Arguments against qualia typically challenge the very coherence of anything which could play the desired role. It’s not like trying to prove fire doesn’t exist, it’s like trying to prove there is no such thing as elan vital or chakras.
I think there’s some hindsight bias there, in the case of chakras. It is by no means obvious that these supposed centres of something-or-other distributed along the spine and in the head don’t exist. One might be sceptical purely on account of the sources of the concept being mystical or religious, but the same is true of meditation, which has been favourably spoken of by rationalists. It’s only by actually looking for structures in the places where the chakras are supposed to be and not finding anything that could correspond to them that the idea can be discarded. There is also (I think) the fact that different traditions assert different sets of chakras.
“Élan vital” was always a fake explanation for a phenomenon—life—that no-one understood. It’s like a doctor listening to a patient’s symptoms and solemnly making a diagnosis by repeating the symptoms back to the patient in medical Latin. No-one talks about élan vital now because the subject matter succumbed to investigation based on “stuff is made of atoms”.
But consciousness is different—we experience it. We have no explanation for it, just the experience—the fact that there is such a thing as experience. “Consciousness”, “sensation”, “experience”, “qualia”, and so on are not explanations, just names for the phenomenon.
So clearly there is such a thing as subjective experience, in some sense. This, however, is not what is at issue.
To me, this is exactly what is at issue. We have subjective experience, yet we have no idea how there can possibly be such a thing. All discussions of this, it seems to me, immediately veer off into people on one side putting up explanations of what it is, and people on the other knocking them down. The fact of experience remains, ignored by the warring parties.
It seems to me the best case for exponents of consciousness is to force a dilemma—an argument pushing us on the one hand to accept the existence of something which on the other appears to be incoherent (as per just above).
There is no case to be made. Either you have this experience or you do not. I have it and I think that most people do. What people—at least, those who do have subjective experience—need to do first is recognise that there is a problem:
I have subjective experience.
It is impossible for there to be any such thing as subjective experience.
All of the argument is about proposed solutions to this problem. But refuting every solution to a problem does not solve the problem.
I think there’s some hindsight bias there, in the case of chakras. It is by no means obvious that these supposed centres of something-or-other distributed along the spine and in the head don’t exist. One might be sceptical purely on account of the sources of the concept being mystical or religious, but the same is true of meditation, which has been favourably spoken of by rationalists. It’s only by actually looking for structures in the places where the chakras are supposed to be and not finding anything that could correspond to them that the idea can be discarded. There is also (I think) the fact that different traditions assert different sets of chakras.
“Élan vital” was always a fake explanation for a phenomenon—life—that no-one understood. It’s like a doctor listening to a patient’s symptoms and solemnly making a diagnosis by repeating the symptoms back to the patient in medical Latin. No-one talks about élan vital now because the subject matter succumbed to investigation based on “stuff is made of atoms”.
But consciousness is different—we experience it. We have no explanation for it, just the experience—the fact that there is such a thing as experience. “Consciousness”, “sensation”, “experience”, “qualia”, and so on are not explanations, just names for the phenomenon.
To me, this is exactly what is at issue. We have subjective experience, yet we have no idea how there can possibly be such a thing. All discussions of this, it seems to me, immediately veer off into people on one side putting up explanations of what it is, and people on the other knocking them down. The fact of experience remains, ignored by the warring parties.
There is no case to be made. Either you have this experience or you do not. I have it and I think that most people do. What people—at least, those who do have subjective experience—need to do first is recognise that there is a problem:
I have subjective experience.
It is impossible for there to be any such thing as subjective experience.
All of the argument is about proposed solutions to this problem. But refuting every solution to a problem does not solve the problem.