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.
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.