I can describe qualia in general as the way thing seem to us.
I don’t believe so. I’ll accept that you can describe them as the way things seem to you. Or define them as the way things seem to us. What I am saying is that you cannot convince me that the definition has a definiendum unless you get more specific. Certainly, your intuitions on the significance of that ‘seeming’ have no argumentative force on anyone else until you offer some explanation why they should know what you are talking about.
Maybe this analogy is helpful: saying “qualia” isn’t giving us insight into consciousness any more than saying “phlogiston” is giving us insight into combustion. However, that doesn’t mean that qualia don’t exist or that any reference to them is nonsensical. Phlogiston exists. However, in our better state of knowledge, we’ve discarded the term and now we call it “hydrocarbons”.
Not really helpful (though I don’t see why it deserved a downvote). It is not that I object to the term ‘qualia’ because I think it is a residue of discredited worldviews. I object to the term because I have never seen a clear enough exposition of the term so that I could understand/appreciate the concept pulling any weight in an argument.
And, as I stated earlier, I particularly object when philosophers offer color qualia as paradigmatic examples of atomic, primitive qualia. Haven’t philosophers ever read a science book? Color vision has been well understood for some time. Cones and rods, rods of three kinds, and all that. So color sensation is not primitive.
And moving up a level from neurons to mind, I cannot imagine how anyone might suggest that there is a higher-level “experience” of the color green which is so similar to an experience of smell-of-mothballs or an experience of A-major-chord so that all three are instances of the same thing—qualia.
Yes, I agree that this kind of atomism is silly, and by implication that things like Drescher’s gensym analogy are even sillier. Nonetheless, the black box needs a label if we want to do something besides point at it and grunt.
I’m saying that there wasn’t a box until someone felt the need to label something. The various phenomena which are being grouped together as qualia are not (or rather are not automatically) a natural kind.
Nothing much hinges on the claim that colour qualia are not really primitive. If we could use their non-primitivity to communicate them, you would be on to something, but
the scientific understanding you mention isn’t subjectively accessible.
You seem happy with the idea that all those disparate experiences are experiences. Why not be happy with the idea that they are all qualia?
We do use their non-primitivity to communicate them. I learned the names of the colors in kindergarten as a result of a demonstration involving three kinds of rods in my eyes and photons of various wavelengths. Of course, I didn’t realize all that at the time, but the learning would have been less successful if one of my three types of photoreceptors had not been generally functional.
You seem happy with the idea that all those disparate experiences are experiences. Why not be happy with the idea that they are all qualia?
I don’t object to the word—I object to the exclusionary way it is used—the discriminatory weight it is called upon to bear. “Yeah, buddy, you and me, we have qualia. Unlike those nasty robots over there.” How did my humanity become so inextricably tied to my possession of certain kinds of sense organs? Or rather, my use of those organs.
You were not using their non- primitivity to communicate them: you were not offering or being offered a descrption that sed a decomposition of a quale into primitive terms. You were using a knowledge-by-acquaintance mechanism that happened to
be complex, although you did not know it was complex, or needed to know it was complex. In fact it could have been primitive for all you knew.
The issue about discrimination you bring up is not, I think, central. Moral relevance
is tied to the ability to suffer and enjoy. These are qualia. No one feels guilty about kicking rocks because we believe rocks don’t have pain qualia. But even if we did
believe rocks have pain qualia, the epistemological and metaphysical issues remain.
Does your objection to “discrimination” extend to treating rocks as sensitive beings?
Does your objection to “discrimination” extend to treating rocks as sensitive beings?
I certainly would treat a rock as sensitive if I had reason to believe that it would be willing to treat me as sensitive. (Maybe the only thing Kant got right!). Certainly my decision regarding how to treat rocks would have absolutely nothing to do with my guesses as to whether the way they experience the world was ontologically similar to the way I experience the world.
Even if their sensitivity were perfectly well understood in terms of geochemical cause and effect? Understood well enough to simulate? A simulation that could be connected to actuators that would act in my interests (assuming I reciprocated)? Great. Then we are in agreement. There is nothing mysterious or unsimulatable about qualia.
That reply would be cogent if I claimed not to feel pain. It not useful in this context, though, since I claim not to understand exactly what you do and don’t mean by “qualia”.
It does serve as a single example though. Provide a few dozen more, plus another few dozen examples of mental events that are not qualia, and a brief explanation of what it is that separates the negative and positive examples—do that and you will have communicated a concept. That is, you will have done so if no one disagrees with your lists and explanations and has a different understanding of the word ‘qualia’.
Sometimes I wonder whether this is the reason that philosophers never produce such lists. When you read a text on thermodynamics, say, you will spend many pages going over the meanings of important technical terms like system, open, and closed. But, it is worth it because when you are done, everyone is on the same page. :)
An example would be the way lemons taste to you, as opposed to their chemical composition. Other examples: the way a sunset looks, the way sandpaper feels, the smell of coffee, a stomach-ache a sharp pain, such as sitting on a thumbtack. There are therefore qualia corresponding to all the traditional sensory modalities, although nothing need be sensed to have a quale — they occur in dreams, for instance. Some people include the “phenomenal feels” of emotional states along with qualia, although these are something of an edge case. Phenomenal states or qualia form one of three large and overlapping categories of mental states, the others being cognitive/intentional states and states of volition, will and decision-making.
I decided to look back to see how I got into this fruitless conversation. I think it started with this question from dfranke:
Are you able to make any sense of the concept of “computing red”?
I responded flippantly that I was unable to make any sense of the concept of experiencing red. I didn’t make clear that what I was really objecting to was the reification of “red”. I certainly can imagine any person with the same kindergarten education as myself, recognizing a red apple, or a red light, or a red object of indeterminate shape. I can imagine someone classifying the sensation of a tack in the bottom as painful, and someone identifying the taste of lemon juice as sour.
I also have no trouble at all imagining that a robot trained by a naive Bayes classifier (rather than by a kindergarden teacher named Mrs. Weiskopf), could easily recognize those red things as ‘red’, the piercing thing as ‘painful’, and the lemon thing as ‘sour’. Yet people keep suggesting that robots can’t have qualia.
So, I respectfully suggest that your examples are not successfully communicating to me what it is about qualia that you know you have, you suspect that I have, and you (or maybe it is just dfranke) claim a robot cannot have.
I also have no trouble at all imagining that a robot trained by a naive Bayes classifier (rather than by a kindergarden teacher named Mrs. Weiskopf), could easily recognize those red things as ‘red’, the piercing thing as ‘painful’, and the lemon thing as ‘sour’. Yet people keep suggesting that robots can’t have qualia.
Agreed. As you illustrate here, a lot of talk about “qualia” and “subjective experiences” can easily be interpreted as everyday talk about perception and discrimination between different real things out there in the physical world (e.g. there really is something about the chemistry which we are discriminating when we notice how the lemon tastes, which a robot could, if he has the right sensors, just as easily discriminate), and furthermore I think that this everyday interpretation is the main part of what makes such talk seem obviously true. That is, the philosophical talk about qualia is powered by ambiguity about what is being said, by equivocation between the everyday meaning and the “philosophical” meaning.
Equivocation—saying one thing which is accepted as true, then silently shifting its meaning in order to draw a false conclusion—is a huge problem in philosophical discussion, and it’s hard to deal with precisely because the meaning shifts are not easy to notice, since the words remain the same.
I don’t believe so. I’ll accept that you can describe them as the way things seem to you. Or define them as the way things seem to us. What I am saying is that you cannot convince me that the definition has a definiendum unless you get more specific. Certainly, your intuitions on the significance of that ‘seeming’ have no argumentative force on anyone else until you offer some explanation why they should know what you are talking about.
Maybe this analogy is helpful: saying “qualia” isn’t giving us insight into consciousness any more than saying “phlogiston” is giving us insight into combustion. However, that doesn’t mean that qualia don’t exist or that any reference to them is nonsensical. Phlogiston exists. However, in our better state of knowledge, we’ve discarded the term and now we call it “hydrocarbons”.
Not really helpful (though I don’t see why it deserved a downvote). It is not that I object to the term ‘qualia’ because I think it is a residue of discredited worldviews. I object to the term because I have never seen a clear enough exposition of the term so that I could understand/appreciate the concept pulling any weight in an argument.
And, as I stated earlier, I particularly object when philosophers offer color qualia as paradigmatic examples of atomic, primitive qualia. Haven’t philosophers ever read a science book? Color vision has been well understood for some time. Cones and rods, rods of three kinds, and all that. So color sensation is not primitive.
And moving up a level from neurons to mind, I cannot imagine how anyone might suggest that there is a higher-level “experience” of the color green which is so similar to an experience of smell-of-mothballs or an experience of A-major-chord so that all three are instances of the same thing—qualia.
Yes, I agree that this kind of atomism is silly, and by implication that things like Drescher’s gensym analogy are even sillier. Nonetheless, the black box needs a label if we want to do something besides point at it and grunt.
I’m saying that there wasn’t a box until someone felt the need to label something. The various phenomena which are being grouped together as qualia are not (or rather are not automatically) a natural kind.
Nothing much hinges on the claim that colour qualia are not really primitive. If we could use their non-primitivity to communicate them, you would be on to something, but the scientific understanding you mention isn’t subjectively accessible.
You seem happy with the idea that all those disparate experiences are experiences. Why not be happy with the idea that they are all qualia?
We do use their non-primitivity to communicate them. I learned the names of the colors in kindergarten as a result of a demonstration involving three kinds of rods in my eyes and photons of various wavelengths. Of course, I didn’t realize all that at the time, but the learning would have been less successful if one of my three types of photoreceptors had not been generally functional.
I don’t object to the word—I object to the exclusionary way it is used—the discriminatory weight it is called upon to bear. “Yeah, buddy, you and me, we have qualia. Unlike those nasty robots over there.” How did my humanity become so inextricably tied to my possession of certain kinds of sense organs? Or rather, my use of those organs.
You were not using their non- primitivity to communicate them: you were not offering or being offered a descrption that sed a decomposition of a quale into primitive terms. You were using a knowledge-by-acquaintance mechanism that happened to be complex, although you did not know it was complex, or needed to know it was complex. In fact it could have been primitive for all you knew.
The issue about discrimination you bring up is not, I think, central. Moral relevance is tied to the ability to suffer and enjoy. These are qualia. No one feels guilty about kicking rocks because we believe rocks don’t have pain qualia. But even if we did believe rocks have pain qualia, the epistemological and metaphysical issues remain.
Does your objection to “discrimination” extend to treating rocks as sensitive beings?
I certainly would treat a rock as sensitive if I had reason to believe that it would be willing to treat me as sensitive. (Maybe the only thing Kant got right!). Certainly my decision regarding how to treat rocks would have absolutely nothing to do with my guesses as to whether the way they experience the world was ontologically similar to the way I experience the world.
You’re sensitive. If they were, that would be a broad similarity
Even if their sensitivity were perfectly well understood in terms of geochemical cause and effect? Understood well enough to simulate? A simulation that could be connected to actuators that would act in my interests (assuming I reciprocated)? Great. Then we are in agreement. There is nothing mysterious or unsimulatable about qualia.
The word “qualia” doesn’t have to justify its existence by providing a solution. It can justify its use by outlining a problem.
Sit on a brass tack. If you feel nothing, I will accept that the deifintion has no definiendum for you, even though it does for me and everyone else.
That reply would be cogent if I claimed not to feel pain. It not useful in this context, though, since I claim not to understand exactly what you do and don’t mean by “qualia”.
It does serve as a single example though. Provide a few dozen more, plus another few dozen examples of mental events that are not qualia, and a brief explanation of what it is that separates the negative and positive examples—do that and you will have communicated a concept. That is, you will have done so if no one disagrees with your lists and explanations and has a different understanding of the word ‘qualia’.
Sometimes I wonder whether this is the reason that philosophers never produce such lists. When you read a text on thermodynamics, say, you will spend many pages going over the meanings of important technical terms like system, open, and closed. But, it is worth it because when you are done, everyone is on the same page. :)
An example would be the way lemons taste to you, as opposed to their chemical composition. Other examples: the way a sunset looks, the way sandpaper feels, the smell of coffee, a stomach-ache a sharp pain, such as sitting on a thumbtack. There are therefore qualia corresponding to all the traditional sensory modalities, although nothing need be sensed to have a quale — they occur in dreams, for instance. Some people include the “phenomenal feels” of emotional states along with qualia, although these are something of an edge case. Phenomenal states or qualia form one of three large and overlapping categories of mental states, the others being cognitive/intentional states and states of volition, will and decision-making.
I decided to look back to see how I got into this fruitless conversation. I think it started with this question from dfranke:
I responded flippantly that I was unable to make any sense of the concept of experiencing red. I didn’t make clear that what I was really objecting to was the reification of “red”. I certainly can imagine any person with the same kindergarten education as myself, recognizing a red apple, or a red light, or a red object of indeterminate shape. I can imagine someone classifying the sensation of a tack in the bottom as painful, and someone identifying the taste of lemon juice as sour.
I also have no trouble at all imagining that a robot trained by a naive Bayes classifier (rather than by a kindergarden teacher named Mrs. Weiskopf), could easily recognize those red things as ‘red’, the piercing thing as ‘painful’, and the lemon thing as ‘sour’. Yet people keep suggesting that robots can’t have qualia.
So, I respectfully suggest that your examples are not successfully communicating to me what it is about qualia that you know you have, you suspect that I have, and you (or maybe it is just dfranke) claim a robot cannot have.
Agreed. As you illustrate here, a lot of talk about “qualia” and “subjective experiences” can easily be interpreted as everyday talk about perception and discrimination between different real things out there in the physical world (e.g. there really is something about the chemistry which we are discriminating when we notice how the lemon tastes, which a robot could, if he has the right sensors, just as easily discriminate), and furthermore I think that this everyday interpretation is the main part of what makes such talk seem obviously true. That is, the philosophical talk about qualia is powered by ambiguity about what is being said, by equivocation between the everyday meaning and the “philosophical” meaning.
Equivocation—saying one thing which is accepted as true, then silently shifting its meaning in order to draw a false conclusion—is a huge problem in philosophical discussion, and it’s hard to deal with precisely because the meaning shifts are not easy to notice, since the words remain the same.
Most qualiaohiic philosophers are explicit that qualia are not just discriminative behaviours or abilities.