I am suspecting that you are using a definition of “qualia” that has ontological commitments built in. The term really doesn’t have those and you need to get your terms straight. If you want to talk about those ontological commitment use words that directly access them.
I maybe too generous in assuming that you mean what “qualia” means. The example of insisting that people are blindsighted is what I understand for someone that doesn’t believe in qualia. The version that treats qualia as “explanations” of how things can work as they do utilise a sense of the word that it does not have.
It feels like you mean”qualia” as a bit of ontology that is not material which would explain why you see materialism as it’s antonym. What you really ought to use are words like “metaphysical organ” or “soul” or “mental” as ontolgocial primitive in contrast to materia. Those words have a lot worse ring because claims involving them tend to be somewhat ridicilous.
There might be an interesting argument of the lines of “materialism doesn’t explain experience so we need to entertain the possibility of non-physical bits into our ontology”. “qualia” refer to the “experience is a thing that happens” part but not to the hypothetical ontology extension. Like gravity anomalies might found assumptions into the existence of dark matter there migth be a danger of taking “dark matter” to be a synonym or shorthand for the gravity anomalies. But conceptually these are separate and there are physicist that think that discovering better gravitation laws addresses the anomalies without supposing new categories of substance (ie dark matterless theories are seen as viable).
It might be interesting to try to steelman the soul question. For example in a morph environment there might be a question of which actors are NPC and which are PC. And it’s true there that on a game world level PCs and NPCs are similar functionning. But PCs can go “afk” and they require wetware to sit in front of a keyboard. Somebody that thought that the game world is the place where the cognitive machinery lies might think that there is no reason to posit that keyboards even exit and esoteric “biological” components would be explanationarily needless for understanding what happens in the game world. In particular examining part of the game code/world that is involved in netcode one might quess tht the cognition lies inside that bit of code instead of locating outside it.
And in general for video games the perception for the game world is primary to the existence of the game world itself. You infer the existence of a 3d world because of what flashes on your screen and because 3d terminology is an effective way to talk about different screen states. And in the case of games we know the worlds are fictious they can only upkeep an apperance and keeping up that appearance uses up cpu cycles. If somebody would try to get inductive on what is shown on the screen they could get a very different concpetion of what world forces there are present than one that assumes that there is a source code that dictates what happens.
In a conception that is popoular in these days it’s easy to tell a story where the effective phenomena that we see are representative of the mechanisms that generate our expereiences. We think we can see the workings of the world, we think we have access to the source code. But if we could hit a soft or hard wall on figuring out the source code of a video game from the inductive screen patterns how could we tell whether we have hit such a wall in the real world?
It might be that explainining things like healthbars are very unnaturally explained in a theory that tries to treat the 3d game world as the actually existing layer of existence. Someone that has a lot of skill that is built on a 3d conception of the world might be tempted to not even try to explain healthbars and rather try to argue that they don’t exist. But it’s still a different thing to note that healthbars exist than to theorise background entities that might be responcible for them.
Qualia is a word that different people use in different ways. In this post I have been using it to refer to some kind of sensation or experience, but in a sense beyond the materialist conceptions of these words. I will admit that in other contexts I’ve used it to refer to whatever makes I think we have these non-materialist sensations and that I should make my terminology more consistent, but I don’t think I’ve used it this way in this post? I think this is a useful thing to have a term for and I wish I’d added a short section at the start to clarify my use of the term, but I also think it should be clear enough from context what I’m arguing for and against.
“For example in a morph environment there might be a question of which actors are NPC and which are PC. And it’s true there that on a game world level PCs and NPCs are similar functionning. But PCs can go “afk” and they require wetware to sit in front of a keyboard. Somebody that thought that the game world is the place where the cognitive machinery lies might think that there is no reason to posit that keyboards even exit and esoteric “biological” components would be explanationarily needless for understanding what happens in the game world. In particular examining part of the game code/world that is involved in netcode one might quess tht the cognition lies inside that bit of code instead of locating outside it.”—this is actually very similar what I was planning to write in my next post. Not sure whether I’ll still write this post now, but if I do I’ll reference this comment.
I do not understand and I am afraid to guess what you mean by “non-materialist sensation”. I understand that if I see a red flash and explain it by a red photon having hit my eye that I employ a materialist concept to explain my experiencen. And if somebody explains the red flash with a ghost that would be a non-materialist explanation. However I don’t get how the flash itself would be material or immaterial, it’s a sensation it doesn’t come with a user manual. Now if i had frequent remoteviewing experiences I might have categories of sensations that do not have readily available materialist explanations. But often unexplained sensations remain open to their explanation types. It would be even more rare to not have a explanation but have reason to believe that the explanation can’t be material (usually it’s just assumed to be unknonwn material explanation).
By being careless with the words you are undoing a lot of concept analysis that philosophers that try to only take a small bite at a big problem have done. You are very close to promoting muddy thinking. In particular I do not really know the referent of “materialist conception of sensation”. I might be badly educated in that I miss some highly spesific word associations. But I think it’s also highly possible that you do not have enough grasp of the concept to explain it by other words. With a lot of “-ism” words there is often the trouble that people use it as a very short shorthand for a lot of detailed claims but different people use different expanded theories. Being able to open up the shortened version allows for disambiguation when there is semantic conflict.
For example I remember there was some named philopsher that seriously cliamed that things exist as thoughts in god’s head and that matter doesn’t exist. It would seem that this kind of conception for example how to see the tree would still fall under the usual way of interpreting seeing. Thus it would seem that this theory still uses “materialist conception of percieving”. But then we have an antonym problem as the mentalist ontology is supposed to stand in opposition to an ontolgoy that affirms that matter exists and that mental things do not have ontological primacy. But the “qualist” apporach is supposed to stand in opposition too and it doesn’t at the face of it be complatible or atleast says something different as mentalism. To solve these kinds of troubles I usuallly turn to talking about details. I get that someobody that has a different understnading of the “-isms” doesn’t have the same troubles of trying to get to relate to each other. But I think how you are using the words relies too much on how idiosyncratically they have ararnged themself in your head and in order to do valuable work in other peoples mind, more care is needed for mind interoperability. There is some hint what you mean but most of that hinting just suggest that your concepetions are unhelpful or really actually wrong. If you start to mean “table” with the word “chair” and people start to disambiguiate “you do use a chair for sitting right?” that is often work critical to establish a understanding link. Even if we don’t rule whether “table” should mean “chair” people being aware that there are two conceptions at play helps tremendously to account for possibilities.
I think you might not be appriciative how qualia is attempted to be a very narrow term referring to expererience. Like using “3 legged rotary bar chair” in the actual meaning of “any furniture used for sitting”. Non-physical ontolgoical primaries are a whole another family of terms, “materia” for a ontological primary that is passive and follows some N dimensional space rules, “thought” for for a primary that has intentionality and usualy doesn’t have extents or locations. “Dualism” says that there are multiple co-existing primaries most commonly materia and thought but that they exist independently of each other. “Neutral monism” say that there is only 1 ontological primary which can’t be characterised to be any of the dualism co-existing primaries. These are terms which creep closely how you actually try to use the word “qualia”. But it’s not the area of concept where the word really should be used. It’s like you are using the word “fourteen” in a place where a color would be expected. I need some serious briefing how fourteen makes sense as a color or I am just assuming that you are making an error. Which ever the case I am currently unable to read any intelligble claim from the text.
If you see a red flash, and explain that red flash by a red photon hitting your eye, then you are either being imprecise to the point of philosophical carelessness, or you are confused about physiology, physics, or both.
Whatever the case may be, it does not do to forget that materialism is not at all the same thing as assuming that the world is simple. The real story about what color is, and how color perception works, is vastly more complex than your offhand comment implies. I am no dualist, but I would suggest to you that giving a materialistic account of color is, in fact, quite a challenging task. The question of whether we have yet accomplished it, is not one which I would so quickly declare to be closed.
Fine I glossed over more than was good for the point I was making. To my needs if you look at a red chair, you have a vision of a red chair and it makes you think of a furniture object existing out in the world and that object is electromagnetically interacting with the object that you associate with your “identity” (ie your body). The story about objects existing is prone to theorethical uncertainty and error and it not evident from the perception itself. The link between particular kinds of flashes and particular kinds of electromagnetic waves is not central and I guess at the world side of things it would be more proper to talk about certain nanometer length waves instead (unheard tree makes a pressure wave). However you expect any kind of story of electromagnetic waves interacting with eyes in the relevant way to have a corresponding experience going. That is if you point a laser at your eye you are not surprised why you see a flash even if you have not ever damaged your eyes with a laser before.
But for example if your photo resistors are pushed without them triggering you do not experience that in any way. And if you photoreceptor are rubbed in a way that makes them go off some experience might trigger and an unused perciever might associate that experience with receiving light but what you actually experience is physical touch which is mainly felt throught skin ordinarily. A problem is that you come to believe how your senses work throught what is in them.
Say that you are watchiing television that has a documentary running how TV programs are made. Say that you are sceptical that TVs can be trusted. There is a problem in that the documentary is likely not seem compelling if you need to trust in the reliability of the TV in the first place to take it seriously. You might think that the documentary is a forgery to promote more tv ad adherence. If a person main method of finding out how TV programs are made is wathing tv they might be stuck in this catch-22 (for example my knowledge of “the room” is largely represented by “the disaster artist”). With TV you can instead go open a door and watch things with your eyes. But with our senses they are unescapingly the method that we interface with the world. There is no “extrasensory” release valve and even if there was that would just be another (standard) sense. So if we learn how eyes work by looking at slides in a biology class that is similar to wathcing a TV-making documentary on TV. Inductive reliance gives some hope. But it leaves the door open that one day the illusion of an outside world no longer (perfectly) holds. If I only dreamed the biology lesson the rules it teaches are not that fundamental. If blair witch project tries to sell itself as a found footage programming but I notice inconsistencies which are better exlained by actual production process my expectation on what I might see get changed a lot. If something is supposedly live action but looks very CGI another big shift. In the same way it’s plausible that stories about electromagnetic fields might be more akin to theather sets, yes their appearance is in congruence with the plot but they are only apparent but not fundamental.
None of that is at all relevant to what I was alluding to, which concerned human color perception. (A sample of relevant questions: “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see magenta”; “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see orange”; “what color are afterimages”; “can something look to have a certain color but actually have a different color”; “what does it mean to be wrong about an object’s color”; “is there such a thing as an object that has a color no human can see”. There are many more; this is only a small sample.)
The question is relevant only to the extenet that physical world event and perceptions are intermingled. I used simplist language, I infact know a lot of interesting things about color perception which you could not have deduced from my simplistic language.
For example for the question “can something look to have a certain color but actually have a different color” there is the illusion about a cylinder casting a shadow on a chessboard. Then there is what on what in chess terms would be different colored squares one outof shadow and one in shadowm marked A and B. The image is made so that if you compare the fill color of A and B on a monitor they have the exact same color values. But when humans are presented with the picture and claimed that A and B are the same color they can’t believe it. The human brain is such that when it recognises that something is in shadow it presupposes that the material would in more ordinary lighting be a more bright color and part of what makes the illusion work is that when people refer to “color” they have a closer association to the lightning-invariant color than to the kind of absolute color that computer monitor pixels have to assume. Quesitons of the form “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see orange” have presuppositions that get overruled by this lighting context. Under orange lighting the criteria on what wavelengths are counted as orange get tighter.
Going over what I wrote I notice a possible ambquity. “materialist theory” can refer to any theory whose primary ontology is fairly described as “materia” or it can be read as the top honed result of what “materialist starting point theory” has provided. A toy model belonging to the wide category doesn’t do justice for exemplifying explanatory power. But the point was to clarify that there is the evidence, the suppositions that are used to make sense of the evidence and the abstract hypotheses that are either bought or disbelief based on understanding. In the visual processing system taking into account shadows it assumes the existence of shadows as appropriate transformations on raw data to get useful data. The brain assumes out of habit or without justification that shadows happen and on the abstract layer it becomes diffult to doubt them. A and B seem like different colors and as the abstract reasoner you have little clue that the assumption of shadows was used to derive those colors. “they just appear to be different color” as a matter of fact. But if you had to do the job that your visual cortex does automatically by hand you could see how the raw data doesn’t necceciate that result. Looking pixel by pixel you can see that the color values match.
There is also color perception that does not enforce a materialist-handy set of assumptions. There is a form of synesthesia where letters are seen as colored. It’s not that super mysterious as letter-contex is not that different from shadow-context. But somebody having these kinds of experiences is much less likely to think of these as objective qualities world objects have. You don’t get confused as black object turns to red as you recognise it to be a t-letter. But sometimes your emotional state can color your perception of others feelings. If you are feeling paranoid you can think of everyone else as paranoid even without realising. This kind of experience can feel a lot like “just directly accessing that persons objective paranoidness” I guess you could have a sort of synesthesia where you color people based on what you think their mood is. If you did have emotional processing this automatic it could be hard to entertain that your emotional logic could be wrong “offcourse he is sad, just look how blue he is!”
I appear to have rambled but the point is that “simple color perception” is just open to be abstractly wrong as coloring sad people as blue. It’s hard to rule out that you are literally seeing red because you are synesthesing your anger into your experience. But the standard interpretion “I am seeing red because the environment is uncaringly having electromagnetic state in my location” suffers from same sorts of difficulties.
I do not understand how the linked discussion highlight anything that I have not covered. There are two conceptions of color according to one that A and B are same and another which they are not. Just as long as you don’t mix concepts you are fine. It might be misleading that language has only one color word but it should be pretty clear that the concept definitions are separate. Notice how there is no good word to call the color the squares do not have in common. Or if we use words “white”, “grey” and “black” they are both grey but one of them is black and the other is white. If you would think color was a single category one might be confused how something can be both white and grey. But the “grey” color is a different type of color (“apparent illumination”) than the others (“shaded hue”). For example we readily recognise that there would be a category error for thinking that shiny and white would mean the same thing (note that shininess would be confrimed in image wby the presence of whiter than usual pixels). When the both categories are called “white” it becomes harder to recognise that they are actually homonyms of two distinct concepts.
What lesson do you think I am drawing? What thing the linked discussion is drawing? And how is the linked discussion more appropriate learning? What color conception is appropriate for tyhe situation depends on the application. Sure human brains have a great need for “shaded hue” color. But computer monitor makers have a great practical relevance for “apparent illumination” color. that’s like arguing that “right” is the correct concept and “starboard” is an irrelevant and incorrect concept. And that road leads to arguing whether landlife is more valid than sealife.
If you are confused by what I’m saying, you might want to spend some time talking to some regular (non-philosophical) people and understanding their views about consciousness. Notice that a good proportion will have views contrary to the materialist stance. Anyway, I see my role as more pointing out a possible path to coming to understanding, rather than actually forcing you to take the path.
Edit: Okay let’s try this. In dualism, sensations have a non-material component. Similarly, in property dualism.
Second edit: I felt my original comment was a bit rude, so I decided to edit it.
Usualy when talking to people one of the goals is to convey ideas. It’s not mandatory to participate in talk but I figured that conveying that the line is dead informs whether to abandon the activity asd pointless or to engage in repair conduct.
I do know that a lot of people have softer views and people with great technical skill can have very “harsh” worldviews. And often they do not fully appriciate the philosophical problems their models have when it seems their models details are driven by a particular sort of need for detail. A materialistic stance is useful to demand and to accept thought time sacrificed to entertain and form long and detailed explanations.
The comparison to what I know of the world generally is really hampered as I don’t understand that well what “materialist stance” is supposed to refer to.
It is certainly not the case that I am at duty to accept your thesis because I can’t come to understand it. It might be fine even if a little disapointing to “agree to not understand” when even “agree to disagree” is often discomforting.
Another relevant option is that people downvote and don’t reply and the author is left wondering why there is no engagement around the topic. This would correspond ot the stance of “if I am not understood I don’t want to know about it”
If everybody would be at liberty to scramble the english dictionary and speak only in their scrambling of it communication would be very laboursome. In order to not have a “let’s find out what your dictionary is” part to every conversation there needs to be some minimum level of respect for established terms.
I feel it’s also a good communication practise to declare when you are not part of the common understanding early rather than late. Thus saying “you lost me at ‘materialistic stance’” I feel like am making the task of upcoming explanation as easy as possible by setting it up at a point where most other concepts are understood and where the job of explaning is predictably not that long.
I guess there is a danger that somebody might deliberately play dumb to avoid processing of views they oppopse. But I have also a principle that I can’t say tht somehtign is dumb before I understand what it is getting at. Thus rather than holding a hardly or not legible claim against the speaker it’s more akin to having said nothing.
Okay sensations in connetion to those categories I kind of understand. But it would seem that this should somehow make clearer how qualia or “materialist stance” enters the picture.
I was unsure whether “property dualism” is the same or different as neutral monism. Wikisearching gives such things as “property dualism is epistemic as distinct from ontic” while it seems here the ontic is of relevance. And it would seem that the view still thinks that there is only physical basic ontological stuff. That would seem to make it a materialist stance when it was supposed to be an example of a system that had a non-materialistic aspect.
Non-materialistic aspect seems to be relevant. Does qualia somehow exhibit it?
I am suspecting that you are using a definition of “qualia” that has ontological commitments built in. The term really doesn’t have those and you need to get your terms straight. If you want to talk about those ontological commitment use words that directly access them.
I maybe too generous in assuming that you mean what “qualia” means. The example of insisting that people are blindsighted is what I understand for someone that doesn’t believe in qualia. The version that treats qualia as “explanations” of how things can work as they do utilise a sense of the word that it does not have.
It feels like you mean”qualia” as a bit of ontology that is not material which would explain why you see materialism as it’s antonym. What you really ought to use are words like “metaphysical organ” or “soul” or “mental” as ontolgocial primitive in contrast to materia. Those words have a lot worse ring because claims involving them tend to be somewhat ridicilous.
There might be an interesting argument of the lines of “materialism doesn’t explain experience so we need to entertain the possibility of non-physical bits into our ontology”. “qualia” refer to the “experience is a thing that happens” part but not to the hypothetical ontology extension. Like gravity anomalies might found assumptions into the existence of dark matter there migth be a danger of taking “dark matter” to be a synonym or shorthand for the gravity anomalies. But conceptually these are separate and there are physicist that think that discovering better gravitation laws addresses the anomalies without supposing new categories of substance (ie dark matterless theories are seen as viable).
It might be interesting to try to steelman the soul question. For example in a morph environment there might be a question of which actors are NPC and which are PC. And it’s true there that on a game world level PCs and NPCs are similar functionning. But PCs can go “afk” and they require wetware to sit in front of a keyboard. Somebody that thought that the game world is the place where the cognitive machinery lies might think that there is no reason to posit that keyboards even exit and esoteric “biological” components would be explanationarily needless for understanding what happens in the game world. In particular examining part of the game code/world that is involved in netcode one might quess tht the cognition lies inside that bit of code instead of locating outside it.
And in general for video games the perception for the game world is primary to the existence of the game world itself. You infer the existence of a 3d world because of what flashes on your screen and because 3d terminology is an effective way to talk about different screen states. And in the case of games we know the worlds are fictious they can only upkeep an apperance and keeping up that appearance uses up cpu cycles. If somebody would try to get inductive on what is shown on the screen they could get a very different concpetion of what world forces there are present than one that assumes that there is a source code that dictates what happens.
In a conception that is popoular in these days it’s easy to tell a story where the effective phenomena that we see are representative of the mechanisms that generate our expereiences. We think we can see the workings of the world, we think we have access to the source code. But if we could hit a soft or hard wall on figuring out the source code of a video game from the inductive screen patterns how could we tell whether we have hit such a wall in the real world?
It might be that explainining things like healthbars are very unnaturally explained in a theory that tries to treat the 3d game world as the actually existing layer of existence. Someone that has a lot of skill that is built on a 3d conception of the world might be tempted to not even try to explain healthbars and rather try to argue that they don’t exist. But it’s still a different thing to note that healthbars exist than to theorise background entities that might be responcible for them.
Qualia is a word that different people use in different ways. In this post I have been using it to refer to some kind of sensation or experience, but in a sense beyond the materialist conceptions of these words. I will admit that in other contexts I’ve used it to refer to whatever makes I think we have these non-materialist sensations and that I should make my terminology more consistent, but I don’t think I’ve used it this way in this post? I think this is a useful thing to have a term for and I wish I’d added a short section at the start to clarify my use of the term, but I also think it should be clear enough from context what I’m arguing for and against.
“For example in a morph environment there might be a question of which actors are NPC and which are PC. And it’s true there that on a game world level PCs and NPCs are similar functionning. But PCs can go “afk” and they require wetware to sit in front of a keyboard. Somebody that thought that the game world is the place where the cognitive machinery lies might think that there is no reason to posit that keyboards even exit and esoteric “biological” components would be explanationarily needless for understanding what happens in the game world. In particular examining part of the game code/world that is involved in netcode one might quess tht the cognition lies inside that bit of code instead of locating outside it.”—this is actually very similar what I was planning to write in my next post. Not sure whether I’ll still write this post now, but if I do I’ll reference this comment.
I do not understand and I am afraid to guess what you mean by “non-materialist sensation”. I understand that if I see a red flash and explain it by a red photon having hit my eye that I employ a materialist concept to explain my experiencen. And if somebody explains the red flash with a ghost that would be a non-materialist explanation. However I don’t get how the flash itself would be material or immaterial, it’s a sensation it doesn’t come with a user manual. Now if i had frequent remoteviewing experiences I might have categories of sensations that do not have readily available materialist explanations. But often unexplained sensations remain open to their explanation types. It would be even more rare to not have a explanation but have reason to believe that the explanation can’t be material (usually it’s just assumed to be unknonwn material explanation).
By being careless with the words you are undoing a lot of concept analysis that philosophers that try to only take a small bite at a big problem have done. You are very close to promoting muddy thinking. In particular I do not really know the referent of “materialist conception of sensation”. I might be badly educated in that I miss some highly spesific word associations. But I think it’s also highly possible that you do not have enough grasp of the concept to explain it by other words. With a lot of “-ism” words there is often the trouble that people use it as a very short shorthand for a lot of detailed claims but different people use different expanded theories. Being able to open up the shortened version allows for disambiguation when there is semantic conflict.
For example I remember there was some named philopsher that seriously cliamed that things exist as thoughts in god’s head and that matter doesn’t exist. It would seem that this kind of conception for example how to see the tree would still fall under the usual way of interpreting seeing. Thus it would seem that this theory still uses “materialist conception of percieving”. But then we have an antonym problem as the mentalist ontology is supposed to stand in opposition to an ontolgoy that affirms that matter exists and that mental things do not have ontological primacy. But the “qualist” apporach is supposed to stand in opposition too and it doesn’t at the face of it be complatible or atleast says something different as mentalism. To solve these kinds of troubles I usuallly turn to talking about details. I get that someobody that has a different understnading of the “-isms” doesn’t have the same troubles of trying to get to relate to each other. But I think how you are using the words relies too much on how idiosyncratically they have ararnged themself in your head and in order to do valuable work in other peoples mind, more care is needed for mind interoperability. There is some hint what you mean but most of that hinting just suggest that your concepetions are unhelpful or really actually wrong. If you start to mean “table” with the word “chair” and people start to disambiguiate “you do use a chair for sitting right?” that is often work critical to establish a understanding link. Even if we don’t rule whether “table” should mean “chair” people being aware that there are two conceptions at play helps tremendously to account for possibilities.
I think you might not be appriciative how qualia is attempted to be a very narrow term referring to expererience. Like using “3 legged rotary bar chair” in the actual meaning of “any furniture used for sitting”. Non-physical ontolgoical primaries are a whole another family of terms, “materia” for a ontological primary that is passive and follows some N dimensional space rules, “thought” for for a primary that has intentionality and usualy doesn’t have extents or locations. “Dualism” says that there are multiple co-existing primaries most commonly materia and thought but that they exist independently of each other. “Neutral monism” say that there is only 1 ontological primary which can’t be characterised to be any of the dualism co-existing primaries. These are terms which creep closely how you actually try to use the word “qualia”. But it’s not the area of concept where the word really should be used. It’s like you are using the word “fourteen” in a place where a color would be expected. I need some serious briefing how fourteen makes sense as a color or I am just assuming that you are making an error. Which ever the case I am currently unable to read any intelligble claim from the text.
If you see a red flash, and explain that red flash by a red photon hitting your eye, then you are either being imprecise to the point of philosophical carelessness, or you are confused about physiology, physics, or both.
Whatever the case may be, it does not do to forget that materialism is not at all the same thing as assuming that the world is simple. The real story about what color is, and how color perception works, is vastly more complex than your offhand comment implies. I am no dualist, but I would suggest to you that giving a materialistic account of color is, in fact, quite a challenging task. The question of whether we have yet accomplished it, is not one which I would so quickly declare to be closed.
Fine I glossed over more than was good for the point I was making. To my needs if you look at a red chair, you have a vision of a red chair and it makes you think of a furniture object existing out in the world and that object is electromagnetically interacting with the object that you associate with your “identity” (ie your body). The story about objects existing is prone to theorethical uncertainty and error and it not evident from the perception itself. The link between particular kinds of flashes and particular kinds of electromagnetic waves is not central and I guess at the world side of things it would be more proper to talk about certain nanometer length waves instead (unheard tree makes a pressure wave). However you expect any kind of story of electromagnetic waves interacting with eyes in the relevant way to have a corresponding experience going. That is if you point a laser at your eye you are not surprised why you see a flash even if you have not ever damaged your eyes with a laser before.
But for example if your photo resistors are pushed without them triggering you do not experience that in any way. And if you photoreceptor are rubbed in a way that makes them go off some experience might trigger and an unused perciever might associate that experience with receiving light but what you actually experience is physical touch which is mainly felt throught skin ordinarily. A problem is that you come to believe how your senses work throught what is in them.
Say that you are watchiing television that has a documentary running how TV programs are made. Say that you are sceptical that TVs can be trusted. There is a problem in that the documentary is likely not seem compelling if you need to trust in the reliability of the TV in the first place to take it seriously. You might think that the documentary is a forgery to promote more tv ad adherence. If a person main method of finding out how TV programs are made is wathing tv they might be stuck in this catch-22 (for example my knowledge of “the room” is largely represented by “the disaster artist”). With TV you can instead go open a door and watch things with your eyes. But with our senses they are unescapingly the method that we interface with the world. There is no “extrasensory” release valve and even if there was that would just be another (standard) sense. So if we learn how eyes work by looking at slides in a biology class that is similar to wathcing a TV-making documentary on TV. Inductive reliance gives some hope. But it leaves the door open that one day the illusion of an outside world no longer (perfectly) holds. If I only dreamed the biology lesson the rules it teaches are not that fundamental. If blair witch project tries to sell itself as a found footage programming but I notice inconsistencies which are better exlained by actual production process my expectation on what I might see get changed a lot. If something is supposedly live action but looks very CGI another big shift. In the same way it’s plausible that stories about electromagnetic fields might be more akin to theather sets, yes their appearance is in congruence with the plot but they are only apparent but not fundamental.
None of that is at all relevant to what I was alluding to, which concerned human color perception. (A sample of relevant questions: “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see magenta”; “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see orange”; “what color are afterimages”; “can something look to have a certain color but actually have a different color”; “what does it mean to be wrong about an object’s color”; “is there such a thing as an object that has a color no human can see”. There are many more; this is only a small sample.)
The question is relevant only to the extenet that physical world event and perceptions are intermingled. I used simplist language, I infact know a lot of interesting things about color perception which you could not have deduced from my simplistic language.
For example for the question “can something look to have a certain color but actually have a different color” there is the illusion about a cylinder casting a shadow on a chessboard. Then there is what on what in chess terms would be different colored squares one outof shadow and one in shadowm marked A and B. The image is made so that if you compare the fill color of A and B on a monitor they have the exact same color values. But when humans are presented with the picture and claimed that A and B are the same color they can’t believe it. The human brain is such that when it recognises that something is in shadow it presupposes that the material would in more ordinary lighting be a more bright color and part of what makes the illusion work is that when people refer to “color” they have a closer association to the lightning-invariant color than to the kind of absolute color that computer monitor pixels have to assume. Quesitons of the form “what is the wavelength of light that makes you see orange” have presuppositions that get overruled by this lighting context. Under orange lighting the criteria on what wavelengths are counted as orange get tighter.
Going over what I wrote I notice a possible ambquity. “materialist theory” can refer to any theory whose primary ontology is fairly described as “materia” or it can be read as the top honed result of what “materialist starting point theory” has provided. A toy model belonging to the wide category doesn’t do justice for exemplifying explanatory power. But the point was to clarify that there is the evidence, the suppositions that are used to make sense of the evidence and the abstract hypotheses that are either bought or disbelief based on understanding. In the visual processing system taking into account shadows it assumes the existence of shadows as appropriate transformations on raw data to get useful data. The brain assumes out of habit or without justification that shadows happen and on the abstract layer it becomes diffult to doubt them. A and B seem like different colors and as the abstract reasoner you have little clue that the assumption of shadows was used to derive those colors. “they just appear to be different color” as a matter of fact. But if you had to do the job that your visual cortex does automatically by hand you could see how the raw data doesn’t necceciate that result. Looking pixel by pixel you can see that the color values match.
There is also color perception that does not enforce a materialist-handy set of assumptions. There is a form of synesthesia where letters are seen as colored. It’s not that super mysterious as letter-contex is not that different from shadow-context. But somebody having these kinds of experiences is much less likely to think of these as objective qualities world objects have. You don’t get confused as black object turns to red as you recognise it to be a t-letter. But sometimes your emotional state can color your perception of others feelings. If you are feeling paranoid you can think of everyone else as paranoid even without realising. This kind of experience can feel a lot like “just directly accessing that persons objective paranoidness” I guess you could have a sort of synesthesia where you color people based on what you think their mood is. If you did have emotional processing this automatic it could be hard to entertain that your emotional logic could be wrong “offcourse he is sad, just look how blue he is!”
I appear to have rambled but the point is that “simple color perception” is just open to be abstractly wrong as coloring sad people as blue. It’s hard to rule out that you are literally seeing red because you are synesthesing your anger into your experience. But the standard interpretion “I am seeing red because the environment is uncaringly having electromagnetic state in my location” suffers from same sorts of difficulties.
It is interesting that you mention the cylinder/chessboard “illusion”. I do not think that the lesson to be drawn from it is what you think it is.
I do not understand how the linked discussion highlight anything that I have not covered. There are two conceptions of color according to one that A and B are same and another which they are not. Just as long as you don’t mix concepts you are fine. It might be misleading that language has only one color word but it should be pretty clear that the concept definitions are separate. Notice how there is no good word to call the color the squares do not have in common. Or if we use words “white”, “grey” and “black” they are both grey but one of them is black and the other is white. If you would think color was a single category one might be confused how something can be both white and grey. But the “grey” color is a different type of color (“apparent illumination”) than the others (“shaded hue”). For example we readily recognise that there would be a category error for thinking that shiny and white would mean the same thing (note that shininess would be confrimed in image wby the presence of whiter than usual pixels). When the both categories are called “white” it becomes harder to recognise that they are actually homonyms of two distinct concepts.
What lesson do you think I am drawing? What thing the linked discussion is drawing? And how is the linked discussion more appropriate learning? What color conception is appropriate for tyhe situation depends on the application. Sure human brains have a great need for “shaded hue” color. But computer monitor makers have a great practical relevance for “apparent illumination” color. that’s like arguing that “right” is the correct concept and “starboard” is an irrelevant and incorrect concept. And that road leads to arguing whether landlife is more valid than sealife.
If you are confused by what I’m saying, you might want to spend some time talking to some regular (non-philosophical) people and understanding their views about consciousness. Notice that a good proportion will have views contrary to the materialist stance. Anyway, I see my role as more pointing out a possible path to coming to understanding, rather than actually forcing you to take the path.
Edit: Okay let’s try this. In dualism, sensations have a non-material component. Similarly, in property dualism.
Second edit: I felt my original comment was a bit rude, so I decided to edit it.
Usualy when talking to people one of the goals is to convey ideas. It’s not mandatory to participate in talk but I figured that conveying that the line is dead informs whether to abandon the activity asd pointless or to engage in repair conduct.
I do know that a lot of people have softer views and people with great technical skill can have very “harsh” worldviews. And often they do not fully appriciate the philosophical problems their models have when it seems their models details are driven by a particular sort of need for detail. A materialistic stance is useful to demand and to accept thought time sacrificed to entertain and form long and detailed explanations.
The comparison to what I know of the world generally is really hampered as I don’t understand that well what “materialist stance” is supposed to refer to.
It is certainly not the case that I am at duty to accept your thesis because I can’t come to understand it. It might be fine even if a little disapointing to “agree to not understand” when even “agree to disagree” is often discomforting.
Another relevant option is that people downvote and don’t reply and the author is left wondering why there is no engagement around the topic. This would correspond ot the stance of “if I am not understood I don’t want to know about it”
If everybody would be at liberty to scramble the english dictionary and speak only in their scrambling of it communication would be very laboursome. In order to not have a “let’s find out what your dictionary is” part to every conversation there needs to be some minimum level of respect for established terms.
I feel it’s also a good communication practise to declare when you are not part of the common understanding early rather than late. Thus saying “you lost me at ‘materialistic stance’” I feel like am making the task of upcoming explanation as easy as possible by setting it up at a point where most other concepts are understood and where the job of explaning is predictably not that long.
I guess there is a danger that somebody might deliberately play dumb to avoid processing of views they oppopse. But I have also a principle that I can’t say tht somehtign is dumb before I understand what it is getting at. Thus rather than holding a hardly or not legible claim against the speaker it’s more akin to having said nothing.
Okay sensations in connetion to those categories I kind of understand. But it would seem that this should somehow make clearer how qualia or “materialist stance” enters the picture.
I was unsure whether “property dualism” is the same or different as neutral monism. Wikisearching gives such things as “property dualism is epistemic as distinct from ontic” while it seems here the ontic is of relevance. And it would seem that the view still thinks that there is only physical basic ontological stuff. That would seem to make it a materialist stance when it was supposed to be an example of a system that had a non-materialistic aspect.
Non-materialistic aspect seems to be relevant. Does qualia somehow exhibit it?