This is an interesting demonstration of what’s possible in philosophy, and maybe I’ll want to engage in detail with it at some point. But for now I’ll just say, I see no need to be an eliminativist or to consider eliminativism, any more than I feel a need to consider “air eliminativism”, the theory that there is no air, or any other eliminativism aimed at something that obviously exists.
Interest in eliminativism arises entirely from the belief that the world is made of nothing but physics, and that physics doesn’t contain qualia, intentionality, consciousness, selves, and so forth. Current physical theory certainly contains no such things. But did you ever try making a theory that contains them?
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. You’re absolutely right that denying the existence of air would be absurd. Air is empirically detectable, causally active, and its absence has measurable effects. But that’s precisely what makes it different from qualia.
Eliminative Nominalism is not the claim whether “x or y exists,” but a critique of how and why we come to believe that something exists at all. It’s not merely a reaction to physicalism; it’s a deeper examination of the formal constraints on any system that attempts to represent or model itself.
If you follow the argument to its root, it suggests that “existence” itself may be a category error—not because nothing is real, but because our minds are evolutionarily wired to frame things in terms of existence and agency. We treat things as discrete, persistent entities because our cognitive architecture is optimized for survival, not for ontological precision.
In other words, we believe in “things” because our brains are very keen on not dying.
So it’s not that qualia are “less real” than air. It’s that air belongs to a class of empirically resolvable phenomena, while qualia belong to a class of internally generated, structurally unverifiable assertions—necessary for our self-models, but not grounded in any formal or observable system.
“existence” itself may be a category error—not because nothing is real
If something is real, then something exists, yes? Or is there a difference between “existing” and “being real”?
Do you take any particular attitude towards what is real? For example, you might believe that something exists, but you might be fundamentally agnostic about the details of what exists. Or you might claim that the real is ineffable or a continuum, and so any existence claim about individual things is necessarily wrong.
qualia … necessary for our self-models, but not grounded in any formal or observable system
See, from my perspective, qualia are the empirical. I would consider the opposite view to be “direct realism”—experience consists of direct awareness of an external world. That would mean e.g. that when someone dreams or hallucinates, the perceived object is actually there.
What qualic realism and direct realism have in common, is that they also assume the reality of awareness, a conscious subject aware of phenomenal objects. I assume your own philosophy denies this as well. There is no actual awareness, there are only material systems evolved to behave as if they are aware and as if there are such things as qualia.
It is curious that the eliminativist scenario can be elaborated that far. Nonetheless, I really do know that something exists and that “I”, whatever I may be, am aware of it; whether or not I am capable of convincing you of this. And my own assumption is that you too are actually aware, but have somehow arrived at a philosophy which denies it.
Descartes’s cogito is the famous expression of this, but I actually think a formulation due to Ayn Rand is superior. We know that consciousness exists, just as surely as we know that existence exists; and furthermore, to be is to be something (“existence is identity”), to be aware is to know something (“consciousness is identification”).
What we actually know by virtue of existing and being conscious, probably goes considerably beyond even that; but negating either of those already means that you’re drifting away from reality.
I think you really should read or listen to the text.
”It is curious that the eliminativist scenario can be elaborated that far. Nonetheless, I really do know that something exists and that “I”, whatever I may be, am aware of it; whether or not I am capable of convincing you of this. And my own assumption is that you too are actually aware, but have somehow arrived at a philosophy which denies it.”
Yes! That is exactly the point. EN predicts that you will say that, and says, this is a “problem of second order logic”. Basically behavior justifies qualia, and qualia justifies behavior. We know however that first order logic is more fundamental.
I myself feel qualia just as you do, and I am not convinced by my own theory from an intuitive perspective, but from a rational perspective, it must be otherwise what I feel. That is the essence of being a g-Zombie.
During the next few days, I do not have time to study exactly how you manage to tie together second-order logic, the symbol grounding problem, and qualia as Gödel sentences (or whatever that connection is). I am reminded of Hofstadter’s theory that consciousness has something to do with indirect self-reference in formal systems, so maybe you’re a kind of Hofstadterian eliminativist.
However, in response to this --
EN predicts that you will say that
-- I can tell you how a believer in the reality of intentional states, would go about explaining you and EN. The first step is to understand what the key propositions of EN are, the next step is to hypothesize about the cognitive process whereby the propositions of EN arose from more commonplace propositions, the final step is to conceive of that cognitive process in an intentional-realist way, i.e. as a series of thoughts that occurred in a mind, rather than just as a series of representational states in a brain.
You mention Penrose. Penrose had the idea that the human mind can reason about the semantics of higher-order logic because brain dynamics is governed by highly noncomputable physics (highly noncomputable in the sense of Turing degrees, I guess). It’s a very imaginative idea, and it’s intriguing that quantum gravity may actually contain a highly noncomputable component (because of the undecidability of many properties of 4-manifolds, that may appear in the gravitational path integral).
Nonetheless, it seems an avoidable hypothesis. A thinking system can derive the truth of Gödel sentences, so long as it can reason about the semantics of the initial axioms, so all you need is a capacity for semantic reflection (I believe Feferman has a formal theory of this under the name “logical reflection”). Penrose doesn’t address this because he doesn’t even tackle the question of how anything physical has intentionality, he sticks purely to mathematics, physics, and logic.
My approach to this is Husserlian realism about the mind. You don’t start with mindless matter and hope to see how mental ontology is implicit in it or emerges from it. You start with the phenomenological datum that the mind is real, and you build on that. At some point, you may wish to model mental dynamics purely as a state machine, neglecting semantics and qualia; and then you can look for relationships between that state machine, and the state machines that physics and biology tell you about.
But you should never forget the distinctive ontology of the mental, that supplies the actual “substance” of that mental state machine. You’re free to consider panpsychism and other identity theories, interactionism, even pure metaphysical idealism; but total eliminativism contradicts the most elementary facts we know, as Descartes and Rand could testify. Even you say that you feel the qualia, it’s just that you think “from a rational perspective, it must be otherwise”.
I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to engage meaningfully on this topic. You’ve brought up some important points:
“I do not have time” — Completely understandable. ”Symbol grounding” — This is inherently tied to the central issue we’re discussing. ”Qualia as Gödel sentences” — An important distinction here: it’s not that qualia are Gödel sentences, but rather, the absence of qualia functions analogously to a Gödel sentence — paradoxically. Consider this line of reasoning.
This paradox highlights the self-referential inconsistency — invoking Gödel’s incompleteness theorems:
To highlight expressivity: A. Lisa is a P-Zombie. B. Lisa asserts that she is a P-Zombie. C. A true P-Zombie cannot assert or hold beliefs. D. Therefore, Lisa cannot assert that she is a P-Zombie.
Cases:
A. Lisa is a P-Zombie. B. Lisa asserts that she is a P-Zombie. C. Lisa would be complete: Not Possible
A. Lisa is not a P-Zombie. B. Lisa asserts that she is a P-Zombie. C. Lisa would be not complete: Possible but irrelevant.
A. Lisa is a P-Zombie. B. Lisa asserts that she is a not P-Zombie. C. Lisa would be not complete: Possible
A. Lisa is not a P-Zombie. B. Lisa asserts that she is a not P-Zombie. C. Lisa would be complete: Not Possible
In order for Lisa to be internally consistent yet incomplete, she must maintain that she is not a P-Zombie. But if she maintains that she is not a P-Zombie AND IS NOT A P-Zombie, Lisa would be complete. AHA! Thus impossible.
This connects to Turing’s use of Modus Tollens in the halting problem — a kind of logical self-reference that breaks the system from within.
Regarding Hofstadter: My use of Gödel’s ideas is strictly arithmetic and formal — not metaphorical or analogical, as Hofstadter often approaches them. So while interesting, his theory diverges significantly from what I’m proposing.
You mentioned:
“I can tell you how a ‘believer’...” — Exactly. That’s the point. “Believer”
“You mention Penrose.” — Yes. Penrose is consequential. Though I believe his argument is flawed. His reasoning hinges on accepting qualia as a given. If he somehow manages to validate that assumption by proving second order logic in the quantum realm, I’ll tip my hat — but my framework challenges that very basis.
You said:
“My approach is Husserlian realism about the mind — you don’t start with mindless matter and hope...” — Right, but I’d like to clarify: this critique applies more to Eliminative Materialism than to Eliminative Nominalism. In EN, ‘matter’ itself is a symbol — not a foundational substance. So the problem isn’t starting with “mindless matter” — it’s assuming that “matter” has ontological priority at all. And finally, on the notion of substance — I’m not relying on that strawman. My position isn’t based on classical substance dualism
This is an interesting demonstration of what’s possible in philosophy, and maybe I’ll want to engage in detail with it at some point. But for now I’ll just say, I see no need to be an eliminativist or to consider eliminativism, any more than I feel a need to consider “air eliminativism”, the theory that there is no air, or any other eliminativism aimed at something that obviously exists.
Interest in eliminativism arises entirely from the belief that the world is made of nothing but physics, and that physics doesn’t contain qualia, intentionality, consciousness, selves, and so forth. Current physical theory certainly contains no such things. But did you ever try making a theory that contains them?
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. You’re absolutely right that denying the existence of air would be absurd. Air is empirically detectable, causally active, and its absence has measurable effects. But that’s precisely what makes it different from qualia.
Eliminative Nominalism is not the claim whether “x or y exists,” but a critique of how and why we come to believe that something exists at all. It’s not merely a reaction to physicalism; it’s a deeper examination of the formal constraints on any system that attempts to represent or model itself.
If you follow the argument to its root, it suggests that “existence” itself may be a category error—not because nothing is real, but because our minds are evolutionarily wired to frame things in terms of existence and agency. We treat things as discrete, persistent entities because our cognitive architecture is optimized for survival, not for ontological precision.
In other words, we believe in “things” because our brains are very keen on not dying.
So it’s not that qualia are “less real” than air. It’s that air belongs to a class of empirically resolvable phenomena, while qualia belong to a class of internally generated, structurally unverifiable assertions—necessary for our self-models, but not grounded in any formal or observable system.
If something is real, then something exists, yes? Or is there a difference between “existing” and “being real”?
Do you take any particular attitude towards what is real? For example, you might believe that something exists, but you might be fundamentally agnostic about the details of what exists. Or you might claim that the real is ineffable or a continuum, and so any existence claim about individual things is necessarily wrong.
See, from my perspective, qualia are the empirical. I would consider the opposite view to be “direct realism”—experience consists of direct awareness of an external world. That would mean e.g. that when someone dreams or hallucinates, the perceived object is actually there.
What qualic realism and direct realism have in common, is that they also assume the reality of awareness, a conscious subject aware of phenomenal objects. I assume your own philosophy denies this as well. There is no actual awareness, there are only material systems evolved to behave as if they are aware and as if there are such things as qualia.
It is curious that the eliminativist scenario can be elaborated that far. Nonetheless, I really do know that something exists and that “I”, whatever I may be, am aware of it; whether or not I am capable of convincing you of this. And my own assumption is that you too are actually aware, but have somehow arrived at a philosophy which denies it.
Descartes’s cogito is the famous expression of this, but I actually think a formulation due to Ayn Rand is superior. We know that consciousness exists, just as surely as we know that existence exists; and furthermore, to be is to be something (“existence is identity”), to be aware is to know something (“consciousness is identification”).
What we actually know by virtue of existing and being conscious, probably goes considerably beyond even that; but negating either of those already means that you’re drifting away from reality.
I think you really should read or listen to the text.
”It is curious that the eliminativist scenario can be elaborated that far. Nonetheless, I really do know that something exists and that “I”, whatever I may be, am aware of it; whether or not I am capable of convincing you of this. And my own assumption is that you too are actually aware, but have somehow arrived at a philosophy which denies it.”
Yes! That is exactly the point. EN predicts that you will say that, and says, this is a “problem of second order logic”. Basically behavior justifies qualia, and qualia justifies behavior. We know however that first order logic is more fundamental.
I myself feel qualia just as you do, and I am not convinced by my own theory from an intuitive perspective, but from a rational perspective, it must be otherwise what I feel. That is the essence of being a g-Zombie.
Again, read the text.
During the next few days, I do not have time to study exactly how you manage to tie together second-order logic, the symbol grounding problem, and qualia as Gödel sentences (or whatever that connection is). I am reminded of Hofstadter’s theory that consciousness has something to do with indirect self-reference in formal systems, so maybe you’re a kind of Hofstadterian eliminativist.
However, in response to this --
-- I can tell you how a believer in the reality of intentional states, would go about explaining you and EN. The first step is to understand what the key propositions of EN are, the next step is to hypothesize about the cognitive process whereby the propositions of EN arose from more commonplace propositions, the final step is to conceive of that cognitive process in an intentional-realist way, i.e. as a series of thoughts that occurred in a mind, rather than just as a series of representational states in a brain.
You mention Penrose. Penrose had the idea that the human mind can reason about the semantics of higher-order logic because brain dynamics is governed by highly noncomputable physics (highly noncomputable in the sense of Turing degrees, I guess). It’s a very imaginative idea, and it’s intriguing that quantum gravity may actually contain a highly noncomputable component (because of the undecidability of many properties of 4-manifolds, that may appear in the gravitational path integral).
Nonetheless, it seems an avoidable hypothesis. A thinking system can derive the truth of Gödel sentences, so long as it can reason about the semantics of the initial axioms, so all you need is a capacity for semantic reflection (I believe Feferman has a formal theory of this under the name “logical reflection”). Penrose doesn’t address this because he doesn’t even tackle the question of how anything physical has intentionality, he sticks purely to mathematics, physics, and logic.
My approach to this is Husserlian realism about the mind. You don’t start with mindless matter and hope to see how mental ontology is implicit in it or emerges from it. You start with the phenomenological datum that the mind is real, and you build on that. At some point, you may wish to model mental dynamics purely as a state machine, neglecting semantics and qualia; and then you can look for relationships between that state machine, and the state machines that physics and biology tell you about.
But you should never forget the distinctive ontology of the mental, that supplies the actual “substance” of that mental state machine. You’re free to consider panpsychism and other identity theories, interactionism, even pure metaphysical idealism; but total eliminativism contradicts the most elementary facts we know, as Descartes and Rand could testify. Even you say that you feel the qualia, it’s just that you think “from a rational perspective, it must be otherwise”.
I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to engage meaningfully on this topic. You’ve brought up some important points:
“I do not have time” — Completely understandable.
”Symbol grounding” — This is inherently tied to the central issue we’re discussing.
”Qualia as Gödel sentences” — An important distinction here: it’s not that qualia are Gödel sentences, but rather, the absence of qualia functions analogously to a Gödel sentence — paradoxically.
Consider this line of reasoning.
This paradox highlights the self-referential inconsistency — invoking Gödel’s incompleteness theorems:
To highlight expressivity:
A. Lisa is a P-Zombie.
B. Lisa asserts that she is a P-Zombie.
C. A true P-Zombie cannot assert or hold beliefs.
D. Therefore, Lisa cannot assert that she is a P-Zombie.
Cases:
A. Lisa is a P-Zombie.
B. Lisa asserts that she is a P-Zombie.
C. Lisa would be complete: Not Possible
A. Lisa is not a P-Zombie.
B. Lisa asserts that she is a P-Zombie.
C. Lisa would be not complete: Possible but irrelevant.
A. Lisa is a P-Zombie.
B. Lisa asserts that she is a not P-Zombie.
C. Lisa would be not complete: Possible
A. Lisa is not a P-Zombie.
B. Lisa asserts that she is a not P-Zombie.
C. Lisa would be complete: Not Possible
In order for Lisa to be internally consistent yet incomplete, she must maintain that she is not a P-Zombie. But if she maintains that she is not a P-Zombie AND IS NOT A P-Zombie, Lisa would be complete. AHA! Thus impossible.
This connects to Turing’s use of Modus Tollens in the halting problem — a kind of logical self-reference that breaks the system from within.
Regarding Hofstadter: My use of Gödel’s ideas is strictly arithmetic and formal — not metaphorical or analogical, as Hofstadter often approaches them. So while interesting, his theory diverges significantly from what I’m proposing.
You mentioned:
“I can tell you how a ‘believer’...”
— Exactly. That’s the point. “Believer”
“You mention Penrose.”
— Yes. Penrose is consequential. Though I believe his argument is flawed. His reasoning hinges on accepting qualia as a given. If he somehow manages to validate that assumption by proving second order logic in the quantum realm, I’ll tip my hat — but my framework challenges that very basis.
You said:
“My approach is Husserlian realism about the mind — you don’t start with mindless matter and hope...”
— Right, but I’d like to clarify: this critique applies more to Eliminative Materialism than to Eliminative Nominalism. In EN, ‘matter’ itself is a symbol — not a foundational substance. So the problem isn’t starting with “mindless matter” — it’s assuming that “matter” has ontological priority at all.
And finally, on the notion of substance — I’m not relying on that strawman. My position isn’t based on classical substance dualism
The argument you put forward is valid, but it is addressed in the text. It is called the “Phenomenological Objection” by Husserl.