If there is evidence for qualia, you should believe in qualia, irrespective of the consequences. The “poisoned idea” idea suggests that it’s OK to reject evidence in order to preserve theories. In the form of “fossils were created by the devil to delude people”, that’s the height of irrationallity.
‘Evidence’ doesn’t imply any particular degree of certainty, e.g. “should believe”.
But I wasn’t in fact denying the existence of qualia as much as thinking that we’re ‘confused’ about the thing we’re gesturing at, hence the ‘poison’.
I agree that there seems like something ‘special’ about, e.g. why the color ‘red’ also ‘looks red’ (and maybe ‘looks’ differently to someone else). But I’m (thoroughly) confused about whether it is special, or whether it’s natural and expected, ‘from the inside’, for any sentience/consciousness to think that (without it also being necessarily ‘true’).
I’m not even sure that what I think is my own qualia is what other people mean by ‘qualia’! How could I know? It seems like the only way for ‘qualia’ to even possibly be referring to the same thing is via communication with and among similar beings as myself.
I agree that there seems like something ‘special’ about, e.g. why the color ‘red’ also ‘looks red’ (and maybe ‘looks’ differently to someone else). But I’m (thoroughly) confused about whether it is special, or whether it’s natural and expected, ‘from the inside’, for any sentience/consciousness to think that (without it also being necessarily ‘true’).
That means you don’t have an explanation of qualia. Which is fine, you are not supposed to. But lacking an explanation is not a good reason to reject the whole topic.
I’m not even sure that what I think is my own qualia is what other people mean by ‘qualia’
The same could be said of terms like “consciousness” and ” sentience”, yet you have been using them. In fact, the term. “Qualia” comes from an attempt to clarify “consciousness” .
That means you don’t have an explanation of qualia. Which is fine, you are not supposed to. But lacking an explanation is not a good reason to reject the whole topic.
That’s not my only evidence for why it might be sensible to “reject the whole topic”. I would expect a good explanation, if one existed, to be NOT confusing for LOTS of people, not just its proponents.
I suspect that it’s the kind of confusion where we (eventually) realize that ‘qualia is a thing’ isn’t ‘even wrong’.
My current very-tentative/very-weakly-held hypothesis for ‘qualia’ is that it’s nothing in particular, i.e. that there’s no sharp delineation between ‘qualia’ and ‘information processing’ (‘computation’) or ‘things with qualia’ and ‘things without qualia’.
I think we can in fact look at other entities, ‘from the outside’, and make reliable estimations as to their likely ‘qualia’. I think ‘having qualia’ is ‘sentience’ and that sentience is a spectrum spanning (at least):
Photons – basically no qualia
Rocks – also basically no (interesting/complicated) qualia
Viruses and rocks – a kind of ‘minimal’ qualia maybe? They do seem to have a minimal degree of sensation/perception[^1] and, being ‘life’ (maybe), they do have a kind of un-conscious/fixed/hard-coded memory/history that they encode/‘remember’
Lots of animals – definitely some kind/degree-of-quality of qualia. Lots seem able to track and predict other entities and have some kind of ‘temporal qualia’ maybe too. They also seem to mostly have ‘real’ memory that isn’t encode/fixed/hard-code, e.g. in their DNA.
Animals with communication – ‘social qualia’
Us and maybe a few other species? – ‘conscious qualia’, i.e. ‘self-aware qualia’
I’m guessing that ‘consciousness’ starts at [5] – with basically any kind of communication, i.e. being able to be any kind of a ‘storyteller’.
I think we – and maybe some other species – are at the ‘next level’ because our communication is ‘universal’ in a way that other animal’s communications are more static/fixed/repeating/nested, but not more complicated than that.
[^1] I can’t see much of a definite clear line delineating/classifying/categorizing ‘sensation’ versus ‘perception’. They both just like a ‘kind of computation’ we can somewhat reliably recognize.
That’s not my only evidence for why it might be sensible to “reject the whole topic”. I would expect a good explanation, if one existed, to be NOT confusing for LOTS of people, not just its proponents.
Theres not supposed to be a good explanation of qualia , in terms of what they are and how they work. “Qualia” is supposed to point to the heart of the problem of consciousness. There may also be confusion about what “qualia” points to as a prima facie evidence … but it may be motivated, not genuine.
My current very-tentative/very-weakly-held hypothesis for ‘qualia’ is that it’s nothing in particular, i.e. that there’s no sharp delineation between ‘qualia’ and ‘information processing’ (‘computation’) or ‘things with qualia’ and ’things without qualia
You are doing that thing of treating qualia as objective, when they are supposed to be subjective. It makes a big difference to you whether you have surgery under anesthesia or not.
Yes, I defy the assumption that qualia are “supposed to be subjective”. I would expect ’having surgery under anesthesia or not” to not be entirely subjective.
How do you know if you don’t what “qualia” means?
What do you mean by “know”?
I think that what other people mean when they say or write ‘qualia’ is something like ‘subjective experience’.
I think ‘having qualia’ is the same thing as ‘sentience’ and I think ‘sentience’ is (roughly) ‘being a thing about which a story could be told’. The more complex the story that can be told, the more ‘sentience’ a thing has. Photons/rocks/etc. have simple stories and basically no sentience. More complex things with more complex sensation/perception/cognition have more complex stories, up to (at least) us, where our stories can themselves contain stories.
Maybe what’s missing from my loose/casual/extremely-approximate ‘definition’ of ‘sentience’ is ‘perspective’. Maybe what that is that’s missing is something like a being with qualia/sentience being ‘a thing about which a story could be told – from its own perspective’, i.e. a ‘thing with a first-person story’.
‘Subjective experience’ then is just the type of the elements, the ‘raw material’, from which such a story could be constructed.
For a person/animal/thing with qualia/sentience:
Having surgery performed on them with anesthesia would result in a story like “I fell asleep on the operating table. Then I woke up, in pain, in a recovery room.”
Having surgery without anesthesia would (or could) result in a story like “I didn’t fall asleep on the operating table. I was trapped in my body for hours and felt all of the pain of every part of the surgery. …”
I don’t think there’s any good reason to expect that we won’t – at least someday – be able to observe ‘subjective experiences’ (thus ‘sentience’), tho the work of ‘translating’ between the experiences of ‘aliens’ and the experiences of people (humans) can be arbitrarily difficult. (Even translating between or among humans is often extremely difficult!)
In this extremely-rough model then, ‘consciousness’ is the additional property of ‘being able to tell a story oneself’.
Theres not supposed to be a good explanation of qualia
That’s a perfect example of why it seems sensible to “reject the whole topic”.
I’ve already explained why that’s an anti pattern. If you had rejected the very idea of magnetism when magnetism wasn’t understood, it would not now be understood. Or meteorites, which actually were rejected for a while.
That’s just picking ‘worship’ instead of ‘explain’.
There’s not supposed to be a good explanation of qualia currently.
Qualia aren’t supposed to be inexplicable, just unexplained. It’s not like there are just two states “hopeless woo” and “fully explained right now”.
Yes, I defy the assumption that qualia are “supposed to be subjective”. I would expect ’having surgery under anesthesia or not” to not be entirely subjective.
So it’s still subjective, so long as subjective means “not entirely objective”.
I don’t think there’s any good reason to expect that we won’t – at least someday – be able to observe ’subjective experience
Who said otherwise? You seem to have decided that “qualia are subjective experiences and we don’t understand them” means something like “qualia are entirely and irredeemably subjective and will be a mystery forever”.
It’s almost always the case that claims come in a variety of strengths … But outgroup homogeneity bias will make and it seem like your outgroup all have the same, dumb claim. If you are attacking the most easily attackable form of qualiaphilia, you are weakmanning.
Maybe we will have qualiometers one day, and maybe we will abandon the very idea of qualia. But maybe we won’t, so we have no reason to treat qualia as poison now.
I’ve already explained why that’s an anti pattern. If you had rejected the very idea of magnetism when magnetism wasn’t understood, it would not now be understood.
I’m rejecting the idea of ‘qualia’ for the same reason I wouldn’t reject the idea of magnetism – they both seem (or would seem, for magnetism, in your hypothetical).
I’m rejecting ‘mysterious answers’, e.g. “Theres not supposed to be a good explanation of qualia”.
Who said otherwise? You seem to have decided that “qualia are subjective experiences and we don’t understand them” means something like “qualia are entirely and irredeemably subjective and will be a mystery forever”.
Sorry – that’s not what I intended to convey. And maybe we’re writing past each other about this. I suspect that ‘qualia’ is basically equivalent to something far more general, e.g. ‘information processing’, and that our intuitions about what ‘qualia’ are, and the underlying mechanics of them (of which many people seem to insist don’t exist), are based on the limited means we have of currently, e.g. introspecting on them, communicating with each other about them, and weakly generalizing to other entities (e.g. animals) or possible beings (e.g. AIs).
I also suspect that ‘consciousness’ – which I’m currently (loosely/casually) modeling as ‘being capable of telling stories’ – and us having consciousness, makes thinking and discussing ‘qualia’ more difficult than I suspect it will turn out to be.
Maybe we will have qualiometers one day, and maybe we will abandon the very idea of qualia. But maybe we won’t, so we have no reason to treat qualia as poison now.
What I’m (kinda) ‘treating as poison’ is the seemingly common view that ‘qualia’ cannot be explained at all, i.e. that it’s inherently and inescapably ‘subjective’. It sure seems like at least some people – tho maybe not yourself – are either in the process ‘retreating’, or have adopted a ‘posture’ whereby they’re constantly ‘ready to retreat’, from the ‘advances’ of ‘objective investigation’ and then claim that only the ‘leftover’ parts of ‘qualia’ that remain ‘subjective’ are the ‘real qualia’.
I’m rejecting the idea of ‘qualia’ for the same reason I wouldn’t reject the idea of magnetism – they both seem (or would seem, for magnetism, in your hypothetical)
Seem what?
I’m rejecting ‘mysterious answers’, e
The lack of explanation for qualia is not intended as an answer.
I suspect that ‘qualia’ is basically equivalent to something far more general, e.g. ‘information processing’,
If you could show that , that would be an explanation. Staring that an A is, for no particular reason, a B is not explanation.
What I’m (kinda) ‘treating as poison’ is the seemingly common view that ‘qualia’ cannot be explained at all
You say it is common , but no one in this discussion has made it , and you haven’t named anyone who has made it. And inexplicability is not part of the definition of “qualia”.
Winding back:-
I’m not convinced that statements like “qualia clearly exist” are informative. It feels like a ‘poisoned idea’, e.g. because of the connection with ‘p-zombies’.
Theres nothing about inexplicability there , either. But there is something about wrongthought ,.ie.zombies.
So it’s still subjective, so long as subjective means “not entirely objective”.
Everything in the universe is (arguably) physical—there is nothing that exists that’s not entirely objective and entirely accessible to external inquiry.
To the extent that qualia are subjective, their subjectivity needs to be an entirely objective property—otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
Everything in the universe is (arguably) physical—there is nothing that exists that’s not entirely objective and entirely accessible to external inquiry.
That’s true only if the evidence supports it.
To the extent that qualia are subjective, their subjectivity needs to be an entirely objective property—otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
That’s the opposite of rationality. In rationality, evidence determines theories,not vice versa.
If there is evidence for qualia, you should believe in qualia, irrespective of the consequences. The “poisoned idea” idea suggests that it’s OK to reject evidence in order to preserve theories. In the form of “fossils were created by the devil to delude people”, that’s the height of irrationallity.
‘Evidence’ doesn’t imply any particular degree of certainty, e.g. “should believe”.
But I wasn’t in fact denying the existence of qualia as much as thinking that we’re ‘confused’ about the thing we’re gesturing at, hence the ‘poison’.
I agree that there seems like something ‘special’ about, e.g. why the color ‘red’ also ‘looks red’ (and maybe ‘looks’ differently to someone else). But I’m (thoroughly) confused about whether it is special, or whether it’s natural and expected, ‘from the inside’, for any sentience/consciousness to think that (without it also being necessarily ‘true’).
I’m not even sure that what I think is my own qualia is what other people mean by ‘qualia’! How could I know? It seems like the only way for ‘qualia’ to even possibly be referring to the same thing is via communication with and among similar beings as myself.
Evidence implies updating by a non zero amount.
That means you don’t have an explanation of qualia. Which is fine, you are not supposed to. But lacking an explanation is not a good reason to reject the whole topic.
The same could be said of terms like “consciousness” and ” sentience”, yet you have been using them. In fact, the term. “Qualia” comes from an attempt to clarify “consciousness” .
That’s not my only evidence for why it might be sensible to “reject the whole topic”. I would expect a good explanation, if one existed, to be NOT confusing for LOTS of people, not just its proponents.
I suspect that it’s the kind of confusion where we (eventually) realize that ‘qualia is a thing’ isn’t ‘even wrong’.
My current very-tentative/very-weakly-held hypothesis for ‘qualia’ is that it’s nothing in particular, i.e. that there’s no sharp delineation between ‘qualia’ and ‘information processing’ (‘computation’) or ‘things with qualia’ and ‘things without qualia’.
I think we can in fact look at other entities, ‘from the outside’, and make reliable estimations as to their likely ‘qualia’. I think ‘having qualia’ is ‘sentience’ and that sentience is a spectrum spanning (at least):
Photons – basically no qualia
Rocks – also basically no (interesting/complicated) qualia
Viruses and rocks – a kind of ‘minimal’ qualia maybe? They do seem to have a minimal degree of sensation/perception[^1] and, being ‘life’ (maybe), they do have a kind of un-conscious/fixed/hard-coded memory/history that they encode/‘remember’
Lots of animals – definitely some kind/degree-of-quality of qualia. Lots seem able to track and predict other entities and have some kind of ‘temporal qualia’ maybe too. They also seem to mostly have ‘real’ memory that isn’t encode/fixed/hard-code, e.g. in their DNA.
Animals with communication – ‘social qualia’
Us and maybe a few other species? – ‘conscious qualia’, i.e. ‘self-aware qualia’
I’m guessing that ‘consciousness’ starts at [5] – with basically any kind of communication, i.e. being able to be any kind of a ‘storyteller’.
I think we – and maybe some other species – are at the ‘next level’ because our communication is ‘universal’ in a way that other animal’s communications are more static/fixed/repeating/nested, but not more complicated than that.
[^1] I can’t see much of a definite clear line delineating/classifying/categorizing ‘sensation’ versus ‘perception’. They both just like a ‘kind of computation’ we can somewhat reliably recognize.
Theres not supposed to be a good explanation of qualia , in terms of what they are and how they work. “Qualia” is supposed to point to the heart of the problem of consciousness. There may also be confusion about what “qualia” points to as a prima facie evidence … but it may be motivated, not genuine.
You are doing that thing of treating qualia as objective, when they are supposed to be subjective. It makes a big difference to you whether you have surgery under anesthesia or not.
How do you know if you don’t what “qualia” means?
What does “sentience” mean?
That’s a perfect example of why it seems sensible to “reject the whole topic”. That’s just picking ‘worship’ instead of ‘explain’.
Yes, I defy the assumption that qualia are “supposed to be subjective”. I would expect ’having surgery under anesthesia or not” to not be entirely subjective.
What do you mean by “know”?
I think that what other people mean when they say or write ‘qualia’ is something like ‘subjective experience’.
I think ‘having qualia’ is the same thing as ‘sentience’ and I think ‘sentience’ is (roughly) ‘being a thing about which a story could be told’. The more complex the story that can be told, the more ‘sentience’ a thing has. Photons/rocks/etc. have simple stories and basically no sentience. More complex things with more complex sensation/perception/cognition have more complex stories, up to (at least) us, where our stories can themselves contain stories.
Maybe what’s missing from my loose/casual/extremely-approximate ‘definition’ of ‘sentience’ is ‘perspective’. Maybe what that is that’s missing is something like a being with qualia/sentience being ‘a thing about which a story could be told – from its own perspective’, i.e. a ‘thing with a first-person story’.
‘Subjective experience’ then is just the type of the elements, the ‘raw material’, from which such a story could be constructed.
For a person/animal/thing with qualia/sentience:
Having surgery performed on them with anesthesia would result in a story like “I fell asleep on the operating table. Then I woke up, in pain, in a recovery room.”
Having surgery without anesthesia would (or could) result in a story like “I didn’t fall asleep on the operating table. I was trapped in my body for hours and felt all of the pain of every part of the surgery. …”
I don’t think there’s any good reason to expect that we won’t – at least someday – be able to observe ‘subjective experiences’ (thus ‘sentience’), tho the work of ‘translating’ between the experiences of ‘aliens’ and the experiences of people (humans) can be arbitrarily difficult. (Even translating between or among humans is often extremely difficult!)
In this extremely-rough model then, ‘consciousness’ is the additional property of ‘being able to tell a story oneself’.
I’ve already explained why that’s an anti pattern. If you had rejected the very idea of magnetism when magnetism wasn’t understood, it would not now be understood. Or meteorites, which actually were rejected for a while.
There’s not supposed to be a good explanation of qualia currently. Qualia aren’t supposed to be inexplicable, just unexplained. It’s not like there are just two states “hopeless woo” and “fully explained right now”.
So it’s still subjective, so long as subjective means “not entirely objective”.
Who said otherwise? You seem to have decided that “qualia are subjective experiences and we don’t understand them” means something like “qualia are entirely and irredeemably subjective and will be a mystery forever”.
It’s almost always the case that claims come in a variety of strengths … But outgroup homogeneity bias will make and it seem like your outgroup all have the same, dumb claim. If you are attacking the most easily attackable form of qualiaphilia, you are weakmanning.
Maybe we will have qualiometers one day, and maybe we will abandon the very idea of qualia. But maybe we won’t, so we have no reason to treat qualia as poison now.
I’m rejecting the idea of ‘qualia’ for the same reason I wouldn’t reject the idea of magnetism – they both seem (or would seem, for magnetism, in your hypothetical).
I’m rejecting ‘mysterious answers’, e.g. “Theres not supposed to be a good explanation of qualia”.
Sorry – that’s not what I intended to convey. And maybe we’re writing past each other about this. I suspect that ‘qualia’ is basically equivalent to something far more general, e.g. ‘information processing’, and that our intuitions about what ‘qualia’ are, and the underlying mechanics of them (of which many people seem to insist don’t exist), are based on the limited means we have of currently, e.g. introspecting on them, communicating with each other about them, and weakly generalizing to other entities (e.g. animals) or possible beings (e.g. AIs).
I also suspect that ‘consciousness’ – which I’m currently (loosely/casually) modeling as ‘being capable of telling stories’ – and us having consciousness, makes thinking and discussing ‘qualia’ more difficult than I suspect it will turn out to be.
What I’m (kinda) ‘treating as poison’ is the seemingly common view that ‘qualia’ cannot be explained at all, i.e. that it’s inherently and inescapably ‘subjective’. It sure seems like at least some people – tho maybe not yourself – are either in the process ‘retreating’, or have adopted a ‘posture’ whereby they’re constantly ‘ready to retreat’, from the ‘advances’ of ‘objective investigation’ and then claim that only the ‘leftover’ parts of ‘qualia’ that remain ‘subjective’ are the ‘real qualia’.
Seem what?
The lack of explanation for qualia is not intended as an answer.
If you could show that , that would be an explanation. Staring that an A is, for no particular reason, a B is not explanation.
You say it is common , but no one in this discussion has made it , and you haven’t named anyone who has made it. And inexplicability is not part of the definition of “qualia”.
Winding back:-
Theres nothing about inexplicability there , either. But there is something about wrongthought ,.ie.zombies.
Everything in the universe is (arguably) physical—there is nothing that exists that’s not entirely objective and entirely accessible to external inquiry.
To the extent that qualia are subjective, their subjectivity needs to be an entirely objective property—otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
That’s true only if the evidence supports it.
That’s the opposite of rationality. In rationality, evidence determines theories,not vice versa.
So, for that to be otherwise, people would need to find that the (human) brain breaks the laws of physics. Otherwise it’s true.
Fundamental subjectivity can exist without breaking physics.
But not subjectivity that wouldn’t be fully objective at the same time.
Subjectivity that is not also objectivity is what I meant by fundamental subjectivity.