Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to “propositional attitudes”,[1] where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.
Whereas illusionism is almost impossible to define coherently.
“According to illusionism, you only have propositional attitudes, not perceptions. Some of those propositional attitudes seem like propositional attitudes , and others seem like perceptions. Well they don’t, because if anything seemed like anything, that would be a perception. So actually you have a meta legal belief that some of your propositional attitudes are propositional attitudes, but also a meta level belief that others aren’t. That’s the illusion. But actually it’s not an illusion,because an illusion is a false perception , and there are no perceptions. Its actually a false belief, a delusion I don’t know why we call it illusionism”
It’s easy to give examples of things we think of as qualia. I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition of “qualia”.
I can give lots of examples of people, but there’s scope for endless debate about exactly what counts as a person and what doesn’t. (Newly born children? 16-week-old foetuses? Aliens or AIs, should any exist now or in the future, with abilities comparable to ours but very different brains and minds? Beings like gods, angels, demons, etc., should any exist, with abilities in some ways comparable to ours but not made out of matter at all?) And for debate about when persons A and B are actually the same person. (Suppose some intelligent computer programs are persons. If I take a copy, do I then have one person or two? Suppose we favour a multiverse-type interpretation of quantum mechanics. Are the versions of “me” on two nearby Everett branches one person, or two? Am I the same person as I was 30 years ago?)
There’s similar unclarity about what things count as qualia and about how to individuate them. (E.g., if you and I look at the same red object and both have normal colour vision, do we have “the same” quale of seeing-a-red-thing or not? If I see the same red thing twice, is that “the same” quale each time? If the answers are negative, what actual work is the notion of qualia doing?) And e.g. Daniel Dennett would claim that the word “qualia” includes enough baggage that it’s better to say that there are no qualia while in no way denying that people experience things.
It’s not (I think) in question that we experience things. It’s quite reasonable (I think) to question whether anything about our experience is made clearer by introducing objects called qualia.
It’s easy to give examples of things we think of as qualia. I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition of “qualia”.
Satisfactory for whom? I use examples because they are sufficient to get the point across to people who aren’t too biased. Someone night have some genuine reason to need a more rigourous definition...but they might not, they might instead be making a selective demand for rigour, out of bias. Where are the calls for rigourous definitions of “matter”, “computation”, etc?
I can give lots of examples of people, but there’s scope for endless debate about exactly what counts as a person and what doesn’t. (Newly born children? 16-week-old foetuses? Aliens or AIs, should any exist now or in the future, with abilities comparable to ours but very different brains and minds? Beings like gods, angels, demons, etc., should any exist, with abilities in some ways comparable to ours but not made out of matter at all?)
If my purpose is to demonstrate that people exist, all I need to do is point to a few uncontentious examples of people...I don’t need to solve every edge case.
And “endless debate” needs to be avoided. People who make selective demands for rigour don’t to change their minds, and endless debate is a great way of achieving that
(E.g., if you and I look at the same red object and both have normal colour vision, do we have “the same” quale of seeing-a-red-thing or not
Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist, or lack a reductive explanation?
(I’m ignoring those parts of your reply that seem to have no purpose other than implicitly accusing me of arguing in bad faith. I have seldom known anything useful to come out of engaging with that sort of thing. These discussions would be more enjoyable, for me at least, if you weren’t so relentlessly adversarial about them.)
Satisfactory for whom? For me, obviously :-).
There is at least one eminent philosopher, namely Daniel Dennett, who has made something of a speciality of this area and who flatly denies that qualia “exist”, and who doesn’t appear to me to be either a dimwit or a crackpot. That is already sufficient reason for me to want to be careful about saying “duh, of course qualia exist”.
Of course if all you mean by that is that people have experience, then I agree with that, but if that’s all you mean then what need is there to talk about “qualia” at all? And if it’s not all you mean, then before agreeing I need to know what else is being implicitly brought in.
Now, in the present instance it’s Jemist who introduced “qualia” to the discussion (so, in particular, you are under no obligation to be able to tell me precisely what Jemist means by the term). And Jemist talks e.g. about experience being “turned into qualia”, and I don’t see how your examples help to understand what that means, or what distinction between “experience” and “qualia” Jemist is trying to draw.
The general idea seems to be something like this: people and chickens alike have some sort of stream or sea of experiences, and humans (and maybe chickens or maybe not) “turn these experiences into qualia”, and having not merely experiences but qualia is what justifies calling an entity “conscious” and/or seeing that entity as of moral significance.
I’m sympathetic to the general idea that there’s something that’s kinda-the-same about chickens’ sensory input and ours, and something that’s maybe different about the early stages of processing that sensory input, and that that has something to do with possible moral differences between us and chickens. But I don’t see any reason to think that filling in that picture in detail, if we knew how to do it, would look much like identifying things (“qualia”) that we “have” and chickens maybe “don’t have”. And one way to resist the so-far-unjustified slide from “there may be something importantly different between how we process our sensory input and how chickens process theirs” to “maybe we have qualia and chickens don’t” is to remain mindful of the fact that we don’t have—or, at least, I don’t have and I haven’t seen much evidence that others have—a very clear idea of exactly what “qualia” are supposed to be, and of how “having qualia” is supposed to go beyond “having experience”.
Here’s another example of how the leap to “having qualia” may bring in unacknowledged baggage. You say “Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist” (so far so good, I guess) “or lack a reductive explanation?”. Where did that come from? It certainly doesn’t seem to be something that follows from the fact that people experience things. If you’re somehow inferring that from “having qualia” then I think there’s got to be something in your concept of “qualia” that is very much not an obvious consequence of having experience, and I don’t want to just nod wisely when someone says “of course we have qualia” because it may turn out that part of what they mean by “qualia” involves some sort of in-principle irreducibility, and I want to see some actual argument before agreeing to that!
(“Lack a reductive explanation” is ambiguous between “we don’t have one yet” and “we are probably never going to have one” and “we are definitely never going to have one” and “it is in principle impossible for us ever to have one”. I don’t like this because it’s too easy to slide between those meanings without explicitly noting that that’s happening and offering any justification. I don’t know whether I have guessed correctly at what combination of those things you meant; if you think I haven’t, feel free to clarify.)
There is at least one eminent philosopher, namely Daniel Dennett, who has made something of a speciality of this area and who flatly denies that qualia “exist”, and who doesn’t appear to me to be either a dimwit or a crackpot. That is already sufficient reason for me to want to be careful about saying “duh, of course qualia exist”.
By that standard, there is no satisfactory definition of anything, since there are philosophers who doubt their own existence, your existence, the existence of an external world, the existence of matter and so on.
But a definition is not supposed to count as a proof all by itself. A definition of X should allow two people who are having a conversation about X to understand each other. A definition that is satisfactory for that purpose does not need to constitute a proof or settle every possible edge case.
The general idea seems to be something like this: people and chickens alike have some sort of stream or sea of experiences, and humans (and maybe chickens or maybe not) “turn these experiences into qualia”, and having not merely experiences but qualia is what justifies calling an entity “conscious” and/or seeing that entity as of moral significance.
I’m not sure why it’s my job to explain what Jemist means.
If you want a hint as to what an “experience” could be other than a quale, then look at what qualia sceptics think an experience is...apparently some sort of disposition to answer “yes I see red” when asked what they see.
If you are anything like most people, you probably have no compunction against destroying machinery, or the virtual characters in a game. And you probably don’t care too much if the characters say “aaagh!” or the machinery reports damage. So it’s as if you think there is something about living organisms that goes beyond damage and reports of damage … something like pain, maybe?
and having not merely experiences but qualia is what justifies calling an entity “conscious” and/or seeing that entity as of moral significance.
More than one thing could make an entity morally significant, and there are arguments for the existence of qualia other than moral significance.
But I don’t see any reason to think that filling in that picture in detail, if we knew how to do it, would look much like identifying things (“qualia”) that we “have” and chickens maybe “don’t have”.
Well, if we fill in the picture by adding in more fine grained structure and function, we are probably not going to find the qualia for the same reason that we haven’t already. Nonetheless, we have good reason to think that our qualia are there, and rather less good reason to believe that the from-the-outside approach is literally everything, so that qualia have to be disregarded if they cannot be located on that particular map.
and I don’t want to just nod wisely when someone says “of course we have qualia” because it may turn out that part of what they mean by “qualia” involves some sort of in-principle irreducibility, and I want to see some actual argument before agreeing to that!
I just quoted a definition of qualia which says nothing about in-principle irreducibility. Do agree with that defintion?
Is it reasonable to to reject X, for which there is evidence, on the basis that someone might be smuggling in Y? Have you noticed that creationists do this—they don’t accept random mutation and natural selection because they are afraid they might end up agreeing that there is no god?
Here’s another example of how the leap to “having qualia” may bring in unacknowledged baggage. You say “Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist” (so far so good, I guess) “or lack a reductive explanation?”. Where did that come from?
“Lack a reductive explanation” is a separate claim, not an implication of “have qualia”.
“Lack a reductive explanation” is ambiguous between “we don’t have one yet” and “we are probably never going to have one” and “we are definitely never going to have one” and “it is in principle impossible for us ever to have one”.
The obvious interpretation is “we don’t have one yet”. Moreover , it is also true, so charitableness recommends it as the interpretation.
it’s too easy to slide between those meanings without explicitly noting that that’s happening and offering any justification.
I don’t do that.
What I would like to be able to do is be able to build up a step-by-step argument. But that can only work with a reader who is willing to judge each step on its own merits.
By that standard, there is no satisfactory definition of anything
I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. (My fault, no doubt, for not being clearer and more explicit.) I was not arguing that because some eminent philosophers deny the “existence” of “qualia” it follows that the term has no satisfactory definition. (I do say that I’ve not seen a really satisfactory definition, but that’s a separate claim.) But it seemed that you were saying that the “existence” of “qualia” is just obvious and I was explaining one reason why I can’t agree.
(Why all the scare-quotes? Because if I just say “it is not obvious that qualia exist” then someone may take “qualia exist” to mean the same thing as “people experience things” and think that I am saying it isn’t obvious that people experience things. That is not what I’m doubtful about. I am doubtful about the wisdom of reifying that experience into things-called-qualia, and I am doubtful about some of the philosophical baggage that “qualia” sometimes seem to be carrying.)
A definition of X should allow two people who are having a conversation about X to understand one another.
Yup. But (unless I’ve misunderstood you) you’re wanting to define “qualia” by pointing to some examples of people having experience, and that is definitely not sufficient for me to understand exactly what you mean by “qualia” and by “having qualia”.
I’m not sure why it’s my job to explain what Jemist means.
It isn’t, and in the comment to which you were replying I explicitly said that it isn’t. I’m not sure why you think I think it’s your job to explain what Jemist means, and if it’s because I said something that implies that or looks like it did then I hope you will accept my apologies, because I didn’t intend to do any such thing.
If you want a hint [...] something like pain, maybe?
It seems to me that the comment to which you were replying already sketched exactly the argument you’re making, and then went on to explain why I don’t find that argument sufficient reason to say that we “have qualia”, even though (of course!) I agree that it indicates that there is something going on that has something to do with what people are pointing at when they talk about qualia.
(Perhaps the following analogy will help. Suppose you were instead arguing that people “have souls”. I say I’m not convinced that that’s true, and it’s not entirely clear just what “souls” are meant to be. You say: of course there are souls, they’re what make us us, they’re what enable us to have moral values and appreciate beauty. I say: of course I agree that we are who we are and that we have moral values and appreciate beauty, but I don’t see any good reason to think that those things are best explained by postulating things that we call “souls”, and some of the specific things people say about “souls”—e.g., that they are inherently immortal and persist after our brains decompose—seem probably false. I don’t know how you feel about souls, but if like me you are skeptical about them then it might be helpful to know that what you’re actually saying about “qualia” seems very much like my imaginary-you is saying about “souls”.)
I just quoted a definition of qualia which says nothing about in-principle irreducibility. Do you agree with that definition?
I think you’re referring here to what you quoted from Wikipedia several comments back. (If not, my apologies, and please let me know what you meant instead.) I’m not sure what you mean by “agree with”. I generally avoid using the term “qualia”, in part because I don’t think it’s always clear what people mean by it, so I can’t “agree with” any definition of it in the sense of using that definition myself. If you mean do I think it’s a definition that a reasonable person might use, then I guess kinda—except that there isn’t actually a definition in what you quoted. You could extract from it something like “qualia are perceived sensations” (from the list of examples) or “qualia are qualitative characters of sensation” (from something later in what you quoted), but those two seem to me like they’re different things. If I have a headache, is the quale (1) my “perceived sensation” of pain in my head, or (2) the “qualitative character” of that sensation?
I’ve no problem with any of this if it’s taken informally. I might talk about “having a headache”, and you might say that in that case I “have a quale of headachiness”, and in some sense we’re referring to the same thing, and this is all fine. But “quale” is meant to be a technical philosophical term, to be deployed with precision, and for that purpose I worry that it assumes too much. I believe in headaches, in the sense that of course sometimes people’s heads hurt. I am not so sure that I want an ontology that actually literally has things called headaches in it; it might be more accurate to treat having-a-headache as an intransitive verb, for instance. “Qualia” might b e like “headaches” in this sense.
I agree, for the avoidance of doubt, that “qualia are perceived sensations” and “qualia are qualitative characters of sensation” do not imply that they are in principle irreducible.
Is it reasonable to to reject X, for which there is evidence, on the basis that someone might be smuggling in Y?
Nope. But it might be reasonable to be cautious about X and want it very precisely defined, to make sure such smuggling doesn’t happen. If you’re talking about evolution with a fundamentalist, then you should be very careful not to slide between “evolution means change of allele frequencies in a population” and “evolution means mutation and natural selection” and “evolution means mutation and natural selection, all happening through purely natural processes”. (And I think sometimes people do slide between those, and if they do then the creationists are right to complain.)
What I would like to be able to do is to build up a step-by-step argument. But that can only work with a reader who is willing to judge each step on its own merits.
Fine with me, with of course the proviso that sometimes it’s perfectly reasonable to say things like “oh, I hadn’t realised you meant that or “hmm, that inference seems valid, so let me reconsider something I agreed to before—yeah, on reflection I shouldn’t have been so quick to agree, and I now think it’s probably wrong”.
I agree that people experience things. You are apparently very keen that I should say not only that but also that people have qualia. Before agreeing with that, I want to know precisely what you mean by “having qualia” and how it goes beyond “experiencing things”. The thing you quoted from Wikipedia doesn’t really help me understand that. Could you be more explicit about what it is that you think I should be more confident of than I am? It surely isn’t just that you specifically want me to say the particular words “we have qualia”.
But it seemed that you were saying that the “existence” of “qualia” is just obvious and I was explaining one reason why I can’t agree.
But you weren’t disagreeing with anything actually in the definition. You have been saying that the definition doesn’t make it explicit enough that qualia aren’t irreducible, immaterial, etc. Merely failing to mention reducibility, etc, one way or the other isn’t enough for you.
I am doubtful about some of the philosophical baggage that “qualia” sometimes seem to be carrying.
“Seem” to whom? From my perspective, you keep insisting that I have smuggled in non-materialistic assumptions … but I don’t even see how that would work.
If I offer you one definition, then swap it for another, isn’t that a blatant cheat on my part? And if it is , why worry?
Or if I argue that qualia are immaterial based on other evidence and theories and whatever. … so that the conclusion isn’t begged by definition alone … that’s legitimate argumentation.
Suppose you were instead arguing that people “have souls”. I say I’m not convinced that that’s true, and it’s not entirely clear just what “souls” are meant to be. You say: of course there are souls, they’re what make us us, they’re what enable us to have moral values and appreciate beauty. I say: of course I agree that we are who we are and that we have moral values and appreciate beauty, but I don’t see any good reason to think that those things are best explained by postulating things that we call “souls”, and some of the specific things people say about “souls”—e.g., that they are inherently immortal and persist after our brains decompose—seem probably false. I don’t know how you feel about souls, but if like me you are skeptical about them then it might be helpful to know that what you’re actually saying about “qualia” seems very much like my imaginary-you is saying about “souls”.
You are asking me to tell you what qualia are ontologically. But thats not a definition , that’s a theory. Theories explain evidence. Evidence has to be spoken about separately from theories. When I define qualia, I am defining something that needs to be explained, not offering an explanation. I want the definition to be ontologically non committal so that the process of theory building can procede without bias. But neutrality isn’t enough for you: you are committed to a theory, and you won’t consider something as relevant evidence unless you can be guaranteed that it won’t disrupt the theory.
I agree that people experience things. You are apparently very keen that I should say not only that but also that people have qualia
“Experience things” doesn’t convey enough information, because it can too easily be taken in a naive realist sense.
The point isn’t that you are seeing a tomato, it is that you are seeing it in a certain way.
According to science , our senses are not an open window on the world that portrays it exactly as it is. Instead , the sensory centres of our brains are connected the outside world by a complex causal chain, during which information, already limited by our sensory modalities, is filtered and reprocessed in various ways.
So scientific accounts of perception require there to be a way-we-perceive-things...quite possibly , an individual one. Which might as well be called “qualia” as anything else.
[I] have been saying that the definition doesn’t make it explicit enough that qualia aren’t irreducible, immaterial, etc.
I have been saying that the things you offer by way of defining “qualia” don’t make it clear enough what the term means. And that I don’t want to affirm the existence of something whose meaning is not clear to me, one reason (not the only one) being that that opens the way for bait-and-switch moves where I say “sure, X exists” and then the person I’m talking to says “aha, so you agree that Y” where Y is something that now turns out to be part of what they meant by X that hadn’t been made explicit before.
That doesn’t mean that I need a definition that says “these things aren’t irreducible or immaterial”. It means I need a definition clear enough that I can tell whether irreducibility, or immateriality, or a dozen other things, are part of what the term means.
So far, you’ve (1) pointed to a few things and said “look, these are qualia” (which obviously doesn’t enable me to tell what is and isn’t part of what you mean by the term), and (2) cited a definition in a Wikipedia article which, as I explained above, seems actually to be at least two different definitions that say different things. And, in your latest comment, (3) said some things about the processes of perception that don’t help me understand what you mean by “qualia” for reasons I’ll get to below.
It’s very likely that what you mean by “qualia” doesn’t in fact presuppose immateriality or irreducibility or whatever! But I can’t tell because you have so far not chosen to tell me, in terms I am able to understand with confidence, just what you mean by the term.
you keep insisting that I have smuggled in non-materialistic assumptions
Nope. I keep insisting that I can’t tell what assumptions, if any, you might have smuggled in or might smuggle in later, because I can’t tell exactly what you mean by the term. Which is problematic for all sorts of reasons other than possible assumption-smuggling.
If I offer you one definition, then swap it for another, isn’t that a blatant cheat on my part?
Yup, and as you say that would be fine because then I could just say “look, you cheated and here’s how”. But what you’re actually doing is offering me no definitions concrete enough to tell what exactly you mean. And, again, the problem with that isn’t just that if you were inclined to be dishonest you could smuggle things in. It’s that you’re getting cross at me for not saying “yes, I agree that there are qualia” even though I still don’t know exactly what you would take that affirmation to mean.
(I remark that that really is the full extent of my denial. I haven’t said “there are no qualia” or “your alleged notion of qualia is incoherent” or anything of the sort. I have merely explained why I am not positively affirming that there are qualia, and from this you make extravagant deductions about how I am inflexibly attached to some theory—you don’t say what theory—which might possibly be troubled by the implications of qualia—you don’t say what implications. I think it is entirely possible that at some point in this discussion I will say “OK, I believe that by having qualia you mean X, and I completely agree that in that sense we have qualia”. To the best of my knowledge I am not committed to any theory that would make that impossible.)
I agree that there is nothing illegitimate about arguing from actual evidence on which we agree that qualia are immaterial, or whatever. That’s fine. But obviously we first need to figure out what evidence we agree on. You would like “qualia exist” to be one piece of evidence. Before I agree with that I need to know exactly what you mean by it. I am trying to find out, so far with less success than I’d like.
In the next bit of what you write it seems to me that you’re doing two things that I don’t see how to square with one another, while accusing me of bad faith for allegedly doing something that it looks to me as if you are doing. It would be nice to clear this up. So, first of all, the two things I don’t see how to square with one another.
On the one hand, you insist that when you talk about “qualia” you’re doing so in a way that doesn’t have any sort of theory attached, that merely amounts to presenting “something that needs to be explained”, something ontologically non-committal.
On the other hand, you aren’t content with e.g. “people experience things”; you want something on top of that that’s denoted by the word “qualia”.
Now, it seems to me that what uncontroversially needs to be explained is simply that people experience things. (Which, at the risk of rererepeating myself, I agree that we do.) Maybe what-you-mean-by-qualia is another thing that uncontroversially needs to be explained, but (1) I still don’t know exactly what you mean by “qualia” and (2) it looks to me as if the term goes beyond what uncontroversially needs to be explained.
One thing that going from “people experience things” to “people have qualia” adds, I think, is a reification of ways-of-experiencing, an implicit assertion something along the lines of “all those times people experience red, there is some single common thing shared between them”. (Not necessarily exactly that, of course. But something along those lines.) But that’s all those things you say you aren’t doing: it introduces a theory to the effect that different experiences share the same quale, it introduces an ontological commitment to there being actual things for the term “qualia” to attach to, and in doing these things it assumes something that (it seems to me) you don’t get to demand an explanation for, to treat as part of what needs to be explained, until you’ve given reason to think it’s real. Which I don’t think you’ve done yet.
(You have pointed to examples of people experiencing things. I agree that they are examples of people experiencing things. Before agreeing that they are, beyond that, examples of “qualia”, I need to understand exactly what that means to you that goes beyond “people experiencing things”, and so far I do not.)
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by “qualia” and what it actually commits us to. That’s very possible. Because I keep trying to get you to be more explicit about it and you keep not being explicit about it.
So I’ll ask again. Please, please, could you have another go at being explicit and clear about what exactly you mean by “qualia” and what you consider someone is and isn’t committed to by saying that “qualia exist”? If Alice believes that there are qualia and Bob believes that people experience things but there aren’t qualia, can you describe what should be different between Alice’s world and Bob’s without needing the word “qualia”? In Bob-world, do you expect people not to say things like “what a beautifully red rose” or “that book cover is the exact same shade of blue as my lover’s eyes”? Or do you expect people to say and do the same things but not really experience those things they’re talking about? Or something else? (I think probably something else. But I would like a better understanding of what else.)
Finally, you offer (unless I misunderstand?) an argument for why “people experience things” isn’t enough and we need “people have qualia” instead. But I don’t understand the argument.
I agree (of course) that our perception of the external world is a complicated affair, with lots of processing and filtering along the way. But I have no inkling how you get from there to the assertion that in addition to saying “people experience things” we need a reification of ways-of-perceiving-things. (It seems almost as if you’re equivocating between “ways of” meaning “processes by which” and “ways of” meaning something like “varieties of”; the fact that our perception is complicated and indirect might[1] give reason to believe in processes-by-which-perception-happens, but that’s not the sort of “ways of perceiving” that qualia are supposed to be at all, surely?)
[1] Though I’m not 100% convinced those need reifying either.
(We haven’t been discussing matter. I haven’t been insisting that you affirm the existence of matter. There aren’t any circumstances parallel to those involving “qualia”.)
But, since you ask, here’s the best I can do on short notice.
First, purely handwavily and to give some informal idea of the boundaries, here are some things that I would call “matter” and some possibly-similar things that I would not. Matter: electrons, neutrons, bricks, stars, air, people, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a particular bunch of particular people). Not matter: photons, electric fields, empty space (to whatever extent such a thing exists), the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a thing whose detailed composition changes over time), the god believed in by Christians (should he exist), minds. Doubtful: black holes; the gods believed in by the ancient Greeks (should they exist).
“Matter” is a kind of stuff rather than a kind of thing; that is, in general if some things are “matter” then so is what we get by considering them together, and so are whatever parts they might have. (This might need revision if e.g. it turns out that things I consider “matter” and things I don’t are somehow merely different arrangements of some more fundamental stuff.)
Conditional on the universe working roughly the way I currently model it as doing (or, more precisely, allow other people better at these things to model it as doing), I think the actually-existing things I call “matter” are coexistent with “things made from excitations of fermionic quantum fields”. If the way the universe works is very different from how I think it does, then depending on the details I might want (1) to continue to say that matter is excitations of fermionic quantum fields, and to declare that contrary to appearances some things we’ve all been thinking of as matter are something else, or (2) to continue to say that the things we naïvely think of as matter should be called matter, even though some of them are made of other things than excitations of fermionic quantum fields, or (3) to abandon the notion of “matter” as ill-adapted for the way the world actually turns out to be.
If faced with someone denying, or reluctant to positively affirm, the existence of “matter”, I would be interested to know whether they mean that some or all concrete things I regard as “matter” are fictions or simulations or imaginations or something, or whether they agree that those things are real but disagree somehow about their fundamental nature (in which case it would be nice to know what), or whether as in our case they don’t find my usage of the term clear enough to endorse or reject.
(In our case, I think the experiencing you point at when you refer to “qualia” is real; I do not know whether you are intending to point at something more noun-like, nor whether the things in question are real; I don’t think the term “qualia” generally presupposes any detailed view about the underlying nature of whatever-it-points-at but would want a clearer understanding of how my interlocutor is using the term before being confident of that in a specific case.)
But I have no inkling how you get from there to the assertion that in addition to saying “people experience things” we need a reification of ways-of-perceiving-things.
I didn’t say anything explicit about reification. And it’s not an implication, either. Merely using a noun is not reification. “Action”, “event”, “state” “property”, “process” and “nothingness” are all nouns, yet none of them refer to things.
a reification of ways-of-experiencing, an implicit assertion something along the lines of “all those times people experience red, there is some single common thing shared between them”.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition , not a complete theory. Again, your grounds for saying that the definition is inadequate is that it isn’t answering every question you might have—and that it might have implications you don’t. If the way qualia actually work, ontologically—a subject about which I have said nothing so far—involves the literal sharing of a universal between identical subjective sensations, then you should believe it, because it is true, and not object to it dogmatically. Definitions are supposed to have implications. It’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications … and it’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications you don’t like, because you are supposed to decide theories on the basis.
Notice that in raising the issue, you are already using a good-enough definition of qualia. To object to qualia on the basis that they involve a Platonic shared universal, rather than some other solution to the problem of universals, you have to be able to talk about them, even if without using the word “qualia”. But of course, you always have to have pre-theoretic definitions in order to build a theory.
It’s very likely that what you mean by “qualia” doesn’t in fact presuppose immateriality or irreducibility or whatever! But I can’t tell because you have so far not chosen to tell me, in terms I am able to understand with confidence, just what you mean by the term.
Whether qualia are immaterial or irreducible or whatever depends on all the evidence—on a theory. It should not be begged by a single definition. Question begging definitions are bad, m’kay.
I agree that there is nothing illegitimate about arguing from actual evidence on which we agree that qualia are immaterial
But we would first need to agree that qualia exist at all. That’s how theory building works ..step by step. Nobody could come to any conclusion about anything if they had to start with completely clear and exhaustive definitions. Ordinary definitions are not as exhaustive as encyclopedia articles, for instance. You are engaging in a selective demand for rigour.
If Alice believes that there are qualia and Bob believes that people experience things but there aren’t qualia, can you describe what should be different between Alice’s world and Bob’s without needing the word “qualia”?
I’ve already answered that: if Bob differs from Alice , he differs in being a naive realist.
give reason to believe in processes-by-which-perception-happens, but that’s not the sort of “ways of perceiving” that qualia are supposed to be at all, surely?)
No, they are supposed to be subjectively experienced ways of perceiving, as I have already said several times. I wasn’t putting forward ways-of-perceiving as an exhaustive definition, I was pointing out the inadequacy of your definition.
Using a noun is, by default, reification. Or, at the very least, should be presumed so in the absence of some statement along the lines of “of course when I’m asking you to agree that people have qualia, I am not asking you to commit yourself to there being any such things as qualia”.
Qualia without reification seem to me to amount to “people have experiences”. I understand that it doesn’t seem that way to you, but I don’t understand why; I don’t yet understand just what you mean by “qualia”, and the one thing you’ve said that seems to be an attempt to explain why you want something that goes beyond “people have experiences” in the direction you’re calling “qualia”—the business about perception being a complex multi-stage process involving filtering and processing and whatnot—didn’t help me, for the reasons I’ve already given.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition, not a complete theory.
I wish you would offer a definition. You are repeatedly declining to do so, and then complaining that I object to your definition (which you haven’t given) or have another definition of my own (which I don’t) or that I am immovably committed to some theory (you don’t say what) that conflicts (you don’t say how) with something (you don’t say what) about qualia. Maybe you’re right—for instance, I might be committed to some theory without even recognizing the fact, because it seems so obvious to me. But if so, the only way you’re going to correct my error (I assume, at least for the sake of argument, that if I am wrong you do want to help me get less wrong, rather than merely to gloat at how wrong I am) is by showing me what I’m doing wrong, which you seem very unwilling to do. You just want to keep saying that I’m wrong, which so far as I can see accomplishes nothing.
Definitions are supposed to have implications. It’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications
That’s OK, because I’m not doing that, as I already tried to make clear. My problem is that I can’t tell what implications your definition has. Because you won’t tell me what it is.
in raising the issue, you are already using a good-enough definition of qualia
It seems to me that in order for a definition I’m using to be good enough, a minimum requirement should be for me to have a reasonable idea what it is. In the present case, this requirement is not met.
Further, what I require to raise the issue is precisely the thing you are now saying is not part of what you mean by “qualia”, namely the understanding that insisting on the term “qualia” rather than merely saying that people experience things amounts to reifying whatever-it-is-”qualia”-is-about. You seem to be saying simultaneously (1) that speaking of “qualia” doesn’t commit one to reifying anything, and (2) that if I say “I don’t like the term ‘qualia’ because it seems like it may be reifying things that might be better not reified” I thereby demonstrate that I understand what you mean by “qualia” well enough. How can those possibly both be true?
Question begging definitions are bad, m’kay.
I’m glad you agree with me about that. But you seem to be … offended? … that I might be concerned at the possibility that you might be trying to make a question-begging definition. Do you consider that the way you’ve been conducting your side of this discussion demonstrates your bona fides so clearly that no reasonable person in my position could be concerned that there might be such an issue?
if Bob differs from Alice, he differs in being a naïve realist.
Splendid! I believe, like Alice, that people have experience. I am not a naïve realist. Therefore, apparently, I believe in qualia in whatever sense you have in mind, even though I don’t yet understand what that sense is. Problem solved!
(At least, I think I am not a naïve realist. But—I’m sorry if this seems to be becoming a theme—I don’t really understand exactly what you mean by “naïve realist”, so maybe I’m wrong in thinking I’m not one. At any rate, I agree with what you said in apparent criticism of naïve realism, namely that when we perceive things it happens by means of a complicated process in which lots of things happen along the way.)
I wasn’t putting forward ways-of-perceiving as an exhaustive definition, I was pointing out the inadequacy of your definition.
Not possible, since I wasn’t proposing to define anything. I assume you mean the inadequacy of my proposal of “people experience things” as the uncontroversially-true-and-needing-explaining part of what you might possibly mean by “people have qualia”. But, for the reasons I already gave and which you seem to have simply ignored without comment, I do not understand how what you said about naïve realism and the complexity of perception does anything to explain how “people have qualia” is better than “people experience things”.
It occurs to me that maybe you’re taking “things” in “people experience things” to be e.g. sunsets, and “people experience things” to mean something like “a straightforward X-experiences-Y relation holds between people and sunsets”, which might explain why you are accusing me of naïve realism. That isn’t what I mean; the difficulty I am having here is that the language we have available for talking about this stuff is full of implicit reifications and the like. Perhaps just “people experience” would be better. What is uncontroversial is not that people directly-interact-perceptually-with sunsets, nor that people have actual-reified-experience-types-called qualia, but that experiencing-events (-processes? all these terms are still too commital if taken literally) of the kind we are describing when we say things like “I saw a lovely sunset” happen. All the details of just what objects are involved are, I think, up for grabs and one of the things that makes me uneasy about “people have qualia” is that it strongly suggests particular answers to some of those questions that—because “question-begging definitions are bad, m’kay”—would be better left un-suggested.
You are engaging in a selective demand for rigor.
Only in the following sense: you seem offended that I will not declare that people have qualia. (Again, that’s the full extent of what I’m doing, so if something else is what’s offending you then you might consider saying explicitly what it is.) So I want to know what you mean when you say that people have qualia, and how that differs from weaker propositions like “people experience things”.
So, sure, it’s selective: I am selectively seeking clarification of the things you’re talking about where I don’t understand what you mean. If you find that problematic, then I would like some help understanding why.
It is possible that something you say at the end of your comment above is intended to be an answer to my often-repeated question. (Of course you claim that you have “already said [it] several times”, and of course that is not true, but never mind.)
they [sc. qualia] are supposed to be subjectively experienced ways of perceiving
Well, for sure I agree that perceiving happens, and that how that feels to us is subjective (because how anything feels to us is subjective, because that’s what “subjective” means). Does that mean that I agree with what you mean when you say “we have qualia”, or not?
(That isn’t meant to be some sort of gotcha-question. I genuinely don’t know what the answer is. I am still trying to avoid needless reification, and I suspect that for reasons I am not currently able to anticipate you will find it unsatisfactory that I don’t use the exact phrase “have qualia”; it seems to me that what I said above precisely captures what you get by taking “we have qualia” + “qualia are subjectively experienced ways of perceiving” and trying to change that as little as possible while avoiding the (apparent?) reification I’m worried about; but maybe I’m wrong. And a part of my brain still harbours the uncharitable suspicion that despite your assurances above the reification is actually the point and you will not accept any wording that doesn’t carry the ontological commitment you say you aren’t trying to beg the question of. Again, this is an uncharitable suspicion and I am aware that it is; but I am having trouble figuring out better explanations for why you’re so concerned that I specifically embrace “qualia”, in so many words.)
Using a noun is, by default, reification. Or, at the very least, should be presumed so in the absence of some statement along the lines of “of course when I’m asking you to agree that people have qualia, I am not asking you to commit yourself to there being any such things as qualia”.
I’ve already said that I’m using “qualia” in an ontologically non committal way.
I note from your 2016 comment that you use the word noncommittally yourself.
“Qualia are what happens in our brains (or our immaterial souls, or wherever we have experiences) in response to external stimulation, or similar things that arise in other ways (e.g., in dreams).”
Qualia without reification seem to me to amount to “people have experiences”.
As I have explained, equating qualia and experiences doesn’t sufficiently emphasise the subjective aspects.
“Experience” can be used in contexts like “experience a sunset” where the thing experienced is entirely objective, or contexts like “experience existential despair” ,where it’s a subjective feeling. Only the second kind of use overlaps with “qualia”. Hence, “qualia” is often briefly defined as “subjective experience”.
Note that “experience” is just as much of a noun as “quale”, so it has just as much of reification issue.
None.
I am still trying to avoid needless reification,
Then dont reify. The reification issue exists only in your imagination.
I understand that it doesn’t seem that way to you, but I don’t understand why; I don’t yet understand just what you mean by “qualia”,
How do you know it’s different from what you mean? You were comfortable using the word in 2016.
This conversation started when I used a series of examples to define “qualia”, which you objected to as not being a real definition.
“It’s easy to give examples of things we think of as qualia. I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition of “qualia”.′
But when I asked you to define “matter”...you started off with a listof examples!
“First, purely handwavily and to give some informal idea of the boundaries, here are some things that I would call “matter” and some possibly-similar things that I would not. Matter: electrons, neutrons, bricks, stars, air, people, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a particular bunch of particular people). Not matter: photons, electric fields, empty space (to whatever extent such a thing exists), the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a thing whose detailed composition changes over time), the god believed in by Christians (should he exist), minds. Doubtful: black holes; the gods believed in by the ancient Greeks (should they exist).”
The only thing I’m doing that is different is going for a minimal and common sense approach, rather than a technical definition on the lines of “that which is ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable. Hence why the list of examples: it’s hard to deny that ones pains feel like something, even when one can quibble about incorrigibility or whatever.
and the one thing you’ve said that seems to be an attempt to explain why you want something that goes beyond “people have experiences” in the direction you’re calling “qualia”—the business about perception being a complex multi-stage process involving filtering and processing and whatnot—didn’t help me, for the reasons I’ve already given.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition, not a complete theory. Again, you shouldn’t be rejecting evidence because you don’t like it’s theoretical implications.
Splendid! I believe, like Alice, that people have experience. I am not a naïve realist.
Naive realism is not the denial of experience: it’s treating experience as objective.
At least, I think I am not a naïve realist. But—I’m sorry if this seems to be becoming a theme—I don’t really understand exactly what you mean by “naïve realist”
You can look up definitions, just as you can for “qualia”.
so maybe I’m wrong in thinking I’m not one. At any rate, I agree with what you said in apparent criticism of naïve realism, namely that when we perceive things it happens by means of a complicated process in which lots of things happen along the way.)
Which have an objective aspect -- things happen differently in the brains of different perceivers—and a subjective aspect—things seem different to different observers. Again, the subjective aspect is what’s relevant.
It occurs to me that maybe you’re taking “things” in “people experience things” to be e.g. sunsets, and “people experience things” to mean something like “a straightforward X-experiences-Y relation holds between people and sunsets”, which might explain why you are accusing me of naïve realism. That isn’t what I mean; the difficulty I am having here is that the language we have available for talking about this stuff is full of implicit reifications
No, it just seems to you that way.
they [sc. qualia] are supposed to be subjectively experienced ways of perceiving
Well, for sure I agree that perceiving happens, and that how that feels to us is subjective (because how anything feels to us is subjective, because that’s what “subjective” means).
No, it doesn’t mean anything so vacuous. If two people perform mental arithmetic , that is not subjective because maths is objective...they get the same answer, or one of them is wrong. “Subjective” doesn’t just mean that individual apprehensions vary, it means there is no right or wrong about the variation Some people like the way marmite tastes to them, others don’t. Neither is right or wrong, but the marmite is always the exact same substance.
Does that mean that I agree with what you mean when you say “we have qualia”, or not?
Well, you seem to be having trouble understanding what “subjective” means.
Yup, I used the term “qualia” in 2016 (in response to someone else making an argument that used the term). I don’t always pick every possible fight :-).
(In that case, turchin was making another specific argument and used the word “qualia” in passing. I disagreed with the other specific argument and argued against that. The specific word “qualia” was a side issue at most. Here, the specific point at issue is whether everyone needs to agree that “we have qualia”.)
You asked for a definition of “matter” and I (1) gave a list of examples and counterexamples and near-the-boundary examples, (2) prefaced with an explicit note that this was preliminary handwaving, (3) followed by an attempt at a precise definition distinguishing matter from not-matter. You haven’t done any of that for “qualia”, just given a list of examples, and that (not the fact that you did give a list of examples) is what I was complaining about. “It’s easy to give examples … I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition”.
Your accusations of wilful ignorance and/or laziness
Yes, I could look up definitions of “naïve realism” or of “qualia”. As it happens, I have. They don’t tell me what you mean by those terms, and definitions of them do not always agree with one another. Which is why I keep asking you what you mean by terms you are using, and get frustrated when you seem reluctant to tell me.
For instance, here we read that “the naïve realist claims that, when we successfully see a tomato, that tomato is literally a constituent of that experience, such that an experience of that fundamental kind could not have occurred in the absence of that object”. Here we read that “naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased”. In a comment of yours elsewhere in this thread you say “People generally and incorrectly assume that colours are objective properties (hence the consternation caused, amongst some, by the dress illusion). That’s called naive realism, and it’s scientifically wrong.”
(I remark in passing that you also said that the difference between two people who agree that people experience things, one of whom says that we have qualia and one of whom doesn’t, is that the latter has to be a naïve realist; if you are in fact claiming that “we have qualia” means something that is straightforwardly implied by “colours are not objective properties of the objects whose colours they are” then, yay, it turns out that I believe that we have qualia and we can stop arguing. But I’m pretty sure this will not in fact be enough.)
These three things are not entirely unlike one another, but no two of them are the same. Your comment is offering an example rather than a definition, but it is not in fact an example of the first definition and I’m doubtful about its being an example of the second.
Or I could look up “qualia” in, say, the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, whose entry for that subject begins as follows—my annotations in square brackets.
The terms quale and qualia (pl.) are most commonly used [“most commonly”, so plainly what is about to follow is acknowledged not to be a definition that covers everyone’s use of the terms—gjm] to characterize the qualitative, experiential, or felt properties of mental states. [“most commonly used to characterize” is quite a long way from defining anything—gjm] Some philosophers take qualia to be essential features of all conscious mental states; others only of sensations and perceptions. [Again, not everyone uses the word the same way. -- gjm]
Here we have clear acknowledgement that the term is used differently by different people, and (I think deliberately) something that falls short of an actual clear definition.
Or I could go to an ordinary dictionary, say the superlative Oxford English Dictionary, the relevant part of whose definition reads: “a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person”. Which seems to presuppose (at least one version of) “naïve realism”: these qualities or properties are presumably of things in the external world and this definition seems at risk of importing the objects themselves into our qualia.
(But: people have experiences; often those experiences are “of” qualities or properties of objects in the world around them; if you don’t consider that to be acknowledging that “people have qualia”, what do you think is missing other than a specific shibboleth-phrasing?)
Actual discussion of the issues
I’m not sure whether “that which is ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable” is a (presumably very partial) description of what you mean when you talk about qualia, rather than just a random list of adjectives. If it is, then it’s a nice illustration of why I am reluctant to say (as I think you want me to) “yes, sure, I agree that there are qualia”. I strongly suspect that what most people who talk about “qualia” mean when they use that word goes way beyond the specific handwavy examples they offer, and I don’t want to be thought (by them or by others) to be endorsing any of the other stuff until we’ve talked about that other stuff explicitly. I agree with you that people experience things; I do not think it’s clear that they have experiences, or equivalence-classes-of-experiences, or whatever, that are ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable. Maybe they do. I’m not saying they definitely don’t. Just that those further claims are substantial claims, and that I think they are the sort of thing that “qualia” commonly means even to people who say “oh, no, all I mean by qualia is that stuff that happens when you look at a red thing”, and that part of the difference between “I agree that people experience things” and I agree that people have qualia” is that the latter is liable to give the impression that I endorse those substantial claims, and that if you want my assent to those claims then we actually need to discuss them.
Saying that you’re going for a minimal and common-sense approach is all very well, but in practice people are not that great at using words that have connotations in ways that abandon those connotations. This is also why I don’t think an atheist should play along if a certain kind of theist says “well, let’s just take ‘God’ as a sort of shorthand for humanity’s highest and best aspirations”, and I don’t think a creationist should play along if a biologist says “look, all ‘evolution’ means is change of allele frequencies in populations”.
You distinguish (I think this is the nearest you get to answering my question about what exactly you mean by qualia) between two kinds of things we might say about experience: “objective” (things happen differently in the brains of different people) and “subjective” (things seem different to different people) and say it’s the subjective side you’re concerned with. I am not actually convinced that “things seem different to different people” is a very meaningful proposition—that seems to presuppose some way of comparing experiences across people, and while obviously it’s easy to say that my experience of looking at a green thing is not the same as your experience of being struck gently on the head with a golf club I don’t really know what it would mean to say that my experience of looking at a green thing is or isn’t the same as your experience of looking at a green thing, and I strongly suspect that there is no answer.
Still, for sure people experience things and we can e.g. ask someone what they feel like. Does that mean that I agree that “people have qualia”? If not, what do you think is missing other than a specific shibboleth-phrasing?
Satisfactory for whom? I use examples because they are sufficient to get the point across to people who aren’t too biased.
It’s not satisfactory to me. Does this mean I am “too biased?” That seems like a potentially unjustified presumption to make, and not a fair way to have a discussion with others who might disagree with you.
Anyone could offer a definition then state in advance that anyone who doesn’t accept it is “too biased” then, when someone says they don’t accept it say “see, I told you so,” even if an unbiased person would judge the definition to be inadequate.
In any case, I’m not making a selective demand for rigor. Even if I were, I’d probably just shrug and raise the challenge, anyway. I don’t know what people talking about qualia are talking about. But I am also pretty confident they don’t know what they are talking about. I suspect qualia is a pseudoconcept invented by philosophers, and that to the extent that we adequately characterize it, it faces pretty serious challenges.
Where are the calls for rigourous definitions of “matter”, “computation”, etc?
The main person I discuss illusionism and consciousness with specializes in philosophy of computation and philosophy of science, with an emphasis on broad metaphysical questions. We both endorse illusionism, and have for years, so there’s little to say there. Instead, regularly we mostly discuss their views on computation and metaphysics, and I’m often asked to read their papers on these topics. So, in the past few years, I have read significantly more work on what computers and matter are than I have on consciousness.
Thus, ironically, I have more discussions about rigorous attempts to define computers and features of the external world than I do about consciousness. So if you think that, in denying qualia, I am somehow failing to apply a similar degree of rigor as I do to other ideas, you could not have picked worse examples. It is not the case that I’m especially tough on the notion of qualia.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the account of qualia you’ve presented is adequate.
First, I don’t know what is meant by “perceived sensation” of the pain of a headache. This could be cashed out in functional terms that don’t make appeal to what I am very confident philosophers are typically referring to when they refer to qualia. So this strikes me as a kind of veiled way of just using another word or phrase (in this case, “perceived sensation”) as a stand-in for “qualia,” rather than a definition. It’s a bit like saying the definition of morality is that it is “about ethics.”
I’m likewise at a loss about the second part of this. What is the qualitative character of a sensation? What does it mean to say that you’re referring to “what it is directly like to be experiencing” rather than a belief about experiences? Again, these just seem like roundabout ways of gesturing towards something that remains so underspecified that I still don’t know what people are talking about.
Whereas illusionism is almost impossible to define coherently.
Illusionism holds that our introspections about the nature of our conscious experiences are systematically mistaken in particular ways that induce people to hold the incorrect belief that our experiences have phenomenal properties.
I think this is a coherent position, and I’m reasonably confident it comports with how Dennett and Frankish would characterize it.
Where is that quote from? It seems to imply that all mental states are other propositional attitudes or perceptions. If so, that doesn’t seem right to me. Also, the complaint primarily seems to be with the name “illusionism.” I’m happy to call it delusionism. If we do that, do they still have an objection? If so, I’m not quite sure what the objection is.
So this strikes me as a kind of veiled way of just using another word or phrase (in this case, “perceived sensation”) as a stand-in for “qualia,” rather than a definition.
Is “unmarried man” a mere stand-in for “bachelor”?
Again, these just seem like roundabout ways of gesturing towards something that remains so underspecified that I still don’t know what people are talking about.
They are ways of gesturing towards your own experience. If you refuse to introspect you are not going to get it.
Where is that quote from?
Me.
Illusionism holds that our introspections about the nature of our conscious experiences are systematically mistaken in particular ways that induce people to hold the incorrect belief that our experiences have phenomenal properties.
Thats what I was expanding on.
The phenomenon properties you mentioned...those are qualia. You have the concept , because you need the concept to say it’s illusory.
Is “unmarried man” a mere stand-in for “bachelor”?
In some cases, but not others. One can reasonably ask whether the Pope is a bachelor, but for the purposes of technical philosophical work one might treat “unmarried man” and “bachelor” as identical in the context of some technical discussion.
They are ways of gesturing towards your own experience. If you refuse to introspect you are not going to get it.
I can understand if someone who doesn’t know me or my educational background might think that I just haven’t thought about the topic of qualia enough, or that I am refusing to introspect about it, but that isn’t the case. This isn’t a topic I’ve thought about only casually; it is relevant to my work.
That being said, I have introspected, and I have come to the conclusion that there isn’t anything to get with respect to qualia. Nothing about my introspection gives me any insight into what you or others mean by qualia. Instead, I have concluded that the notion of qualia that has trickled out from academic philosophy is most likely a conceptual confusion enshrining the kinds of introspective errors Dennett and others argue that people are prone to make.
Me.
Okay, thanks. I apologize for having had to ask but you provided a paragraph in quotation with no attribution, and it was difficult for me to interpret what that meant.
The phenomenon properties you mentioned...those are qualia. You have the concept , because you need the concept to say it’s illusory.
I have a kind of meta-concept: that other people have a concept of qualia but I myself am not personally acquainted with them, and would not say that I have the concept. One does not need to personally be subject to an illusion to believe that others are.
I know that other people purport to have a notion of qualia, but I do not. But thinking other people have mistaken or confused concepts does not require that one have the concept in the sense of possessing or understanding it. In other words, other people might tell me that there’s, e.g., “something it’s like” to see red or taste chocolate that somehow defies explanation, is private, is inaccessible, and so on. But I myself do not have such experiences.In such cases, I think people are simply confused, and that this can result in the case of believing in qualia in developing pseudoconcepts.
This isn’t the only case where I think this could or does occur. If people insisted they had a concept that was unintelligible or self-contradictory, such as a “colorless color” or if they insisted something could be “intrinsically north-facing,” I could hold that they are mistaken in having such concepts, , and maintain that I don’t “have the concept,” in that I am not actually capable of personally entertaining entertaining the notion of colorless colors or intrinsically north-facing objects.
In fact, this is exactly my position on non-naturalist moral realism: I regard the notion of stance-independent moral facts to be unintelligible. I can talk about “stance-independent moral facts,” as a concept other people purport to “have” in the sense of understanding it without understanding it myself. That is, I don’t actually have the concepts non-natural moral realists purport to have, while still regarding the people who hold such views to be subject to an intellectual or experiential error of some kind.
I have introspected and it has not resulted in acquaintance with qualia.
I believe people can introspect and then draw mistaken conclusions about the nature of their experiences, and that qualia is a good candidate for one of these mistaken conclusions.
What did it result in acquaintance with? If it seems to you that all your mental content consists only of propositional attitudes, then you don’t even have the illusion of phenomenonal consciousness. But why would you alone be lacking it?
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.
I’m not sure how to answer the first question. I’m sure my introspection revealed all manner of things over the course of years, and I’m also not sure what level of specificity you are going for. I don’t want to evade actually reporting on the contents of my mental states, so perhaps a more specific question would help me form a useful response.
I may very well not have even the illusion of phenomenal consciousness, but I’m not sure I am alone in lacking it. While it remains an open empirical question, and I can’t vouch for the methodological rigor of any particular study, there is some empirical research on whether or not nonphilosophers are inclined towards thinking there is a hard problem of consciousness:
It may be that notions of qualia, and the kinds of views that predominate among academic philosophers are outliers that don’t represent how other people think about these issues, if they think about them at all.
“Qualia” is easy to define. As Wikipedia has it
Whereas illusionism is almost impossible to define coherently.
“According to illusionism, you only have propositional attitudes, not perceptions. Some of those propositional attitudes seem like propositional attitudes , and others seem like perceptions. Well they don’t, because if anything seemed like anything, that would be a perception. So actually you have a meta legal belief that some of your propositional attitudes are propositional attitudes, but also a meta level belief that others aren’t. That’s the illusion. But actually it’s not an illusion,because an illusion is a false perception , and there are no perceptions. Its actually a false belief, a delusion I don’t know why we call it illusionism”
It’s easy to give examples of things we think of as qualia. I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition of “qualia”.
I can give lots of examples of people, but there’s scope for endless debate about exactly what counts as a person and what doesn’t. (Newly born children? 16-week-old foetuses? Aliens or AIs, should any exist now or in the future, with abilities comparable to ours but very different brains and minds? Beings like gods, angels, demons, etc., should any exist, with abilities in some ways comparable to ours but not made out of matter at all?) And for debate about when persons A and B are actually the same person. (Suppose some intelligent computer programs are persons. If I take a copy, do I then have one person or two? Suppose we favour a multiverse-type interpretation of quantum mechanics. Are the versions of “me” on two nearby Everett branches one person, or two? Am I the same person as I was 30 years ago?)
There’s similar unclarity about what things count as qualia and about how to individuate them. (E.g., if you and I look at the same red object and both have normal colour vision, do we have “the same” quale of seeing-a-red-thing or not? If I see the same red thing twice, is that “the same” quale each time? If the answers are negative, what actual work is the notion of qualia doing?) And e.g. Daniel Dennett would claim that the word “qualia” includes enough baggage that it’s better to say that there are no qualia while in no way denying that people experience things.
It’s not (I think) in question that we experience things. It’s quite reasonable (I think) to question whether anything about our experience is made clearer by introducing objects called qualia.
Satisfactory for whom? I use examples because they are sufficient to get the point across to people who aren’t too biased. Someone night have some genuine reason to need a more rigourous definition...but they might not, they might instead be making a selective demand for rigour, out of bias. Where are the calls for rigourous definitions of “matter”, “computation”, etc?
If my purpose is to demonstrate that people exist, all I need to do is point to a few uncontentious examples of people...I don’t need to solve every edge case.
And “endless debate” needs to be avoided. People who make selective demands for rigour don’t to change their minds, and endless debate is a great way of achieving that
Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist, or lack a reductive explanation?
(I’m ignoring those parts of your reply that seem to have no purpose other than implicitly accusing me of arguing in bad faith. I have seldom known anything useful to come out of engaging with that sort of thing. These discussions would be more enjoyable, for me at least, if you weren’t so relentlessly adversarial about them.)
Satisfactory for whom? For me, obviously :-).
There is at least one eminent philosopher, namely Daniel Dennett, who has made something of a speciality of this area and who flatly denies that qualia “exist”, and who doesn’t appear to me to be either a dimwit or a crackpot. That is already sufficient reason for me to want to be careful about saying “duh, of course qualia exist”.
Of course if all you mean by that is that people have experience, then I agree with that, but if that’s all you mean then what need is there to talk about “qualia” at all? And if it’s not all you mean, then before agreeing I need to know what else is being implicitly brought in.
Now, in the present instance it’s Jemist who introduced “qualia” to the discussion (so, in particular, you are under no obligation to be able to tell me precisely what Jemist means by the term). And Jemist talks e.g. about experience being “turned into qualia”, and I don’t see how your examples help to understand what that means, or what distinction between “experience” and “qualia” Jemist is trying to draw.
The general idea seems to be something like this: people and chickens alike have some sort of stream or sea of experiences, and humans (and maybe chickens or maybe not) “turn these experiences into qualia”, and having not merely experiences but qualia is what justifies calling an entity “conscious” and/or seeing that entity as of moral significance.
I’m sympathetic to the general idea that there’s something that’s kinda-the-same about chickens’ sensory input and ours, and something that’s maybe different about the early stages of processing that sensory input, and that that has something to do with possible moral differences between us and chickens. But I don’t see any reason to think that filling in that picture in detail, if we knew how to do it, would look much like identifying things (“qualia”) that we “have” and chickens maybe “don’t have”. And one way to resist the so-far-unjustified slide from “there may be something importantly different between how we process our sensory input and how chickens process theirs” to “maybe we have qualia and chickens don’t” is to remain mindful of the fact that we don’t have—or, at least, I don’t have and I haven’t seen much evidence that others have—a very clear idea of exactly what “qualia” are supposed to be, and of how “having qualia” is supposed to go beyond “having experience”.
Here’s another example of how the leap to “having qualia” may bring in unacknowledged baggage. You say “Why does that matter if all I am doing is asserting that qualia exist” (so far so good, I guess) “or lack a reductive explanation?”. Where did that come from? It certainly doesn’t seem to be something that follows from the fact that people experience things. If you’re somehow inferring that from “having qualia” then I think there’s got to be something in your concept of “qualia” that is very much not an obvious consequence of having experience, and I don’t want to just nod wisely when someone says “of course we have qualia” because it may turn out that part of what they mean by “qualia” involves some sort of in-principle irreducibility, and I want to see some actual argument before agreeing to that!
(“Lack a reductive explanation” is ambiguous between “we don’t have one yet” and “we are probably never going to have one” and “we are definitely never going to have one” and “it is in principle impossible for us ever to have one”. I don’t like this because it’s too easy to slide between those meanings without explicitly noting that that’s happening and offering any justification. I don’t know whether I have guessed correctly at what combination of those things you meant; if you think I haven’t, feel free to clarify.)
By that standard, there is no satisfactory definition of anything, since there are philosophers who doubt their own existence, your existence, the existence of an external world, the existence of matter and so on.
But a definition is not supposed to count as a proof all by itself. A definition of X should allow two people who are having a conversation about X to understand each other. A definition that is satisfactory for that purpose does not need to constitute a proof or settle every possible edge case.
I’m not sure why it’s my job to explain what Jemist means.
If you want a hint as to what an “experience” could be other than a quale, then look at what qualia sceptics think an experience is...apparently some sort of disposition to answer “yes I see red” when asked what they see.
If you are anything like most people, you probably have no compunction against destroying machinery, or the virtual characters in a game. And you probably don’t care too much if the characters say “aaagh!” or the machinery reports damage. So it’s as if you think there is something about living organisms that goes beyond damage and reports of damage … something like pain, maybe?
More than one thing could make an entity morally significant, and there are arguments for the existence of qualia other than moral significance.
Well, if we fill in the picture by adding in more fine grained structure and function, we are probably not going to find the qualia for the same reason that we haven’t already. Nonetheless, we have good reason to think that our qualia are there, and rather less good reason to believe that the from-the-outside approach is literally everything, so that qualia have to be disregarded if they cannot be located on that particular map.
I just quoted a definition of qualia which says nothing about in-principle irreducibility. Do agree with that defintion?
Is it reasonable to to reject X, for which there is evidence, on the basis that someone might be smuggling in Y? Have you noticed that creationists do this—they don’t accept random mutation and natural selection because they are afraid they might end up agreeing that there is no god?
“Lack a reductive explanation” is a separate claim, not an implication of “have qualia”.
The obvious interpretation is “we don’t have one yet”. Moreover , it is also true, so charitableness recommends it as the interpretation.
I don’t do that.
What I would like to be able to do is be able to build up a step-by-step argument. But that can only work with a reader who is willing to judge each step on its own merits.
I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. (My fault, no doubt, for not being clearer and more explicit.) I was not arguing that because some eminent philosophers deny the “existence” of “qualia” it follows that the term has no satisfactory definition. (I do say that I’ve not seen a really satisfactory definition, but that’s a separate claim.) But it seemed that you were saying that the “existence” of “qualia” is just obvious and I was explaining one reason why I can’t agree.
(Why all the scare-quotes? Because if I just say “it is not obvious that qualia exist” then someone may take “qualia exist” to mean the same thing as “people experience things” and think that I am saying it isn’t obvious that people experience things. That is not what I’m doubtful about. I am doubtful about the wisdom of reifying that experience into things-called-qualia, and I am doubtful about some of the philosophical baggage that “qualia” sometimes seem to be carrying.)
Yup. But (unless I’ve misunderstood you) you’re wanting to define “qualia” by pointing to some examples of people having experience, and that is definitely not sufficient for me to understand exactly what you mean by “qualia” and by “having qualia”.
It isn’t, and in the comment to which you were replying I explicitly said that it isn’t. I’m not sure why you think I think it’s your job to explain what Jemist means, and if it’s because I said something that implies that or looks like it did then I hope you will accept my apologies, because I didn’t intend to do any such thing.
It seems to me that the comment to which you were replying already sketched exactly the argument you’re making, and then went on to explain why I don’t find that argument sufficient reason to say that we “have qualia”, even though (of course!) I agree that it indicates that there is something going on that has something to do with what people are pointing at when they talk about qualia.
(Perhaps the following analogy will help. Suppose you were instead arguing that people “have souls”. I say I’m not convinced that that’s true, and it’s not entirely clear just what “souls” are meant to be. You say: of course there are souls, they’re what make us us, they’re what enable us to have moral values and appreciate beauty. I say: of course I agree that we are who we are and that we have moral values and appreciate beauty, but I don’t see any good reason to think that those things are best explained by postulating things that we call “souls”, and some of the specific things people say about “souls”—e.g., that they are inherently immortal and persist after our brains decompose—seem probably false. I don’t know how you feel about souls, but if like me you are skeptical about them then it might be helpful to know that what you’re actually saying about “qualia” seems very much like my imaginary-you is saying about “souls”.)
I think you’re referring here to what you quoted from Wikipedia several comments back. (If not, my apologies, and please let me know what you meant instead.) I’m not sure what you mean by “agree with”. I generally avoid using the term “qualia”, in part because I don’t think it’s always clear what people mean by it, so I can’t “agree with” any definition of it in the sense of using that definition myself. If you mean do I think it’s a definition that a reasonable person might use, then I guess kinda—except that there isn’t actually a definition in what you quoted. You could extract from it something like “qualia are perceived sensations” (from the list of examples) or “qualia are qualitative characters of sensation” (from something later in what you quoted), but those two seem to me like they’re different things. If I have a headache, is the quale (1) my “perceived sensation” of pain in my head, or (2) the “qualitative character” of that sensation?
I’ve no problem with any of this if it’s taken informally. I might talk about “having a headache”, and you might say that in that case I “have a quale of headachiness”, and in some sense we’re referring to the same thing, and this is all fine. But “quale” is meant to be a technical philosophical term, to be deployed with precision, and for that purpose I worry that it assumes too much. I believe in headaches, in the sense that of course sometimes people’s heads hurt. I am not so sure that I want an ontology that actually literally has things called headaches in it; it might be more accurate to treat having-a-headache as an intransitive verb, for instance. “Qualia” might b e like “headaches” in this sense.
I agree, for the avoidance of doubt, that “qualia are perceived sensations” and “qualia are qualitative characters of sensation” do not imply that they are in principle irreducible.
Nope. But it might be reasonable to be cautious about X and want it very precisely defined, to make sure such smuggling doesn’t happen. If you’re talking about evolution with a fundamentalist, then you should be very careful not to slide between “evolution means change of allele frequencies in a population” and “evolution means mutation and natural selection” and “evolution means mutation and natural selection, all happening through purely natural processes”. (And I think sometimes people do slide between those, and if they do then the creationists are right to complain.)
Fine with me, with of course the proviso that sometimes it’s perfectly reasonable to say things like “oh, I hadn’t realised you meant that or “hmm, that inference seems valid, so let me reconsider something I agreed to before—yeah, on reflection I shouldn’t have been so quick to agree, and I now think it’s probably wrong”.
I agree that people experience things. You are apparently very keen that I should say not only that but also that people have qualia. Before agreeing with that, I want to know precisely what you mean by “having qualia” and how it goes beyond “experiencing things”. The thing you quoted from Wikipedia doesn’t really help me understand that. Could you be more explicit about what it is that you think I should be more confident of than I am? It surely isn’t just that you specifically want me to say the particular words “we have qualia”.
But you weren’t disagreeing with anything actually in the definition. You have been saying that the definition doesn’t make it explicit enough that qualia aren’t irreducible, immaterial, etc. Merely failing to mention reducibility, etc, one way or the other isn’t enough for you.
“Seem” to whom? From my perspective, you keep insisting that I have smuggled in non-materialistic assumptions … but I don’t even see how that would work.
If I offer you one definition, then swap it for another, isn’t that a blatant cheat on my part? And if it is , why worry?
Or if I argue that qualia are immaterial based on other evidence and theories and whatever. … so that the conclusion isn’t begged by definition alone … that’s legitimate argumentation.
You are asking me to tell you what qualia are ontologically. But thats not a definition , that’s a theory. Theories explain evidence. Evidence has to be spoken about separately from theories. When I define qualia, I am defining something that needs to be explained, not offering an explanation. I want the definition to be ontologically non committal so that the process of theory building can procede without bias. But neutrality isn’t enough for you: you are committed to a theory, and you won’t consider something as relevant evidence unless you can be guaranteed that it won’t disrupt the theory.
“Experience things” doesn’t convey enough information, because it can too easily be taken in a naive realist sense.
The point isn’t that you are seeing a tomato, it is that you are seeing it in a certain way.
According to science , our senses are not an open window on the world that portrays it exactly as it is. Instead , the sensory centres of our brains are connected the outside world by a complex causal chain, during which information, already limited by our sensory modalities, is filtered and reprocessed in various ways.
So scientific accounts of perception require there to be a way-we-perceive-things...quite possibly , an individual one. Which might as well be called “qualia” as anything else.
It is simply not true that
I have been saying that the things you offer by way of defining “qualia” don’t make it clear enough what the term means. And that I don’t want to affirm the existence of something whose meaning is not clear to me, one reason (not the only one) being that that opens the way for bait-and-switch moves where I say “sure, X exists” and then the person I’m talking to says “aha, so you agree that Y” where Y is something that now turns out to be part of what they meant by X that hadn’t been made explicit before.
That doesn’t mean that I need a definition that says “these things aren’t irreducible or immaterial”. It means I need a definition clear enough that I can tell whether irreducibility, or immateriality, or a dozen other things, are part of what the term means.
So far, you’ve (1) pointed to a few things and said “look, these are qualia” (which obviously doesn’t enable me to tell what is and isn’t part of what you mean by the term), and (2) cited a definition in a Wikipedia article which, as I explained above, seems actually to be at least two different definitions that say different things. And, in your latest comment, (3) said some things about the processes of perception that don’t help me understand what you mean by “qualia” for reasons I’ll get to below.
It’s very likely that what you mean by “qualia” doesn’t in fact presuppose immateriality or irreducibility or whatever! But I can’t tell because you have so far not chosen to tell me, in terms I am able to understand with confidence, just what you mean by the term.
Nope. I keep insisting that I can’t tell what assumptions, if any, you might have smuggled in or might smuggle in later, because I can’t tell exactly what you mean by the term. Which is problematic for all sorts of reasons other than possible assumption-smuggling.
Yup, and as you say that would be fine because then I could just say “look, you cheated and here’s how”. But what you’re actually doing is offering me no definitions concrete enough to tell what exactly you mean. And, again, the problem with that isn’t just that if you were inclined to be dishonest you could smuggle things in. It’s that you’re getting cross at me for not saying “yes, I agree that there are qualia” even though I still don’t know exactly what you would take that affirmation to mean.
(I remark that that really is the full extent of my denial. I haven’t said “there are no qualia” or “your alleged notion of qualia is incoherent” or anything of the sort. I have merely explained why I am not positively affirming that there are qualia, and from this you make extravagant deductions about how I am inflexibly attached to some theory—you don’t say what theory—which might possibly be troubled by the implications of qualia—you don’t say what implications. I think it is entirely possible that at some point in this discussion I will say “OK, I believe that by having qualia you mean X, and I completely agree that in that sense we have qualia”. To the best of my knowledge I am not committed to any theory that would make that impossible.)
I agree that there is nothing illegitimate about arguing from actual evidence on which we agree that qualia are immaterial, or whatever. That’s fine. But obviously we first need to figure out what evidence we agree on. You would like “qualia exist” to be one piece of evidence. Before I agree with that I need to know exactly what you mean by it. I am trying to find out, so far with less success than I’d like.
In the next bit of what you write it seems to me that you’re doing two things that I don’t see how to square with one another, while accusing me of bad faith for allegedly doing something that it looks to me as if you are doing. It would be nice to clear this up. So, first of all, the two things I don’t see how to square with one another.
On the one hand, you insist that when you talk about “qualia” you’re doing so in a way that doesn’t have any sort of theory attached, that merely amounts to presenting “something that needs to be explained”, something ontologically non-committal.
On the other hand, you aren’t content with e.g. “people experience things”; you want something on top of that that’s denoted by the word “qualia”.
Now, it seems to me that what uncontroversially needs to be explained is simply that people experience things. (Which, at the risk of rererepeating myself, I agree that we do.) Maybe what-you-mean-by-qualia is another thing that uncontroversially needs to be explained, but (1) I still don’t know exactly what you mean by “qualia” and (2) it looks to me as if the term goes beyond what uncontroversially needs to be explained.
One thing that going from “people experience things” to “people have qualia” adds, I think, is a reification of ways-of-experiencing, an implicit assertion something along the lines of “all those times people experience red, there is some single common thing shared between them”. (Not necessarily exactly that, of course. But something along those lines.) But that’s all those things you say you aren’t doing: it introduces a theory to the effect that different experiences share the same quale, it introduces an ontological commitment to there being actual things for the term “qualia” to attach to, and in doing these things it assumes something that (it seems to me) you don’t get to demand an explanation for, to treat as part of what needs to be explained, until you’ve given reason to think it’s real. Which I don’t think you’ve done yet.
(You have pointed to examples of people experiencing things. I agree that they are examples of people experiencing things. Before agreeing that they are, beyond that, examples of “qualia”, I need to understand exactly what that means to you that goes beyond “people experiencing things”, and so far I do not.)
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by “qualia” and what it actually commits us to. That’s very possible. Because I keep trying to get you to be more explicit about it and you keep not being explicit about it.
So I’ll ask again. Please, please, could you have another go at being explicit and clear about what exactly you mean by “qualia” and what you consider someone is and isn’t committed to by saying that “qualia exist”? If Alice believes that there are qualia and Bob believes that people experience things but there aren’t qualia, can you describe what should be different between Alice’s world and Bob’s without needing the word “qualia”? In Bob-world, do you expect people not to say things like “what a beautifully red rose” or “that book cover is the exact same shade of blue as my lover’s eyes”? Or do you expect people to say and do the same things but not really experience those things they’re talking about? Or something else? (I think probably something else. But I would like a better understanding of what else.)
Finally, you offer (unless I misunderstand?) an argument for why “people experience things” isn’t enough and we need “people have qualia” instead. But I don’t understand the argument.
I agree (of course) that our perception of the external world is a complicated affair, with lots of processing and filtering along the way. But I have no inkling how you get from there to the assertion that in addition to saying “people experience things” we need a reification of ways-of-perceiving-things. (It seems almost as if you’re equivocating between “ways of” meaning “processes by which” and “ways of” meaning something like “varieties of”; the fact that our perception is complicated and indirect might[1] give reason to believe in processes-by-which-perception-happens, but that’s not the sort of “ways of perceiving” that qualia are supposed to be at all, surely?)
[1] Though I’m not 100% convinced those need reifying either.
Anyway,
Define “matter”.
Why?
(We haven’t been discussing matter. I haven’t been insisting that you affirm the existence of matter. There aren’t any circumstances parallel to those involving “qualia”.)
But, since you ask, here’s the best I can do on short notice.
First, purely handwavily and to give some informal idea of the boundaries, here are some things that I would call “matter” and some possibly-similar things that I would not. Matter: electrons, neutrons, bricks, stars, air, people, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a particular bunch of particular people). Not matter: photons, electric fields, empty space (to whatever extent such a thing exists), the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a thing whose detailed composition changes over time), the god believed in by Christians (should he exist), minds. Doubtful: black holes; the gods believed in by the ancient Greeks (should they exist).
“Matter” is a kind of stuff rather than a kind of thing; that is, in general if some things are “matter” then so is what we get by considering them together, and so are whatever parts they might have. (This might need revision if e.g. it turns out that things I consider “matter” and things I don’t are somehow merely different arrangements of some more fundamental stuff.)
Conditional on the universe working roughly the way I currently model it as doing (or, more precisely, allow other people better at these things to model it as doing), I think the actually-existing things I call “matter” are coexistent with “things made from excitations of fermionic quantum fields”. If the way the universe works is very different from how I think it does, then depending on the details I might want (1) to continue to say that matter is excitations of fermionic quantum fields, and to declare that contrary to appearances some things we’ve all been thinking of as matter are something else, or (2) to continue to say that the things we naïvely think of as matter should be called matter, even though some of them are made of other things than excitations of fermionic quantum fields, or (3) to abandon the notion of “matter” as ill-adapted for the way the world actually turns out to be.
If faced with someone denying, or reluctant to positively affirm, the existence of “matter”, I would be interested to know whether they mean that some or all concrete things I regard as “matter” are fictions or simulations or imaginations or something, or whether they agree that those things are real but disagree somehow about their fundamental nature (in which case it would be nice to know what), or whether as in our case they don’t find my usage of the term clear enough to endorse or reject.
(In our case, I think the experiencing you point at when you refer to “qualia” is real; I do not know whether you are intending to point at something more noun-like, nor whether the things in question are real; I don’t think the term “qualia” generally presupposes any detailed view about the underlying nature of whatever-it-points-at but would want a clearer understanding of how my interlocutor is using the term before being confident of that in a specific case.)
I didn’t say anything explicit about reification. And it’s not an implication, either. Merely using a noun is not reification. “Action”, “event”, “state” “property”, “process” and “nothingness” are all nouns, yet none of them refer to things.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition , not a complete theory. Again, your grounds for saying that the definition is inadequate is that it isn’t answering every question you might have—and that it might have implications you don’t. If the way qualia actually work, ontologically—a subject about which I have said nothing so far—involves the literal sharing of a universal between identical subjective sensations, then you should believe it, because it is true, and not object to it dogmatically. Definitions are supposed to have implications. It’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications … and it’s not reasonable to object to them for having implications you don’t like, because you are supposed to decide theories on the basis.
Notice that in raising the issue, you are already using a good-enough definition of qualia. To object to qualia on the basis that they involve a Platonic shared universal, rather than some other solution to the problem of universals, you have to be able to talk about them, even if without using the word “qualia”. But of course, you always have to have pre-theoretic definitions in order to build a theory.
Whether qualia are immaterial or irreducible or whatever depends on all the evidence—on a theory. It should not be begged by a single definition. Question begging definitions are bad, m’kay.
But we would first need to agree that qualia exist at all. That’s how theory building works ..step by step. Nobody could come to any conclusion about anything if they had to start with completely clear and exhaustive definitions. Ordinary definitions are not as exhaustive as encyclopedia articles, for instance. You are engaging in a selective demand for rigour.
I’ve already answered that: if Bob differs from Alice , he differs in being a naive realist.
No, they are supposed to be subjectively experienced ways of perceiving, as I have already said several times. I wasn’t putting forward ways-of-perceiving as an exhaustive definition, I was pointing out the inadequacy of your definition.
Using a noun is, by default, reification. Or, at the very least, should be presumed so in the absence of some statement along the lines of “of course when I’m asking you to agree that people have qualia, I am not asking you to commit yourself to there being any such things as qualia”.
Qualia without reification seem to me to amount to “people have experiences”. I understand that it doesn’t seem that way to you, but I don’t understand why; I don’t yet understand just what you mean by “qualia”, and the one thing you’ve said that seems to be an attempt to explain why you want something that goes beyond “people have experiences” in the direction you’re calling “qualia”—the business about perception being a complex multi-stage process involving filtering and processing and whatnot—didn’t help me, for the reasons I’ve already given.
I wish you would offer a definition. You are repeatedly declining to do so, and then complaining that I object to your definition (which you haven’t given) or have another definition of my own (which I don’t) or that I am immovably committed to some theory (you don’t say what) that conflicts (you don’t say how) with something (you don’t say what) about qualia. Maybe you’re right—for instance, I might be committed to some theory without even recognizing the fact, because it seems so obvious to me. But if so, the only way you’re going to correct my error (I assume, at least for the sake of argument, that if I am wrong you do want to help me get less wrong, rather than merely to gloat at how wrong I am) is by showing me what I’m doing wrong, which you seem very unwilling to do. You just want to keep saying that I’m wrong, which so far as I can see accomplishes nothing.
That’s OK, because I’m not doing that, as I already tried to make clear. My problem is that I can’t tell what implications your definition has. Because you won’t tell me what it is.
It seems to me that in order for a definition I’m using to be good enough, a minimum requirement should be for me to have a reasonable idea what it is. In the present case, this requirement is not met.
Further, what I require to raise the issue is precisely the thing you are now saying is not part of what you mean by “qualia”, namely the understanding that insisting on the term “qualia” rather than merely saying that people experience things amounts to reifying whatever-it-is-”qualia”-is-about. You seem to be saying simultaneously (1) that speaking of “qualia” doesn’t commit one to reifying anything, and (2) that if I say “I don’t like the term ‘qualia’ because it seems like it may be reifying things that might be better not reified” I thereby demonstrate that I understand what you mean by “qualia” well enough. How can those possibly both be true?
I’m glad you agree with me about that. But you seem to be … offended? … that I might be concerned at the possibility that you might be trying to make a question-begging definition. Do you consider that the way you’ve been conducting your side of this discussion demonstrates your bona fides so clearly that no reasonable person in my position could be concerned that there might be such an issue?
Splendid! I believe, like Alice, that people have experience. I am not a naïve realist. Therefore, apparently, I believe in qualia in whatever sense you have in mind, even though I don’t yet understand what that sense is. Problem solved!
(At least, I think I am not a naïve realist. But—I’m sorry if this seems to be becoming a theme—I don’t really understand exactly what you mean by “naïve realist”, so maybe I’m wrong in thinking I’m not one. At any rate, I agree with what you said in apparent criticism of naïve realism, namely that when we perceive things it happens by means of a complicated process in which lots of things happen along the way.)
Not possible, since I wasn’t proposing to define anything. I assume you mean the inadequacy of my proposal of “people experience things” as the uncontroversially-true-and-needing-explaining part of what you might possibly mean by “people have qualia”. But, for the reasons I already gave and which you seem to have simply ignored without comment, I do not understand how what you said about naïve realism and the complexity of perception does anything to explain how “people have qualia” is better than “people experience things”.
It occurs to me that maybe you’re taking “things” in “people experience things” to be e.g. sunsets, and “people experience things” to mean something like “a straightforward X-experiences-Y relation holds between people and sunsets”, which might explain why you are accusing me of naïve realism. That isn’t what I mean; the difficulty I am having here is that the language we have available for talking about this stuff is full of implicit reifications and the like. Perhaps just “people experience” would be better. What is uncontroversial is not that people directly-interact-perceptually-with sunsets, nor that people have actual-reified-experience-types-called qualia, but that experiencing-events (-processes? all these terms are still too commital if taken literally) of the kind we are describing when we say things like “I saw a lovely sunset” happen. All the details of just what objects are involved are, I think, up for grabs and one of the things that makes me uneasy about “people have qualia” is that it strongly suggests particular answers to some of those questions that—because “question-begging definitions are bad, m’kay”—would be better left un-suggested.
Only in the following sense: you seem offended that I will not declare that people have qualia. (Again, that’s the full extent of what I’m doing, so if something else is what’s offending you then you might consider saying explicitly what it is.) So I want to know what you mean when you say that people have qualia, and how that differs from weaker propositions like “people experience things”.
So, sure, it’s selective: I am selectively seeking clarification of the things you’re talking about where I don’t understand what you mean. If you find that problematic, then I would like some help understanding why.
It is possible that something you say at the end of your comment above is intended to be an answer to my often-repeated question. (Of course you claim that you have “already said [it] several times”, and of course that is not true, but never mind.)
Well, for sure I agree that perceiving happens, and that how that feels to us is subjective (because how anything feels to us is subjective, because that’s what “subjective” means). Does that mean that I agree with what you mean when you say “we have qualia”, or not?
(That isn’t meant to be some sort of gotcha-question. I genuinely don’t know what the answer is. I am still trying to avoid needless reification, and I suspect that for reasons I am not currently able to anticipate you will find it unsatisfactory that I don’t use the exact phrase “have qualia”; it seems to me that what I said above precisely captures what you get by taking “we have qualia” + “qualia are subjectively experienced ways of perceiving” and trying to change that as little as possible while avoiding the (apparent?) reification I’m worried about; but maybe I’m wrong. And a part of my brain still harbours the uncharitable suspicion that despite your assurances above the reification is actually the point and you will not accept any wording that doesn’t carry the ontological commitment you say you aren’t trying to beg the question of. Again, this is an uncharitable suspicion and I am aware that it is; but I am having trouble figuring out better explanations for why you’re so concerned that I specifically embrace “qualia”, in so many words.)
I’ve already said that I’m using “qualia” in an ontologically non committal way.
I note from your 2016 comment that you use the word noncommittally yourself.
“Qualia are what happens in our brains (or our immaterial souls, or wherever we have experiences) in response to external stimulation, or similar things that arise in other ways (e.g., in dreams).”
As I have explained, equating qualia and experiences doesn’t sufficiently emphasise the subjective aspects.
“Experience” can be used in contexts like “experience a sunset” where the thing experienced is entirely objective, or contexts like “experience existential despair” ,where it’s a subjective feeling. Only the second kind of use overlaps with “qualia”. Hence, “qualia” is often briefly defined as “subjective experience”.
Note that “experience” is just as much of a noun as “quale”, so it has just as much of reification issue.
None.
Then dont reify. The reification issue exists only in your imagination.
How do you know it’s different from what you mean? You were comfortable using the word in 2016. This conversation started when I used a series of examples to define “qualia”, which you objected to as not being a real definition.
“It’s easy to give examples of things we think of as qualia. I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition of “qualia”.′
But when I asked you to define “matter”...you started off with a listof examples!
“First, purely handwavily and to give some informal idea of the boundaries, here are some things that I would call “matter” and some possibly-similar things that I would not. Matter: electrons, neutrons, bricks, stars, air, people, the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a particular bunch of particular people). Not matter: photons, electric fields, empty space (to whatever extent such a thing exists), the London Philharmonic Orchestra (considered as a thing whose detailed composition changes over time), the god believed in by Christians (should he exist), minds. Doubtful: black holes; the gods believed in by the ancient Greeks (should they exist).”
The only thing I’m doing that is different is going for a minimal and common sense approach, rather than a technical definition on the lines of “that which is ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable. Hence why the list of examples: it’s hard to deny that ones pains feel like something, even when one can quibble about incorrigibility or whatever.
Again, that would be an ontology of qualia. Again, I am offering a definition, not a complete theory. Again, you shouldn’t be rejecting evidence because you don’t like it’s theoretical implications.
Naive realism is not the denial of experience: it’s treating experience as objective.
You can look up definitions, just as you can for “qualia”.
Which have an objective aspect -- things happen differently in the brains of different perceivers—and a subjective aspect—things seem different to different observers. Again, the subjective aspect is what’s relevant.
No, it just seems to you that way.
No, it doesn’t mean anything so vacuous. If two people perform mental arithmetic , that is not subjective because maths is objective...they get the same answer, or one of them is wrong. “Subjective” doesn’t just mean that individual apprehensions vary, it means there is no right or wrong about the variation Some people like the way marmite tastes to them, others don’t. Neither is right or wrong, but the marmite is always the exact same substance.
Well, you seem to be having trouble understanding what “subjective” means.
Your accusations of inconsistency
Yup, I used the term “qualia” in 2016 (in response to someone else making an argument that used the term). I don’t always pick every possible fight :-).
(In that case, turchin was making another specific argument and used the word “qualia” in passing. I disagreed with the other specific argument and argued against that. The specific word “qualia” was a side issue at most. Here, the specific point at issue is whether everyone needs to agree that “we have qualia”.)
You asked for a definition of “matter” and I (1) gave a list of examples and counterexamples and near-the-boundary examples, (2) prefaced with an explicit note that this was preliminary handwaving, (3) followed by an attempt at a precise definition distinguishing matter from not-matter. You haven’t done any of that for “qualia”, just given a list of examples, and that (not the fact that you did give a list of examples) is what I was complaining about. “It’s easy to give examples … I’m not so sure that that means it’s easy to give a satisfactory definition”.
Your accusations of wilful ignorance and/or laziness
Yes, I could look up definitions of “naïve realism” or of “qualia”. As it happens, I have. They don’t tell me what you mean by those terms, and definitions of them do not always agree with one another. Which is why I keep asking you what you mean by terms you are using, and get frustrated when you seem reluctant to tell me.
For instance, here we read that “the naïve realist claims that, when we successfully see a tomato, that tomato is literally a constituent of that experience, such that an experience of that fundamental kind could not have occurred in the absence of that object”. Here we read that “naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased”. In a comment of yours elsewhere in this thread you say “People generally and incorrectly assume that colours are objective properties (hence the consternation caused, amongst some, by the dress illusion). That’s called naive realism, and it’s scientifically wrong.”
(I remark in passing that you also said that the difference between two people who agree that people experience things, one of whom says that we have qualia and one of whom doesn’t, is that the latter has to be a naïve realist; if you are in fact claiming that “we have qualia” means something that is straightforwardly implied by “colours are not objective properties of the objects whose colours they are” then, yay, it turns out that I believe that we have qualia and we can stop arguing. But I’m pretty sure this will not in fact be enough.)
These three things are not entirely unlike one another, but no two of them are the same. Your comment is offering an example rather than a definition, but it is not in fact an example of the first definition and I’m doubtful about its being an example of the second.
Or I could look up “qualia” in, say, the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, whose entry for that subject begins as follows—my annotations in square brackets.
Here we have clear acknowledgement that the term is used differently by different people, and (I think deliberately) something that falls short of an actual clear definition.
Or I could go to an ordinary dictionary, say the superlative Oxford English Dictionary, the relevant part of whose definition reads: “a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person”. Which seems to presuppose (at least one version of) “naïve realism”: these qualities or properties are presumably of things in the external world and this definition seems at risk of importing the objects themselves into our qualia.
(But: people have experiences; often those experiences are “of” qualities or properties of objects in the world around them; if you don’t consider that to be acknowledging that “people have qualia”, what do you think is missing other than a specific shibboleth-phrasing?)
Actual discussion of the issues
I’m not sure whether “that which is ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable” is a (presumably very partial) description of what you mean when you talk about qualia, rather than just a random list of adjectives. If it is, then it’s a nice illustration of why I am reluctant to say (as I think you want me to) “yes, sure, I agree that there are qualia”. I strongly suspect that what most people who talk about “qualia” mean when they use that word goes way beyond the specific handwavy examples they offer, and I don’t want to be thought (by them or by others) to be endorsing any of the other stuff until we’ve talked about that other stuff explicitly. I agree with you that people experience things; I do not think it’s clear that they have experiences, or equivalence-classes-of-experiences, or whatever, that are ineffable, incorrigible, irreducible and repeatable. Maybe they do. I’m not saying they definitely don’t. Just that those further claims are substantial claims, and that I think they are the sort of thing that “qualia” commonly means even to people who say “oh, no, all I mean by qualia is that stuff that happens when you look at a red thing”, and that part of the difference between “I agree that people experience things” and I agree that people have qualia” is that the latter is liable to give the impression that I endorse those substantial claims, and that if you want my assent to those claims then we actually need to discuss them.
Saying that you’re going for a minimal and common-sense approach is all very well, but in practice people are not that great at using words that have connotations in ways that abandon those connotations. This is also why I don’t think an atheist should play along if a certain kind of theist says “well, let’s just take ‘God’ as a sort of shorthand for humanity’s highest and best aspirations”, and I don’t think a creationist should play along if a biologist says “look, all ‘evolution’ means is change of allele frequencies in populations”.
You distinguish (I think this is the nearest you get to answering my question about what exactly you mean by qualia) between two kinds of things we might say about experience: “objective” (things happen differently in the brains of different people) and “subjective” (things seem different to different people) and say it’s the subjective side you’re concerned with. I am not actually convinced that “things seem different to different people” is a very meaningful proposition—that seems to presuppose some way of comparing experiences across people, and while obviously it’s easy to say that my experience of looking at a green thing is not the same as your experience of being struck gently on the head with a golf club I don’t really know what it would mean to say that my experience of looking at a green thing is or isn’t the same as your experience of looking at a green thing, and I strongly suspect that there is no answer.
Still, for sure people experience things and we can e.g. ask someone what they feel like. Does that mean that I agree that “people have qualia”? If not, what do you think is missing other than a specific shibboleth-phrasing?
It’s not satisfactory to me. Does this mean I am “too biased?” That seems like a potentially unjustified presumption to make, and not a fair way to have a discussion with others who might disagree with you.
Anyone could offer a definition then state in advance that anyone who doesn’t accept it is “too biased” then, when someone says they don’t accept it say “see, I told you so,” even if an unbiased person would judge the definition to be inadequate.
In any case, I’m not making a selective demand for rigor. Even if I were, I’d probably just shrug and raise the challenge, anyway. I don’t know what people talking about qualia are talking about. But I am also pretty confident they don’t know what they are talking about. I suspect qualia is a pseudoconcept invented by philosophers, and that to the extent that we adequately characterize it, it faces pretty serious challenges.
The main person I discuss illusionism and consciousness with specializes in philosophy of computation and philosophy of science, with an emphasis on broad metaphysical questions. We both endorse illusionism, and have for years, so there’s little to say there. Instead, regularly we mostly discuss their views on computation and metaphysics, and I’m often asked to read their papers on these topics. So, in the past few years, I have read significantly more work on what computers and matter are than I have on consciousness.
Thus, ironically, I have more discussions about rigorous attempts to define computers and features of the external world than I do about consciousness. So if you think that, in denying qualia, I am somehow failing to apply a similar degree of rigor as I do to other ideas, you could not have picked worse examples. It is not the case that I’m especially tough on the notion of qualia.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the account of qualia you’ve presented is adequate.
First, I don’t know what is meant by “perceived sensation” of the pain of a headache. This could be cashed out in functional terms that don’t make appeal to what I am very confident philosophers are typically referring to when they refer to qualia. So this strikes me as a kind of veiled way of just using another word or phrase (in this case, “perceived sensation”) as a stand-in for “qualia,” rather than a definition. It’s a bit like saying the definition of morality is that it is “about ethics.”
I’m likewise at a loss about the second part of this. What is the qualitative character of a sensation? What does it mean to say that you’re referring to “what it is directly like to be experiencing” rather than a belief about experiences? Again, these just seem like roundabout ways of gesturing towards something that remains so underspecified that I still don’t know what people are talking about.
Illusionism holds that our introspections about the nature of our conscious experiences are systematically mistaken in particular ways that induce people to hold the incorrect belief that our experiences have phenomenal properties.
I think this is a coherent position, and I’m reasonably confident it comports with how Dennett and Frankish would characterize it.
Where is that quote from? It seems to imply that all mental states are other propositional attitudes or perceptions. If so, that doesn’t seem right to me. Also, the complaint primarily seems to be with the name “illusionism.” I’m happy to call it delusionism. If we do that, do they still have an objection? If so, I’m not quite sure what the objection is.
Is “unmarried man” a mere stand-in for “bachelor”?
They are ways of gesturing towards your own experience. If you refuse to introspect you are not going to get it.
Me.
Thats what I was expanding on.
The phenomenon properties you mentioned...those are qualia. You have the concept , because you need the concept to say it’s illusory.
In some cases, but not others. One can reasonably ask whether the Pope is a bachelor, but for the purposes of technical philosophical work one might treat “unmarried man” and “bachelor” as identical in the context of some technical discussion.
I can understand if someone who doesn’t know me or my educational background might think that I just haven’t thought about the topic of qualia enough, or that I am refusing to introspect about it, but that isn’t the case. This isn’t a topic I’ve thought about only casually; it is relevant to my work.
That being said, I have introspected, and I have come to the conclusion that there isn’t anything to get with respect to qualia. Nothing about my introspection gives me any insight into what you or others mean by qualia. Instead, I have concluded that the notion of qualia that has trickled out from academic philosophy is most likely a conceptual confusion enshrining the kinds of introspective errors Dennett and others argue that people are prone to make.
Okay, thanks. I apologize for having had to ask but you provided a paragraph in quotation with no attribution, and it was difficult for me to interpret what that meant.
I have a kind of meta-concept: that other people have a concept of qualia but I myself am not personally acquainted with them, and would not say that I have the concept. One does not need to personally be subject to an illusion to believe that others are.
I know that other people purport to have a notion of qualia, but I do not. But thinking other people have mistaken or confused concepts does not require that one have the concept in the sense of possessing or understanding it. In other words, other people might tell me that there’s, e.g., “something it’s like” to see red or taste chocolate that somehow defies explanation, is private, is inaccessible, and so on. But I myself do not have such experiences.In such cases, I think people are simply confused, and that this can result in the case of believing in qualia in developing pseudoconcepts.
This isn’t the only case where I think this could or does occur. If people insisted they had a concept that was unintelligible or self-contradictory, such as a “colorless color” or if they insisted something could be “intrinsically north-facing,” I could hold that they are mistaken in having such concepts, , and maintain that I don’t “have the concept,” in that I am not actually capable of personally entertaining entertaining the notion of colorless colors or intrinsically north-facing objects.
In fact, this is exactly my position on non-naturalist moral realism: I regard the notion of stance-independent moral facts to be unintelligible. I can talk about “stance-independent moral facts,” as a concept other people purport to “have” in the sense of understanding it without understanding it myself. That is, I don’t actually have the concepts non-natural moral realists purport to have, while still regarding the people who hold such views to be subject to an intellectual or experiential error of some kind.
Of course, introspection isn’t meant to give you a definition of qualia...it’s meant to give you direct acquaintance.
I have introspected and it has not resulted in acquaintance with qualia.
I believe people can introspect and then draw mistaken conclusions about the nature of their experiences, and that qualia is a good candidate for one of these mistaken conclusions.
What did it result in acquaintance with? If it seems to you that all your mental content consists only of propositional attitudes, then you don’t even have the illusion of phenomenonal consciousness. But why would you alone be lacking it?
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.
I’m not sure how to answer the first question. I’m sure my introspection revealed all manner of things over the course of years, and I’m also not sure what level of specificity you are going for. I don’t want to evade actually reporting on the contents of my mental states, so perhaps a more specific question would help me form a useful response.
I may very well not have even the illusion of phenomenal consciousness, but I’m not sure I am alone in lacking it. While it remains an open empirical question, and I can’t vouch for the methodological rigor of any particular study, there is some empirical research on whether or not nonphilosophers are inclined towards thinking there is a hard problem of consciousness:
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2021/00000028/f0020003/art00002
It may be that notions of qualia, and the kinds of views that predominate among academic philosophers are outliers that don’t represent how other people think about these issues, if they think about them at all.