Sorry if this comes off as pedantic, but I don’t know what this means. The philosopher in me keeps saying “I think we’re playing a language game,” so I’d like to get as precise as we can. Is there a paper or SEP article or blog post or something that I could read which defines the meaning of this claim or the individual terms precisely?
We’re all philosophers here, this is a safe space for pedantry. :)
Below, I’ll use the words ‘phenomenal property’ and ‘quale’ interchangeably.
An example of a phenomenal property is the particular redness of a particular red thing in my visual field.
Geoff would say he’s certain, while he’s experiencing it, that this property is instantiated.
I would say that there’s no such property, though there is a highly similar property that serves all the same behavioral/cognitive/functional roles (and just lacks that extra ‘particular redness’, and perhaps that extra ‘inwardness / inner-light-ness / interiority / subjectivity / perspectivalness’—basically, lacks whatever aspects make the hard problem seem vastly harder than the ‘easy’ problems of reducing other mental states to physical ones).
This, of course, is a crazy-sounding view on my part. It’s weird that I even think Geoff and I have a meaningful, substantive disagreement. Like, if I don’t think that Geoff’s brain really instantiates qualia, then what do I think Geoff even means by ‘qualia’? How does Geoff successfully refer to “qualia, if he doesn’t have them? Why not just say that ‘qualia’ refers to something functional?
Two reasons:
I think hard-problem intuitions are grounded in a quasi-perceptual illusion, not a free-floating delusion.
If views like Geoff’s and David Chalmers’ were grounded in a free-floating delusion, then we would just say ‘they have a false belief about their experiences’ and stop there.
If we’re instead positing that there’s something analogous to an optical illusion happening in people’s basic perception of their own experiences, then it makes structural sense to draw some distinction between ‘the thing that’s really there’ and ‘the thing that’s not really there, but seems to be there when we fall for the illusion’.
I may not think that the latter concept really and truly has the full phenomenal richness that Geoff / Chalmers / etc. think it does (for the same reason it’s hard to imagine a p-zombie having a full and correct conception of ‘what red looks like’). But I’m still perfectly happy to use the word ‘qualia’ to refer to it, keeping in mind that I think our concept of ‘qualia’ is more like ‘a promissory note for “the kind of thing we’d need to instantiate in order to justify hard-problem arguments”’—it’s a p-zombie’s notion of qualia, though the p-zombie may not realize it.
I think the hard-problem reasoning is correct, in that if we instantiated properties like those we (illusorily) appear to have, then physicalism would be false, there would be ‘further facts’ over and above the physics facts (that aren’t logically entailed/constrained by physics), etc.
Basically, I’m saying that a p-zombie’s concept of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (or we can call it ‘blenomenal consciousness’ or something, if we want to say that p-zombies lack the ‘full’ concept) is distinct from the p-zombie’s concept of ‘the closest functional/reducible analog of phenomenal consciousness’. I think this isn’t a weird view. The crazy part is when I take the further step of asserting that we’re p-zombies. :)
I don’t know Geoff’s view, but Descartes thinks he can be deceived about mathematical truths (I can dig up the relevant sections from the Meditations if helpful).
We’re all philosophers here, this is a safe space for pedantry. :)
Below, I’ll use the words ‘phenomenal property’ and ‘quale’ interchangeably.
An example of a phenomenal property is the particular redness of a particular red thing in my visual field.
Geoff would say he’s certain, while he’s experiencing it, that this property is instantiated.
I would say that there’s no such property, though there is a highly similar property that serves all the same behavioral/cognitive/functional roles (and just lacks that extra ‘particular redness’, and perhaps that extra ‘inwardness / inner-light-ness / interiority / subjectivity / perspectivalness’—basically, lacks whatever aspects make the hard problem seem vastly harder than the ‘easy’ problems of reducing other mental states to physical ones).
This, of course, is a crazy-sounding view on my part. It’s weird that I even think Geoff and I have a meaningful, substantive disagreement. Like, if I don’t think that Geoff’s brain really instantiates qualia, then what do I think Geoff even means by ‘qualia’? How does Geoff successfully refer to “qualia, if he doesn’t have them? Why not just say that ‘qualia’ refers to something functional?
Two reasons:
I think hard-problem intuitions are grounded in a quasi-perceptual illusion, not a free-floating delusion.
If views like Geoff’s and David Chalmers’ were grounded in a free-floating delusion, then we would just say ‘they have a false belief about their experiences’ and stop there.
If we’re instead positing that there’s something analogous to an optical illusion happening in people’s basic perception of their own experiences, then it makes structural sense to draw some distinction between ‘the thing that’s really there’ and ‘the thing that’s not really there, but seems to be there when we fall for the illusion’.
I may not think that the latter concept really and truly has the full phenomenal richness that Geoff / Chalmers / etc. think it does (for the same reason it’s hard to imagine a p-zombie having a full and correct conception of ‘what red looks like’). But I’m still perfectly happy to use the word ‘qualia’ to refer to it, keeping in mind that I think our concept of ‘qualia’ is more like ‘a promissory note for “the kind of thing we’d need to instantiate in order to justify hard-problem arguments”’—it’s a p-zombie’s notion of qualia, though the p-zombie may not realize it.
I think the hard-problem reasoning is correct, in that if we instantiated properties like those we (illusorily) appear to have, then physicalism would be false, there would be ‘further facts’ over and above the physics facts (that aren’t logically entailed/constrained by physics), etc.
Basically, I’m saying that a p-zombie’s concept of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (or we can call it ‘blenomenal consciousness’ or something, if we want to say that p-zombies lack the ‘full’ concept) is distinct from the p-zombie’s concept of ‘the closest functional/reducible analog of phenomenal consciousness’. I think this isn’t a weird view. The crazy part is when I take the further step of asserting that we’re p-zombies. :)
Interesting!