“Experiencing blue” is just what your brain does when it is exposed to a certain wavelength of light.
Sophistry. It’s madness to say that the blue isn’t actually there. But this is tempting for people who like the science we have, because the blue isn’t there in that model of reality.
What we need is a model of reality in which experiences are what they are, and in which they play the causal role they appear to play. If our current physical ontology has no room for the existence of an actually blue experience in the brain, so much the worse for our current physical ontology. But modern physics is mathematical and operational, there is plenty of opportunity for something to actually be a conscious experience, while appearing in the formal theory as a state or entity with certain abstractly characterized structural and algebraic properties.
Sophistry. It’s madness to say that the blue isn’t actually there. But this is tempting for people who like the science we have, because the blue isn’t there in that model of reality.
Ah, no. See, I am absolutely not saying that the blue isn’t there. I agree that would be madness—I’ve experienced blue a million times. What I’m saying is this:
During the times when your brain is in the “blue state” you also happen to be experiencing the sensation of blueness. Same goes for the sensation of pain and the brain state associated with pain. In fact, this partnership between brain-state and perception is so reliable that we’re getting close to being able to record people’s thoughts in video format by scanning their heads. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo&feature=player_embedded)
The question is, if our model allows us to predict people’s sensory experiences perfectly well on the basis of purely physical phenomena, why do we need posit qualia? Seems to me that the simplest theory that describes all the data is that causal relationships between physical things are the only things that exist in this universe. If you throw out the premises that sensations aren’t physical things and that physical things aren’t sensations then it suddenly seems like the most natural conclusion in the world, and I’ve never seen any evidence that prompted me to hold onto either of those premises.
Here’s a query—what did it feel like the last time you didn’t have a brain state? Obviously that’s a stupid question, it’s impossible for you to have a brain without having it be in one state or another, and you don’t have any memories from before you had a brain. Similarly, by definition you can’t remember what it was like the last time you were experiencing absolutely nothing (if there was something to remember then you would have been experiencing something). So what piece of evidence was it that prompted you to hypothesise the existence of qualia?
“Qualia” is just a new word for what used to be meant by the word “sensations”, before “sensation” was redefined to mean “a type of brain process”. The idea that sensory qualities like color are in the sensations, and hence in us, has been around for hundreds of years—thousands, if you count Democritus.
The problem with the modern redefinition of “sensation” as “brain process” is now that color is nowhere at all, inside or outside the brain. Or, more precisely, it substitutes a particular theory of what a sensation is (brain event) for the thing itself (experience of a sensory quality) in a way which allows the latter to be ignored or even denied.
On this issue most materialists are dualists—property dualists—without even noticing it. The problem is very simple. Physics, and hence natural science, is based on a model of the world in which all that exists are fundamental entities (particles, wavefunctions, etc) which do not possess the “secondary sensory qualities” like color, either individually or in combination. There is a disjunction between the properties posited by physics and the properties known in experience.
There are three known ways of dealing with this while still believing in physics. You say that both properties exist—property dualism. You say that only physical properties exist—total “eliminativism”. Or you say that the experiential properties are directly playing a role in physics—which is best known via panpsychism, but one might doubt the necessity to regard everything (“pan”) as “mental” (“psych”).
Most materialists are property dualists because they say that only atoms exist, but then they think of their experience as how it feels to be a particular arrangement of atoms, when there is no such property in physics. It’s an extra thing being tacked onto the physics. And the realization that this is dualism is somehow pushed away by the use of a locution like “experiencing blue”—e.g. “my current state includes the property that I am experiencing blue”—which buries the fact that the sensation itself has the property of being blue.
It’s the fact that something is blue, which is why “qualia” have to be “posited”.
It’s only really your second paragraph that I disagree with. I’m a panpsychist, but I don’t often mention it because a lot of people take that to mean “I believe that everything in the universe has a mind, including rocks and stars”.
I go even further than you, though. I think that even of the materialists who aren’t accidental/secret property dualists, most of them are still dualists without realising it. The idea that there are physical objects which are related to one another causally is inherently dualist because it theorises two types of things in the universe—physical objects and causal relations. More importantly, the idea of physical objects as distinct from causal relationships is dodgy, because it opens us up to Humean skepticism: we never see the objects themselves, just detect them by their causal relationships to us, so how do we know what they’re actually like? All of the properties we associate with physical objects are products of their causal relationships with other matter, so separating the universe into physical things and causal relations paints us into the corner of believing in things which have no properties at all—a propertyless substrate a la the Scholastics.
The only hard and fast way to have a dualism-proof materialism that I’m comfortable with is to hold that objects are just clumps of causal relations. An electron isn’t a tiny little ball of substrate to which the properties of mass and charge and spin adhere, rather it’s just a likelihood that other particles in a given region will be affected by mass and charge and spin in an electron-like way. And that’s how I can be a panpsychist: all causal relations are equal. The only thing different about the ones in our heads is that they’re intricately interrelated in such a way that they’re self-referential, sensitively dependent on outside conditions, and persistent in a way that means that present interactions can recall interactions that happened years in the past (memory). The sensation of being alive is just what it feels like to be a really complex web of causal relations, and when this web reacts slightly to outside stimuli, that sensation changes slightly to, say, “the sensation of being alive and seeing the colour blue”. This is why I say that panpsychism isn’t the same as believing that rocks are conscious—consciousness is a special, complex type of causal relation, a sub-category into which inanimate objects don’t fit unless you spend a lot of time and energy constructing an AI out of them.
The question is, if our model allows us to predict people’s sensory experiences perfectly well on the basis of v purely physical phenomena, why do we need posit qualia?
We cant predict experienes perfectly well, because can’t predict novel experiences, because we cant describe novel experiences, because we can’t describe (as opposed to label) non novel experiences.
Sophistry. It’s madness to say that the blue isn’t actually there. But this is tempting for people who like the science we have, because the blue isn’t there in that model of reality.
If by blue you mean—as you do—the purely subjective aspect of perceiving the color blue (call that “blue”), then it’s only madness to deny it exists if you insist on confusing blue with “blue.” No one but a madman would say blue doesn’t exist; no philosopher should be caught saying “blue” exists.
If you can show a causal role for pure experience, that would be something else, but instead you speak of the “causal role they appear to play.” But we don’t want a theory where things play the role they “appear” to play; the illusion of conscious experience includes the seemingness that qualia play a causal role (Added: as I explain in my account of the related illusion of “free will.”
In short, it just won’t do to call qualia nihilism “madness,” when you offer no arguments, only exasperation.
But modern physics is mathematical and operational, there is plenty of opportunity for something to actually be a conscious experience, while appearing in the formal theory as a state or entity with certain abstractly characterized structural and algebraic properties.
This simply doesn’t solve the problem; not in the least. If you posit abstractly characterized structural entities, you are still left with the problem regarding what makes that configuration give the appearance “blue.” You’re also left with the problem of explaining why evolution would have provided a means of registering these “abstractly characterized structural and algebraic properties” when they make no difference for adaptation.
My guess, you espouse an epistemology that makes sense data necessary. Completely freeing epistemology from sensationalism is virtue rather than vice: philosophers have been looking for a way out of sensationalism since Karl Popper’s failed falsificationism.
You need an argument better than alleging madness. Many things seem blatantly wrong before one reflects on them.
If you can show a causal role for pure experience, that would be something else, but instead you speak of the “causal role they appear to play.”
I was actually talking more about the deduction that experiences are causally downstream from physical stimulation of sense organs, and causally upstream from voluntary motor action. This deduction is made because the physical brain is in that position; the physical causal sequence matches up with the subjectively conceived causal sequence “influences from outside me → my experiences → my actions”; so one supposes that experiences are in the brain and relevant to “physical” causality.
If you posit abstractly characterized structural entities, you are still left with the problem regarding what makes that configuration give the appearance “blue.”
To say that these entities have abstract structure, is not to say that that is the whole of their being. I am only emphasizing how qualia, and things made out of qualia, can be part of a mathematically characterized fundamental physics. The mathematical theory would talk about a causal network of basic objects characterized with the abstruseness typical of such theories—e.g. as combinations of elements of an algebra—and some of those objects would in reality be qualia.
If you were then to ask “what makes one of those objects blue? what makes it look blue?”—those are questions which could not be answered solely on the mathematical level, which doesn’t even talk about blue, only about abstracted structural properties and abstracted causal roles. They could only be tackled in a fuller ontological context, where you say “this entity from the theory is an experience, this property is the property of being blue, this process is the experiencing of blue”, and so on.
It’s like the difference between doing arithmetic and talking about apples. You can count apples, and numbers can be calculational proxies for groups of apples, but apples aren’t numbers and talking about numbers isn’t really the same thing as talking about apples. These abstracted propositions would only belong to the mathematical part of a theory of causally efficacious physical qualia, and that’s not the whole theory, in the same way that arithmetic statements about how many apples I have, are not my whole “theory of apples”.
The “non-mathematical part” doesn’t just include a series of verbal stipulations that “these abstractly characterized entities are ‘experiences’”. It implicitly also includes a bit of phenomenology: you would need to be able to single out various aspects of your own experience, and know that those are what is meant by the corresponding terms in the theory. You should be able to look at something blue and think, “OK, that’s blue, that’s property X from the formalism, and my awareness of blue, that’s property X’...”, and so on, for as far as theory and thought can take you.
That is a long-term ideal for a physical theory of consciousness; nothing we have right now measures up.
Sophistry. It’s madness to say that the blue isn’t actually there. But this is tempting for people who like the science we have, because the blue isn’t there in that model of reality.
What we need is a model of reality in which experiences are what they are, and in which they play the causal role they appear to play. If our current physical ontology has no room for the existence of an actually blue experience in the brain, so much the worse for our current physical ontology. But modern physics is mathematical and operational, there is plenty of opportunity for something to actually be a conscious experience, while appearing in the formal theory as a state or entity with certain abstractly characterized structural and algebraic properties.
Ah, no. See, I am absolutely not saying that the blue isn’t there. I agree that would be madness—I’ve experienced blue a million times. What I’m saying is this:
During the times when your brain is in the “blue state” you also happen to be experiencing the sensation of blueness. Same goes for the sensation of pain and the brain state associated with pain. In fact, this partnership between brain-state and perception is so reliable that we’re getting close to being able to record people’s thoughts in video format by scanning their heads. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo&feature=player_embedded)
The question is, if our model allows us to predict people’s sensory experiences perfectly well on the basis of purely physical phenomena, why do we need posit qualia? Seems to me that the simplest theory that describes all the data is that causal relationships between physical things are the only things that exist in this universe. If you throw out the premises that sensations aren’t physical things and that physical things aren’t sensations then it suddenly seems like the most natural conclusion in the world, and I’ve never seen any evidence that prompted me to hold onto either of those premises.
Here’s a query—what did it feel like the last time you didn’t have a brain state? Obviously that’s a stupid question, it’s impossible for you to have a brain without having it be in one state or another, and you don’t have any memories from before you had a brain. Similarly, by definition you can’t remember what it was like the last time you were experiencing absolutely nothing (if there was something to remember then you would have been experiencing something). So what piece of evidence was it that prompted you to hypothesise the existence of qualia?
“Qualia” is just a new word for what used to be meant by the word “sensations”, before “sensation” was redefined to mean “a type of brain process”. The idea that sensory qualities like color are in the sensations, and hence in us, has been around for hundreds of years—thousands, if you count Democritus.
The problem with the modern redefinition of “sensation” as “brain process” is now that color is nowhere at all, inside or outside the brain. Or, more precisely, it substitutes a particular theory of what a sensation is (brain event) for the thing itself (experience of a sensory quality) in a way which allows the latter to be ignored or even denied.
On this issue most materialists are dualists—property dualists—without even noticing it. The problem is very simple. Physics, and hence natural science, is based on a model of the world in which all that exists are fundamental entities (particles, wavefunctions, etc) which do not possess the “secondary sensory qualities” like color, either individually or in combination. There is a disjunction between the properties posited by physics and the properties known in experience.
There are three known ways of dealing with this while still believing in physics. You say that both properties exist—property dualism. You say that only physical properties exist—total “eliminativism”. Or you say that the experiential properties are directly playing a role in physics—which is best known via panpsychism, but one might doubt the necessity to regard everything (“pan”) as “mental” (“psych”).
Most materialists are property dualists because they say that only atoms exist, but then they think of their experience as how it feels to be a particular arrangement of atoms, when there is no such property in physics. It’s an extra thing being tacked onto the physics. And the realization that this is dualism is somehow pushed away by the use of a locution like “experiencing blue”—e.g. “my current state includes the property that I am experiencing blue”—which buries the fact that the sensation itself has the property of being blue.
It’s the fact that something is blue, which is why “qualia” have to be “posited”.
It’s only really your second paragraph that I disagree with. I’m a panpsychist, but I don’t often mention it because a lot of people take that to mean “I believe that everything in the universe has a mind, including rocks and stars”.
I go even further than you, though. I think that even of the materialists who aren’t accidental/secret property dualists, most of them are still dualists without realising it. The idea that there are physical objects which are related to one another causally is inherently dualist because it theorises two types of things in the universe—physical objects and causal relations. More importantly, the idea of physical objects as distinct from causal relationships is dodgy, because it opens us up to Humean skepticism: we never see the objects themselves, just detect them by their causal relationships to us, so how do we know what they’re actually like? All of the properties we associate with physical objects are products of their causal relationships with other matter, so separating the universe into physical things and causal relations paints us into the corner of believing in things which have no properties at all—a propertyless substrate a la the Scholastics.
The only hard and fast way to have a dualism-proof materialism that I’m comfortable with is to hold that objects are just clumps of causal relations. An electron isn’t a tiny little ball of substrate to which the properties of mass and charge and spin adhere, rather it’s just a likelihood that other particles in a given region will be affected by mass and charge and spin in an electron-like way. And that’s how I can be a panpsychist: all causal relations are equal. The only thing different about the ones in our heads is that they’re intricately interrelated in such a way that they’re self-referential, sensitively dependent on outside conditions, and persistent in a way that means that present interactions can recall interactions that happened years in the past (memory). The sensation of being alive is just what it feels like to be a really complex web of causal relations, and when this web reacts slightly to outside stimuli, that sensation changes slightly to, say, “the sensation of being alive and seeing the colour blue”. This is why I say that panpsychism isn’t the same as believing that rocks are conscious—consciousness is a special, complex type of causal relation, a sub-category into which inanimate objects don’t fit unless you spend a lot of time and energy constructing an AI out of them.
We cant predict experienes perfectly well, because can’t predict novel experiences, because we cant describe novel experiences, because we can’t describe (as opposed to label) non novel experiences.
If by blue you mean—as you do—the purely subjective aspect of perceiving the color blue (call that “blue”), then it’s only madness to deny it exists if you insist on confusing blue with “blue.” No one but a madman would say blue doesn’t exist; no philosopher should be caught saying “blue” exists.
If you can show a causal role for pure experience, that would be something else, but instead you speak of the “causal role they appear to play.” But we don’t want a theory where things play the role they “appear” to play; the illusion of conscious experience includes the seemingness that qualia play a causal role (Added: as I explain in my account of the related illusion of “free will.”
In short, it just won’t do to call qualia nihilism “madness,” when you offer no arguments, only exasperation.
This simply doesn’t solve the problem; not in the least. If you posit abstractly characterized structural entities, you are still left with the problem regarding what makes that configuration give the appearance “blue.” You’re also left with the problem of explaining why evolution would have provided a means of registering these “abstractly characterized structural and algebraic properties” when they make no difference for adaptation.
My guess, you espouse an epistemology that makes sense data necessary. Completely freeing epistemology from sensationalism is virtue rather than vice: philosophers have been looking for a way out of sensationalism since Karl Popper’s failed falsificationism.
You need an argument better than alleging madness. Many things seem blatantly wrong before one reflects on them.
I was actually talking more about the deduction that experiences are causally downstream from physical stimulation of sense organs, and causally upstream from voluntary motor action. This deduction is made because the physical brain is in that position; the physical causal sequence matches up with the subjectively conceived causal sequence “influences from outside me → my experiences → my actions”; so one supposes that experiences are in the brain and relevant to “physical” causality.
To say that these entities have abstract structure, is not to say that that is the whole of their being. I am only emphasizing how qualia, and things made out of qualia, can be part of a mathematically characterized fundamental physics. The mathematical theory would talk about a causal network of basic objects characterized with the abstruseness typical of such theories—e.g. as combinations of elements of an algebra—and some of those objects would in reality be qualia.
If you were then to ask “what makes one of those objects blue? what makes it look blue?”—those are questions which could not be answered solely on the mathematical level, which doesn’t even talk about blue, only about abstracted structural properties and abstracted causal roles. They could only be tackled in a fuller ontological context, where you say “this entity from the theory is an experience, this property is the property of being blue, this process is the experiencing of blue”, and so on.
It’s like the difference between doing arithmetic and talking about apples. You can count apples, and numbers can be calculational proxies for groups of apples, but apples aren’t numbers and talking about numbers isn’t really the same thing as talking about apples. These abstracted propositions would only belong to the mathematical part of a theory of causally efficacious physical qualia, and that’s not the whole theory, in the same way that arithmetic statements about how many apples I have, are not my whole “theory of apples”.
The “non-mathematical part” doesn’t just include a series of verbal stipulations that “these abstractly characterized entities are ‘experiences’”. It implicitly also includes a bit of phenomenology: you would need to be able to single out various aspects of your own experience, and know that those are what is meant by the corresponding terms in the theory. You should be able to look at something blue and think, “OK, that’s blue, that’s property X from the formalism, and my awareness of blue, that’s property X’...”, and so on, for as far as theory and thought can take you.
That is a long-term ideal for a physical theory of consciousness; nothing we have right now measures up.