I have a simple, yet unusual, explanation for the difference between camp #1 and camp#2: we have different experiences of consciousness. Believing that everyone has our kind of consciousness, of course we talk past each other.
I’ve noticed that in conversations about qualia, I’m always in the position of Mr Boldface in the example dialog: I don’t think there is anything that needs to be explained, and I’m puzzled that nobody can tell me what qualia are using sensible words. (I‘m not particularly stupid or ignorant; I got a degree in philosophy and linguistics from MIT.) I suggest a simple explanation: some of us have qualia and some of us don’t. I‘m one of those who don’t. And when someone tries to point at them, all I can do is to react with obtuse incomprehension, while they point at the most obvious thing in the world. It apparently is the most obvious thing in the world, to a lot of people.
Obviously I have sensory impressions; I can tell you when something looks red. And I have sensory memories; I can tell you when something looked red yesterday. But there isn’t any hard-to-explain extra thing there.
One might object that qualia are so obvious that everyone must have them. But there are many cases where people differ in their mental faculties, which can be determined only by careful comparison, and which provoke amazement when revealed. Some people have no visual experience of imagined objects at all. Some people can’t rotate an imagined object to see it from the other side. Some people maintain a continuous internal narration. We all get through life.
Alternative explanation: everyone has qualia, but some people lack the mental mechanism that makes them feel like qualia require a special metaphysical explanation. Since qualia are almost always represented as requiring such an explanation (or at least as ineffable, mysterious and elusive), these latter people don’t recognize their own qualia as that which is being talked about.
How can people lack such a mental mechanism? Either
they simply have never done the particular kind of introspection that’s needed to realize the weirdness of qualia, or
there is a correct reductive explanation for qualia, and some people’s naive intuition just happens to naturally coincide with this explanation, or
same as 2 except that the explanation is (partially or wholly) incorrect. Presumably, sufficient introspection of the right type would move these people to either 1 or 2 (edit: or to the category of people who are puzzled about qualia, of course).
I don’t have a clue about the relative prevalences of these groups, nor do I mean to make a claim about which group you personally are in.
You’ve summarized this more elegantly than I can. Let me rewrite your explanation into my slightly different terminology: “everyone has qualia sensations, but some people lack the mental mechanism that makes them feel like there are also qualia requireing a special metaphysical explanation. Since qualia are almost always represented as requiring such an explanation (or at least as ineffable, mysterious and elusive), these latter people don’t recognize their own qualiasensations as that which is being talked about.” I would agree with this rephrasing as describing my experience. I think the rephrasing is harmless, just that what I’m calling (sensation + qualia) is what you’re calling (qualia + the mental mechanism etc.)
As for how I can lack such a mental mechanism, I don’t think you’re on the right track. Taking the points in order:
I’ve done plenty of introspection. I suppose I might be doing ‘the wrong kind’, but until someone tells me how do ‘the right kind’, I doubt it.
This might be the case for me. But if it is, I don’t know what the ‘correct explanation’ is. When I introspect, I simply don’t experience anything ‘requiring a metaphysical explanation’, or that is ‘mysterious, ineffable or elusive’, to use your terminology.
I’d want to hear from someone who had actually done this before I think it’s possible.
That’s interesting, but I doubt it’s what’s going on in general (though maybe it is for some camp #1 people). My instinct is also strongly camp #1, but I feel like I get the appeal of camp #2 (and qualia feel “obvious” to me on a gut level). The difference between the camps seems to me to have more to do with differences in philosophical priors.
Oh, I don’t think it’s the only difference between Camp #1 and Camp #2. But it certainly creates a pre-philosophical bias toward Camp #1, for those of us who don’t have qualia. I suspect Daniel Dennet is also in the no-qualia camp, given the arguments advanced in his paper “Quining Qualia”.
There are less drastic ways of explaining qualiaphobia.
Firstly, to get qualia you have to stop believing in naive realism. Naive realism means that colours are taken to be painted on the surfaces of objects and perceived exactly as they are. People vary a lot about in how easy they find it to get away from naive realism
Secondly subjective feelings are what scientists are trained to ignore in favour of 3rd person perspective. That’s a perfectly good methodological rule in the most areas of science, but it tends to get exaggerated into a fact of reality - - “feels don’t real”. Consciousness isn’t a typical scientific field—subjectivity is central.
First, a side note: I don’t like the word “qualiaphobia” for what we’re discussing here, because (a) I’m not afraid of qualia, I just don’t think I have them, and (b) it smacks of homophobia or transphobia, which have a negative connotation.
More later— your comments provoke me to have many thoughts, which I’ll have to finish thinking later, because I have to go to work now.
“To get qualia you have to stop believing in naive realism.” Does “get” mean “experience” or “acquire”? In any event, I don’t believe in naive realism. (if I have correctly understood what naive realism means). I am quite aware of the enormous processing it takes to keep object colors constant under changes in illumination. I further believe that many things that we feel are “out there” are in fact concocted by our brain to make the world easier to understand. That includes the ideas of objects that have properties, kinds of objects, people who have beliefs, desires and intentions, and the passage of time, None of these appear in true reality, but everybody thinks with them, because otherwise it’s too hard.
“Feelings are what scientists are trained to ignore.” It’s true that I was raised as a scientist, but I’ve believed in the validity of subjective evidence since my sophomore year at college, when I took a cognitive science class and had my mind expanded. That was also about the time people tried to explain qualia to me, and my first experience of completely failing to get the point.
I failed to understand what qualia were. Their attempts at explanation failed to engage with anything in my introspection, and in some cases seemed like word salad. I was eventually led to the conclusion that one of the following was true: (a) I am too dumb to understand qualia. Probably not true, since I am smart enough for most things. (B) It’s one of those wooly concepts that continental philosophers like, and doesn’t actually have a referent. Probably not true, since down-to-earth philosophers, like Dennet or Ned Block, talk about it. (C) my cognition is such that I don’t have what they were trying to point at.
When you see the color red, what is that like? When you run your hand over something rough and bumpy, what is that like? When you taste salt, what is that like?
I’m not actually sure I’d argue qualia are particularly different from “the experience of sensation” (but, I think they are different from “sensation”).
(I notice other people in this thread, who are talking about qualia and asking you questions, seem to be asking different questions than the ones I’d ask, so I’m still not sure even the “obviously qualia!” people are talking about the same thing)
Some quotes of yours I wanted to respond to:
> So what happens if you hallucinate a color? When that happens, is there anything red, any “redness” or “experience of redness” there?
There is nothing red, there is no redness, but there is an experience of redness. It’s just another case of my brain lying to me, like telling me I don’t have a blind spot, or have color vision all the way to the periphery.
and
qualia are a kind of tag on top of perceptions, that says “This is real, reason on that basis.” I don’t have that tag, so it’s easier for me to believe that my mind has constructed reality from sense data, rather than that I directly perceive it.
Note that I don’t think of qualia as having anything to do with things being real. I think qualia is pretty close to just meaning “experience of sensation”. Insofar as I have a tag-connected-with-my-perceptions, it’s more like “it matters to me that I experience perceiving this.” (I usually think of this as most important for “I experience perceiving happiness, excitement, sadness, fear, i.e. emotions with positive or negative valence)
I think sensation is different from experience-of-sensation. A thermostat has sensation of temperature, but I would be very surprised if it had an experience of sensation (I think when I feel “hot” or “cold”, there is an experience of what-that-feels like that I think requires some kind of mental representation, and I don’t think thermostats can have temperature representations)
I tend to think that, regardless of which camp is correct, it’s unlikely that the difference is due to different experiences, and more likely that one of the two sides is making a philosophical error. Reason being that experience itself is a low-level property, whereas judgments about experience are a high-level property, and it generally seems to be the case that the variance in high-level properties is way way higher.
E.g., it’d be pretty surprising if someone claimed that red is more similar to green than to orange, but less surprising if they had a strange idea about the meaning of life, and that’s pretty much true regardless of what exactly they think about the meaning of life. We’ve just come to expect that pretty much any high-level opinion is possible.
I’ve heard this approach to the question multiple times and I must say I really dislike it.
Because
It’s an attempt to sidestep the philosophical disagreement instead of resolving one
It makes us even more map-territory confused as now we conflate abscense of belief in qualia with abscence of qualia
Most obviously it fails to acknowledge that people do change their views on the subject. I used to be a subjective idealist and now I’m a reductive materialist. Did I lost my qualia in the process?
The existence of people without qualia might be a way to displace the question from philosophy to cognitive psychology, where at least we have some ways to answer questions. I don’t think it’s illegitimate for me to say what I say; I think it’s fascinating additional data.
Well, we have to be careful to keep the two concepts separate. I don’t think I have qualia, but I’m sure other people do. They’ve claimed to on many occasions, and I don’t think they’re lying or deceived. From my point of view, other people have some extra thing on top of their sensations, which produces philosophical conundrums when they try to think about it.
You tell me! People say qualia are the most obvious thing in the world. Do you feel like you have them?
From my point of view, other people have some extra thing on top of their sensations, which produces philosophical conundrums when they try to think about it.
As someone who definitely has qualia (and believes that you do too), no, that’s not what’s going on. There’s some confusing extra thing on top of behavior—namely, sensations. There would be no confusion if the world were coupled differential equations all the way down (and not just because there would be no one home to be confused), but instead we’re something that acts like a collection of coupled differential equations but also, unlike abstract mathematical structures, is like something to be.
“There’s some confusing extra thing on top of behavior, namely sensations.” Wow, that’s a fascinating notion. But presumably if we didn’t have visual sensations, we’d be blind, assuming the rest of our brain worked the same, right? So what exactly requires explanation? You’re postulating something that acts just like me but has no sensations, I.e. is blind, deaf, etc. I don’t see how that can be a coherent thing you’re imagining.
When I read you saying “is like something to be,” I get the same feeling I get when someone tries to tell me what qualia are— it’s a peculiar collection of familiar words. It seems to me that you’re trying to turn a two-place predicate “A imagines what it feels like to be B” into a one-place predicate “B is like something to be”, where it’s a pure property of B.
Wow, that’s a fascinating notion. But presumably if we didn’t have visual sensations, we’d be blind, assuming the rest of our brain worked the same, right?
If you lacked information about your environment, you would be functionally impaired. Information about your environment doesn’t have to be visual...it could be sonar or something. It doesn’t have to be sensory either...you could just somehow know that there is a door ahead of you ,and a turning to the left. Presumably , that’s how Dennett thinks it works.
I get the same feeling I get when someone tries to tell me what qualia are— it’s a peculiar collection of familiar words
“Time and space are, and they can bend and warp” is a peculiar combination of familiar words.
The existence of people without qualia might be a way to displace the question from philosophy to cognitive psychology,
There are both philosophical (What are qualia? What having/not having qualia implies?) and neuroscientific (How exactly the closest referent to “qualia” actually works?) aspects to the problem. Both require an answer. Substituting one for another won’t do. The issue with the philosophical aspect isn’t that we can’t get an answer. It’s that we get too many, incompatible with each other answers and it’s hard to use definitions consistently in such situation.
I agree that there may be fascinating additional data in the realm of neurosciency. I wouldn’t be much surprised if some people indeed have much more impressive subjective experiences than others. It’s legitimate to talk about it as a possibility, and yet it’s only tangental to the philosophical questions at hand.
I don’t think I have qualia, but I’m sure other people do. They’ve claimed to on many occasions, and I don’t think they’re lying or deceived.
As you may see from the comments these people also claim that you misunderstand them with such interpretaton. I don’t think they are lying either.
You tell me! People say qualia are the most obvious thing in the world. Do you feel like you have them?
See my reply to GeorgeWilfrid and his original comment. I have qualia defined the way he did and I expect you to have them too. Let’s call it weak qualia (wq). On the other hand, if qualia are defined as irreducible and non-physical—hard qualia (hq) - then I believe that I don’t have them, nor that I had them in my subjective idealist days and I don’t think anyone does no matter how awesome their subjective experience is.
The problem, however, that there is mob and bailey dynamics going on. Some people confuse wq with hq, some people think that wq imply hq. People that think they have hq often use the same language that people who think they have only wq. People arguing past each other often use different definitions. And so on.
When we’ve fixed the definitions. I believe we can properly solve the philosophical aspect. The question is reduced to whether wq indeed imply hq. I think the argument for works like that (if there is someone who holds wq->hq position here, please correct me):
I have direct access to experience. My experience is different from matter. Thus the fact that I have experience at all means that it’s not material.
The mistake her is in failure to account for map-territoiry destinction. What if you have direct access only to your experience of experience and not experience itself? Then
My experience of experience is different from my experience of matter. Which doesn’t necessary means that experience is not material only that I feel this way even if it’s not true.
So the philosophical zombie is a person who reports a completely normal set of sensations and emotions, while actually having none of them, right? I think zombies would be a ridiculous way to build an organism. Much easier to build something that reported the truth, rather than build a perfect liar. I could imagine such a thing, but that doesn’t say much about whether a zombie could exist. I read a lot of science fiction and can imagine six impossible things before breakfast.
The point is not that zombies exist. The point is that “it’s a ridiculous way to build an organism” is not a physical law and actual physical laws don’t seem to specify that our world is not a zombie-world. For anything else from science fiction you can in principle check corresponding physical equation and conclude that this thing is impossible. How do you do it for the difference between our world and zombie-world?
The point is that “it’s a ridiculous way to build an organism” is not a physical law
It kind of is. An organism evolved to be a perfect liar about having consciousness has to have a different causal history than a organism evolved to have consciousness and tell about it so the physical laws that provided these histories have to be different too.
Also, notice that what you are talking here isn’t a classical PZ as originally stated: an entity that does everything that a conscious human does for exactly the same reasons up to every elemental particle in the brain but still lacks consciousness. It’s a “zombie master” scenario where there are some other causes that makes the zombie pretend that it has consciousness. Confusion between this two scenarios is common and misleading.
Well, looks like I misremebered what a P-zombie is. I think the notion of “an entity that does everything a human being does for exactly the same reasons […] but lacks consciousness” is completely absurd. Obviously someone who lacks consciousness is asleep or comatose. I don’t see how someone who’s walking around, talking about past experience, reporting sensations, etc, could fail to be conscious.
This has always seemed perfectly obvious to me, but it’s not obvious to other highly sensible people. Could it be they’re experiencing some extra thing in their sensations, that says “this could be dispensed with, you would have the same sensations, but then you wouldn’t be conscious.”? If so, I’m here to tell you the good news that your brain is lying about that.
Well, it’s fascinating the extent to which we each find the other’s position completely unrealistic. I think we’re getting closer to a crux, which is good.
I presume you’re not talking about Cotard’s delusion, which can result in people walking around and talking while claiming they’re dead. That’s just a delusion.
We measure comatoseness with the Glasgow Coma Scale, which ranges from 0 (eyes closed, no speech, motionless even under painful stimuli) to 15 (normal). You’re talking about people who feel comatose while still scoring 15 on the Glasgow coma scale? How can someone be comatose and still respond to stimuli, report memories, and perform voluntary action? It seems implicit in the definition of comatose that that’s impossible. It may not be a physical law, but it’s certainly a medical one.
(For the record, I don’t find your position completely unrealistic).
How can someone be comatose and still respond to stimuli, report memories, and perform voluntary action?
Not “be comatose”—“feel comatose”. No one is disputing medical knowledge—it certainly works in our world. But, regardless of how much it contradicts usual science heuristics, how unlikely it is to actually work like that in reality—can you imagine that the world could be different in only “feeling” aspect? Where zombie-you is looking at the blue sky and doesn’t feel like you in the same situation, but feels like you imagine feeling when comatose. If you don’t immediately reject that idea as implausible, do you have a concept for it at all?
If you do, then the problem is that, regardless of how absurd it is heuristically, actual laws of physics don’t seem to specify that our world is not a zombie-world.
Crucially, in a world with only these zombies- where no-one who has ever had qualia—the zombies start arguing about the existing of qualia. (Otherwise, this would be a way to distinguish zombies from people using a physical test)
That’s just unimaginably weird. In my experience of feeling comatose, having no vision and not laying down any memories were notable features. There’s no way I can experience a blue sky while simultaneously not experiencing it. Nor can I report on my recent experiences while being unable to form memories.
See, this is why I think qualia are a thing on top of sensation. You experience qualia, and feel that without them, something vital would be missing, and it would be like feeling comatose. And I’m here to tell you that life without qualia is pretty sweet.
Zombie-you wouldn’t experience blue sky—they would always only experience being comatose. They would behave like you behave down to the level of neurons and atoms, but they would not experience what you experience when you are seeing a blue sky. I understand that this may sound unlikely and, yes, weird, but what’s so hard to imagine? You just imagine feeling comatose, nothing more. Sure you can imagine feeling angry, when in reality you would feel sad—how is this different?
That is, from my point of view, asking me to have two contradictory experiences at once: being normal and being comatose. And you’re going to say, “not being comatose, feeling comatose.“ And I will say, I can’t imagine acting awake and also feeling comatose. Let‘s look at a particular feature of coma: not being able to stand upright. I would feel like I was unable to stand, while in fact standing up whenever appropriate. And this is not some crazy delusion— in fact my brain is operating normally. No, I can’t imagine what that would feel like. We‘re both intelligent persons, not trying to be deceptive. And yet we have a large difference in what we can imagine ourselves being like when we introspect. I claim this is due to an actual difference in the structure of our cognition, best summed up as “I don’t have qualia, you do.”
That would feel like being comatose. Again, I could understand if you said “it’s unlikely to happen”, but I still don’t understand how not being able to even imagine it would work. Some similar things are even can happen in the real world: you can not consciously see anything, don’t feel like you can move your hand, but still move your hand. You can just extrapolate from this to not feeling anything. You can say that feelings about being comatose are delusional in that case.
Or, can you imagine that it’s not you that experiences blue sky—your copy does—when actual you are a comatose ghost? Like, you don’t even need to have qualia to imagine qualia—they can be modeled by just adding a node to your casual graph that includes neurons or whatever. You can do that with your models, right?
Your disagreement is mirrored almost exactly in Yudkowsky’s post Zombies Redacted. The crucial point (as mentioned also in Hastings’ sister comment) is that the thought experiment breaks down as soon as you consider the zombies making just the same claims about consciousness as we do, while not actually having any coherent reason for making such claims (as they are defined to not have consciousness in the first place). I guess you can imagine, in some sense, a scenario like that, but what’s the point of imagining a hypothetical set of physical laws that lack internal coherence?
Zombies being wrong is not a problem for experiment’s coherence—their reasons for making claims about consciousness are just terminated on the level of physical description. The point is that the laws of physics don’t seem to prohibit a scenario like this: for other imagined things you can in principle run the calculations and say “no, evolution on earth would not produce talking unicorns”, but where is the part that says that we are not zombies? There are reasons to not believe in zombies and more reasons to not believe in epiphenomenalism, like “it would be coincidence for us to know about epiphenomenal consciousness”, but the problem is that these reasons seem to be outside of physical laws.
what’s the point of imagining a hypothetical set of physical laws that lack internal coherence?
I don’t think they lack internal coherence; you haven’t identified a contradiction in them. But one point of imagining them is to highlight the conceptual distinction between, on the one hand, all of the (in principle) externally observable features or signs of consciousness, and, on the other hand, qualia. The fact that we can imagine these coming completely apart, and that the only ‘contradiction’ in the idea of zombie world is that it seems weird and unlikely, shows that these are distinct (even if closely related) concepts.
This conceptual distinction is relevant to questions such as whether a purely physical theory could ever ‘explain’ qualia, and whether the existence of qualia is compatible with a strictly materialist metaphysics. I think that’s the angle from which Yudkowsky was approaching it (i.e. he was trying to defend materialism against qualia-based challenges). My reading of the current conversation is that Signer is trying to get Carl to acknowledge the conceptual distinction, while Carl is saying that while he believes the distinction makes sense to some people, it really doesn’t to him, and his best explanation for this is that some people have qualia and some don’t.
Obviously I have sensory impressions; I can tell you when something looks red. And I have sensory memories; I can tell you when something looked red yesterday. But there isn’t any hard-to-explain extra thing there.
What is “looking red”, in terms of something physical?
The brevity of your question makes me suspect that I am about to fall into a philosophical trap. But I will go ahead and answer it.
There’s one particular interface in my brain. It’s got some kind of reference to the thing in question, bound to a representation for the color I’ve been trained to call ‘red’. This color mostly is detected for objects that mostly reflect the longest wavelengths of visible light. Is that the kind of ‘physical’ you were looking for?
Let’s just say it’s a test to see whether you have qualia in your worldview after all.
I’ll try not to get stuck on terms like interface, reference, binding, and focus for now just on this entity called a “representation”. Is that the thing which is red, or which looks red? And if so, could you remind us what it is, physically?
Nope, it’s the object in the world, an apple or whatever, that looks red and (usually) is red. The representation in my brain usually responds to a red object in the world, but it can be fooled by psychedelics or clever illumination. I don’t know how data structures are represented in my brain, so I can’t answer “what it is, physically”. if I knew more neuroscience, I might be able to localize it to a particular brain area, but no more (given my current understanding of what we know).
I hope you’re going to tell me some way to tell if I have qualia :-).
There is nothing red, there is no redness, but there is an experience of redness. It’s just another case of my brain lying to me, like telling me I don’t have a blind spot, or have color vision all the way to the periphery.
I have been mulling over this discussion, trying to identify the best ways to move it forward—focus on the case of an object that isn’t red but still looks red? focus on the relationship between representation and experience? - not just because the nature of reality is interesting, but because getting the nature of consciousness right, is potentially central to alignment of superintelligence (what OpenAI is now calling “superalignment”). I was also interested in exploring your hypothesis that some substantial difference (of phenomenology, cognition, and/or metacognition), maybe even a phenotypic difference, might be the reason why some naturally favor qualia, and others don’t.
However, in another comment you have declared that along with qualia, you also disbelieve in properties, kinds, people, and time. These are all concocted by our brains. So your ontology seems to be one in which, there’s physics, and then there are brains, which fabricate an entire fake reality, which is nonetheless the reality that we live in.
At this point, I have to conclude that I’m not dealing with a subtly different phenomenology, but rather with the effects of a philosophical belief system. There’s no reason to suppose that your skepticism towards qualia has a special subtle cause, when you deny the reality of so much else.
Maybe we could call it Democritus Syndrome, since he had a very similar outlook. In reality, there’s just atoms and the void; but “by convention”, we also say there’s color and taste and everything else. Interestingly, the fragment which reports this proposition (fragment 125) actually attributes it to the intellect, and also presents a riposte from the senses, who say, how can you deny us when you rely on our evidence?
But Democritus is just one of the first known examples of this stance. When Locke distinguishes secondary qualities from primary qualities, it’s a step in the same direction. One response to that distinction is found in doctrines like property dualism and emergentism, in which one acknowledges that physics portrays the world of the primary qualities as causally closed and self-sufficient, but one is unable to deny the reality of the secondary qualities, and therefore regards them as equally real, and either correlated with, or dependent on, the primary qualities.
Then there’s the response which denies the reality of the secondary qualities, or at least regards them as having a lesser reality. You seem to fall into this category. I don’t know if you adhere to a specific philosophical school of this type, or if you’re just a scientific materialist who is agnostic about the details. (I also want to note something Dennett said about eliminativism, that eliminativists can be selective; they can believe in some aspects of reported phenomenology, and disbelieve in others.)
Then we have various ontological doctrines for which robust realism regarding the phenomenal is all but axiomatic. There is the idealist option which says, if I am faced with a dilemma between physics and phenomenology, of course I choose phenomenology, that’s what I actually and directly know about reality. And then there’s a kind of qualic realism which says, physics only provides a relational or structural description of reality, but phenomenology gives us a glimpse of the things in themselves. The experienced world, the “lifeworld”, is the actual nature of the conscious part of the brain. That is my position, more or less.
So if I try to imagine what it’s like to be you, I imagine a phenomenology which is a normal human phenomenology, but then (when ontological issues arise) there’s an internal commentary which reminds you that all this is a construction of the brain, and the true reality is the wavefunction of the universe (or however it is that you conceive of fundamental physics).
I first noticed my inability to understand qualia in 1981 or 1982, when I was an undergraduate in Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind class. That wasn’t a big deal, I didn’t understand lots of things as an undergraduate. But it was a niggling problem. It wasn’t until the ’90s sometime that I came up with my “I don’t have qualia” theory. And it wasn’t until 2016, when I read The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts, and other Kantian philosophy, that I realized that many things whose reality I accepted were actually constructed by my mind for my convenience. That‘s a problem for the theory that Democritus Syndrome causes claiming disbelief in qualia, since I claimed to not have qualia before I caught Democritus Syndrome.
Here’s an alternate theory. Qualia are a kind of tag on top of perceptions, that says “This is real, reason on that basis.” I don’t have that tag, so it’s easier for me to believe that my mind has constructed reality from sense data, rather than that I directly perceive it. The direction of causality is reversed from your theory.
Saying that qualia dont really exist, but only appear to, solves nothing. For one thing qualia are definitionally appearances , so you haven’t eliminated them. For another, the physicalist still need to explain how and why the brain produces such appearances. For a third, you have to know what “qualia” means to express a sceptical.theory about them.
For a third, you have to know what “qualia” means to express a sceptical.theory about them.
I mean, by your definition the experience of red is a quale, by their definition experience is some neural activity, and then there is nothing else to explain. The sceptical theory is only sceptical about “but experience is not neural activity!” and for that “qualia, as a thing that is not neural activity, only appears to exist” is a reasonable answer when appearances are defined to be some neural activity.
The way I see it works is every definition is under a theory of the model that includes these definitions describing reality better or worse. Otherwise they are just empty words. So “qualia are experiences” or just “there are such things as qualia” are also implicitly low-resolution theories. Experiences are privileged only under misguided theories of knowledge (which are theories because it’s in the name) which make experiences axiomatically true. Otherwise just gesturing to “you know, experiences, you obviously see some things” is not fundamentally different from gesturing to neural activity, and the one about neural activity is more precise.
So, I don’t understand which part of the above you have a problem with. You don’t disbelief in theoretical ability of neuroscience to show on a screen what you are seeing, right? Because all that talk about reductive explanation may give such impression. So it’s all about Mary? That even after we obtain precise theory of what you see, it still wouldn’t make you see and that… “seems necessary” or something.
I don’t mind corrections to specific steps, but would appreciate you confirming that yes, you think Mary is a strong argument. And then it would be nice to have a better justification for this than “seems necessary”.
>Experiences are privileged only under misguided theories of knowledge (which are theories because it’s in the name) which make experiences axiomatically true.
Science regards experiences as probably correct about their causes, because you can’t do empiricism without that assumption. “Qualia are axiomatically true” is not something you need to claim to define qualia, and not something that is always claimed about qualia, and not central to the problem of qualia.
> Otherwise just gesturing to “you know, experiences, you obviously see some things” is not fundamentally different from gesturing to neural activity, and the one about neural activity is more precise.
It’s different because we don’t experience neural activity as neural activity. That doesn’t rule out neural activity being causal or constitutive of qualia. But what the camp #2 person wants is an explanation of how neural activity constitutes the experience. Asserting, as a definition, that it does isn’t a persuasive explanation...and is talking-past.
>So, I don’t understand which part of the above you have a problem with. You don’t disbelief in theoretical ability of neuroscience to show on a screen what you are seeing, right?
That’s ambiguous in just the way that Mary’s Room is supposed to disambiguate. Mary is able to tell what someone is seeing in the third-person reading-the label sense, just not in the first person, drinking the wine, sense.
>Because all that talk about reductive explanation may give such impression. So it’s all about Mary? That even after we obtain precise theory of what you see, it still wouldn’t make you see and that… “seems necessary” or something.
An objective explanation of seeing red doesn’t make you personally see red *and* personally seeing red is necessary to know what red looks like...ie. the explanation is incomplete.
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary’s Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to them that a physical description of brain state won’t convey what that state is like, because it doesn’t put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a descirption of a brain state won’t put you into that brain state. But that doesn’t show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to understand something.
>I don’t mind corrections to specific steps, but would appreciate you confirming that yes, you think Mary is a strong argument. And then it would be nice to have a better justification for this than “seems necessary
It’s tautologous that an explanation of subjective experience needs be about subjective experience. If subjective experience is reducible to brain states, then an explanation should be able to predict qualia, including novel ones...given a brain state as an input , it predicts a set of qualia as an output. But what does that mean? How can an entirely objective theory produce such an output? You say: well, naturally doesn’t , because it doesn’t put you into the brain state. But even though you have excused the shortcoming, it is still there. You have a meta explanation for why the explanation fails, not a successful explanation. And “Mary needs to actually instantiate Red herself” concedes that there are some things that are intrinsically subjective.
Have you actually seen orthonormal’s sequence on this exact argument? My intuitions say the “Martha” AI described therein, which imitates “Mary,” would in fact have qualia; this suffices to prove that our intuitions are unreliable (unless you can convincingly argue that some intuitions are more equal than others.) Moreover, it suggests a credible answer to your question: integration is necessary in order to “understand experience” because we’re talking about a kind of “understanding” which necessarily stems from the internal workings of the system, specifically the interaction of the “conscious” part with the rest.
(I do note that the addendum to the sequence’s final post should have been more fully integrated into the sequence from the start.)
Have you actually seen orthonormal’s sequence on this exact argument?
Yes.
My intuitions say the “Martha” AI described therein, which imitates “Mary,” would in fact have qualia;
Obviously, both arguments rely on intuition.
this suffices to prove that our intuitions are unreliable
I don’t think intuitions are 100% reliable.
I do think we are stuck with them.
(unless you can convincingly argue that some intuitions are more equal than others.)
I have been addressing the people who have the expected response to Mary’s Room
..I can’t do much about the rest.
Moreover, it suggests a credible answer to your question: integration is necessary in order to “understand experience” because we’re talking about a kind of “understanding” which necessarily stems from the internal workings of the system, specifically the interaction of the “conscious” part with the rest.
I think that sort of objection just pushes the problem back. If “integration” is a fully physical and objective process, and if Mary is truly a superscientist, then Mary will fully understand how her subject “integrated” their sense experience, and won’t be surprised by experiencing red.
It’s different because we don’t experience neural activity as neural activity. That doesn’t rule out neural activity being causal or constitutive of qualia. But what the camp #2 person wants is an explanation of how neural activity constitutes the experience. Asserting, as a definition, that it does isn’t a persuasive explanation...and is talking-past.
Yeah, that’s what I mean when I talk about axiomatically privileging experience and what I explicitly disagree with—we don’t experience experiences as experiences either. It’s not different. Describing things as “I’m seeing blue” or having similar internal thoughts is not inherently better. In fact it’s worse, because it’s less precise. There is no strong foundation for preferring such theory/definitions and so there is no reason to demand for a better theory to logically derive concepts from a worse one—it’s not how reductionism works[1].
And as to why Mary doesn’t provide such foundation...
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it.
...it’s not necessary. At the point where physical theory fully describes both knowledge and state of Mary, there is no argument for why you must define knowledge in a way that leads to contradictions. And there are arguments why you shouldn’t—we understand how knowledge works physically, so you can’t just say that “not fully understand” feels appropriate here and treat it as enough of a justification.
And again, experience is not the only case—if you told someone to look at Mary falling from a bicycle and asked them whether she knows how to ride a bicycle, they would say that she doesn’t.
So, considering that the meta explanation is correct in identifying the demand to use the bad definitions as wrong, why would someone not be persuaded? What is the argument for the necessity of instantiating experience for knowledge that keeps you persuaded in it?
Yeah, that’s what I mean when I talk about axiomatically privileging experience and what I explicitly disagree with—we don’t experience experiences as experiences either.
Of course we do.
It’s not different. Describing things as “I’m seeing blue” or having similar internal thoughts is not inherently better. In fact it’s worse, because it’s less precise.
It would be a less accurate way of defining the same thing, if we already knew that experiences are fully identifiable with neural activity. But we don’t know, that....that is what the whole debate is about.
Once you have a successful theory, it is reasonable to change a definition in accordance. For instance, knowing that water (“wet stuff in rivers, seas, and lakes”) is H2O,you can define water as H2O.
You can’t make the arrow go in the other direction. Defining a tail as a leg doesn’t prove a dog has five legs.
Would you concede that it’s ever possible to misuse arbitrary redefinitions?
There is no strong foundation for preferring such theory/definitions and so there is no reason to demand for a better theory to logically derive concepts from a worse one—it’s not how reductionism works[1].
Definitions aren’t theories. Preferring “precise”,objective, etc., definitions of words doesn’t prove everything is objective , because it’s just your own preference. What you are not doing is investigating reality in an unbiased way… instead you have placed yourself in the driving seat.
An explanation of fire is not about fire in logical sense—it’s about atoms.
It is of course, about both. A reductive explanation relates a higher level phenomenon to a lower level one, If you insist on ignoring the higher level phenomeneon because it is “bad” or “imprecise”, you can’t achieve an explanation. You have to have the vague understanding of water as wet stuff before you can have the precise understanding of water as H2O.
...it’s not necessary. At the point where physical theory fully describes both knowledge and state of Mary, there is no argument for why you must define knowledge in a way that leads to contradictions.
What contradiction? If something is contradictory, you need to show it.
Physical theory doesn’t fully describes the knowledge and state of Mary, because physical theory can’t describe sensations. That’s the whole point.
There is an argument against physical theory being fully adequate, and since the theory isn’t known to be correct, we shouldn’t change the definition of “quale”.
And there are arguments why you shouldn’t—we understand how knowledge works physically,
We understand how some kinds of knowledge do, but maybe not all kinds. People have believed in knowledge-by-aquaintance for a long time.
so you can’t just say that “not fully understand” feels appropriate here and treat it as enough of a justification.
You cant just say “fully understand” feels appropriate here and treat it as enough of a justification. It’s intuitions either way
And again, experience is not the only case—if you told someone to look at Mary falling from a bicycle and asked them whether she knows how to ride a bicycle, they would say that she doesn’t.
You’re not the first person to think that knowledge-by-acquaintance is the same thing as know-how. But...consider showing it , not just telling it.
So, considering that the meta explanation is correct in identifying the demand to use the bad definitions as wrong, why would someone not be persuaded?
You haven’t shown anything is bad.
What is the argument for the necessity of instantiating experience for knowledge that keeps you persuaded in it?
The Mary’s Room argument is not a logical proof. It is nonetheless persuasive to a lot of people because a lot of people find that experiencing something personally is more informative than hearing about it at second hand.
To be clear, I don’t argue for physicalism about qualia in general here, only against Mary.
Would you concede that it’s ever possible to misuse arbitrary redefinitions?
Yes, of course, it’s possible to use a definition from incomplete or wrong theory, among other things.
What contradiction?
The contradiction between with physical description of knowledge.
You cant just say “fully understand” feels appropriate here and treat it as enough of a justification. It’s intuitions either way
It’s not—it’s intuitions and precise description of everything about the situation (Which you agree with, right? That it’s not surprising for an image of a brain scan to have a different effect on Mary from seeing something red, that physicalism predicts the difference) on the one side and just intuition on the other. So...
It would be a less accurate way of defining the same thing, if we already knew that experiences are fully identifiable with neural activity. But we don’t know, that....that is what the whole debate is about.
...we (or we from future, or Mary) do know this by observing that neural activity works the same way the thing that you call “experience” works. The argument for identifying experiences with neural activity works as much now as arguments for reductive explanation about trajectory of a falling leaf, but even if you want to check whether it works in the future and imagine Mary, you would still discover that at best it’s slightly unintuitive.
There is an argument against physical theory being fully adequate, and since the theory isn’t known to be correct, we shouldn’t change the definition of “quale”.
The problem is that the whole argument is “it feels unintuitive”, when the theory is known to be correct to the level of precisely describing everything about the situation.
We understand how some kinds of knowledge do, but maybe not all kinds. People have believed in knowledge-by-aquaintance for a long time.
We also understand how knowledge-by-acquaintance works physically—it just changes your brain. There is nothing problematic on the knowledge level.
If you insist on ignoring the higher level phenomeneon because it is “bad” or “imprecise”, you can’t achieve an explanation.
The only part being ignored in physical description of knowledge-by-aquaintance is the feeling of it being unintuitive.
a lot of people find that experiencing something personally is more informative than hearing about it at second hand.
Which is explained physically. What’s the argument for demanding more?
You’re not the first person to think that knowledge-by-acquaintance is the same thing as know-how. But...consider showing it , not just telling it.
They are not precisely the same thing—they are different neural processes. But yes, they both harder to obtain with just description. What’s there to show? The argument was that experiences are the only kind of knowledge that requires something except physical description. Do you disagree that Mary can have all physical knowledge but still don’t know how to drive a bike? The thing we can deduce from this is that such definition of physical knowledge is bad.
Of course we do.
And why do you think this is true? All definitions bottom out somewhere and there is no reason to stop at experiences specifically.
The only way Mary can work as an argument is if you give the “we experience experiences as experiences”-assumption a special status: if you have an axiom of “I know what it’s like to see red”, then you can build on that the justification for why it’s so important to preserve all aspects of your assumed knowledge including what must be called knowledge and the intuitions about knowledge-by-acquaintance.
To be clear, I don’t argue for physicalism about qualia in general here, only against Mary.
You’re arguing against Mary’s Room on the basis of physicalism:-
It’s not—it’s intuitions and precise description of everything about the situation
The idea that a complete physical and explanation captures “everything” is a clam equivalent to physicalism.
The contradiction between with physical description of knowledge.
Of course “Mary doesn’t know what Red looks like” contradicts “physical descriptions in the form of detailed brain scans capture everything”...and vice versa. That’s the point. An argument for X contradicts not X. That’s not the same as a self contradiction.
(Which you agree with, right? That it’s not surprising for an image of a brain scan to have a different effect on Mary from seeing something red, that physicalism predicts the difference)
The point is not just that seeing a tomato has a different effect , the point is that Mary learns something. And physicalism does not predict that , because it implies complete physical descriptions leave something out.
on the one side and just intuition on the other. So...
It would be a less accurate way of defining the same thing, if we already knew that experiences are fully identifiable with neural activity.
We don’t know that. Assuming it is equivalent to assuming physicalism, which begs the question against Mary’s Room.
..we (or we from future, or Mary) do know this by observing that neural activity works the same way the thing that you call “experience” works.
No. One of them is only knowable by personal instantiation...as you concede...kind of.
The argument for identifying experiences with neural activity works as much now as arguments for reductive explanation about trajectory of a falling leaf,
Every individual reductive argument has to pay it’s own way. There’s no global argument for reductionism.
but even if you want to check whether it works in the future and imagine Mary, you would still discover that at best it’s slightly unintuitive.
Since we don’t actually have a reductive explanation of conscious experience, it’s intuition telling you that we will or should or must.
There is an argument against physical theory being fully adequate, and since the theory isn’t known to be correct, we shouldn’t change the definition of “quale”.
The problem is that the whole argument is “it feels unintuitive”, when the theory is known to be correct to the level of precisely describing everything about the situation.
No it isn’t.
a lot of people find that experiencing something personally is more informative than hearing about it at second hand.
Which is explained physically. What’s the argument for demanding more?
Are you saying:-
we don’t learn from acquaintance..
but we have a false intuition we do...
and science can definitely predict 2.
...?
Ie., something like illusionism. Because I’m pretty sure 3 is false.
You’re not the first person to think that knowledge-by-acquaintance is the same thing as know-how. But...consider showing it , not just telling it.
They are not precisely the same thing—they are different neural processes. But yes, they both harder to obtain with just description. What’s there to show? The argument was that experiences are the only kind of knowledge that requires something except physical description. Do you disagree that Mary can have all physical knowledge but still don’t know how to drive a bike?
I agree, but I don’t see how that makes both things the same.
Of course we do.
And why do you think this is true? All definitions bottom out somewhere and there is no reason to stop at experiences specifically.
I’ve didn’t say there was. I’m calling for experiences to be accepted as having some sort of existence, and explained somehow. To not be ignored.
The only way Mary can work as an argument is if you give the “we experience experiences as experiences”-assumption a special status: if you have an axiom of “I know what it’s like to see red”,
I agree with “I know what it’s like to see red” , but I don’t see how it equates to “we experience experiences as experiences”. What else would we experience our own experiences as? Brain scans?
then you can build on that the justification for why it’s so important to preserve all aspects of your assumed knowledge
It’s important not to disregard things, and the claim that you have a “complete” explanation.
I’m saying that it’s ok to beg the question here, because, as you say, Mary is not a logical argument: if there is no contradiction either way, then physicalism wins by precision. And you don’t need to explicitly assume “physical descriptions in the form of detailed brain scans capture everything”—you only need to consistently use one of common-sense-to-someone-who-knows-physics definitions of knowledge.
Ie., something like illusionism. Because I’m pretty sure 3 is false.
Yes, I’m saying that you can non-contradictory choose your definitions of knowledge in such a way that 1 is true and so 2 is also true because intuition asserting non-true proposition is wrong and 3 is true because intuition is just neural activity and science predicts all of it. And yes, that means that illusionism is right in that you can be wrong about your (knowledge of) experiences.
I agree with “I know what it’s like to see red” , but I don’t see how it equates to “we experience experiences as experiences”. What else would we experience our own experiences as? Brain scans?
As neural signals. There is no justification to start from a model that includes experiences. If Mary is not an argument for adding experiences to a physical model, then it’s not an argument for not ignoring (contradictory aspects of) them when reducing high level description to a physical model.
I’m calling for experiences to be accepted as having some sort of existence, and explained somehow. To not be ignored.
They are not ignored, they’re represented by corresponding neural processes. Like, what is ignored and not explained by a physical description? It’s not the need for instantiation—it’s predicted by experiences being separate neural process. You can’t say “it ignores qualia”—that would be ignoring the whole Mary setup and begging the question—as far as Mary goes there is no problem with “qualia are neural processes”. So it leaves only intuition about knowledge—about high-level concept which you can define however you want.
No. One of them is only knowable by personal instantiation...as you concede...kind of.
Under a definition of knowledge that calls experiences “knowledge” knowing some of your own neural activity also requires instantiating that neural activity.
I’m saying that it’s ok to beg the question here, because, as you say, Mary is not a logical argument: if there is no contradiction either way, then physicalism wins by precision.
There is a fact of the matter about whether physical descriptions are exhaustive, even if Mary’s Room doesnt prove it. If physical descriptions don’t convey experiences as such , they are fundamentally flawed , and the precision isn’t much compensation.
And you don’t need to explicitly assume “physical descriptions in the form of detailed brain scans capture everything”—you only need to consistently use one of common-sense-to-someone-who-knows-physics definitions of knowledge.
Defining knowledge as purely physical doesn’t prove anything about the world. (But you are probably using “definition” to mean “theory’.)
Are you saying:-
1 we don’t learn from acquaintance..
2 but we have a false intuition we do...
3 and science can definitely predict 2.
Yes, I’m saying that you can non-contradictory
Lots of things are non contradictory. Non circularity is more of an achievement.
choose your definitions of knowledge in such a way that 1 is true and so 2 is also true because intuition asserting non-true proposition is wrong and 3 is true because intuition is just neural activity and science predicts all of it. And yes, that means that illusionism is right in that you can be wrong about your (knowledge of) experiences.
Again, you can’t prove things by adopting definitions. If we had a detailed understanding of neuroscience that predicted an illusion of knowledge-by -acquaintance specifically, you’d be onto something. But illusionist claims are philosophical theories, not scientific facts.
What else would we experience our own experiences as? Brain scans?
As neural signals.
We don t experience experiences as neural signals. A person can spend their life with no idea that there is such a thing as a neural signal.
There is no justification to start from a model that includes experiences
Experience need to be explained because everything needs to be explained. Experiences need not end up in the final ontological model, because sometimes less an explanation explains-away.
If Mary is not an argument for adding experiences to a physical model, then it’s not an argument for not ignoring (contradictory aspects of) them when reducing high level description to a physical model.
I’m calling for experiences to be accepted as having some sort of existence, and explained somehow. To not be ignored.
They are not ignored, they’re represented by corresponding neural processes. Like, what is ignored and not explained by a physical description?
The experience itself.
It’s not the need for instantiation—it’s predicted by experiences being separate neural process. You can’t say “it ignores qualia”—that would be ignoring the whole Mary setup and begging the question—as far as Mary goes there is no problem with “qualia are neural processes”.
That would be the case if physicalism is true, but you don’t know that physicalism is.true..
You basically assumed it, by assuming that physical explanations are complete. That’s circular.
Under a definition of knowledge that calls experiences “knowledge” knowing some of your own neural activity also requires instantiating that neural activity.
So maybe I could arbitrarily assume that definition?
Lots of things are non contradictory. Non circularity is more of an achievement.
Such physical definitions of knowledge are not more circular than anything, I think?
So maybe I could arbitrarily assume that definition?
I mean, go ahead—then Mary would just be able to imagine red.
Again, you can’t prove things by adopting definitions.
Exactly—that’s why Mary doesn’t work.
If we had a detailed understanding of neuroscience that predicted an illusion of knowledge-by -acquaintance specifically, you’d be onto something. But illusionist claims are philosophical theories, not scientific facts.
There is no need for additional scientific facts. There are enough scientific facts to accept physical explanation of the whole Mary setup. That’s why people mostly seek philosophical problems with physicalism and why physicalists answer with philosophical theories—if physicalism is philosophically coherent, then it is undoubtedly true.
That would be the case if physicalism is true, but you don’t know that physicalism is.true..You basically assumed it, by assuming that physical explanations are complete. That’s circular.
The Mary’s room was supposed to be an argument against physicalism. If there are no philosophical problems in the setup after you assume physicalism, then argument fails. It is equivalent to disagreeing with some step of an argument, like “Mary gets new knowledge”—you can’t just disallow disagreeing with this because it’s logically equivalent to assuming physicalism—that would be assuming non-physicalism that the argument was about. Of course, I don’t just assume physicalism—you need to satisfy the “no philosophical problems” condition, so I talk about why “Mary gets new knowledge” is just trying to prove things by adopting definitions. I don’t see how do you think it can work otherwise—you can’t derive “physicalism is true” from Mary’s assumptions alone. Obviously, assuming physicalism doesn’t prove that physicalism is true. But again, I don’t argue, that physicalism is true, I’m arguing that Mary is a bad argument.
There is a fact of the matter about whether physical descriptions are exhaustive, even if Mary’s Room doesnt prove it. If physical descriptions don’t convey experiences as such , they are fundamentally flawed , and the precision isn’t much compensation.
Sure. So you do agree now that talking about Mary or knowledge is unnecessary?
They are not ignored, they’re represented by corresponding neural processes. Like, what is ignored and not explained by a physical description?
The experience itself.
So, what is your argument against “experience itself is explained by “human experiences are neural processes”″, if it’s not Mary?
Experience need to be explained because everything needs to be explained. Experiences need not end up in the final ontological model, because sometimes less an explanation explains-away.
If you don’t demand specific experiences to be in the final ontological model, they are explained the same way the fire is explained. The explanation of fire does not usually set you on fire. What you call “I’m seeing blue” is actually “your neurons are activated in a way similar to a way they are activated when blue light is directed to your eyes”. On what basis then you say that these 3gb of numbers from a simulation do not explain fire?
Such physical definitions of knowledge are not more circular than anything, I think?
I don’t know what your mean. I wasn’t intentionally saying anything physical or non physical.
So maybe I could arbitrarily assume that definition?
I mean, go ahead—then Mary would just be able to imagine red.
No,because you can’t prove things through definitions.
Again, you can’t prove things by adopting definitions.
Exactly—that’s why Mary doesn’t work.
The Mary’s Room argument is not an argument from definitions.
If we had a detailed understanding of neuroscience that predicted an illusion of knowledge-by -acquaintance specifically, you’d be onto something. But illusionist claims are philosophical theories, not scientific facts.
There is no need for additional scientific facts. There are enough scientific facts to accept physical explanation of the whole Mary setup.
Show me a prediction of a novel quale!
That’s why people mostly seek philosophical problems with physicalism and why physicalists answer with philosophical theories—if physicalism is philosophically coherent, then it is undoubtedly true.
No. Consistency is necessary for truth, but nowhere near sufficient.
That would be the case if physicalism is true, but you don’t know that physicalism is.true..You basically assumed it, by assuming that physical explanations are complete. That’s circular.
The Mary’s room was supposed to be an argument against physicalism. If there are no philosophical problems in the setup after you assume physicalism,
It’s suppose to be an argumetn against phsysicalism, so you can’t refute it by assuming physicalism.
then argument fails. It is equivalent to disagreeing with some step of an argument, like “Mary gets new knowledge”—you can’t just disallow disagreeing with this
I don’t disallow disagreeing with it. I disallow assuming physicalism. The point is to think about what would happen in the situation whilst suspending judgement about the ontology the world works on.
because it’s logically equivalent to assuming physicalism—that would be assuming non-physicalism that the argument was about.
Non physicalism doesn’t imply “Mary would not know what Red looks like”>
Of course, I don’t just assume physicalism—you need to satisfy the “no philosophical problems” condition, so I talk about why “Mary gets new knowledge” is just trying to prove things by adopting definitions. I don’t see how do you think it can work otherwise—you can’t derive “physicalism is true” from Mary’s assumptions alone. Obviously, assuming physicalism doesn’t prove that physicalism is true. But again, I don’t argue, that physicalism is true, I’m arguing that Mary is a bad argument.
So you do agree now that talking about Mary or knowledge is unnecessary?
No.
They are not ignored, they’re represented by corresponding neural processes.
There’s no fact of the matter about that. If they are fully represented , then Mary would know what red looks like, otherwise not. If we could perform M’s R as a rela experiment, we would not need it as a thought experiment.
Like, what is ignored and not explained by a physical description?
The experience itself.
So, what is your argument against “experience itself is explained by “human experiences are neural processes”″, if it’s not Mary?
There’s no reason it shouldn’t be Mary. Mary’s Room isn’t a proof, but there is no proof of the contrary. Arguments that start “assuming physicalism” are not proof because they are invalid because they are circular.
If you don’t demand specific experiences to be in the final ontological model, they are explained the same way the fire is explained.
We have a detailed gears-level explanation of fire, we do not have one of conscious experience. There are three possibilities, not two:
X is explained, and survives the explanation as part of ontology.
X is explained away.
X is not explained at all.
Merely saying that “X is an emergent, high level phenomenon..but don’t ask me how or why” is not an explanation, despite what many here think.
The explanation of fire does not usually set you on fire.
You only need to instantiate something yourself if it fundamentally subjective.
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary’s Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to them that a physical description of brain state won’t convey what that state is like, because it doesn’t put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a descirption of a brain state won’t put you into that brain state. But that doesn’t show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.
If another version of Mary were shut up to learn everything about, say, nuclear fusion, the question “would she actually know about nuclear fusion” could only be answered “yes, of course....didn’t you just say she knows everything”? The idea that she would have to instantiate a fusion reaction within her own body in order to understand fusion is quite counterintuitive. Similarly, a description of photosynthesis will make you photosynthesise, and would not be needed for a complete understanding of photosynthesis.
There seem to be some edge cases.: for instance, would an alternative Mary know everything about heart attacks without having one herself? Well, she would know everything except what a heart attack feels like, and what it feels like is a quale. the edge cases, like that one, are cases are just cases where an element of knowledge-by-acquaintance is needed for complete knowledge. Even other mental phenomena don’t suffer from this peculiarity. Thoughts and memories are straightforwardly expressible in words, so long as they don’t involve qualia.
So: is the response “well, she has never actually instantiated colour vision in her own brain” one that lays to rest and the challenge posed by the Knowledge argument, leaving physicalism undisturbed? The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
What you call “I’m seeing blue” is actually “your neurons are activated in a way similar to a way they are activated when blue light is directed to your eyes”.
Says who? You can’t actually show me the explanation, and you can’t prove it by assuming physicalism.
On what basis then you say that these 3gb of numbers from On what basis then you say that these 3gb of numbers from a simulation do not explain fire?
I didn;’t say fire doesn’t have an explanation. Note that explanations have nothing to do with simulations. Explanations have to do with
i) showing that two things are necessarily, not arbitrarily linked.
ii) making predictions, especially novel ones.
An explanation of conscious experience would render zombies unimaginable (because of i) and allow you to predict novel qualia (because of ii).
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it.
Here—“fully understand” depends on definition of “understand”. What you understand is not a matter of fact, it’s a matter of definition. All you talk about is how it is “counterintuitive” to call instantiating nuclear reaction in yourself “understanding”. “It’s intuitive to call new experience “additional knowledge”″ is an argument from definitions.
There seem to be some edge cases.: for instance, would an alternative Mary know everything about heart attacks without having one herself? Well, she would know everything except what a heart attack feels like, and what it feels like is a quale. the edge cases, like that one, are cases are just cases where an element of knowledge-by-acquaintance is needed for complete knowledge. Even other mental phenomena don’t suffer from this peculiarity. Thoughts and memories are straightforwardly expressible in words, so long as they don’t involve qualia.
They are only edge cases of specific definitions of knowledge. There is no fundamental reason why you must call “knowledge” heart attack’s effect on your brain and not call “knowledge” fire’s effect on your hand.
The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
“Necessary” for what? Judging from “epistemically unique” it is implied that it is necessary for knowledge? Then it’s certainly incorrect—it’s either not necessary, because Mary can have a more compact representation of knowledge about color, or it’s necessary for all things, if Mary supposed to have all representations of knowledge. It may be necessary for satisfying Mary’s preferences to have qualia independently of their epistemic value—that’s your perfectly physicalist source of subjectivity.
If you only care about matters of fact, then there are no problems for physicalism in that the human qualia are unusual—it predicts that different neural processes are different. And predicts that it’s useful to see things for yourself. And that it will feel intuitive to say “Mary gets new knowledge” for some people. I think it even follows from casual closure, that it doesn’t make sense for there to be unphysical explanation for intuitions? If your intuition is not predicted by physics, then atoms somewhere have to be unexpectedly nudged—is it what you propose? I… don’t really understand the argument here? The physicalism doesn’t say that all things that it is intuitive to call “knowledge” are equally easy to get from books, or something—why exactly it is an argument against physicalism that Mary gets what it predicts?
No,because you can’t prove things through definitions.
There’s no fact of the matter about that. If they are fully represented , then Mary would know what red looks like, otherwise not. If we could perform M’s R as a rela experiment, we would not need it as a thought experiment.
Wait, is the problem that you actually think that it is not obviously physically possible to imagine red without seeing it? Like, knowing everything plausible includes having all permutations of neuron states, including the state where you are seeing red. Is your “matter of fact” about knowing what it is like to see considers the possibility that without actually seeing Mary could only simulate zombie-red or something?
Oh, I finally got why are you talking about predicting novel qualia—you are saying that physicalism doesn’t predict Mary seeing red, right? Because it only predicts neural activity. My point is that this complain doesn’t have anything to do with Mary or knowledge. If you only talk about Mary, then there is no motivation to doubt physicalism from the experiment. The point of Mary is that she gains knowledge and physicalism predicts gaining knowledge. There is no need to talk about novel qualia, because physical knowledge contains knowledge about differences between different, old and novel, qualia. You agree, that physicalism at least (allows definition of knowledge where it) predicts gaining some knowledge from instantiation when Mary leaves room, right? Then even if you have doubts about this predicted knowledge being incomplete, Mary doesn’t provide anything that justifies this doubt—your arguments about insufficient gears-level explanations would work the same way in situations without novel qualia or complete physical knowledge. Or do you have an example of specific difference between qualia that is not predicted by physicalism and uniquely depends on the whole instantiation thing? I mean, my position is that there are no differences between qualia that are not predicted by physicalism at all, so any examples would be appreciated.
Novel relative to what epistemic state? Sure, we probably can’t ethically and consistently make a human say “wow, it was neither sight nor hearing” now, but I really don’t get what’s the justification for ignoring other facts about qualia that physicalism can predict? Some of them were novel for humanity in their time.
Says who?
Induction.
We have a detailed gears-level explanation of fire, we do not have one of conscious experience.
We don’t usually have very detailed explanations of specific fires. And we have detailed explanation of conscious experience—physics equations^^. But ok, there is a space for more useful theories. The thing I don’t understand is how it is an argument against physicalism—do you expect to not get gears-level explanation in the future? The whole point of doing Mary is that no one expects it.
Merely saying that “X is an emergent, high level phenomenon..but don’t ask me how or why” is not an explanation, despite what many here think.
Yes, but that would just mean that the correct position is “physicalism is right, but the detailed explanation is in the works”. Not detailed-enough explanation at the present moment is just one of factors you weight, along with “physicalism has detailed explanations about physics, neurons and all other things”, not something that logically prohibits believing in physicalism. Again, that’s not what mainstream arguments against physicalism are? It’s always “physicalism can’t possibly explain consciousness even if it’s explanation have been detailed”.
i) showing that two things are necessarily, not arbitrarily linked.
That’s what I am against—it’s not justified, depending on what do you mean by “necessarily”—atoms are not necessarily linked to fire. In the end, we just arbitrary call some atoms “fire”. So why demand this only for qualia? If it’s only “as necessary as reduction of fire”, than it is already that necessary—the expectation that you will get neurological explanation in future is the same kind of inductive reasoning that you do, when you decide that correlations between atoms and fire are enough to believe explanation in terms of atoms.
Do you think you have experienced a dissociative crisis at any point of your life? I mean the sensations of derealisation/depersonalisation, not other symptoms, and it doesn’t need to have been ‘strong’ at all.
I ask because those sensations are not in any obvious way about processing sensory data, and because of the feeling of detachment from reality that comes with them. So I was curious if you could identify anything like that.
I have on three occasions experienced a state where I can still perceive shapes, but they don’t have any meaning, don’t feel real, and do not resolve into separate objects. It only lasted a few seconds in each case, and was not distressing. In fact it was fascinating and I wished it lasted longer so I could gather more data. I’m still capable of voluntary action during these spells— I know this because I once said “Oh hey, I’m derealized!” (or something like that) while it was happening.
I used to experience a phenomenon that I privately call ‘paralysis of the will’, which lasted about ten seconds, and during which I was incapable of willing any new voluntary action, but could continue with my present activity. For example, it happened when I was driving, and I continued to drive, halted a stop sign, and then proceeded. But if someone had asked me a question during that time, I wouldn’t have been able to reply. It’s never been a problem for me, since it looks like absent-mindedness or preoccupation and doesn’t last long. I used to get it every few months, but not for the last ten years. It’s not an absence seizure because my memory is continuous through it.
I don’t know if this tells you anything. I might be typical-minding here, but I think lots of people get various brief funny mental phenomena, and most people just shrug it off.
Yes. If qualia is defined as George Wilfrid describes it elsewhere in this thread, as nothing more than sensation, then I definitely have it. But I suspect there’s something more— plenty of people have tried to point to it, using phrases like “conceptually separate the information content from what it feels like”. Well, I can’t. That phrase doesn’t mesh with a phenomenon in my mind. The information content is what it feels like.
That depends on how we define “information”—for one definition of information, qualia are information (and also everything else is, since we can only recognize something by the pattern it presents to us).
But for another definition of information, there is a conceptual difference—for example, morphine users report knowing they are in pain, but not feeling the quale of pain.
I have a simple, yet unusual, explanation for the difference between camp #1 and camp#2: we have different experiences of consciousness. Believing that everyone has our kind of consciousness, of course we talk past each other.
I’ve noticed that in conversations about qualia, I’m always in the position of Mr Boldface in the example dialog: I don’t think there is anything that needs to be explained, and I’m puzzled that nobody can tell me what qualia are using sensible words. (I‘m not particularly stupid or ignorant; I got a degree in philosophy and linguistics from MIT.) I suggest a simple explanation: some of us have qualia and some of us don’t. I‘m one of those who don’t. And when someone tries to point at them, all I can do is to react with obtuse incomprehension, while they point at the most obvious thing in the world. It apparently is the most obvious thing in the world, to a lot of people.
Obviously I have sensory impressions; I can tell you when something looks red. And I have sensory memories; I can tell you when something looked red yesterday. But there isn’t any hard-to-explain extra thing there.
One might object that qualia are so obvious that everyone must have them. But there are many cases where people differ in their mental faculties, which can be determined only by careful comparison, and which provoke amazement when revealed. Some people have no visual experience of imagined objects at all. Some people can’t rotate an imagined object to see it from the other side. Some people maintain a continuous internal narration. We all get through life.
Alternative explanation: everyone has qualia, but some people lack the mental mechanism that makes them feel like qualia require a special metaphysical explanation. Since qualia are almost always represented as requiring such an explanation (or at least as ineffable, mysterious and elusive), these latter people don’t recognize their own qualia as that which is being talked about.
How can people lack such a mental mechanism? Either
they simply have never done the particular kind of introspection that’s needed to realize the weirdness of qualia, or
there is a correct reductive explanation for qualia, and some people’s naive intuition just happens to naturally coincide with this explanation, or
same as 2 except that the explanation is (partially or wholly) incorrect. Presumably, sufficient introspection of the right type would move these people to either 1 or 2 (edit: or to the category of people who are puzzled about qualia, of course).
I don’t have a clue about the relative prevalences of these groups, nor do I mean to make a claim about which group you personally are in.
You’ve summarized this more elegantly than I can. Let me rewrite your explanation into my slightly different terminology: “everyone has
qualiasensations, but some people lack the mental mechanism that makes them feel like there are also qualia requireing a special metaphysical explanation. Since qualia are almost always represented as requiring such an explanation (or at least as ineffable, mysterious and elusive), these latter people don’t recognize their ownqualiasensations as that which is being talked about.” I would agree with this rephrasing as describing my experience. I think the rephrasing is harmless, just that what I’m calling (sensation + qualia) is what you’re calling (qualia + the mental mechanism etc.)As for how I can lack such a mental mechanism, I don’t think you’re on the right track. Taking the points in order:
I’ve done plenty of introspection. I suppose I might be doing ‘the wrong kind’, but until someone tells me how do ‘the right kind’, I doubt it.
This might be the case for me. But if it is, I don’t know what the ‘correct explanation’ is. When I introspect, I simply don’t experience anything ‘requiring a metaphysical explanation’, or that is ‘mysterious, ineffable or elusive’, to use your terminology.
I’d want to hear from someone who had actually done this before I think it’s possible.
That’s interesting, but I doubt it’s what’s going on in general (though maybe it is for some camp #1 people). My instinct is also strongly camp #1, but I feel like I get the appeal of camp #2 (and qualia feel “obvious” to me on a gut level). The difference between the camps seems to me to have more to do with differences in philosophical priors.
Oh, I don’t think it’s the only difference between Camp #1 and Camp #2. But it certainly creates a pre-philosophical bias toward Camp #1, for those of us who don’t have qualia.
I suspect Daniel Dennet is also in the no-qualia camp, given the arguments advanced in his paper “Quining Qualia”.
There are less drastic ways of explaining qualiaphobia.
Firstly, to get qualia you have to stop believing in naive realism. Naive realism means that colours are taken to be painted on the surfaces of objects and perceived exactly as they are. People vary a lot about in how easy they find it to get away from naive realism
Secondly subjective feelings are what scientists are trained to ignore in favour of 3rd person perspective. That’s a perfectly good methodological rule in the most areas of science, but it tends to get exaggerated into a fact of reality - - “feels don’t real”. Consciousness isn’t a typical scientific field—subjectivity is central.
First, a side note: I don’t like the word “qualiaphobia” for what we’re discussing here, because (a) I’m not afraid of qualia, I just don’t think I have them, and (b) it smacks of homophobia or transphobia, which have a negative connotation.
More later— your comments provoke me to have many thoughts, which I’ll have to finish thinking later, because I have to go to work now.
“To get qualia you have to stop believing in naive realism.” Does “get” mean “experience” or “acquire”? In any event, I don’t believe in naive realism. (if I have correctly understood what naive realism means). I am quite aware of the enormous processing it takes to keep object colors constant under changes in illumination. I further believe that many things that we feel are “out there” are in fact concocted by our brain to make the world easier to understand. That includes the ideas of objects that have properties, kinds of objects, people who have beliefs, desires and intentions, and the passage of time, None of these appear in true reality, but everybody thinks with them, because otherwise it’s too hard.
“Feelings are what scientists are trained to ignore.” It’s true that I was raised as a scientist, but I’ve believed in the validity of subjective evidence since my sophomore year at college, when I took a cognitive science class and had my mind expanded. That was also about the time people tried to explain qualia to me, and my first experience of completely failing to get the point.
Neither, it means “understand semantically”.
what does “get the point” mean? Are you saying you failed to understand what “qualia” means , or.failed to understand why qualia are significant?
I failed to understand what qualia were. Their attempts at explanation failed to engage with anything in my introspection, and in some cases seemed like word salad. I was eventually led to the conclusion that one of the following was true: (a) I am too dumb to understand qualia. Probably not true, since I am smart enough for most things. (B) It’s one of those wooly concepts that continental philosophers like, and doesn’t actually have a referent. Probably not true, since down-to-earth philosophers, like Dennet or Ned Block, talk about it. (C) my cognition is such that I don’t have what they were trying to point at.
D) the idea that the word must mean something weird, since it is a strange word—it cannot be an unfamilar term for something familiar.
You said you had the experience of redness. I told you that’s a quale. Why didn’t that tell you what “qualia” means?
When you see the color red, what is that like? When you run your hand over something rough and bumpy, what is that like? When you taste salt, what is that like?
I’m not actually sure I’d argue qualia are particularly different from “the experience of sensation” (but, I think they are different from “sensation”).
(I notice other people in this thread, who are talking about qualia and asking you questions, seem to be asking different questions than the ones I’d ask, so I’m still not sure even the “obviously qualia!” people are talking about the same thing)
Some quotes of yours I wanted to respond to:
and
Note that I don’t think of qualia as having anything to do with things being real. I think qualia is pretty close to just meaning “experience of sensation”. Insofar as I have a tag-connected-with-my-perceptions, it’s more like “it matters to me that I experience perceiving this.” (I usually think of this as most important for “I experience perceiving happiness, excitement, sadness, fear, i.e. emotions with positive or negative valence)
I think sensation is different from experience-of-sensation. A thermostat has sensation of temperature, but I would be very surprised if it had an experience of sensation (I think when I feel “hot” or “cold”, there is an experience of what-that-feels like that I think requires some kind of mental representation, and I don’t think thermostats can have temperature representations)
To be clear, the thing the zombies argument is about is explicitly not the thing that caused (only) by ability to have a mental representation.
I tend to think that, regardless of which camp is correct, it’s unlikely that the difference is due to different experiences, and more likely that one of the two sides is making a philosophical error. Reason being that experience itself is a low-level property, whereas judgments about experience are a high-level property, and it generally seems to be the case that the variance in high-level properties is way way higher.
E.g., it’d be pretty surprising if someone claimed that red is more similar to green than to orange, but less surprising if they had a strange idea about the meaning of life, and that’s pretty much true regardless of what exactly they think about the meaning of life. We’ve just come to expect that pretty much any high-level opinion is possible.
I’ve heard this approach to the question multiple times and I must say I really dislike it.
Because
It’s an attempt to sidestep the philosophical disagreement instead of resolving one
It makes us even more map-territory confused as now we conflate abscense of belief in qualia with abscence of qualia
Most obviously it fails to acknowledge that people do change their views on the subject. I used to be a subjective idealist and now I’m a reductive materialist. Did I lost my qualia in the process?
The existence of people without qualia might be a way to displace the question from philosophy to cognitive psychology, where at least we have some ways to answer questions. I don’t think it’s illegitimate for me to say what I say; I think it’s fascinating additional data.
Well, we have to be careful to keep the two concepts separate. I don’t think I have qualia, but I’m sure other people do. They’ve claimed to on many occasions, and I don’t think they’re lying or deceived. From my point of view, other people have some extra thing on top of their sensations, which produces philosophical conundrums when they try to think about it.
You tell me! People say qualia are the most obvious thing in the world. Do you feel like you have them?
As someone who definitely has qualia (and believes that you do too), no, that’s not what’s going on. There’s some confusing extra thing on top of behavior—namely, sensations. There would be no confusion if the world were coupled differential equations all the way down (and not just because there would be no one home to be confused), but instead we’re something that acts like a collection of coupled differential equations but also, unlike abstract mathematical structures, is like something to be.
“There’s some confusing extra thing on top of behavior, namely sensations.” Wow, that’s a fascinating notion. But presumably if we didn’t have visual sensations, we’d be blind, assuming the rest of our brain worked the same, right? So what exactly requires explanation? You’re postulating something that acts just like me but has no sensations, I.e. is blind, deaf, etc. I don’t see how that can be a coherent thing you’re imagining.
When I read you saying “is like something to be,” I get the same feeling I get when someone tries to tell me what qualia are— it’s a peculiar collection of familiar words. It seems to me that you’re trying to turn a two-place predicate “A imagines what it feels like to be B” into a one-place predicate “B is like something to be”, where it’s a pure property of B.
If you lacked information about your environment, you would be functionally impaired. Information about your environment doesn’t have to be visual...it could be sonar or something. It doesn’t have to be sensory either...you could just somehow know that there is a door ahead of you ,and a turning to the left. Presumably , that’s how Dennett thinks it works.
“Time and space are, and they can bend and warp” is a peculiar combination of familiar words.
There are both philosophical (What are qualia? What having/not having qualia implies?) and neuroscientific (How exactly the closest referent to “qualia” actually works?) aspects to the problem. Both require an answer. Substituting one for another won’t do. The issue with the philosophical aspect isn’t that we can’t get an answer. It’s that we get too many, incompatible with each other answers and it’s hard to use definitions consistently in such situation.
I agree that there may be fascinating additional data in the realm of neurosciency. I wouldn’t be much surprised if some people indeed have much more impressive subjective experiences than others. It’s legitimate to talk about it as a possibility, and yet it’s only tangental to the philosophical questions at hand.
As you may see from the comments these people also claim that you misunderstand them with such interpretaton. I don’t think they are lying either.
See my reply to GeorgeWilfrid and his original comment. I have qualia defined the way he did and I expect you to have them too. Let’s call it weak qualia (wq). On the other hand, if qualia are defined as irreducible and non-physical—hard qualia (hq) - then I believe that I don’t have them, nor that I had them in my subjective idealist days and I don’t think anyone does no matter how awesome their subjective experience is.
The problem, however, that there is mob and bailey dynamics going on. Some people confuse wq with hq, some people think that wq imply hq. People that think they have hq often use the same language that people who think they have only wq. People arguing past each other often use different definitions. And so on.
When we’ve fixed the definitions. I believe we can properly solve the philosophical aspect. The question is reduced to whether wq indeed imply hq. I think the argument for works like that (if there is someone who holds wq->hq position here, please correct me):
The mistake her is in failure to account for map-territoiry destinction. What if you have direct access only to your experience of experience and not experience itself? Then
What do you think about zombies? Can you imagine something like you, that doesn’t feel anything, when looking anywhere?
So the philosophical zombie is a person who reports a completely normal set of sensations and emotions, while actually having none of them, right? I think zombies would be a ridiculous way to build an organism. Much easier to build something that reported the truth, rather than build a perfect liar. I could imagine such a thing, but that doesn’t say much about whether a zombie could exist. I read a lot of science fiction and can imagine six impossible things before breakfast.
The point is not that zombies exist. The point is that “it’s a ridiculous way to build an organism” is not a physical law and actual physical laws don’t seem to specify that our world is not a zombie-world. For anything else from science fiction you can in principle check corresponding physical equation and conclude that this thing is impossible. How do you do it for the difference between our world and zombie-world?
It kind of is. An organism evolved to be a perfect liar about having consciousness has to have a different causal history than a organism evolved to have consciousness and tell about it so the physical laws that provided these histories have to be different too.
Also, notice that what you are talking here isn’t a classical PZ as originally stated: an entity that does everything that a conscious human does for exactly the same reasons up to every elemental particle in the brain but still lacks consciousness. It’s a “zombie master” scenario where there are some other causes that makes the zombie pretend that it has consciousness. Confusion between this two scenarios is common and misleading.
Well, looks like I misremebered what a P-zombie is. I think the notion of “an entity that does everything a human being does for exactly the same reasons […] but lacks consciousness” is completely absurd. Obviously someone who lacks consciousness is asleep or comatose. I don’t see how someone who’s walking around, talking about past experience, reporting sensations, etc, could fail to be conscious.
This has always seemed perfectly obvious to me, but it’s not obvious to other highly sensible people. Could it be they’re experiencing some extra thing in their sensations, that says “this could be dispensed with, you would have the same sensations, but then you wouldn’t be conscious.”? If so, I’m here to tell you the good news that your brain is lying about that.
A p zombie is supposed to lack qualia , not consciousness in the medical.sense.
Absurd why? What physical law prevents walking around, talking about past experience and reporting sensations from feeling like being comatose?
Well, it’s fascinating the extent to which we each find the other’s position completely unrealistic. I think we’re getting closer to a crux, which is good.
I presume you’re not talking about Cotard’s delusion, which can result in people walking around and talking while claiming they’re dead. That’s just a delusion.
We measure comatoseness with the Glasgow Coma Scale, which ranges from 0 (eyes closed, no speech, motionless even under painful stimuli) to 15 (normal). You’re talking about people who feel comatose while still scoring 15 on the Glasgow coma scale? How can someone be comatose and still respond to stimuli, report memories, and perform voluntary action? It seems implicit in the definition of comatose that that’s impossible. It may not be a physical law, but it’s certainly a medical one.
(For the record, I don’t find your position completely unrealistic).
Not “be comatose”—“feel comatose”. No one is disputing medical knowledge—it certainly works in our world. But, regardless of how much it contradicts usual science heuristics, how unlikely it is to actually work like that in reality—can you imagine that the world could be different in only “feeling” aspect? Where zombie-you is looking at the blue sky and doesn’t feel like you in the same situation, but feels like you imagine feeling when comatose. If you don’t immediately reject that idea as implausible, do you have a concept for it at all?
If you do, then the problem is that, regardless of how absurd it is heuristically, actual laws of physics don’t seem to specify that our world is not a zombie-world.
Crucially, in a world with only these zombies- where no-one who has ever had qualia—the zombies start arguing about the existing of qualia. (Otherwise, this would be a way to distinguish zombies from people using a physical test)
That’s just unimaginably weird. In my experience of feeling comatose, having no vision and not laying down any memories were notable features. There’s no way I can experience a blue sky while simultaneously not experiencing it. Nor can I report on my recent experiences while being unable to form memories.
See, this is why I think qualia are a thing on top of sensation. You experience qualia, and feel that without them, something vital would be missing, and it would be like feeling comatose. And I’m here to tell you that life without qualia is pretty sweet.
Zombie-you wouldn’t experience blue sky—they would always only experience being comatose. They would behave like you behave down to the level of neurons and atoms, but they would not experience what you experience when you are seeing a blue sky. I understand that this may sound unlikely and, yes, weird, but what’s so hard to imagine? You just imagine feeling comatose, nothing more. Sure you can imagine feeling angry, when in reality you would feel sad—how is this different?
That is, from my point of view, asking me to have two contradictory experiences at once: being normal and being comatose. And you’re going to say, “not being comatose, feeling comatose.“ And I will say, I can’t imagine acting awake and also feeling comatose.
Let‘s look at a particular feature of coma: not being able to stand upright. I would feel like I was unable to stand, while in fact standing up whenever appropriate. And this is not some crazy delusion— in fact my brain is operating normally. No, I can’t imagine what that would feel like.
We‘re both intelligent persons, not trying to be deceptive. And yet we have a large difference in what we can imagine ourselves being like when we introspect. I claim this is due to an actual difference in the structure of our cognition, best summed up as “I don’t have qualia, you do.”
That would feel like being comatose. Again, I could understand if you said “it’s unlikely to happen”, but I still don’t understand how not being able to even imagine it would work. Some similar things are even can happen in the real world: you can not consciously see anything, don’t feel like you can move your hand, but still move your hand. You can just extrapolate from this to not feeling anything. You can say that feelings about being comatose are delusional in that case.
Or, can you imagine that it’s not you that experiences blue sky—your copy does—when actual you are a comatose ghost? Like, you don’t even need to have qualia to imagine qualia—they can be modeled by just adding a node to your casual graph that includes neurons or whatever. You can do that with your models, right?
Your disagreement is mirrored almost exactly in Yudkowsky’s post Zombies Redacted. The crucial point (as mentioned also in Hastings’ sister comment) is that the thought experiment breaks down as soon as you consider the zombies making just the same claims about consciousness as we do, while not actually having any coherent reason for making such claims (as they are defined to not have consciousness in the first place). I guess you can imagine, in some sense, a scenario like that, but what’s the point of imagining a hypothetical set of physical laws that lack internal coherence?
Zombies being wrong is not a problem for experiment’s coherence—their reasons for making claims about consciousness are just terminated on the level of physical description. The point is that the laws of physics don’t seem to prohibit a scenario like this: for other imagined things you can in principle run the calculations and say “no, evolution on earth would not produce talking unicorns”, but where is the part that says that we are not zombies? There are reasons to not believe in zombies and more reasons to not believe in epiphenomenalism, like “it would be coincidence for us to know about epiphenomenal consciousness”, but the problem is that these reasons seem to be outside of physical laws.
I don’t think they lack internal coherence; you haven’t identified a contradiction in them. But one point of imagining them is to highlight the conceptual distinction between, on the one hand, all of the (in principle) externally observable features or signs of consciousness, and, on the other hand, qualia. The fact that we can imagine these coming completely apart, and that the only ‘contradiction’ in the idea of zombie world is that it seems weird and unlikely, shows that these are distinct (even if closely related) concepts.
This conceptual distinction is relevant to questions such as whether a purely physical theory could ever ‘explain’ qualia, and whether the existence of qualia is compatible with a strictly materialist metaphysics. I think that’s the angle from which Yudkowsky was approaching it (i.e. he was trying to defend materialism against qualia-based challenges). My reading of the current conversation is that Signer is trying to get Carl to acknowledge the conceptual distinction, while Carl is saying that while he believes the distinction makes sense to some people, it really doesn’t to him, and his best explanation for this is that some people have qualia and some don’t.
What is “looking red”, in terms of something physical?
The brevity of your question makes me suspect that I am about to fall into a philosophical trap. But I will go ahead and answer it.
There’s one particular interface in my brain. It’s got some kind of reference to the thing in question, bound to a representation for the color I’ve been trained to call ‘red’. This color mostly is detected for objects that mostly reflect the longest wavelengths of visible light. Is that the kind of ‘physical’ you were looking for?
Let’s just say it’s a test to see whether you have qualia in your worldview after all.
I’ll try not to get stuck on terms like interface, reference, binding, and focus for now just on this entity called a “representation”. Is that the thing which is red, or which looks red? And if so, could you remind us what it is, physically?
Nope, it’s the object in the world, an apple or whatever, that looks red and (usually) is red. The representation in my brain usually responds to a red object in the world, but it can be fooled by psychedelics or clever illumination. I don’t know how data structures are represented in my brain, so I can’t answer “what it is, physically”. if I knew more neuroscience, I might be able to localize it to a particular brain area, but no more (given my current understanding of what we know).
I hope you’re going to tell me some way to tell if I have qualia :-).
So what happens if you hallucinate a color? When that happens, is there anything red, any “redness” or “experience of redness” there?
There is nothing red, there is no redness, but there is an experience of redness. It’s just another case of my brain lying to me, like telling me I don’t have a blind spot, or have color vision all the way to the periphery.
That’s exactly a quale.
What about when you’re not hallucinating? On that occasion, is there redness as well as an experience of redness?
The object is red, I experience it as red. I suppose you could say there “is redness”, but I find that a strange way to put it.
I have been mulling over this discussion, trying to identify the best ways to move it forward—focus on the case of an object that isn’t red but still looks red? focus on the relationship between representation and experience? - not just because the nature of reality is interesting, but because getting the nature of consciousness right, is potentially central to alignment of superintelligence (what OpenAI is now calling “superalignment”). I was also interested in exploring your hypothesis that some substantial difference (of phenomenology, cognition, and/or metacognition), maybe even a phenotypic difference, might be the reason why some naturally favor qualia, and others don’t.
However, in another comment you have declared that along with qualia, you also disbelieve in properties, kinds, people, and time. These are all concocted by our brains. So your ontology seems to be one in which, there’s physics, and then there are brains, which fabricate an entire fake reality, which is nonetheless the reality that we live in.
At this point, I have to conclude that I’m not dealing with a subtly different phenomenology, but rather with the effects of a philosophical belief system. There’s no reason to suppose that your skepticism towards qualia has a special subtle cause, when you deny the reality of so much else.
Maybe we could call it Democritus Syndrome, since he had a very similar outlook. In reality, there’s just atoms and the void; but “by convention”, we also say there’s color and taste and everything else. Interestingly, the fragment which reports this proposition (fragment 125) actually attributes it to the intellect, and also presents a riposte from the senses, who say, how can you deny us when you rely on our evidence?
But Democritus is just one of the first known examples of this stance. When Locke distinguishes secondary qualities from primary qualities, it’s a step in the same direction. One response to that distinction is found in doctrines like property dualism and emergentism, in which one acknowledges that physics portrays the world of the primary qualities as causally closed and self-sufficient, but one is unable to deny the reality of the secondary qualities, and therefore regards them as equally real, and either correlated with, or dependent on, the primary qualities.
Then there’s the response which denies the reality of the secondary qualities, or at least regards them as having a lesser reality. You seem to fall into this category. I don’t know if you adhere to a specific philosophical school of this type, or if you’re just a scientific materialist who is agnostic about the details. (I also want to note something Dennett said about eliminativism, that eliminativists can be selective; they can believe in some aspects of reported phenomenology, and disbelieve in others.)
Then we have various ontological doctrines for which robust realism regarding the phenomenal is all but axiomatic. There is the idealist option which says, if I am faced with a dilemma between physics and phenomenology, of course I choose phenomenology, that’s what I actually and directly know about reality. And then there’s a kind of qualic realism which says, physics only provides a relational or structural description of reality, but phenomenology gives us a glimpse of the things in themselves. The experienced world, the “lifeworld”, is the actual nature of the conscious part of the brain. That is my position, more or less.
So if I try to imagine what it’s like to be you, I imagine a phenomenology which is a normal human phenomenology, but then (when ontological issues arise) there’s an internal commentary which reminds you that all this is a construction of the brain, and the true reality is the wavefunction of the universe (or however it is that you conceive of fundamental physics).
I first noticed my inability to understand qualia in 1981 or 1982, when I was an undergraduate in Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind class. That wasn’t a big deal, I didn’t understand lots of things as an undergraduate. But it was a niggling problem. It wasn’t until the ’90s sometime that I came up with my “I don’t have qualia” theory. And it wasn’t until 2016, when I read The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts, and other Kantian philosophy, that I realized that many things whose reality I accepted were actually constructed by my mind for my convenience.
That‘s a problem for the theory that Democritus Syndrome causes claiming disbelief in qualia, since I claimed to not have qualia before I caught Democritus Syndrome.
Here’s an alternate theory. Qualia are a kind of tag on top of perceptions, that says “This is real, reason on that basis.” I don’t have that tag, so it’s easier for me to believe that my mind has constructed reality from sense data, rather than that I directly perceive it. The direction of causality is reversed from your theory.
Saying that qualia dont really exist, but only appear to, solves nothing. For one thing qualia are definitionally appearances , so you haven’t eliminated them. For another, the physicalist still need to explain how and why the brain produces such appearances. For a third, you have to know what “qualia” means to express a sceptical.theory about them.
I mean, by your definition the experience of red is a quale, by their definition experience is some neural activity, and then there is nothing else to explain. The sceptical theory is only sceptical about “but experience is not neural activity!” and for that “qualia, as a thing that is not neural activity, only appears to exist” is a reasonable answer when appearances are defined to be some neural activity.
That’s a theory, not a definition. Confusion between theories and definitions is one of the persistent problems in this debate.
The way I see it works is every definition is under a theory of the model that includes these definitions describing reality better or worse. Otherwise they are just empty words. So “qualia are experiences” or just “there are such things as qualia” are also implicitly low-resolution theories. Experiences are privileged only under misguided theories of knowledge (which are theories because it’s in the name) which make experiences axiomatically true. Otherwise just gesturing to “you know, experiences, you obviously see some things” is not fundamentally different from gesturing to neural activity, and the one about neural activity is more precise.
So, I don’t understand which part of the above you have a problem with. You don’t disbelief in theoretical ability of neuroscience to show on a screen what you are seeing, right? Because all that talk about reductive explanation may give such impression. So it’s all about Mary? That even after we obtain precise theory of what you see, it still wouldn’t make you see and that… “seems necessary” or something.
I don’t mind corrections to specific steps, but would appreciate you confirming that yes, you think Mary is a strong argument. And then it would be nice to have a better justification for this than “seems necessary”.
>Experiences are privileged only under misguided theories of knowledge (which are theories because it’s in the name) which make experiences axiomatically true.
Science regards experiences as probably correct about their causes, because you can’t do empiricism without that assumption. “Qualia are axiomatically true” is not something you need to claim to define qualia, and not something that is always claimed about qualia, and not central to the problem of qualia.
> Otherwise just gesturing to “you know, experiences, you obviously see some things” is not fundamentally different from gesturing to neural activity, and the one about neural activity is more precise.
It’s different because we don’t experience neural activity as neural activity. That doesn’t rule out neural activity being causal or constitutive of qualia. But what the camp #2 person wants is an explanation of how neural activity constitutes the experience. Asserting, as a definition, that it does isn’t a persuasive explanation...and is talking-past.
>So, I don’t understand which part of the above you have a problem with. You don’t disbelief in theoretical ability of neuroscience to show on a screen what you are seeing, right?
That’s ambiguous in just the way that Mary’s Room is supposed to disambiguate. Mary is able to tell what someone is seeing in the third-person reading-the label sense, just not in the first person, drinking the wine, sense.
>Because all that talk about reductive explanation may give such impression. So it’s all about Mary? That even after we obtain precise theory of what you see, it still wouldn’t make you see and that… “seems necessary” or something.
An objective explanation of seeing red doesn’t make you personally see red *and* personally seeing red is necessary to know what red looks like...ie. the explanation is incomplete.
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary’s Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to them that a physical description of brain state won’t convey what that state is like, because it doesn’t put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a descirption of a brain state won’t put you into that brain state. But that doesn’t show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to understand something.
>I don’t mind corrections to specific steps, but would appreciate you confirming that yes, you think Mary is a strong argument. And then it would be nice to have a better justification for this than “seems necessary
It’s tautologous that an explanation of subjective experience needs be about subjective experience. If subjective experience is reducible to brain states, then an explanation should be able to predict qualia, including novel ones...given a brain state as an input , it predicts a set of qualia as an output.
But what does that mean? How can an entirely objective theory produce such an output? You say: well, naturally doesn’t , because it doesn’t put you into the brain state. But even though you have excused the shortcoming, it is still there. You have a meta explanation for why the explanation fails, not a successful explanation. And “Mary needs to actually instantiate Red herself” concedes that there are some things that are intrinsically subjective.
Have you actually seen orthonormal’s sequence on this exact argument? My intuitions say the “Martha” AI described therein, which imitates “Mary,” would in fact have qualia; this suffices to prove that our intuitions are unreliable (unless you can convincingly argue that some intuitions are more equal than others.) Moreover, it suggests a credible answer to your question: integration is necessary in order to “understand experience” because we’re talking about a kind of “understanding” which necessarily stems from the internal workings of the system, specifically the interaction of the “conscious” part with the rest.
(I do note that the addendum to the sequence’s final post should have been more fully integrated into the sequence from the start.)
Yes.
Obviously, both arguments rely on intuition.
I don’t think intuitions are 100% reliable. I do think we are stuck with them.
I have been addressing the people who have the expected response to Mary’s Room ..I can’t do much about the rest.
I think that sort of objection just pushes the problem back. If “integration” is a fully physical and objective process, and if Mary is truly a superscientist, then Mary will fully understand how her subject “integrated” their sense experience, and won’t be surprised by experiencing red.
Thank you for clarifying things.
Yeah, that’s what I mean when I talk about axiomatically privileging experience and what I explicitly disagree with—we don’t experience experiences as experiences either. It’s not different. Describing things as “I’m seeing blue” or having similar internal thoughts is not inherently better. In fact it’s worse, because it’s less precise. There is no strong foundation for preferring such theory/definitions and so there is no reason to demand for a better theory to logically derive concepts from a worse one—it’s not how reductionism works[1].
And as to why Mary doesn’t provide such foundation...
...it’s not necessary. At the point where physical theory fully describes both knowledge and state of Mary, there is no argument for why you must define knowledge in a way that leads to contradictions. And there are arguments why you shouldn’t—we understand how knowledge works physically, so you can’t just say that “not fully understand” feels appropriate here and treat it as enough of a justification.
And again, experience is not the only case—if you told someone to look at Mary falling from a bicycle and asked them whether she knows how to ride a bicycle, they would say that she doesn’t.
So, considering that the meta explanation is correct in identifying the demand to use the bad definitions as wrong, why would someone not be persuaded? What is the argument for the necessity of instantiating experience for knowledge that keeps you persuaded in it?
It doesn’t need to be. An explanation of fire is not about fire in logical sense—it’s about atoms.
Of course we do.
It would be a less accurate way of defining the same thing, if we already knew that experiences are fully identifiable with neural activity. But we don’t know, that....that is what the whole debate is about.
Once you have a successful theory, it is reasonable to change a definition in accordance. For instance, knowing that water (“wet stuff in rivers, seas, and lakes”) is H2O,you can define water as H2O.
You can’t make the arrow go in the other direction. Defining a tail as a leg doesn’t prove a dog has five legs.
Would you concede that it’s ever possible to misuse arbitrary redefinitions?
Definitions aren’t theories. Preferring “precise”,objective, etc., definitions of words doesn’t prove everything is objective , because it’s just your own preference. What you are not doing is investigating reality in an unbiased way… instead you have placed yourself in the driving seat.
It is of course, about both. A reductive explanation relates a higher level phenomenon to a lower level one, If you insist on ignoring the higher level phenomeneon because it is “bad” or “imprecise”, you can’t achieve an explanation. You have to have the vague understanding of water as wet stuff before you can have the precise understanding of water as H2O.
What contradiction? If something is contradictory, you need to show it.
Physical theory doesn’t fully describes the knowledge and state of Mary, because physical theory can’t describe sensations. That’s the whole point. There is an argument against physical theory being fully adequate, and since the theory isn’t known to be correct, we shouldn’t change the definition of “quale”.
We understand how some kinds of knowledge do, but maybe not all kinds. People have believed in knowledge-by-aquaintance for a long time.
You cant just say “fully understand” feels appropriate here and treat it as enough of a justification. It’s intuitions either way
You’re not the first person to think that knowledge-by-acquaintance is the same thing as know-how. But...consider showing it , not just telling it.
You haven’t shown anything is bad.
The Mary’s Room argument is not a logical proof. It is nonetheless persuasive to a lot of people because a lot of people find that experiencing something personally is more informative than hearing about it at second hand.
To be clear, I don’t argue for physicalism about qualia in general here, only against Mary.
Yes, of course, it’s possible to use a definition from incomplete or wrong theory, among other things.
The contradiction between with physical description of knowledge.
It’s not—it’s intuitions and precise description of everything about the situation (Which you agree with, right? That it’s not surprising for an image of a brain scan to have a different effect on Mary from seeing something red, that physicalism predicts the difference) on the one side and just intuition on the other. So...
...we (or we from future, or Mary) do know this by observing that neural activity works the same way the thing that you call “experience” works. The argument for identifying experiences with neural activity works as much now as arguments for reductive explanation about trajectory of a falling leaf, but even if you want to check whether it works in the future and imagine Mary, you would still discover that at best it’s slightly unintuitive.
The problem is that the whole argument is “it feels unintuitive”, when the theory is known to be correct to the level of precisely describing everything about the situation.
We also understand how knowledge-by-acquaintance works physically—it just changes your brain. There is nothing problematic on the knowledge level.
The only part being ignored in physical description of knowledge-by-aquaintance is the feeling of it being unintuitive.
Which is explained physically. What’s the argument for demanding more?
They are not precisely the same thing—they are different neural processes. But yes, they both harder to obtain with just description. What’s there to show? The argument was that experiences are the only kind of knowledge that requires something except physical description. Do you disagree that Mary can have all physical knowledge but still don’t know how to drive a bike? The thing we can deduce from this is that such definition of physical knowledge is bad.
And why do you think this is true? All definitions bottom out somewhere and there is no reason to stop at experiences specifically.
The only way Mary can work as an argument is if you give the “we experience experiences as experiences”-assumption a special status: if you have an axiom of “I know what it’s like to see red”, then you can build on that the justification for why it’s so important to preserve all aspects of your assumed knowledge including what must be called knowledge and the intuitions about knowledge-by-acquaintance.
You’re arguing against Mary’s Room on the basis of physicalism:-
The idea that a complete physical and explanation captures “everything” is a clam equivalent to physicalism.
Of course “Mary doesn’t know what Red looks like” contradicts “physical descriptions in the form of detailed brain scans capture everything”...and vice versa. That’s the point. An argument for X contradicts not X. That’s not the same as a self contradiction.
The point is not just that seeing a tomato has a different effect , the point is that Mary learns something. And physicalism does not predict that , because it implies complete physical descriptions leave something out.
We don’t know that. Assuming it is equivalent to assuming physicalism, which begs the question against Mary’s Room.
No. One of them is only knowable by personal instantiation...as you concede...kind of.
Every individual reductive argument has to pay it’s own way. There’s no global argument for reductionism.
Since we don’t actually have a reductive explanation of conscious experience, it’s intuition telling you that we will or should or must.
No it isn’t.
Are you saying:-
we don’t learn from acquaintance..
but we have a false intuition we do...
and science can definitely predict 2.
...?
Ie., something like illusionism. Because I’m pretty sure 3 is false.
You’re not the first person to think that knowledge-by-acquaintance is the same thing as know-how. But...consider showing it , not just telling it.
I agree, but I don’t see how that makes both things the same.
I’ve didn’t say there was. I’m calling for experiences to be accepted as having some sort of existence, and explained somehow. To not be ignored.
I agree with “I know what it’s like to see red” , but I don’t see how it equates to “we experience experiences as experiences”. What else would we experience our own experiences as? Brain scans?
It’s important not to disregard things, and the claim that you have a “complete” explanation.
I’m saying that it’s ok to beg the question here, because, as you say, Mary is not a logical argument: if there is no contradiction either way, then physicalism wins by precision. And you don’t need to explicitly assume “physical descriptions in the form of detailed brain scans capture everything”—you only need to consistently use one of common-sense-to-someone-who-knows-physics definitions of knowledge.
Yes, I’m saying that you can non-contradictory choose your definitions of knowledge in such a way that 1 is true and so 2 is also true because intuition asserting non-true proposition is wrong and 3 is true because intuition is just neural activity and science predicts all of it. And yes, that means that illusionism is right in that you can be wrong about your (knowledge of) experiences.
As neural signals. There is no justification to start from a model that includes experiences. If Mary is not an argument for adding experiences to a physical model, then it’s not an argument for not ignoring (contradictory aspects of) them when reducing high level description to a physical model.
They are not ignored, they’re represented by corresponding neural processes. Like, what is ignored and not explained by a physical description? It’s not the need for instantiation—it’s predicted by experiences being separate neural process. You can’t say “it ignores qualia”—that would be ignoring the whole Mary setup and begging the question—as far as Mary goes there is no problem with “qualia are neural processes”. So it leaves only intuition about knowledge—about high-level concept which you can define however you want.
Under a definition of knowledge that calls experiences “knowledge” knowing some of your own neural activity also requires instantiating that neural activity.
There is a fact of the matter about whether physical descriptions are exhaustive, even if Mary’s Room doesnt prove it. If physical descriptions don’t convey experiences as such , they are fundamentally flawed , and the precision isn’t much compensation.
Defining knowledge as purely physical doesn’t prove anything about the world. (But you are probably using “definition” to mean “theory’.)
Lots of things are non contradictory. Non circularity is more of an achievement.
Again, you can’t prove things by adopting definitions. If we had a detailed understanding of neuroscience that predicted an illusion of knowledge-by -acquaintance specifically, you’d be onto something. But illusionist claims are philosophical theories, not scientific facts.
We don t experience experiences as neural signals. A person can spend their life with no idea that there is such a thing as a neural signal.
Experience need to be explained because everything needs to be explained. Experiences need not end up in the final ontological model, because sometimes less an explanation explains-away.
The experience itself.
That would be the case if physicalism is true, but you don’t know that physicalism is.true.. You basically assumed it, by assuming that physical explanations are complete. That’s circular.
So maybe I could arbitrarily assume that definition?
Such physical definitions of knowledge are not more circular than anything, I think?
I mean, go ahead—then Mary would just be able to imagine red.
Exactly—that’s why Mary doesn’t work.
There is no need for additional scientific facts. There are enough scientific facts to accept physical explanation of the whole Mary setup. That’s why people mostly seek philosophical problems with physicalism and why physicalists answer with philosophical theories—if physicalism is philosophically coherent, then it is undoubtedly true.
The Mary’s room was supposed to be an argument against physicalism. If there are no philosophical problems in the setup after you assume physicalism, then argument fails. It is equivalent to disagreeing with some step of an argument, like “Mary gets new knowledge”—you can’t just disallow disagreeing with this because it’s logically equivalent to assuming physicalism—that would be assuming non-physicalism that the argument was about. Of course, I don’t just assume physicalism—you need to satisfy the “no philosophical problems” condition, so I talk about why “Mary gets new knowledge” is just trying to prove things by adopting definitions. I don’t see how do you think it can work otherwise—you can’t derive “physicalism is true” from Mary’s assumptions alone. Obviously, assuming physicalism doesn’t prove that physicalism is true. But again, I don’t argue, that physicalism is true, I’m arguing that Mary is a bad argument.
Sure. So you do agree now that talking about Mary or knowledge is unnecessary?
So, what is your argument against “experience itself is explained by “human experiences are neural processes”″, if it’s not Mary?
If you don’t demand specific experiences to be in the final ontological model, they are explained the same way the fire is explained. The explanation of fire does not usually set you on fire. What you call “I’m seeing blue” is actually “your neurons are activated in a way similar to a way they are activated when blue light is directed to your eyes”. On what basis then you say that these 3gb of numbers from a simulation do not explain fire?
I don’t know what your mean. I wasn’t intentionally saying anything physical or non physical.
No,because you can’t prove things through definitions.
The Mary’s Room argument is not an argument from definitions.
If we had a detailed understanding of neuroscience that predicted an illusion of knowledge-by -acquaintance specifically, you’d be onto something. But illusionist claims are philosophical theories, not scientific facts.
Show me a prediction of a novel quale!
No. Consistency is necessary for truth, but nowhere near sufficient.
That would be the case if physicalism is true, but you don’t know that physicalism is.true..You basically assumed it, by assuming that physical explanations are complete. That’s circular.
It’s suppose to be an argumetn against phsysicalism, so you can’t refute it by assuming physicalism.
I don’t disallow disagreeing with it. I disallow assuming physicalism. The point is to think about what would happen in the situation whilst suspending judgement about the ontology the world works on.
Non physicalism doesn’t imply “Mary would not know what Red looks like”>
No.
There’s no fact of the matter about that. If they are fully represented , then Mary would know what red looks like, otherwise not. If we could perform M’s R as a rela experiment, we would not need it as a thought experiment.
There’s no reason it shouldn’t be Mary. Mary’s Room isn’t a proof, but there is no proof of the contrary. Arguments that start “assuming physicalism” are not proof because they are invalid because they are circular.
We have a detailed gears-level explanation of fire, we do not have one of conscious experience. There are three possibilities, not two:
X is explained, and survives the explanation as part of ontology.
X is explained away.
X is not explained at all.
Merely saying that “X is an emergent, high level phenomenon..but don’t ask me how or why” is not an explanation, despite what many here think.
You only need to instantiate something yourself if it fundamentally subjective.
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary’s Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to them that a physical description of brain state won’t convey what that state is like, because it doesn’t put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a descirption of a brain state won’t put you into that brain state. But that doesn’t show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.
If another version of Mary were shut up to learn everything about, say, nuclear fusion, the question “would she actually know about nuclear fusion” could only be answered “yes, of course....didn’t you just say she knows everything”? The idea that she would have to instantiate a fusion reaction within her own body in order to understand fusion is quite counterintuitive. Similarly, a description of photosynthesis will make you photosynthesise, and would not be needed for a complete understanding of photosynthesis.
There seem to be some edge cases.: for instance, would an alternative Mary know everything about heart attacks without having one herself? Well, she would know everything except what a heart attack feels like, and what it feels like is a quale. the edge cases, like that one, are cases are just cases where an element of knowledge-by-acquaintance is needed for complete knowledge. Even other mental phenomena don’t suffer from this peculiarity. Thoughts and memories are straightforwardly expressible in words, so long as they don’t involve qualia.
So: is the response “well, she has never actually instantiated colour vision in her own brain” one that lays to rest and the challenge posed by the Knowledge argument, leaving physicalism undisturbed? The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
Says who? You can’t actually show me the explanation, and you can’t prove it by assuming physicalism.
i) showing that two things are necessarily, not arbitrarily linked.
ii) making predictions, especially novel ones.
An explanation of conscious experience would render zombies unimaginable (because of i) and allow you to predict novel qualia (because of ii).
Here—“fully understand” depends on definition of “understand”. What you understand is not a matter of fact, it’s a matter of definition. All you talk about is how it is “counterintuitive” to call instantiating nuclear reaction in yourself “understanding”. “It’s intuitive to call new experience “additional knowledge”″ is an argument from definitions.
They are only edge cases of specific definitions of knowledge. There is no fundamental reason why you must call “knowledge” heart attack’s effect on your brain and not call “knowledge” fire’s effect on your hand.
“Necessary” for what? Judging from “epistemically unique” it is implied that it is necessary for knowledge? Then it’s certainly incorrect—it’s either not necessary, because Mary can have a more compact representation of knowledge about color, or it’s necessary for all things, if Mary supposed to have all representations of knowledge. It may be necessary for satisfying Mary’s preferences to have qualia independently of their epistemic value—that’s your perfectly physicalist source of subjectivity.
If you only care about matters of fact, then there are no problems for physicalism in that the human qualia are unusual—it predicts that different neural processes are different. And predicts that it’s useful to see things for yourself. And that it will feel intuitive to say “Mary gets new knowledge” for some people. I think it even follows from casual closure, that it doesn’t make sense for there to be unphysical explanation for intuitions? If your intuition is not predicted by physics, then atoms somewhere have to be unexpectedly nudged—is it what you propose? I… don’t really understand the argument here? The physicalism doesn’t say that all things that it is intuitive to call “knowledge” are equally easy to get from books, or something—why exactly it is an argument against physicalism that Mary gets what it predicts?
Wait, is the problem that you actually think that it is not obviously physically possible to imagine red without seeing it? Like, knowing everything plausible includes having all permutations of neuron states, including the state where you are seeing red. Is your “matter of fact” about knowing what it is like to see considers the possibility that without actually seeing Mary could only simulate zombie-red or something?
Oh, I finally got why are you talking about predicting novel qualia—you are saying that physicalism doesn’t predict Mary seeing red, right? Because it only predicts neural activity. My point is that this complain doesn’t have anything to do with Mary or knowledge. If you only talk about Mary, then there is no motivation to doubt physicalism from the experiment. The point of Mary is that she gains knowledge and physicalism predicts gaining knowledge. There is no need to talk about novel qualia, because physical knowledge contains knowledge about differences between different, old and novel, qualia. You agree, that physicalism at least (allows definition of knowledge where it) predicts gaining some knowledge from instantiation when Mary leaves room, right? Then even if you have doubts about this predicted knowledge being incomplete, Mary doesn’t provide anything that justifies this doubt—your arguments about insufficient gears-level explanations would work the same way in situations without novel qualia or complete physical knowledge. Or do you have an example of specific difference between qualia that is not predicted by physicalism and uniquely depends on the whole instantiation thing? I mean, my position is that there are no differences between qualia that are not predicted by physicalism at all, so any examples would be appreciated.
I predict, that if you open this link, you will experience red hair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHPzikH0tXE
Novel relative to what epistemic state? Sure, we probably can’t ethically and consistently make a human say “wow, it was neither sight nor hearing” now, but I really don’t get what’s the justification for ignoring other facts about qualia that physicalism can predict? Some of them were novel for humanity in their time.
Induction.
We don’t usually have very detailed explanations of specific fires. And we have detailed explanation of conscious experience—physics equations^^. But ok, there is a space for more useful theories. The thing I don’t understand is how it is an argument against physicalism—do you expect to not get gears-level explanation in the future? The whole point of doing Mary is that no one expects it.
Yes, but that would just mean that the correct position is “physicalism is right, but the detailed explanation is in the works”. Not detailed-enough explanation at the present moment is just one of factors you weight, along with “physicalism has detailed explanations about physics, neurons and all other things”, not something that logically prohibits believing in physicalism. Again, that’s not what mainstream arguments against physicalism are? It’s always “physicalism can’t possibly explain consciousness even if it’s explanation have been detailed”.
That’s what I am against—it’s not justified, depending on what do you mean by “necessarily”—atoms are not necessarily linked to fire. In the end, we just arbitrary call some atoms “fire”. So why demand this only for qualia? If it’s only “as necessary as reduction of fire”, than it is already that necessary—the expectation that you will get neurological explanation in future is the same kind of inductive reasoning that you do, when you decide that correlations between atoms and fire are enough to believe explanation in terms of atoms.
Do you think you have experienced a dissociative crisis at any point of your life? I mean the sensations of derealisation/depersonalisation, not other symptoms, and it doesn’t need to have been ‘strong’ at all.
I ask because those sensations are not in any obvious way about processing sensory data, and because of the feeling of detachment from reality that comes with them. So I was curious if you could identify anything like that.
I have on three occasions experienced a state where I can still perceive shapes, but they don’t have any meaning, don’t feel real, and do not resolve into separate objects. It only lasted a few seconds in each case, and was not distressing. In fact it was fascinating and I wished it lasted longer so I could gather more data. I’m still capable of voluntary action during these spells— I know this because I once said “Oh hey, I’m derealized!” (or something like that) while it was happening.
I used to experience a phenomenon that I privately call ‘paralysis of the will’, which lasted about ten seconds, and during which I was incapable of willing any new voluntary action, but could continue with my present activity. For example, it happened when I was driving, and I continued to drive, halted a stop sign, and then proceeded. But if someone had asked me a question during that time, I wouldn’t have been able to reply. It’s never been a problem for me, since it looks like absent-mindedness or preoccupation and doesn’t last long. I used to get it every few months, but not for the last ten years. It’s not an absence seizure because my memory is continuous through it.
I don’t know if this tells you anything. I might be typical-minding here, but I think lots of people get various brief funny mental phenomena, and most people just shrug it off.
Do you simultaneously know what it’s like when something looks red, and also believe that you don’t have qualia?
Yes.
If qualia is defined as George Wilfrid describes it elsewhere in this thread, as nothing more than sensation, then I definitely have it. But I suspect there’s something more— plenty of people have tried to point to it, using phrases like “conceptually separate the information content from what it feels like”. Well, I can’t. That phrase doesn’t mesh with a phenomenon in my mind. The information content is what it feels like.
It’s not more than sensation. It’s just the subjective aspect without the behavioural aspect.
That depends on how we define “information”—for one definition of information, qualia are information (and also everything else is, since we can only recognize something by the pattern it presents to us).
But for another definition of information, there is a conceptual difference—for example, morphine users report knowing they are in pain, but not feeling the quale of pain.