The comments of yours I’ve read are always clear and insightful, and usually I agree with what you say. I have to disagree with you here, though, about your supposed second fallacy.
Arguments against the existence of subjective experience (consciousness, qualia, etc.) generally take the form of arguing against other people’s arguments in favour. Since no-one has a good account of what it is, it is not difficult to demolish their bad accounts. This is like refuting the phlogiston theory to prove that fire does not exist.
I disagree. 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 deny the existence of UFOs. It’s pretty clear what UFOs are—spaceships built and flown to Earth by creatures who evolved on distant planets—and I can give fairly straight-forward probabilistic reasons of the kind amenable to rational disagreement, for my stance.
I (mostly) deny the existence of God. Apologies if you’re a theist for the bluntness, but I don’t think it’s at all clear what God is or could be. Every explication I’ve ever encountered of God either involves properties which permit the deduction of contradictions (immovable rocks/unstoppable forces and what-not), or are so anodyne or diffuse as to be trivial (‘God is love’ -hence the ‘mostly’). There is enough talk in our culture about God, however, to give meaning to denials of His existence—roughly, ‘All (rather, most of) this talk which takes place in houses of worship and political chambers involving the word ‘God’ and its ilk, involves a mistaken ontological commitment’.
Do I deny the existence of consciousness, or subjective experience? If my wife and I go to a hockey game or a play, we in some sense experience the same thing -there is a common ‘objective’ experience. But equally we surely have in some sense different experiences—she may be interested or bored by different parts than I am, and will see slightly different parts of the action than I. So clearly there is such a thing as subjective experience, in some sense. This, however, is not what is at issue. Roughly, what we are concerned about is a supposed ineffable aspect of experience, a ‘what it is like’. I deny the existence of this in the sense in which I deny the existence of God. That is, I have yet even to see a clear and coherent articulation of what’s at issue. You imply the burden of argument is with the deniers; I (following Dennett and many others) suggest the burden is with defenders to say what it is they defend.
Are qualia causally efficacious, or not? If they are, then they are in principal objectively detectable/observable, and hence not worthy of the controversy they generate (if they have a causally efficacious ‘aspect’ and a non-efficacious, one, then just factor out the causally efficacious aspect as it plays no role in the controversy). On the flip side, of course, if qualia are not causally efficacious, then they aren’t responsible for our talk of them—they aren’t what we’re presently talking about, paradoxically.
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). But I have yet to see this argument. Appeals to what’s ‘obvious’ or to introspection just don’t do it—the force of the sort of arg above and the several others adduced by Dennett et. al., clearly win out over thumping one’s sternum and saying ‘this!’, simply because the latter isn’t an argument. The typical candidates for serious arguments in this vein are inverted spectrum or Black and White Mary type-arguments, but it seems to me they always just amount to the chest thumping in fancy dress. Would be interested to hear of good candidate arguments for qualia, though, and to hear any objections if you think the foregoing is unfair.
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.
The comments of yours I’ve read are always clear and insightful, and usually I agree with what you say. I have to disagree with you here, though, about your supposed second fallacy.
I disagree. 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 deny the existence of UFOs. It’s pretty clear what UFOs are—spaceships built and flown to Earth by creatures who evolved on distant planets—and I can give fairly straight-forward probabilistic reasons of the kind amenable to rational disagreement, for my stance.
I (mostly) deny the existence of God. Apologies if you’re a theist for the bluntness, but I don’t think it’s at all clear what God is or could be. Every explication I’ve ever encountered of God either involves properties which permit the deduction of contradictions (immovable rocks/unstoppable forces and what-not), or are so anodyne or diffuse as to be trivial (‘God is love’ -hence the ‘mostly’). There is enough talk in our culture about God, however, to give meaning to denials of His existence—roughly, ‘All (rather, most of) this talk which takes place in houses of worship and political chambers involving the word ‘God’ and its ilk, involves a mistaken ontological commitment’.
Do I deny the existence of consciousness, or subjective experience? If my wife and I go to a hockey game or a play, we in some sense experience the same thing -there is a common ‘objective’ experience. But equally we surely have in some sense different experiences—she may be interested or bored by different parts than I am, and will see slightly different parts of the action than I. So clearly there is such a thing as subjective experience, in some sense. This, however, is not what is at issue. Roughly, what we are concerned about is a supposed ineffable aspect of experience, a ‘what it is like’. I deny the existence of this in the sense in which I deny the existence of God. That is, I have yet even to see a clear and coherent articulation of what’s at issue. You imply the burden of argument is with the deniers; I (following Dennett and many others) suggest the burden is with defenders to say what it is they defend.
Are qualia causally efficacious, or not? If they are, then they are in principal objectively detectable/observable, and hence not worthy of the controversy they generate (if they have a causally efficacious ‘aspect’ and a non-efficacious, one, then just factor out the causally efficacious aspect as it plays no role in the controversy). On the flip side, of course, if qualia are not causally efficacious, then they aren’t responsible for our talk of them—they aren’t what we’re presently talking about, paradoxically.
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). But I have yet to see this argument. Appeals to what’s ‘obvious’ or to introspection just don’t do it—the force of the sort of arg above and the several others adduced by Dennett et. al., clearly win out over thumping one’s sternum and saying ‘this!’, simply because the latter isn’t an argument. The typical candidates for serious arguments in this vein are inverted spectrum or Black and White Mary type-arguments, but it seems to me they always just amount to the chest thumping in fancy dress. Would be interested to hear of good candidate arguments for qualia, though, and to hear any objections if you think the foregoing is unfair.
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.