What’s the difference between making claims about nearby objects and making claims about qualia (if there is one)? If I say there’s a book to my left, is that saying something about qualia? If I say I dreamt about a rabbit last night, is that saying something about qualia?
(Are claims of the form “there is a book to my left” radically incorrect?)
That is, is there a way to distinguish claims about qualia from claims about local stuff/phenomena/etc?
Sure. There are a number of properties usually associated with qualia which are the things I deny. If we strip these properties away (something Kieth Frankish refers to as zero qualia) then we can still say that they exist. But it’s confusing to say that something exists when its properties are so minimal. Daniel Dennett listed a number of properties that philosophers have assigned to qualia and conscious experience more generally:
Ineffable because there’s something Mary the neuroscientist is missing when she is in the black and white room. And someone who tried explaining color to her would not be able to fully.
Intrinsic because it cannot be reduced to bare physical entities, like electrons (think: could you construct a quale if you had the right set of particles?).
Private because they are accessible to us and not globally available. In this sense, if you tried to find out the qualia that a mouse was experiencing as it fell victim to a trap, you would come up fundamentally short because it was specific to the mouse mind and not yours. Or as Nagel put it, there’s no way that third person science could discover what it’s like to be a bat.
Directly apprehensible because they are the elementary things that make up our experience of the world. Look around and qualia are just what you find. They are the building blocks of our perception of the world.
It’s not necessarily that none of these properties could be steelmanned. It is just that they are so far from being steelmannable that it is better to deny their existence entirely. It is the same as my analogy with a person who claims to have visited heaven. We could either talk about it as illusory or non-illusory. But for practical purposes, if we chose the non-illusory route we would probably be quite confused. That is, if we tried finding heaven inside the physical world, with the same properties as the claimant had proposed, then we would come up short. Far better then, to treat it as a mistake inside of our cognitive hardware.
Thanks for the elaboration. It seems to me that experiences are:
Hard-to-eff, as a good-enough theory of what physical structures have which experiences has not yet been discovered, and would take philosophical work to discover.
Hard to reduce to physics, for the same reason.
In practice private due to mind-reading technology not having been developed, and due to bandwidth and memory limitations in human communication. (It’s also hard to imagine what sort of technology would allow replicating the experience of being a mouse)
Pretty directly apprehensible (what else would be? If nothing is, what do we build theories out of?)
It seems natural to conclude from this that:
Physical things exist.
Experiences exist.
Experiences probably supervene on physical things, but the supervenience relation is not yet determined, and determining it requires philosophical work.
Given that we don’t know the supervenience relation yet, we need to at least provisionally have experiences in our ontology distinct from physical entities. (It is, after all, impossible to do physics without making observations and reporting them to others)
Here’s a thought experiment which helped me lose my ‘belief’ in qualia: would a robot scientist, who was only designed to study physics and make predictions about the world, ever invent qualia as a hypothesis?
Assuming the actual mouth movements we make when we say things like, “Qualia exist” are explainable via the scientific method, the robot scientist could still predict that we would talk and write about consciousness. But would it posit consciousness as a separate entity altogether? Would it treat consciousness as a deep mystery, even after peering into our brains and finding nothing but electrical impulses?
Robots take in observations. They make theories that explain their observations. Different robots will make different observations and communicate them to each other. Thus, they will talk about observations.
After making enough observations they make theories of physics. (They had to talk about observations before they made low-level physics theories, though; after all, they came to theorize about physics through their observations). They also make bridge laws explaining how their observations are related to physics. But, they have uncertainty about these bridge laws for a significant time period.
The robots theorize that humans are similar to them, based on the fact that they have functionally similar cognitive architecture; thus, they theorize that humans have observations as well. (The bridge laws they posit are symmetric that way, rather than being silicon-chauvinist)
I think you are using the word “observation” to refer to consciousness. If this is true, then I do not deny that humans take in observations and process them.
However, I think the issue is that you have simply re-defined consciousness into something which would be unrecognizable to the philosopher. To that extent, I don’t say you are wrong, but I will allege that you have not done enough to respond to the consciousness-realist’s intuition that consciousness is different from physical properties. Let me explain:
If qualia are just observations, then it seems obvious that Mary is not missing any information in her room, since she can perfectly well understand and model the process by which people receive color observations.
Likewise, if qualia are merely observations, then the Zombie argument amounts to saying that p-Zombies are beings which can’t observe anything. This seems patently absurd to me, and doesn’t seem like it’s what Chalmers meant at all when he came up with the thought experiment.
Likewise, if we were to ask, “Is a bat conscious?” then the answer would be a vacuous “yes” under your view, since they have echolocaterswhich take in observations and process information.
In this view even my computer is conscious since it has a camera on it. For this reason, I suggest we are talking about two different things.
Mary’s room seems uninteresting, in that robot-Mary can predict pretty well what bit-pattern she’s going to get upon seeing color. (To the extent that the human case is different, it’s because of cognitive architecture constraints)
Regarding the zombie argument: The robots have uncertainty over the bridge laws. Under this uncertainty, they may believe it is possible that humans don’t have experiences, due to the bridge laws only identifying silicon brains as conscious. Then humans would be zombies. (They may have other theories saying this is pretty unlikely / logically incoherent / etc)
Basically, the robots have a primitive entity “my observations” that they explain using their theories. They have to reconcile this with the eventual conclusion they reach that their observations are those of a physically instantiated mind like other minds, and they have degrees of freedom in which things they consider “observations” of the same type as “my observations” (things that could have been observed).
As a qualia denier, I sometimes feel like I side more with the Chalmers side of the argument, which at least admits that there’s a strong intuition for consciousness. It’s not that I think that the realist side is right, but it’s that I see the naive physicalists making statements that seem to completely misinterpret the realist’s argument.
I don’t mean to single you out in particular. However, you state that Mary’s room seems uninteresting because Mary is able to predict the “bit pattern” of color qualia. This seems to me to completely miss the point. When you look at the sky and see blue, is it immediately apprehensible as a simple bit pattern? Or does it at least seem to have qualitative properties too?
I’m not sure how to import my argument onto your brain without you at least seeing this intuition, which is something I considered obvious for many years.
There is a qualitative redness to red. I get that intuition.
I think “Mary’s room is uninteresting” is wrong; it’s uninteresting in the case of robot scientists, but interesting in the case of humans, in part because of what it reveals about human cognitive architecture.
I think in the human case, I would see Mary seeing a red apple as gaining in expressive vocabulary rather than information. She can then describe future things as “like what I saw when I saw that first red apple”. But, in the case of first seeing the apple, the redness quale is essentially an arbitrary gensym.
I suppose I might end up agreeing with the illusionist view on some aspects of color perception, then, in that I predict color quales might feel like new information when they actually aren’t. Thanks for explaining.
I predict color quales might feel like new information when they actually aren’t.
I am curious if you disagree with the claim that (human) Mary is gaining implicit information, in that (despite already knowing many facts about red-ness), her (human) optic system wouldn’t have successfully been able to predict the incoming visual data from the apple before seeing it, but afterwards can?
Now that I think about it, due to this cognitive architecture issue, she actually does gain new information. If she sees a red apple in the future, she can know that it’s red (because it produces the same qualia as the first red apple), whereas she might be confused about the color if she hadn’t seen the first apple.
I think I got confused because, while she does learn something upon seeing the first red apple, it isn’t the naive “red wavelengths are red-quale”, it’s more like “the neurons that detect red wavelengths got wired and associated with the abstract concept of red wavelengths.” Which is still, effectively, new information to Mary-the-cognitive-system, given limitations in human mental architecture.
A physicist might discover that you can make computers out of matter. You can make such computers produce sounds. In processing sounds “homonym” is a perfectly legimate and useful concept. Even if two words are stored in far away hardware locations knowing that they will “sound detection clash” is important information. Even if you slice it a little differently and use different kinds of computer architechtures it woudl still be a real phenomenon.
In technical terms there might be the issue whether its meaningful to differntiate between founded concepts and hypothesis. If hypotheses are required then you could have a physicist that didn’t ever talk about temperature.
It seems to me that you are trying to recover the properties of conscious experience in a way that can be reduced to physics. Ultimately, I just feel that this approach is not likely to succeed without radical revisions to what you consider to be conscious experience. :)
Generally speaking, I agree with the dualists who argue that physics is incompatible with the claimed properties of qualia. Unlike the dualists, I see this as a strike against qualia rather than a strike against physics. David Chalmers does a great job in his articles outlining why conscious properties don’t fit nicely in our normal physical models.
It’s not simply that we are awaiting more data to fill in the details: it’s that there seems to be no way even in principle to incorporate conscious experience into physics. Physics is just a different type of beast: it has no mental core, it is entirely made up of mathematical relations, and is completely global. Consciousness as it’s described seems entirely inexplicable in that respect, and I don’t see how it could possibly supervene on the physical.
One could imagine a hypothetical heaven-believer (someone who claimed to have gone to heaven and back) listing possible ways to incorporate their experience into physics. They could say,
Hard-to-eff, as it’s not clear how physics interacts with the heavenly realm. We must do more work to find out where the entry points of heaven and earth are.
In practice private due to the fact that technology hasn’t been developed yet that can allow me to send messages back from heaven while I’m there.
Pretty directly apprehensible because how would it even be possible for me to have experienced that without heaven literally being real!
On the other hand, a skeptic could reply that:
Even if mind reading technology isn’t good enough yet, our best models say that humans can be described as complicated computers with a particular neural network architecture. And we know that computers can have bugs in them causing them to say things when there is no logical justification.
Also, we know that computers can lack perfect introspection so we know that even if it is utterly convinced that heaven is real, this could just be due to the fact that the computer is following its programming and is exceptionally stubborn.
Heaven has no clear interpretation in our physical models. Yes, we could see that a supervenience is possible. But why rely on that hope? Isn’t it better to say that the belief is caused by some sort of internal illusion? The latter hypothesis is at least explicable within our models and doesn’t require us to make new fundamental philosophical advances.
It seems that doubting that we have observations would cause us to doubt physics, wouldn’t it? Since physics-the-discipline is about making, recording, communicating, and explaining observations.
Why think we’re in a physical world if our observations that seem to suggest we are are illusory?
This is kind of like if the people saying we live in a material world arrived at these theories through their heaven-revelations, and can only explain the epistemic justification for belief in a material world by positing heaven. Seems odd to think heaven doesn’t exist in this circumstance.
(Note, personally I lean towards supervenient neutral monism: direct observation and physical theorizing are different modalities for interacting with the same substance, and mental properties supervene on physical ones in a currently-unknown way. Physics doesn’t rule out observation, in fact it depends on it, while itself being a limited modality, such that it is unsurprising if you couldn’t get all modalities through the physical-theorizing modality. This view seems non-contradictory, though incomplete.)
What’s the difference between making claims about nearby objects and making claims about qualia (if there is one)? If I say there’s a book to my left, is that saying something about qualia? If I say I dreamt about a rabbit last night, is that saying something about qualia?
(Are claims of the form “there is a book to my left” radically incorrect?)
That is, is there a way to distinguish claims about qualia from claims about local stuff/phenomena/etc?
Sure. There are a number of properties usually associated with qualia which are the things I deny. If we strip these properties away (something Kieth Frankish refers to as zero qualia) then we can still say that they exist. But it’s confusing to say that something exists when its properties are so minimal. Daniel Dennett listed a number of properties that philosophers have assigned to qualia and conscious experience more generally:
Ineffable because there’s something Mary the neuroscientist is missing when she is in the black and white room. And someone who tried explaining color to her would not be able to fully.
Intrinsic because it cannot be reduced to bare physical entities, like electrons (think: could you construct a quale if you had the right set of particles?).
Private because they are accessible to us and not globally available. In this sense, if you tried to find out the qualia that a mouse was experiencing as it fell victim to a trap, you would come up fundamentally short because it was specific to the mouse mind and not yours. Or as Nagel put it, there’s no way that third person science could discover what it’s like to be a bat.
Directly apprehensible because they are the elementary things that make up our experience of the world. Look around and qualia are just what you find. They are the building blocks of our perception of the world.
It’s not necessarily that none of these properties could be steelmanned. It is just that they are so far from being steelmannable that it is better to deny their existence entirely. It is the same as my analogy with a person who claims to have visited heaven. We could either talk about it as illusory or non-illusory. But for practical purposes, if we chose the non-illusory route we would probably be quite confused. That is, if we tried finding heaven inside the physical world, with the same properties as the claimant had proposed, then we would come up short. Far better then, to treat it as a mistake inside of our cognitive hardware.
Thanks for the elaboration. It seems to me that experiences are:
Hard-to-eff, as a good-enough theory of what physical structures have which experiences has not yet been discovered, and would take philosophical work to discover.
Hard to reduce to physics, for the same reason.
In practice private due to mind-reading technology not having been developed, and due to bandwidth and memory limitations in human communication. (It’s also hard to imagine what sort of technology would allow replicating the experience of being a mouse)
Pretty directly apprehensible (what else would be? If nothing is, what do we build theories out of?)
It seems natural to conclude from this that:
Physical things exist.
Experiences exist.
Experiences probably supervene on physical things, but the supervenience relation is not yet determined, and determining it requires philosophical work.
Given that we don’t know the supervenience relation yet, we need to at least provisionally have experiences in our ontology distinct from physical entities. (It is, after all, impossible to do physics without making observations and reporting them to others)
Is there something I’m missing here?
Here’s a thought experiment which helped me lose my ‘belief’ in qualia: would a robot scientist, who was only designed to study physics and make predictions about the world, ever invent qualia as a hypothesis?
Assuming the actual mouth movements we make when we say things like, “Qualia exist” are explainable via the scientific method, the robot scientist could still predict that we would talk and write about consciousness. But would it posit consciousness as a separate entity altogether? Would it treat consciousness as a deep mystery, even after peering into our brains and finding nothing but electrical impulses?
Robots take in observations. They make theories that explain their observations. Different robots will make different observations and communicate them to each other. Thus, they will talk about observations.
After making enough observations they make theories of physics. (They had to talk about observations before they made low-level physics theories, though; after all, they came to theorize about physics through their observations). They also make bridge laws explaining how their observations are related to physics. But, they have uncertainty about these bridge laws for a significant time period.
The robots theorize that humans are similar to them, based on the fact that they have functionally similar cognitive architecture; thus, they theorize that humans have observations as well. (The bridge laws they posit are symmetric that way, rather than being silicon-chauvinist)
I think you are using the word “observation” to refer to consciousness. If this is true, then I do not deny that humans take in observations and process them.
However, I think the issue is that you have simply re-defined consciousness into something which would be unrecognizable to the philosopher. To that extent, I don’t say you are wrong, but I will allege that you have not done enough to respond to the consciousness-realist’s intuition that consciousness is different from physical properties. Let me explain:
If qualia are just observations, then it seems obvious that Mary is not missing any information in her room, since she can perfectly well understand and model the process by which people receive color observations.
Likewise, if qualia are merely observations, then the Zombie argument amounts to saying that p-Zombies are beings which can’t observe anything. This seems patently absurd to me, and doesn’t seem like it’s what Chalmers meant at all when he came up with the thought experiment.
Likewise, if we were to ask, “Is a bat conscious?” then the answer would be a vacuous “yes” under your view, since they have echolocaters which take in observations and process information.
In this view even my computer is conscious since it has a camera on it. For this reason, I suggest we are talking about two different things.
Mary’s room seems uninteresting, in that robot-Mary can predict pretty well what bit-pattern she’s going to get upon seeing color. (To the extent that the human case is different, it’s because of cognitive architecture constraints)
Regarding the zombie argument: The robots have uncertainty over the bridge laws. Under this uncertainty, they may believe it is possible that humans don’t have experiences, due to the bridge laws only identifying silicon brains as conscious. Then humans would be zombies. (They may have other theories saying this is pretty unlikely / logically incoherent / etc)
Basically, the robots have a primitive entity “my observations” that they explain using their theories. They have to reconcile this with the eventual conclusion they reach that their observations are those of a physically instantiated mind like other minds, and they have degrees of freedom in which things they consider “observations” of the same type as “my observations” (things that could have been observed).
As a qualia denier, I sometimes feel like I side more with the Chalmers side of the argument, which at least admits that there’s a strong intuition for consciousness. It’s not that I think that the realist side is right, but it’s that I see the naive physicalists making statements that seem to completely misinterpret the realist’s argument.
I don’t mean to single you out in particular. However, you state that Mary’s room seems uninteresting because Mary is able to predict the “bit pattern” of color qualia. This seems to me to completely miss the point. When you look at the sky and see blue, is it immediately apprehensible as a simple bit pattern? Or does it at least seem to have qualitative properties too?
I’m not sure how to import my argument onto your brain without you at least seeing this intuition, which is something I considered obvious for many years.
There is a qualitative redness to red. I get that intuition.
I think “Mary’s room is uninteresting” is wrong; it’s uninteresting in the case of robot scientists, but interesting in the case of humans, in part because of what it reveals about human cognitive architecture.
I think in the human case, I would see Mary seeing a red apple as gaining in expressive vocabulary rather than information. She can then describe future things as “like what I saw when I saw that first red apple”. But, in the case of first seeing the apple, the redness quale is essentially an arbitrary gensym.
I suppose I might end up agreeing with the illusionist view on some aspects of color perception, then, in that I predict color quales might feel like new information when they actually aren’t. Thanks for explaining.
I am curious if you disagree with the claim that (human) Mary is gaining implicit information, in that (despite already knowing many facts about red-ness), her (human) optic system wouldn’t have successfully been able to predict the incoming visual data from the apple before seeing it, but afterwards can?
That does seem right, actually.
Now that I think about it, due to this cognitive architecture issue, she actually does gain new information. If she sees a red apple in the future, she can know that it’s red (because it produces the same qualia as the first red apple), whereas she might be confused about the color if she hadn’t seen the first apple.
I think I got confused because, while she does learn something upon seeing the first red apple, it isn’t the naive “red wavelengths are red-quale”, it’s more like “the neurons that detect red wavelengths got wired and associated with the abstract concept of red wavelengths.” Which is still, effectively, new information to Mary-the-cognitive-system, given limitations in human mental architecture.
A physicist might discover that you can make computers out of matter. You can make such computers produce sounds. In processing sounds “homonym” is a perfectly legimate and useful concept. Even if two words are stored in far away hardware locations knowing that they will “sound detection clash” is important information. Even if you slice it a little differently and use different kinds of computer architechtures it woudl still be a real phenomenon.
In technical terms there might be the issue whether its meaningful to differntiate between founded concepts and hypothesis. If hypotheses are required then you could have a physicist that didn’t ever talk about temperature.
It seems to me that you are trying to recover the properties of conscious experience in a way that can be reduced to physics. Ultimately, I just feel that this approach is not likely to succeed without radical revisions to what you consider to be conscious experience. :)
Generally speaking, I agree with the dualists who argue that physics is incompatible with the claimed properties of qualia. Unlike the dualists, I see this as a strike against qualia rather than a strike against physics. David Chalmers does a great job in his articles outlining why conscious properties don’t fit nicely in our normal physical models.
It’s not simply that we are awaiting more data to fill in the details: it’s that there seems to be no way even in principle to incorporate conscious experience into physics. Physics is just a different type of beast: it has no mental core, it is entirely made up of mathematical relations, and is completely global. Consciousness as it’s described seems entirely inexplicable in that respect, and I don’t see how it could possibly supervene on the physical.
One could imagine a hypothetical heaven-believer (someone who claimed to have gone to heaven and back) listing possible ways to incorporate their experience into physics. They could say,
On the other hand, a skeptic could reply that:
Even if mind reading technology isn’t good enough yet, our best models say that humans can be described as complicated computers with a particular neural network architecture. And we know that computers can have bugs in them causing them to say things when there is no logical justification.
Also, we know that computers can lack perfect introspection so we know that even if it is utterly convinced that heaven is real, this could just be due to the fact that the computer is following its programming and is exceptionally stubborn.
Heaven has no clear interpretation in our physical models. Yes, we could see that a supervenience is possible. But why rely on that hope? Isn’t it better to say that the belief is caused by some sort of internal illusion? The latter hypothesis is at least explicable within our models and doesn’t require us to make new fundamental philosophical advances.
It seems that doubting that we have observations would cause us to doubt physics, wouldn’t it? Since physics-the-discipline is about making, recording, communicating, and explaining observations.
Why think we’re in a physical world if our observations that seem to suggest we are are illusory?
This is kind of like if the people saying we live in a material world arrived at these theories through their heaven-revelations, and can only explain the epistemic justification for belief in a material world by positing heaven. Seems odd to think heaven doesn’t exist in this circumstance.
(Note, personally I lean towards supervenient neutral monism: direct observation and physical theorizing are different modalities for interacting with the same substance, and mental properties supervene on physical ones in a currently-unknown way. Physics doesn’t rule out observation, in fact it depends on it, while itself being a limited modality, such that it is unsurprising if you couldn’t get all modalities through the physical-theorizing modality. This view seems non-contradictory, though incomplete.)