Qualia are neither a barrier (“sense data”) to knowledge of the physical world, nor are they illusory. Rather, qualia are a constant concomitant to perception of the physical world. The best hypotheses to explain our experience involve positing both qualia and the rocks, trees, and animals that the “sense-data” of certain philosophers would screen off.
Try this experiment. Set an apple on the table and look at it. Now approach closer and keep looking at it.
Your experience changes during this experiment. However, the apple doesn’t seem to change, the table doesn’t seem to change, etc. Your experience involves more redness, but the apple hasn’t gotten any redder, nor seemed to. Some of our experience amounts to cognition or alleged cognition of the external world—the apple is red, it is sitting on the table, etc. But some does not—it is just an internal aspect of the way we sense the world. Philosophers call the latter “qualia”.
Drugs or sleep deprivation or psychosis may cause someone to hallucinate an apple. If they have enough relevant history, they may correctly doubt that the apparent apple really exists. But they won’t doubt that they are having an experience. What does that experience involve? Qualia, but no external object. If the hallucinator says “I hope the apple is real, because I’m hungry” the word “apple” in that sentence does not refer to the qualia. (Nor does “the apple” said by someone having a veridical experience.) It does not refer at all.
Armchair philosophy cannot reveal the full and exact reference of terms, “qualia” included. Understanding the reference of terms requires doing science. The exact reference of many (any?) terms doesn’t exist, due to semantic vagueness. There is no exact number of hairs you need in order not to be bald. There may likewise be no exact cutoff in evolution between sentient and nonsentient organisms. But the existence of dusk and dawn doesn’t stop the difference between night and day being like, well, the difference between night and day.
Some of our experience amounts to cognition or alleged cognition of the external world—the apple is red, it is sitting on the table, etc. But some does not—it is just an internal aspect of the way we sense the world. Philosophers call the latter “qualia”.
You’re the victim of the basic cognitive fallacy called substitution (Kahneman). In place of the difficult problem (the existence of raw experience), you substitute the easy problem of our ability to recognize our own internal states. Philosophers have distinguished the two problems, and have even dubbed them the hard and easy problem of consciousness. While I deny the problem is very hard (except perhaps emotionally, if you’re religiously committed to raw experience as your essence), it remains true that you have substituted the easy problem for the hard. In short, that’s not what “philosophers have called qualia.”
Armchair philosophy cannot reveal the full and exact reference of terms, “qualia” included. Understanding the reference of terms requires doing science.
This must be a revisionist version of Yudkowskyism. Somewhere Eliezer points out that science is merely an institution that proves things so rigorously that every moron must accept it. He points out (in an essay I can’t locate—help would be appreciated) that the Greeks already saw the impossibility of actual infinities.
In short, that’s not what “philosophers have called qualia.”
That would have a chance to be convincing if you stated an alternative account of what philosophers have called qualia. Saying “raw experience” leaves everything open, including the possibility that some internal aspects of the way we sense the world are raw experience.
As for science, if it makes you happy—or if it doesn’t—I wish to revise my statement: understanding the reference of terms as well as possible requires doing empirical work. (Science is just the best way of doing that, not the only one.) That doesn’t commit us to infinities, just to a non-vicious circularity, of the Neurath’s Boat variety.
I can’t compare my views on semantics to Yudkowsky’s, because I doubt I read all the relevant sequence posts.
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.
Qualia are neither a barrier (“sense data”) to knowledge of the physical world, nor are they illusory. Rather, qualia are a constant concomitant to perception of the physical world. The best hypotheses to explain our experience involve positing both qualia and the rocks, trees, and animals that the “sense-data” of certain philosophers would screen off.
Try this experiment. Set an apple on the table and look at it. Now approach closer and keep looking at it.
Your experience changes during this experiment. However, the apple doesn’t seem to change, the table doesn’t seem to change, etc. Your experience involves more redness, but the apple hasn’t gotten any redder, nor seemed to. Some of our experience amounts to cognition or alleged cognition of the external world—the apple is red, it is sitting on the table, etc. But some does not—it is just an internal aspect of the way we sense the world. Philosophers call the latter “qualia”.
Drugs or sleep deprivation or psychosis may cause someone to hallucinate an apple. If they have enough relevant history, they may correctly doubt that the apparent apple really exists. But they won’t doubt that they are having an experience. What does that experience involve? Qualia, but no external object. If the hallucinator says “I hope the apple is real, because I’m hungry” the word “apple” in that sentence does not refer to the qualia. (Nor does “the apple” said by someone having a veridical experience.) It does not refer at all.
Armchair philosophy cannot reveal the full and exact reference of terms, “qualia” included. Understanding the reference of terms requires doing science. The exact reference of many (any?) terms doesn’t exist, due to semantic vagueness. There is no exact number of hairs you need in order not to be bald. There may likewise be no exact cutoff in evolution between sentient and nonsentient organisms. But the existence of dusk and dawn doesn’t stop the difference between night and day being like, well, the difference between night and day.
You’re the victim of the basic cognitive fallacy called substitution (Kahneman). In place of the difficult problem (the existence of raw experience), you substitute the easy problem of our ability to recognize our own internal states. Philosophers have distinguished the two problems, and have even dubbed them the hard and easy problem of consciousness. While I deny the problem is very hard (except perhaps emotionally, if you’re religiously committed to raw experience as your essence), it remains true that you have substituted the easy problem for the hard. In short, that’s not what “philosophers have called qualia.”
This must be a revisionist version of Yudkowskyism. Somewhere Eliezer points out that science is merely an institution that proves things so rigorously that every moron must accept it. He points out (in an essay I can’t locate—help would be appreciated) that the Greeks already saw the impossibility of actual infinities.
That would have a chance to be convincing if you stated an alternative account of what philosophers have called qualia. Saying “raw experience” leaves everything open, including the possibility that some internal aspects of the way we sense the world are raw experience.
As for science, if it makes you happy—or if it doesn’t—I wish to revise my statement: understanding the reference of terms as well as possible requires doing empirical work. (Science is just the best way of doing that, not the only one.) That doesn’t commit us to infinities, just to a non-vicious circularity, of the Neurath’s Boat variety.
I can’t compare my views on semantics to Yudkowsky’s, because I doubt I read all the relevant sequence posts.
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.
Thanks for the clarity.