That doesn’t commit us to infinities, just to a non-vicious circularity, of the Neurath’s Boat variety.
Not my point. I’m saying whether actual infinities exist physically does not appear to be empirical (or else is resolved by empirical evidence we already have), and there are good rational grounds—endorsed by Yudkowsky, if I’m not mistaken—for rejecting actual infinities, grounds that already existed for the classical Greeks, who rejected the concept . The comparison was between the contention that qualia don’t exist and the contention that absolute infinities don’t exist: speculative but rationally grounded.
I wish to revise my statement: understanding the reference of terms as well as possible requires doing empirical work.
It requires empirical evidence, but that’s not to say we don’t have it, absent experiments. But here, we’re not really talking about the reference of concepts but whether the concepts could even have referents—because of conceptual incoherence.
That would have a chance to be convincing if you stated an alternative account of what philosophers have called qualia.
Philosophers don’t have an account of qualia, but philosophers of mind do have a consensus about what qualia are not, which is what you said qualia are. So, you haven’t correctly defined what “philosophers call qualia”; you’ve defined the topic of the “easy question of consciousness.”
The motivation of the lead essay is to give a (novel) account of the illusion of qualia; it’s in red. But if you’re saying you don’t know what I’m talking about when I refer to raw experience, then either you’re “lying” or I’m wrong, as I do in fact rely on your ability to understand me when I speak of raw experience—at least after reading the philosophers of mind, who mainly accept a concept of qualia distinct from the “easy question” you address. These philosophers work hard at pumping your intuitions to be sure you grasp the concept in question. Shoemaker’s inverted-spectrum thought experiments are particularly useful. You can probably guess what’s involved; and if so, you really do understand the concept of qualia and how the “hard question” is distinct from the “easy question.”
Saying “raw experience” leaves everything open, including the possibility that some internal aspects of the way we sense the world are raw experience.
What it leaves open is the subject of this discussion. To have the discussion, we must agree in our basic intuitions about qualitative experience. I’m actually not sure whether you’re saying we disagree on our intuitive understanding of the concept of “raw experience,” but given that understanding, we can then talk about whether it makes sense to say that unknown neural processes might constitute raw experience. Let’s take it more modestly: which account of raw experience, neural underpinnings or illusion (as described in the red in the main article), best explains the intuition.
The advantages of the illusion account are:
We are spared finding explanation for a fact that would be so ill-suited to the reigning scientific ontology that nobody who has understood the problem claims to have any idea what kind of theory might explain this fact;
We have a solution to the long-standing problem of why there’s no private language. (Wittgenstein saw that there could not be, but didn’t intelligibly explain why.) There’s no private language because what we always assume a private language would have to be anchored to—qualitative experience—doesn’t exist.
We are delivered from the dominant form of epistemological skepticism—that based on sensationalism.
Now, what is gained conceptually by accepting raw experience as an empirical reality that can be nailed down neurologically.
Only the implausibility that a single belief held very strongly is false—which is to say, we gain hardly anything.
It’s more sensible to conclude that we have a single very wrong belief.
If I understand the analogy to Greek arguments against actual infinities, you are claiming that the concept of “qualia” contains a contradiction. The claim in red:
independently real experiences characterizable only by the terms used to describe the external object itself
could generate a contradiction, I suppose, if we add the plausible premise that qualia are known to us. Then we have unthinkable facts we claim to know.
But that puts a lot of pressure on the claim in red, as a supposed interpretation of philosopher-talk about qualia. Especially when I’ve just outlined a case, the apple-table experiment, in which qualia are not characterizable only by terms used to decribe the apple. Rather, they are ostended also by terms used to decribe the relation between the person and the apple.
David Chalmers describes one of the easy problems of consciousness as:
the ability of a system to access its own internal states
But this is not equivalent to my account. Rather, my account goes on to state that the internal states need not correlate perfectly to the external objects. Thus, in Shoemaker’s inverted spectrum, my internal state when perceiving a Fuji apple might be type-identical to your internal state when perceiving a Granny Smith apple, and not identical to your state when perceiving a Fuji. This is a mere conceptual possibility, but there are imaginable ways that neurology might turn out that would confirm or deny that possibility. For a made-up example, it might be that the visual cortex uses high- to low-frequency wave patterns to encode the visual spectrum, but some people have red on the high-frequency neural-wave end and others on the low-frequency end. In that case, a person might undergo surgery to remap the retina-to-cortex pathways, and experience spectrum inversion for themselves.
As for the supposed advantages of the illusion account, private language absence has other candidate explanations. And there are plenty of alternatives to epistemological sensationalism; we don’t need rescue from it. As for scientific ontology, identifying qualia with types of brain activity is well within those bounds. Note that on this view, the “hard” problems are mostly illusory, even though qualia are not.
In particular, the view Chalmers calls “type B materialism” predicts the very “explanatory gap” that Chalmers tries to use to ground a nonphysical account of consciousness. The reason an “explanatory gap” appears is simply that it is one thing to be in the brain state of imagining, say, redness. It is quite another brain state to think about brain activity that goes on when we imagine redness, or to observe a brain in an fMRI where the subject is viewing red things. Because thinking about brains never puts us in the same state as does imagining redness, it can seem that there is a disconnect. The thinker will never find the image of redness floating into mental view just on account of thinking about synapses and networks. Philosophers who insist on that sort of “explanation” will be dissatisfied. My account of qualia explains why these philosophers are dissatisfied. Thus it helps to explain, without speculative evolutionary theory, why many philosophers (and regular folks in philosophical moods) are drawn to metaphysical adventurism about the mind.
Not my point. I’m saying whether actual infinities exist physically does not appear to be empirical (or else is resolved by empirical evidence we already have), and there are good rational grounds—endorsed by Yudkowsky, if I’m not mistaken—for rejecting actual infinities, grounds that already existed for the classical Greeks, who rejected the concept . The comparison was between the contention that qualia don’t exist and the contention that absolute infinities don’t exist: speculative but rationally grounded.
It requires empirical evidence, but that’s not to say we don’t have it, absent experiments. But here, we’re not really talking about the reference of concepts but whether the concepts could even have referents—because of conceptual incoherence.
Philosophers don’t have an account of qualia, but philosophers of mind do have a consensus about what qualia are not, which is what you said qualia are. So, you haven’t correctly defined what “philosophers call qualia”; you’ve defined the topic of the “easy question of consciousness.”
The motivation of the lead essay is to give a (novel) account of the illusion of qualia; it’s in red. But if you’re saying you don’t know what I’m talking about when I refer to raw experience, then either you’re “lying” or I’m wrong, as I do in fact rely on your ability to understand me when I speak of raw experience—at least after reading the philosophers of mind, who mainly accept a concept of qualia distinct from the “easy question” you address. These philosophers work hard at pumping your intuitions to be sure you grasp the concept in question. Shoemaker’s inverted-spectrum thought experiments are particularly useful. You can probably guess what’s involved; and if so, you really do understand the concept of qualia and how the “hard question” is distinct from the “easy question.”
What it leaves open is the subject of this discussion. To have the discussion, we must agree in our basic intuitions about qualitative experience. I’m actually not sure whether you’re saying we disagree on our intuitive understanding of the concept of “raw experience,” but given that understanding, we can then talk about whether it makes sense to say that unknown neural processes might constitute raw experience. Let’s take it more modestly: which account of raw experience, neural underpinnings or illusion (as described in the red in the main article), best explains the intuition.
The advantages of the illusion account are:
We are spared finding explanation for a fact that would be so ill-suited to the reigning scientific ontology that nobody who has understood the problem claims to have any idea what kind of theory might explain this fact;
We have a solution to the long-standing problem of why there’s no private language. (Wittgenstein saw that there could not be, but didn’t intelligibly explain why.) There’s no private language because what we always assume a private language would have to be anchored to—qualitative experience—doesn’t exist.
We are delivered from the dominant form of epistemological skepticism—that based on sensationalism.
Now, what is gained conceptually by accepting raw experience as an empirical reality that can be nailed down neurologically.
Only the implausibility that a single belief held very strongly is false—which is to say, we gain hardly anything.
It’s more sensible to conclude that we have a single very wrong belief.
Updated with last section 11:09 PM. August 7
If I understand the analogy to Greek arguments against actual infinities, you are claiming that the concept of “qualia” contains a contradiction. The claim in red:
could generate a contradiction, I suppose, if we add the plausible premise that qualia are known to us. Then we have unthinkable facts we claim to know.
But that puts a lot of pressure on the claim in red, as a supposed interpretation of philosopher-talk about qualia. Especially when I’ve just outlined a case, the apple-table experiment, in which qualia are not characterizable only by terms used to decribe the apple. Rather, they are ostended also by terms used to decribe the relation between the person and the apple.
David Chalmers describes one of the easy problems of consciousness as:
But this is not equivalent to my account. Rather, my account goes on to state that the internal states need not correlate perfectly to the external objects. Thus, in Shoemaker’s inverted spectrum, my internal state when perceiving a Fuji apple might be type-identical to your internal state when perceiving a Granny Smith apple, and not identical to your state when perceiving a Fuji. This is a mere conceptual possibility, but there are imaginable ways that neurology might turn out that would confirm or deny that possibility. For a made-up example, it might be that the visual cortex uses high- to low-frequency wave patterns to encode the visual spectrum, but some people have red on the high-frequency neural-wave end and others on the low-frequency end. In that case, a person might undergo surgery to remap the retina-to-cortex pathways, and experience spectrum inversion for themselves.
As for the supposed advantages of the illusion account, private language absence has other candidate explanations. And there are plenty of alternatives to epistemological sensationalism; we don’t need rescue from it. As for scientific ontology, identifying qualia with types of brain activity is well within those bounds. Note that on this view, the “hard” problems are mostly illusory, even though qualia are not.
In particular, the view Chalmers calls “type B materialism” predicts the very “explanatory gap” that Chalmers tries to use to ground a nonphysical account of consciousness. The reason an “explanatory gap” appears is simply that it is one thing to be in the brain state of imagining, say, redness. It is quite another brain state to think about brain activity that goes on when we imagine redness, or to observe a brain in an fMRI where the subject is viewing red things. Because thinking about brains never puts us in the same state as does imagining redness, it can seem that there is a disconnect. The thinker will never find the image of redness floating into mental view just on account of thinking about synapses and networks. Philosophers who insist on that sort of “explanation” will be dissatisfied. My account of qualia explains why these philosophers are dissatisfied. Thus it helps to explain, without speculative evolutionary theory, why many philosophers (and regular folks in philosophical moods) are drawn to metaphysical adventurism about the mind.