
I suspect if I found myself feeling like there was some kind of inexplicable essence, or je ne sais quoi to some phenomena, I’d be more inclined to think I was confused than that there really was je ne sais quoiness. I’m not surprised philosophers go in for thinking there are qualia, but I’m surprised that people in the lesswrong community do. Why not think “I’m confused and probably wrong” as a first pass? Why are many people so confident that there is, what as far as I can tell, amounts to something that may be fundamentally incomprehensible, even magical? That is, it’s one thing to purport to have the concept of qualia; it’s another to endorse it. And it sounds not only like you claim to grok the notion of qualia, but to endorse it.
Hi, I was doing research on consciousness-related discussions, blah blah blah, 3 months old, would just like to reply to a few things you mentioned.
I know for certain that consciousness and qualia exist. I used to ‘fall for’ arguments that defined consciousness/qualia/free will as delusions or illusions because they were unobservable. Then, years later, I finally understood that I had some doublethink, and that these words actually were referring to something very simple and clear with my internal experience. I believed that the words were “meaningless” philosophy/morality words—for me, the lack of understanding WAS the ‘gap’ and they were referring to simple concepts all along.
The confusion of ‘defining’ these words even within philosophy creates lots of synonyms and jargon, though. I have gotten my definitions from the simplicity of what the concepts refer to, so I am almost certain I have not invented new complicated ways to refer to the concepts (as that would make communicating with others unnecessarily difficult and subjective).
These words refer to something that does indeed seem to be circular, because they all try to refer to something beyond the physical. I believe the people trying to define these words as something that relates to only physical things are the ones confused.
There is nothing confusing about what the concept is that the words are trying to communicate, but it’s impossible to get across because they are trying to describe something that can’t be replicated.
I’m not sure if you’re supporting/against this idea, but I know of consciousness as the sum of all of someone’s metaphysical experiences. Someone could have more or less amounts of senses/abilities, but it is metaphorical talk to say someone is “less conscious” because they are blind and deaf.
The relevancy of a metaphysical consciousness doesn’t come from philosophical mass mistakenness and navelgazing. It’s because it actually exists (but again, it’s individual, so I am never certain if it exists for anyone else).
I think the other replier did not answer the “redness”/”chocolateyness” question as I would have liked. Colors are the most common example because they seem to be the most ‘pure’ and consistent types of qualia. Are you familiar with the color-swapping thought questions like “if your senses of red and blue were switched, it would be a notably different experience just besides some words being used to refer to different concepts”, or “if you never saw green your entire life even if you read about green objects, then actually saw green, you gain new information”? Have they ever resonated or did they just seem confusing to you?
Yeah, it’s possible to imagine a gap that isn’t there (I mean, you’ve heard about people believing in spirits and magic and all that). Free will actually could be an illusion, although it strongly doesn’t feel like it. I know that from your perspective, unless you were extraordinarily confused and did have qualia, it seems you would still believe that other people were under illusions rather than experiencing something special.
If many individual people talked about feeling these experiences even without being excessively primed with other people’s philosophical discussions, would it make you ‘believe in qualia’, if you didn’t have it?
No. Consider religion and belief in the supernatural. Due to the existence of pareidolia and other psychological phenomena, people may exhibit a shared set of psychological mechanisms that cause them to mistakenly infer the presence of nonphysical or supernatural entities where there are none. While I believe culture and experience play a significant role in shaping the spread and persistence of supernatural beliefs, such beliefs are built on the foundations of psychological systems people share in common. Even if culture and learning were wiped out, due to the nature of human psychology it is likely that such mistakes would emerge yet again. People would once again see faces in the clouds and think that there’s someone up there.
So too, I suspect, people would fall into the same phenomenological quicksand with respect to many of the problems in philosophy. Even if we stopped teaching philosophy and all discussion of qualia vanished, I would not be surprised to find the notion emerge once again. People are not good at making inferences about what the world is like based on their phenomenology. I mean no disrespect, but your account sounds far more like the testimony of a religious convert than a robust philosophical argument for the existence of qualia. Take this blunt remark:
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing religion with theists, and one could readily swap out “consciousness and qualia” for “Jesus” our “God”: “I know for certain that [God] exist[s].” I don’t know for certain that qualia don’t exist. I don’t know for certain that God doesn’t exist. I don’t generally make a point of telling others that I know something “for certain,” and if I did, I think I would appreciate if someone else suggested to me, hopefully kindly, that perhaps my declaration that I know something for certain serves more to convince myself than to convince others.
I take the hallmark of a good idea to be its utility. The notion of qualia has no value. On the contrary, I see it as a product of confusions and mistakes born of overconfidence in our intuitions and phenomenology and to the poor methods of academic philosophy, which serve to anoint such errors with the superficial appearance that they are backed by intellectual rigor.
I’d believe in qualia if and when the concept appears meaningful and when it can figure into our best scientific explanations of what the world is like. That is, I’d accept it if it were a useful feature of our explanations/allowed use to make more accurate predictions than alternative models that didn’t posit qualia.
I take you’d likely disagree, and that’s totally fine with me. But if we survive this century and colonize the stars, it will be due to knowledge and discoveries that pay their way by allowing us to understand and anticipate the world around us, and augment it to our ends. It will not be due to the notion of qualia, which will be little more than a footnote buried deep in the pages of some galactic empire’s archives.
Hey, glad you saw my post and all that. Yes, I know about religion and people having unexplainable supernatural experiences. I don’t have anything like that, and I think people who daydreamed up a supernatural experience shouldn’t have literal certainty, just high confidence. (you’d also expect some high inconsistency in people who recount supernatural events. which unfortunately is probably true for qualia currently too, due to similar levels of how society spreads beliefs)
There is irony in using ‘convert’ when I was unconverted from believing these things by philosophical confusion, and then later untangled myself. Yes, you could go swap out any ‘certainty’ claim with any other words and mock the result. Sure, I guess no one can say ‘certain’ about anything.
“I think I would appreciate if someone else suggested to me, hopefully kindly, that perhaps my declaration that I know something for certain serves more to convince myself than to convince others.” My use of certainty is about honestly communicating strength of belief etc., not being hyperbolic or exaggerating. Yes I understand that many people exaggerate and lie about ‘certain’ things all the time so I trust other people’s “for certain” claims less. It doesn’t mean I should then reduce my own quality of claims to try to cater to the average, that makes no sense. (like, if I said it wasn’t certain, wouldn’t that be room for you to claim it’s a delusion anyway?) Like, the nature of consciousness/qualia is that someone who’s conscious/has qualia is never “uncertain” they are conscious (unlike with free will where there isn’t that level of certainty).
I think I mentioned it before but it seems perfectly rational if someone who doesn’t have qualia is confused by the whole thing. A “robust philosophical argument” isn’t possible, only some statistical one. (the same way that, if you didn’t understand some music’s appeal while a majority of other people did, the response to try to convince you could never be a robust philosophical argument.)
Despite that, I wish to convey that consciousness-related stuff is really about something meaningful and not a religious dream, and that it is very likely possible to make “more accurate predictions”, even though the actual topics relating to those predictions are usually really insignificant. (if consciousness had a major role to play in intelligence, for example, the world would still exhibit that with looking at intelligence only and there’d be likely other correlations to notice, although you might not be able to draw the connection to consciousness directly.)
debating this subject seems ultimately not very relevant to people’s actions or prosperity, yes.
nah
The idea that everything must be useful to explain something else doesn’t work unless you have a core things that need explaining, but are not themselves explanatory posits...basic facts...sometimes called.phenomena.
So qualia don’t have to sit in the category of things-that-do-explaining , because there is another category of things-that-need-explaining.
“Phenomena” (literally meaning appearances ) is a near synonym for “qualia”. And people aren’t good at making inferences from their qualia. People generally and incorrectly assume that colours are objective properties (hence rhe consternation caused , amongst some, by the dress illusion ).
That’s called naive realism, and it’s scientifically wrong.
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. (Of course , such a scientific quale isn’t immaterial by definition. Despite what people keep saying, qualia aren’t defined as immaterial).
I wouldn’t expect a theory of colour qualia to re emerge out of nowhere, because naive realism about colour is so pervasive. On the other hand, no one is naively realistic about tastes, smells etc. Everyone knows that tastes vary.
(I haven’t caught up on the entire thread, apologies if this is a repeat)
Assuming the “qualia is a misguided pseudoconcept” is true, do you have a sense of why people think that it’s real? i.e. taking the evidence of “Somehow, people end up saying sentences about how they have a sense of what it is like to perceive things. Why is that? What process would generate people saying words like that?” (This is not meant to be a gotcha, it just seems like a good question to ask)
No worries, it’s not a gotcha at all, and I already have some thoughts about this.
I was more interested in this topic back about seven or eight years ago, when I was actually studying it. I moved on to psychology and metaethics, and haven’t been actively reading about this stuff since about 2014.
I’m not sure it’d be ideal to try to dredge all that up, but I can roughly point towards something like Robbins and Jack (2006) as an example of the kind of research I’d employ to develop a type of debunking explanation for qualia intuitions. I am not necessarily claiming their specific account is correct, or rigorous, or sufficient all on its own, but it points to the kind of work cognitive scientists and philosophers could do that is at least in the ballpark.
Roughly, they attempt to offer an empirical explanation for the persistent of the explanatory gap (the problem of accounting for the consciousness by appeal to physical or at least nonconscious phenomena). Its persistence could be due to quirks in the way human cognition works. If so, it may be difficult to dispel certain kinds of introspective illusions.
Roughly, suppose we have multiple, distinct “mapping systems” that each independently operate to populate their own maps of the territory. Each of these systems evolved and currently functions to facilitate adaptive behavior. However, we may discover that when we go to formulate comprehensive and rigorous theories about how the world is, these maps seem to provide us with conflicting or confusing information.
Suppose one of these mapping systems was a “physical stuff” map. It populates our world with objects, and we have the overwhelming impression that there is “physical stuff” out there, that we can detect using our senses.
But suppose also we have a “important agents that I need to treat well” system, that detects and highlights certain agents within the world for whom it would be important to treat appropriately, a kind of “VIP agency mapping system” that recruited a host of appropriate functional responses: emotional reactions, adopting the intentional stance, cheater-detection systems, and so on.
On reflecting on the first system, we might come to form the view that the external world really is just this stuff described by physics, whatever that is. And that includes the VIP agents we interact with: they’re bags of meat! But this butts up against the overwhelming impression that they just couldn’t be. They must be more than just bags of meat. They have feelings! We may find ourselves incapable of shaking this impression, no matter how much of a reductionist or naturalist or whatever we might like to be.
What could be going on here is simply the inability for these two mapping systems to adequately talk to one another. We are host to divided minds with balkanized mapping systems, and may find that we simply cannot grok some of the concepts contained in one of our mapping systems in terms of the mapping system in the other. You might call this something like “internal failure to grok.” It isn’t that, say, I cannot grok some other person’s concepts, but that some of the cognitive systems I possess cannot grok each other.
You might call this something like “conceptual incommensurability.” And if we’re stuck with a cognitive architecture like this, certain intuitions may seem incorrigible, even if we could come up with a good model, based on solid evidence, that would explain why things would seem this way to us, without us having to suppose that it is that way.
I forgot to add a reference to the Robbins and Jack citation above. Here it is:
Robbins, P., & Jack, A. I. (2006). The phenomenal stance. Philosophical studies, 127(1), 59-85.