“From an outside view, you have given a long list of wordy philosophical arguments, all of which involve terms that you haven’t defined. The success rate for arguments like that isn’t great.”—Firstly, I didn’t claim that qualia definitely exist, just that they are dismissed too quickly. Secondly, the outside view is widely ignored on Less Wrong—why is this? Do people on Less Wrong really just fall into the reference class of smart people, with nothing setting them apart? Thirdly, is it really accurate to describe these arguments as wordy? Most of the arguments seems concise to me. Indeed, if that is the case, haven’t you just made a wordy argument yourself? Fourthly, if you need definitions, feel free to ask, although as I’ve commented below, I believe that qualia are a primitive concept.
“I expect there to be some set of equations, of which quantum mechanics and relativity are approximations, that predicts every detail of reality”—there’s probably some set of equations that can predict all the physical details of reality, but who says all the details are physical? And even that comes with a major limitation, we can describe relations between physical entities, but what can’t say what their nature is.
“The minds of humans, including myself, are part of reality. Look at a philosopher talking about consciousness or qualia in great detail”—yep, I’ve acknowledge this argument and linked to a post by Eliezer on this.
“You can choose a set of similar patterns of quantum fields and call them qualia”—See the relabeling argument and the discussion in failure to bite the bullet for reasons why defining qualia in the map leads to qualia not being of any real importance.
“This makes a qualia the same type of thing as a word or an apple”—it’s a massive assumption to claim words and apples are the same kind of thing. Why should logical entities be the same kind of thing as physical entities?
“From an outside view, you have given a long list of wordy philosophical arguments, all of which involve terms that you haven’t defined. The success rate for arguments like that isn’t great.”—Firstly, I didn’t claim that qualia definitely exist, just that they are dismissed too quickly. Secondly, the outside view is widely ignored on Less Wrong—why is this? Do people on Less Wrong really just fall into the reference class of smart people, with nothing setting them apart? Thirdly, is it really accurate to describe these arguments as wordy? Most of the arguments seems concise to me. Indeed, if that is the case, haven’t you just made a wordy argument yourself? Fourthly, if you need definitions, feel free to ask, although as I’ve commented below, I believe that qualia are a primitive concept.
“I expect there to be some set of equations, of which quantum mechanics and relativity are approximations, that predicts every detail of reality”—there’s probably some set of equations that can predict all the physical details of reality, but who says all the details are physical? And even that comes with a major limitation, we can describe relations between physical entities, but what can’t say what their nature is.
“The minds of humans, including myself, are part of reality. Look at a philosopher talking about consciousness or qualia in great detail”—yep, I’ve acknowledge this argument and linked to a post by Eliezer on this.
“You can choose a set of similar patterns of quantum fields and call them qualia”—See the relabeling argument and the discussion in failure to bite the bullet for reasons why defining qualia in the map leads to qualia not being of any real importance.
“This makes a qualia the same type of thing as a word or an apple”—it’s a massive assumption to claim words and apples are the same kind of thing. Why should logical entities be the same kind of thing as physical entities?
Whether patterns of graphite on paper, or patterns of electricity in silicon, words are real physical things.
Don’t you think that there could be a logical component that goes beyond this?