Qualia are the specific qualitative properties of our experience, as accessed by first-person introspection. The raw redness of the red you notice in your field of vision, for instance, as contrasted with the functional state of visually detecting light of wavelength 620–740 nm that an alien building a cognitive model of your behavior might initially construct. (Which is not to say that those two properties are non-identical. But if the two are identical, this must be discovered, not just stipulated.)
There are several popular arguments for the irreducibility of qualia (and, more generally, against the reliability of introspection as a method for directly reading off part of our world’s ontology), which has made them controversial posits.
In a conversation about mindstuff, what Eliezer calls ‘Reductionism’ is what I’d call ‘physicalism’ — the doctrine that the mental (unlike physicsy stuff) is non-fundamental, that it can in principle be fully explained in non-mental terms. The ‘reductionism’ I think about (which I’ll distinguish by making it minuscule) is the more specific doctrine that mental stuff — in this case, phenomenal properties, qualia — exists and is reducible. So a physicalist has to either eliminate or reduce every mental posit.
Eliminativists might insist that we reject qualia because the evidence for them is strictly first-person and introspective (phenomenological) rather than sensory and in-the-world (scientific). Or an eliminativist might think that we have strong prior grounds for accepting physicalism, but that reductionism is a doomed project, say, because of the Mary’s Room argument.
first-person and introspective (phenomenological) rather than sensory and in-the-world (scientific)
...what exactly is the difference between these two things? Observation, evidence, etc… are qualia.
qualia — exists and is reducible
If you are saying that problem of qualia is in the realm of neuroscience, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Neuroscience might make some things more obvious—as it has done with free will—but the answer has been available to us all along. We need not look at an actual brain...we don’t even need to look at an actual universe. These sorts of answers hold true no matter what sort of universe you are in, so the word “exists” is inappropriate—you wouldn’t say that Bayes theorem “exists”, would you?
Qualia (or property Q) is the property that makes things Real in the first place. Qualia is the property that separates the actual universe from the range of all possible universes. All of science and epistemic rationality is an attempt to create models that describe qualia.
Introspection is a perception-like, reflective ‘inner sense’. It’s modeling your mental states as mental states, by a relatively non-inferential process. Sensory perception is vision, taste, etc.
Qualia (or property Q) is the property that makes things Real in the first place. Qualia is the property that separates the actual universe from the range of all possible universes.
But there are parts of the universe no one is experiencing. What does it mean to say that there are qualia (properties of experience) there, if there aren’t any subjects of experience to be found?
Don’t all properties distinguish actual universes from non-actual ones? If something isn’t actually a bowling ball, then it isn’t a bowling ball. I don’t see what work qualia is doing here, or what problem it’s solving.
Introspection is a perception-like, reflective ‘inner sense’. It’s modeling your mental states as mental states, by a relatively non-inferential process. Sensory perception is vision, taste, etc.
Yeah, that’s what the words mean, but really, what’s the difference between the two? There’s no sharp distinction between sensory and introspective perception.
1) Well firstly, qualia are only for you, not for others—I’m pseudo-solopsist that way. But to answer the question: qualia are the Known parts of Reality, and everything else is the Unknown. You can guess at the Unknown using Bayes theorem, and stuff.
2) Maybe? He’s being a bit long winded and I’m having trouble ascertaining the main point without spending too much time.
only one term of the correlation, namely, the sensible term, is ever found: the other term seems essentially incapable of being found.
Yes, this is what I mean by qualia being knowns and everything else being unknowns
Physics exhibits sense-data as functions of physical objects, but verification is only possible if physical objects can be exhibited as functions of sense-data.
I’m not sure where he is going with that one as there are many possible interpretations as to what he means. I do think that models are only candidates for being True if they output the correct qualia—and all such models that fit this criteria are then ranked from lowest to highest complexity.
3) No. The counterfactual universe y=3x+7 has properties: the slope is 3, it contains the point (0, 7) and so on. But our reality is not merely “y=3x+7”. You know this because you are experiencing things that are decidedly not in the universe “y=3x+7″. In the same vein, the counterfactual universe where the sky is green is not real either, and you know this for the same reason.
If your qualia consisted of [(-1, 4), (0, 7), (1, 10)] and so on, with a new point appearing every second, you might consider “y=3x+7 with x=x+1 every second” as a practical model for your universe (although not a complete model—you still need to explain the existence of your thoughts). But that’s not our observation...hence, that’s not a candidate model of what our universe looks like.
To put it in different terms: the thing that distinguishes reality from theoretical alternatives is observation.
Qualia are the specific qualitative properties of our experience, as accessed by first-person introspection. The raw redness of the red you notice in your field of vision, for instance, as contrasted with the functional state of visually detecting light of wavelength 620–740 nm that an alien building a cognitive model of your behavior might initially construct. (Which is not to say that those two properties are non-identical. But if the two are identical, this must be discovered, not just stipulated.)
There are several popular arguments for the irreducibility of qualia (and, more generally, against the reliability of introspection as a method for directly reading off part of our world’s ontology), which has made them controversial posits.
In a conversation about mindstuff, what Eliezer calls ‘Reductionism’ is what I’d call ‘physicalism’ — the doctrine that the mental (unlike physicsy stuff) is non-fundamental, that it can in principle be fully explained in non-mental terms. The ‘reductionism’ I think about (which I’ll distinguish by making it minuscule) is the more specific doctrine that mental stuff — in this case, phenomenal properties, qualia — exists and is reducible. So a physicalist has to either eliminate or reduce every mental posit.
Eliminativists might insist that we reject qualia because the evidence for them is strictly first-person and introspective (phenomenological) rather than sensory and in-the-world (scientific). Or an eliminativist might think that we have strong prior grounds for accepting physicalism, but that reductionism is a doomed project, say, because of the Mary’s Room argument.
...what exactly is the difference between these two things? Observation, evidence, etc… are qualia.
If you are saying that problem of qualia is in the realm of neuroscience, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Neuroscience might make some things more obvious—as it has done with free will—but the answer has been available to us all along. We need not look at an actual brain...we don’t even need to look at an actual universe. These sorts of answers hold true no matter what sort of universe you are in, so the word “exists” is inappropriate—you wouldn’t say that Bayes theorem “exists”, would you?
Qualia (or property Q) is the property that makes things Real in the first place. Qualia is the property that separates the actual universe from the range of all possible universes. All of science and epistemic rationality is an attempt to create models that describe qualia.
Introspection is a perception-like, reflective ‘inner sense’. It’s modeling your mental states as mental states, by a relatively non-inferential process. Sensory perception is vision, taste, etc.
But there are parts of the universe no one is experiencing. What does it mean to say that there are qualia (properties of experience) there, if there aren’t any subjects of experience to be found?
Do you have in mind something like Russell’s The relation of sense-data to physics?
Don’t all properties distinguish actual universes from non-actual ones? If something isn’t actually a bowling ball, then it isn’t a bowling ball. I don’t see what work qualia is doing here, or what problem it’s solving.
Yeah, that’s what the words mean, but really, what’s the difference between the two? There’s no sharp distinction between sensory and introspective perception.
1) Well firstly, qualia are only for you, not for others—I’m pseudo-solopsist that way. But to answer the question: qualia are the Known parts of Reality, and everything else is the Unknown. You can guess at the Unknown using Bayes theorem, and stuff.
2) Maybe? He’s being a bit long winded and I’m having trouble ascertaining the main point without spending too much time.
Yes, this is what I mean by qualia being knowns and everything else being unknowns
I’m not sure where he is going with that one as there are many possible interpretations as to what he means. I do think that models are only candidates for being True if they output the correct qualia—and all such models that fit this criteria are then ranked from lowest to highest complexity.
3) No. The counterfactual universe y=3x+7 has properties: the slope is 3, it contains the point (0, 7) and so on. But our reality is not merely “y=3x+7”. You know this because you are experiencing things that are decidedly not in the universe “y=3x+7″. In the same vein, the counterfactual universe where the sky is green is not real either, and you know this for the same reason.
If your qualia consisted of [(-1, 4), (0, 7), (1, 10)] and so on, with a new point appearing every second, you might consider “y=3x+7 with x=x+1 every second” as a practical model for your universe (although not a complete model—you still need to explain the existence of your thoughts). But that’s not our observation...hence, that’s not a candidate model of what our universe looks like.
To put it in different terms: the thing that distinguishes reality from theoretical alternatives is observation.
I agree with most of this, although I am not sure that the way strawberries taste to me is a posit.