Peter, your question doesn’t seem to be the right one for illustrating your concern. The qualitative experience of color isn’t necessary for explaining how someone can partition colored balls. Ignoring the qualitative experience, these people are going through some process of detecting differences in the reflective properties of the balls (which they subjectively experience as having different colors). We could create a reductive explanation of how the eye detects reflected light, how the brain categorizes reflective intensities into concepts like “bright” “dark” and how the body’s mechanics enable picking up and dropping balls. A machine with no apparent subjective experience could sort the balls. However the question of qualitative experience in humans would remain.
We could say “where there is perception, deduce qualitative experience” but this doesn’t explain anything. It might help us frame experiments to test for the existence of qualitative experience, but one element of Chalmer’s argument is that no such objectively verifiable experiment can be created. It’s also hard to come to terms with the idea that our ball sorting robot might be having qualitative experience.
If we are discarding solipsism from our epistemology, on what basis do we do so and is that basis philosophically applicable to discarding the idea that that my qualitative experience might be fundamentally different from someone else’s? Just because I can conceive of a world in which what I experience as red is in fact experienced by someone else with no neural/optical flaws as what I would call yellow doesn’t make that world logical. I would assume that if the object and lighting conditions are the same and our neural and optical machinery was in good order that we would both experience the same thing that it is to experience red when looking at a red object. To conceive otherwise would be baseless (purely metaphysical with no implications for reality).
Peter, your question doesn’t seem to be the right one for illustrating your concern. The qualitative experience of color isn’t necessary for explaining how someone can partition colored balls. Ignoring the qualitative experience, these people are going through some process of detecting differences in the reflective properties of the balls (which they subjectively experience as having different colors). We could create a reductive explanation of how the eye detects reflected light, how the brain categorizes reflective intensities into concepts like “bright” “dark” and how the body’s mechanics enable picking up and dropping balls. A machine with no apparent subjective experience could sort the balls. However the question of qualitative experience in humans would remain.
We could say “where there is perception, deduce qualitative experience” but this doesn’t explain anything. It might help us frame experiments to test for the existence of qualitative experience, but one element of Chalmer’s argument is that no such objectively verifiable experiment can be created. It’s also hard to come to terms with the idea that our ball sorting robot might be having qualitative experience.
If we are discarding solipsism from our epistemology, on what basis do we do so and is that basis philosophically applicable to discarding the idea that that my qualitative experience might be fundamentally different from someone else’s? Just because I can conceive of a world in which what I experience as red is in fact experienced by someone else with no neural/optical flaws as what I would call yellow doesn’t make that world logical. I would assume that if the object and lighting conditions are the same and our neural and optical machinery was in good order that we would both experience the same thing that it is to experience red when looking at a red object. To conceive otherwise would be baseless (purely metaphysical with no implications for reality).