“I don’t see what problems reductionism poses for qualia.”
“I’ve never gotten this either.”
I think I may write a sequence about this. I’ve noticed that there are a lot more LW posts trying to solve the Hard Problem (or insisting that it’s a pseudo-problem) than trying to explain what ‘Hard Problem’ means in the first place, or trying to state it precisely.
Thus I see a lot of people insisting that the Hard Problem either isn’t a problem, or isn’t hard, without investing any time into steel-manning (or even reading) the Other Side. Eliezer, actually, is one of the few LWers I’ve seen who generally grants that it’s both hard and a problem.
A sequence that spent more time trying to figure out what the problem is, and what methodology is appropriate for such a strange topic, might also be more domain-generally useful than one that leaps straight into picking the best solutions (or mocking the worst),
There are apparently some people who have a strong intuition that they can’t be explained in such a fashion, but I do not share this intuition.
Do you understand exactly why they have the intuition, and what their intuition amounts to?
It seems to me that attempting to eliminate qualia is a repeat of the comedy of behaviorism. “All these mystical people claim that qualia can’t be explained by physics, so I’ll say qualia don’t exist at all! That’ll show ’em!”
That may be true for eliminativists who are behaviorists, like perhaps Dennett. But it’s not true for eliminativists who acknowledge that introspective evidence is admissible evidence, and just deny that the evidence for qualia outweighs the evidence for the conjunction ‘physicalism is true, and phenomenal reductionism is false’.
If you can’t regenerate the reasons people disagree with you—if you’re still at the stage where the opposing side purely sounds like a silly caricature, with no coherent supporting arguments—then you should have low confidence that you know their positions’ strong and weak points.
I think I may write a sequence about this. I’ve noticed that there are a lot more LW posts trying to solve the Hard Problem (or insisting that it’s a pseudo-problem) than trying to explain what ‘Hard Problem’ means in the first place, or trying to state it precisely.
Thus I see a lot of people insisting that the Hard Problem either isn’t a problem, or isn’t hard, without investing any time into steel-manning (or even reading) the Other Side. Eliezer, actually, is one of the few LWers I’ve seen who generally grants that it’s both hard and a problem.
A sequence that spent more time trying to figure out what the problem is, and what methodology is appropriate for such a strange topic, might also be more domain-generally useful than one that leaps straight into picking the best solutions (or mocking the worst),
Do you understand exactly why they have the intuition, and what their intuition amounts to?
That may be true for eliminativists who are behaviorists, like perhaps Dennett. But it’s not true for eliminativists who acknowledge that introspective evidence is admissible evidence, and just deny that the evidence for qualia outweighs the evidence for the conjunction ‘physicalism is true, and phenomenal reductionism is false’.
If you can’t regenerate the reasons people disagree with you—if you’re still at the stage where the opposing side purely sounds like a silly caricature, with no coherent supporting arguments—then you should have low confidence that you know their positions’ strong and weak points.