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 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.