Behavioral diagnoses for p-zombies
If you wanted to behaviorally test for the existence of p-zombies, assuming there was some way to empirically distinguish between them and non-p-zombie humans, wouldn't one of the most obvious options be to ask them whether they're p-zombies? You might think, oh, but the p-zombies would be behaviorally identical, so they'd just deny they were.
But that's not true -- lots of philosophers claim they're p-zombies. So why not believe them? Maybe p-zombies arent just a thought experiment. Maybe there literally are p-zombies, but we only notice in certain fringe situations, like reflectively asking people about it. What if some philosophers are so appalled at or confused by the idea of qualia, which ordinary people find not only perfectly reasonable, but difficult to conceive of even denying, because they don't have qualia, i.e. because they're p-zombies?
But that's not true -- lots of philosophers claim they're p-zombies. So why not believe them? Maybe p-zombies arent just a thought experiment. Maybe there literally are p-zombies, but we only notice in certain fringe situations, like reflectively asking people about it. What if some philosophers are so appalled at or confused by the idea of qualia, which ordinary people find not only perfectly reasonable, but difficult to conceive of even denying, because they don't have qualia, i.e. because they're p-zombies?
Comments (101)
Those who deny qualia don't deny the seduction of appeals to qualia. You need to understand what people are talking about when they refer to qualia in order to even argue against it. Dennett does not deny that there are prima facie qualitative experiences, for example.
I would like to know which philosophers claim they are p-zombies. P-zombies are entities that distinctively lack something, while philosophers like Dennett don't think they lack something while others have it - they think that qualitative experience as a whole is a myth.
What would you think of someone who made that claim?
Quoting darthbarracuda
The majority of mainstream analytic philosophers.
Right, so since this view is obviously false, one hypothesis is that Dennett thinks this because he has no qualitative experiences, so they're incomprehensible to him.
One thing Dennett does a lot is give proust-if-proust-were-really-shitty sketches of e.g. watching the light play across the floor of his study. Or listening to some classical piece. (You almost expect him to nostalgically recount the twilight splendor of 18th century Versailles. When Dennett tries to prove he 'gets' the 'myth,' he always strives to be refined and delicate. Like Chaplin's tramp trying to appear a gentleman.) If he were really a p-zombie, the whole thing becomes almost a tragically beautiful pinocchio story. He's doing his best! 'Perhaps being conscious is like this? Is this not what it's like to see light? To hear music? See, I'm real!' Except I guess it would be a pinocchio story where pinocchio wants to be just real enough to prove that real boys are puppets too.
(1) have rigid self-images of being v serious, no-bullshit ppl (like more refined, socially respected, versions of those ppl who put darwin-jesus-fish stickers on their car)
(2) prob have a past of traumatic humiliation which they've tried to overcome via mastery of abstract language-games, to the point where they have trouble admitting there's anything outside the game. And so
(3) have a need - prob largely unconscious - to attack others who undermine the self-sufficient enclosure of their game.
(+ are you not making the same appeal to individual eccentricity by positing the existence of p-zombie types? As in "I don't think an entire cultural or professional tendency can be reduced to individual p-zombiehood, unless this is somehow common to a large number of philosophers" )
What if there's qualia gene buried somewhere? Outward signs include professing belief in qualia, being homosexual, and browsing DeviantArt?
But Dennett is a typical human being with a similar structure to other human beings that profess having qualitative experiences. If those other people are right in that qualia is something, then Dennett most likely also experiences qualitative episodes. If those other people are wrong that qualia is something, then Dennett is right and everyone does not have qualia.
Should we think that those who believe in god are somehow structurally different than those who do not? No, one group just lacks a belief in what another group has. The phenomenon is the same, the interpretation is different. Otherwise it's basically begging to question.
hmmmmmm
I think that's a realistic possibility.
Yes, but you mention this as analogous to qualia. What's the phenomenon which Dennett interprets one way and qualia-supporters another?
It's not as if when defenders of qualia try to point out flaws in Dennett's reasoning, Dennett is metaphorically plugging his ears "lalala I can't hear you!" It's not as if Dennett and his opponents are talking about two different things. Dennett seems to be able, like any other rational human being, to change his mind. Should we automatically think that those who believe qualia is non-real are p-zombies? Shouldn't we give them the benefit of the doubt?
A philosophical zombie wouldn't even be able to comprehend the very concept of qualia. It would be like a blind man denying the color spectrum. Dennett is not a philosophical zombie (from the perspective of a supporter of qualia) because he clearly understands what qualia is supposed to be, and tries to reduce qualia to something non-qualitative. To his opponents, Dennett does not lack qualia, and to his supporters, everyone lacks qualia because qualia is seen as a myth.
I happen to disagree with Dennett on his position, but I certainly don't think that just because Dennett thinks qualia isn't real means that Dennett somehow is a philosophical zombie. I just think he's missing some pieces, and I believe that if these pieces were adequately brought forth, he might change his mind on his position.
I don't understand. Wouldn't believing they're p-zombies be giving them the benefit of the doubt?
Quoting darthbarracuda
But philosophers claim precisely not to be able to understand it, or that it's fundamentally confused, mistaken, or unintelligible. Aren't you just helping my case?
You're equivocating not being familiar with something with not understanding what it is. Dennett, for example, is familiar with the concept of qualia, but does not seem to understand it in the way that qualia-supporters do.
If I give good reasons for denying the reality of color (say I create an argument that attempts to reduce color to something non-colorful in the same way Dennett attempts to reduce qualia to something non-qualitative), you wouldn't call me blind. I'm just arguing that color as an actual thing is a myth, better understood by appeals to reduction.
So Dennett isn't plugging his ears and claiming the elephant in the room doesn't exist. He's just claiming that the elephant (simpliciter) isn't an elephant but something else.
I'm not saying he's plugging his ears. I'm saying maybe he doesn't understand the concept because he has no qualia.
But this is to say that some people interpret qualitative experience as qualitative experience (which is not an interpretation) and that others interpret qualitative experiences as non-existent, even as phenomenon (which would mean there would be nothing to interpret at all, rendering the very idea of interpretation nonsensical.)
The analogy to religion doesn't work so well. What we interpret when we interpret religion (qua phenomenon, with ourselves at a distance) is human behavior, speech, texts. If Dennett's giving an interpretation of qualitative experience, as you say, then he's already conceded the point. (Now Dennett does want to interpret qualitative experience in a way similar to the interpretation of religion. Hence his goofy 'heterophenomenological method.' But this means evaulating claims about qualia based only on third person accounts, on the accounts of others or self-as-other. Just the way a p-zombie would go about handling the problem, since for him qualitative experience is necessarily always somewhere else, somewhere other.)
But this begs the question. Do we all have qualia? I'm apt to say that anything conscious does have qualia. But to say that Dennett is a p-zombie because he denies qualia is to beg the question that it is already proven that we have qualia.
From a naive point of view, pain in the left big toe actually is in the big toe. But after contemplation we understand that there is no actual pain in the left big toe. It just seems that way. Should those who adhere to the naive point of view think that we don't actually feel pain in our left big toe when we stub our toe? Both camps feel pain, but identify them in different areas.
So Dennett "feels" (tongue in cheek) qualia but does not think there is actually any qualia at all. He does not assert this, he actually goes to great lengths attempting to show how our feelings of qualia are misguided. He attempts to deconstruct qualia.
Now, if we could adequately show or prove that qualia is a real thing, and Dennett still did not change his mind, then we would think him dogmatic or mentally compromised. We might even be able to claim that he is a p-zombie. But until we show the qualia is an actual thing, we're begging the question.
We shouldn't think Dennett to be a p-zombie for suggesting this. We should think of him as a rather dogmatic materialist, though. Someone who has made up his mind about materialism without considering all the angles.
I don't really get Dennett's position. He has some good points but overall they don't convince me. Like I said before, I think this shows that Dennett is hell-bent on materialism, not that he is a p-zombie.
Dennett sort of alluding to this I think. We are readily fooled into thinking qualia is about describing. Supposely, it's the great failure of materialism and why the immaterialist is reflective of our experience. The immaterialist is thought to account for our lived experience to a greater extent.
The direction Dennett seems to be going is that this is an illusion. Since the lived moment is never description of that moment, there can be no account of quaila which IS the qualia of in question. The supposed strength of immaterialism, it's accounting of qualia, is a delusion because no such account is possible.
Given this, the supposition qualia needs to be described and that descriptions fail if they are not qualia fall into incoherence. No description was ever trying to be life. If are describing, we are always settling for something less than a lived moment of consciousness. By the inability of description to account for the lived moment, the supposed failure of materialism is shown to be an error based on the immaterialist's equivocation between description and life.
There are not "first person" and "third person" we experiences . All experiences are lived ( what "first person" is trying to talk about) and any description is different to what it is describing ( what "third person" is trying to speak about). The very idea of having a description which is life ("what is a likeness") is nonsensical and has us trying to replace life with mere description.
P-zombies lack consciousness. Only if consciousness is to be understood as qualia would a lack of qualia mean a lack of consciousness. But some, e.g. Dennett, claim that this isn't the case. Although he's claiming to not have qualia he's not claiming to not have consciousness and so isn't claiming to be a p-zombie.
Although at best you could perhaps say that if consciousness really is to be understood as qualia then Dennett is inadvertently claiming to be a p-zombie.
Original post
P-zombies are people who are physiologically and behaviourally identical to conscious people but lack consciousness. Chalmers claims that because this is coherent it must be that consciousness is non-physiological/non-behavioural.
But some philosophers claim that if something is physiologically and behaviourally identical to conscious people then ipso facto it is conscious. So they're not claiming to be p-zombies; they're claiming that the notion of p-zombies doesn't make sense.
If they claim people are conscious, then there is no dispute, since they don't think they're p-zombies.
But for those who think that consciousness at least as popularly conceived in terms of qualia is illusory, they literally are claiming that people who are behaviorally identical to humans (namely, all humans) lack consciousness (in the relevant sense), and so are p-zombies.
Of course, they may be justified in this claim using their own case, since as p-zombies they can't conceive of qualia. But for those who aren't, the argument won't be compelling.
Quoting Michael
That depends on what you mean. On certain understandings of the terms, many philosophers not only believe the concept makes sense, but is actualized in their own case and presumably for the case of all human beings. This won't be the case if you have some lame understanding of what 'consciousness' is (i.e., something other than consciousness) that is functional, behavioral, etc. But that's just definition-gerrymandering and produces nothing of substance, since it will probably end up borderline tautological and have nothing to say about consciousness in the interesting sense, i.e. subjective experience. If the latter is meant, of course the notion of a p-zombie makes sense, in the sense that the average person understand what's meant by it with no difficulty.
I can't understand the claim that consciousness doesn't consist in qualia as anything other than a redefinition of consciousness from its lay meaning to some technical meaning. But isn't the lay meaning what we're interested in? You can gerrymander the definition to show whatever you want, but the result won't be interesting.
By 'consciousness' I don't, and don't think I can, understand anything but qualia, at least if the term is used in anything like its ordinary way.
It may be that Dennett is wrong in dismissing the sensibility of qualia, but because he isn't claiming that he doesn't have consciousness he isn't claiming to be a p-zombie.
At the very most you could argue that the claim "I am conscious and the concept of qualia is meaningless" is a contradiction.
If I claim that the President is white and if I believe that Barack Obama isn't the President, am I claiming that Barack Obama is white?
So if I claim that I don't have qualia and if I believe that consciousness isn't qualia, am I claiming that I don't have consciousness?
With your approach we could always reverse the consideration. You claim you can walk. Walking requires legs. Therefore you claim you have legs. Dennett claims to have consciousness. Consciousness is qualia. Therefore Dennett claims to have qualia.
So if we make two contradictory claims, which one takes priority? Being able to walk or not having legs? Being conscious or not having qualia?
I don't think it makes sense to choose one way or the other. Just take them at their word. You're claiming to not have legs and to be able to walk. Dennett's claiming to be conscious and to not have qualia. The claims might be nonsensical, but that's a different matter.
But that's what I'm doing, taking Dennett at his word that he doesn't have qualia, and is is a p-zombie. Why not take him at his word that he has consciousness instead? Because the former, not the latter, is his primary theoretical motivation.
P-zombies are only a thing for those who take qualia seriously. Dennett doesn't take qualia seriously and would find the entirely concept of a p-zombie incoherent and empty. To say that Dennett is a p-zombie would again beg the question that qualia is something coherent.
I didn't define anything?
Quoting The Great Whatever
That's what I thought.
So the notion of qualia seeks to reify (if you're agin'it) a substance of experience. Subjectivity is the soul of the irreligious. It's not that Dennett does not have legs but miraculously walks, so much as the legs miraculously walk without a Dennett.
Sometimes people are just wrong: maybe from a misunderstanding of "qualia" or a misunderstanding of the context of consciousness.
That's how the word is ordinarily used -- it isn't 'defined' that way.
I don't think so. Consciousness is ordinarily understood to be consciousness of oneself, other people, animals, things, thoughts, bodily feelings, emotions, memories, not qualia.
The notion 'qualia' is itself not a naturally occurring, ordinary everyday idea, but an artificially produced, extraordinary philosophical idea, probably incomprehensible to, and certainly not spontaneously entertained by, most people.
The very fact that it is widely rejected by philosophers shows that it is far from being a necessary idea.
I am not sure what is more immediate than the warmth and cold of touch, the taste of ice cream, the color of the sky, smell of something cooking, and the sound of a familiar song. Even if one or more of these senses are missing, other senses usually become dominant to one's conscious experience. Someone might call them sense perception. Association, reasoning, and conceptual analysis, recognition, or combination thereof, would be various other kinds of mental processes. One may be aware of certain qualias depending on where the mind is putting its attention, but that does not necessarily make the qualia go away, that just makes the value regarding that qualia change. The phenomena of qualia still remains, even if the mind's relationship to it changes. Many classical theories start with the fact that humans have sense experiences and work their way up from there. I don't see how it is relegated to practically nothing in your notion of consciousness.
Also, what are thoughts, bodily feelings, emotions, and the like without linkages to memories of qualia? Objects, even in the mind, have qualia associated with them. Emotions may bring up images and memories that also have qualia. Bodily feelings, arguably are qualia, but that of touch.
Why do think the things you list are qualia? Remember qualia are defined as something like 'qualities of experience'. I would say that when you see the blue sky you see blue sky not a quality of blueness or the experience of blueness. And likewise for your other examples.
I am a bit confused by your definition of qualia then. When you see a blue sky, you see immediate sensations of quality such as blueness- even if you do not recognize what blueness is. The immediate sensation/experience that is perceived is the qualia. The discernment as to "which sensation is blue?" and the concept of "blue in sky vs. blue in pants", is not the same as the quality that is immediately given. In the human mind, qualia may be linked with these mental processes, but they are not the same. The qualia itself is, as you say, the qualities that we perceive or the qualities of experience. The attention given to these qualities, the feelings associated with it, the memories of similar qualities, the bundling of them into immediate concepts, etc. are interesting, but not necessarily the same thing.
I've never understood this sort of objection. It seems to me like saying "when I punch a person I punch a person; I don't punch a striking fist".
To punch someone is to strike them with your fist. To see a blue sky is to have certain qualitative sensations. That's what's claimed.
There's a difference between the intentionality of experience (the blue sky) and the substance of experience (the qualia, allegedly).
Not really. First of all, if someone asks, 'is he conscious?' what they mean is something like 'is he having experiences?' as opposed to being 'blacked out.' They don't mean 'is he conscious of x?' Second of all, you're not conscious of your emotions, at least not primarily; you have emotions, which are feelings. To be conscious is to have qualia, or experiences, not to be conscious of them.
This seems to me what people mean by 'consciousness,' and an attempt to redefine it and then deal with that technical notion isn't of that much interest.
The word isn't naturally occurring, but the idea is. To deny that people have a notion of experience that's pretty much exactly what philosophers call qualia (and ordinarily people just call 'experience' or something like that) seems to me to be absurd and a losing battle. Philosophers don't want there to be such a thing, but that's a different matter.
Quoting John
It obviously shows no such thing, but since you knew that I'm not sure why you said this.
When people say things like this, I just don't know. Maybe there are p-zombies. Allegedly.
Over on the other forum, somebody once characterized the invention of qualia (qua concept) as a dialectical response to eliminative materialism. Seems right. All that's really important about qualia is that, whoa, we actually do have qualitative experience which wouldn't be worth pointing out, because everyone knows that, unless someone started truculently denying it. Arguing with such a person, on their terms, is a fool's errand (like arguing with a solipsist) and can lead to desperate attempts to characterize consciousness in a way such a person might find palatable (though of course, they never do, and never will.) That's the real problem with qualia - that so many philosophers clumsily try to fit consciousness into a mould that doesn't make sense. Most objections to qualia are objections to the reification of consciousness, the idea of qualia as individual things. Obviously problems crop up when you use the language of substantives for something that's more like a verb (or adverb.) That's why the blue sky example misses the point, as Michael pointed out.
(By the by, much of what passes, in Dennett, or Churchland for the denial of consciousness is really the denial of a simple, unified, substantial soul. Dennett loves railing on the Cartesian theater. And that's well and good, but consciousness has been distinguished from a substantial soul for a long time, in many ways (one obvious touchstone here is Kant's antinomy re: the soul's substantiality which, for him, has nothing to do with the transcendental unity of apperception.) It's kind of the perfect sleight of hand. Conscious qualitative experience=Cartesian theater. Argue against the cartesian theater. Pretend you've thereby KO'd conscious qualitative experience. )
All that this means is that we can't know for certain what is taking place inside someone's mind, but it doesn't suggest that there'd be no difference between conscious and unconscious entities with exact behavior.
Perhaps a better example than my first:
A painting of a cup is a painting of a cup, not a painting of paint and a canvas. But it is nonetheless the case that the painting is just paint and a canvas.
So an experience of a cup is an experience of a cup, not an experience of an image. But it is nonetheless the case that the experience is just an image (or so one theory goes).
You need something better than "I see a blue sky, not the quality of blueness" to actually address the core issue(s). Those who argue for qualia can accept that the intentional object of the experience is not qualia whilst still maintaining that the substance of the experience is qualia, just as one can accept that the intentional object of the painting is not paint whilst still maintaining that the substance of the painting is paint.
I would say that we have no reason to think that prior to seeing anything as something, for example seeing a blue sky, it is any more a case of seeing Quoting schopenhauer1 than it is of seeing a blue sky. I would say the notion of seeing "immediate sensations of quality" is secondary to and derivative of seeing anything as something.
Perhaps it may be said that primordially there are patterns, but primordial patterns do not count as qualities, since qualities are the reflexive judgements of subjects, and on any view of 'perception as constructed' (whether by nature or culture) subjects arise co-temporally with objects (such as the blue sky).
Perhaps it is not even appropriate to say that primordial patterns are seen (as opposed to say, simply registered) ( but then, is even the idea of simple registaration consonant with ideas of primordial noumenality?) prior to seeing as unless you want to posit unitary souls in both animals and humans, souls for whom the world is always already pre-conceptually intelligible.
This is just wrong, though. You can have visual experiences without seeing anything 'as' anything, but the reverse isn't true. So what sense of secondary can you possibly mean?
Can you give an example of a visual experience that does not consist in seeing something as something?
Remember, seeing something indefinite counts as seeing something as something as much as seeing something definite does. Both experiences are always already conceptually articulated as either definite or indefinite.
Not really, no. You don't have to individuate something as 'a flash of light' to experience a flash of light. In fact that would make seeing really fucking hard, you'd never be able to see anything, always having to think about what it was before you could experience anything.
Quoting John
So evidence against your position counts as evidence for it.
You're misunderstanding what I am saying; I am not saying you have to explicitly think about what you are seeing in order to see things. Animals see things too, I imagine. The understanding of what you are seeing is pre-explicatory; but if there is no implicit (I hesitate to say "pre-conceptual" but would certainly say "pre-linguistic") understanding of what you are seeing then it makes no real sense to say that you are seeing anything.
But then again, we are supposedly talking philosophy, and philosophical positions generally do not admit of evidence, but are rather judged in terms of clarity, coherence and consistency, no?
What would constitute evidence against any of the well-worn standpoints? Plato's Forms, Aristotle's notion of causality, Spinoza's idea of substance, Hegel's Absolute Spirit: what do you imagine could constitute evidence against any of those ideas?
And I would not word it that way. I would say that not seeing something as distinct is seeing something as indistinct; in both cases something is seen as something. It simply does not make sense to speak of seeing in cases where nothing is seen.
Sure they do -- but this insight into how you see the matter is illuminating, I guess.
Can you give an example of some evidence (presuming here that you mean empirical evidence and not merely 'evidence' from a theory's "clarity, coherency and consistency") that supports or goes against any philosophical position?
I have no idea why you would say that.
I would agree that the kind of physicalism that seems to go so well with modern science (specifically QM) is evidence that the older materialist views that seemed to go so well with Newtonian mechanics, have waned along with the older mechanistic science. In other words it is evidence that human worldviews are profoundly influenced by science. This is certainly an empirically attested sociological fact.
There would not seem to be any empirical evidence which will answer the philosophical question as to whether human worldviews should be profoundly influenced by science, though
So, pre-linguistic babies don't see color due to not having language? I see. I think, even if that was correct as to the proper cognitive origin of sense experience, the qualia is not explained away, it is there, but via that mechanism. The qualia itself remains, just given a different take on its origins. Some people focus on the rods and cones and optic nerves.. If I replace that with your explanation or anything "x" with your explanation, it will only be an explanation. The explanation is not the experience. You cannot talk yourself out of the fact that a blue sky is presenting itself to your mind's integration of things and that this feeling of quality exists.
It happens your explanation seems to be a bit odd, since I can imagine a baby that was not taught language does, in fact, experience qualia and is not a p-zombie. Do animals not have any internal "what it's like to feel" aspect because they do not have language? The senses, one can say, works independently from the mechanism which encapsulate them into integrated concepts.
No, I haven't said that a pre-linguistic baby (or a suitably equipped animal) does not see colour, but I would say it does not experience seeing colour.
Also, a p-zombie is defined as not experiencing anything. So, on that account people are not p-zombies, obviously. I say that people do not experience qualia or 'qualities of experience', that is just an aberrant notion, in my view. People experience things, other people, cities, landscapes, animals and so on.
Also with the notion of 'qualia' itself there is some equivocation about whether it refers to something like 'raw sense data' or 'the subjective quality of experience', both of which I would say are different chimeras.
I was not familiar with the term, and I was hoping you would explain it.
Wiki definition:
I don't believe that there are "sharp cut offs" which determine so-called vague terms. Nor do I think there is no "semantic indeterminacy" in vague terms. So, it would appear that I do not qualify as an epistemicist, unless you can show that some of my claims necessarily entail these beliefs I am disavowing.
I don't know what it could mean to be a "realist about metaphysical questions". For me metaphysical questions deal with what different possibilities we can (logically speaking) think; and what the presuppositions involved in those different possibilities would be. We may very well have good reasons to think one possibility is more likely than another, but I appreciate the fact that people differ when it comes to what they think constitutes "good reasons".
I certainly don't think, as some on these forums do, that science is necessarily our best guide to metaphysics; although I do think it should be taken into account.
I agree about those being legitimate questions, but I think for me their legitimacy has nothing to do with realism; it is, rather, experiential as well as logical.
Those questions are legitimate because, for example, we actually experience time, composition and persistence and, although we do not experience them, universals present legitimate puzzles about difference, sameness and identity that are inherent to thinking itself and not confined merely to conventions of language usage.
I tend towards logical or conceptual realism, which I would also call 'metaphysical realism' except the latter is always strawmanned by anti-realists as some claim about what purportedly lies beyond experience. I don't think the claim that objects are mind-independent, for example, means anything more than that they experienced as being objects available for anyone to see, or feel or hear or whatever, as distinct from mind dependent phenomena like memories or hallucinations that are not available for more than one percipient.
What mind independent objects 'are' in some imagined 'ultimate sense' is unknowable and may not even be a coherent question. But that is what antirealists falsely proclaim that all realists are necessarily making some claim about.
'Course I dunno what that has to do with p-zombies, but you started on this particular tangent...
My point was, however, is Dennett is doing something other than merely asserting qualia doesn't exist. He's deconstructing it say that, as proposed by the immaterialists, it doesn't make sense because they are suggesting the ineffable has description. He's attempting to break down a mistake in our understanding of consciousness.
The reason his position appears confused is becasue he's rejected qualia while still holding there is consciousness to describe. In his deconstruction of qualia, he's realised it's not needed to describe consciousness, so he's happy to say he is conscious without qualia.
Taken literally he's saying he's conscious (has experiences which are described) without his experiences ever existing (no qualia, no moment of experience). He leaves out the indexical pointer ( "qualia") to moments of experience. It like if I was to say: "I don't exist" but than say: "Willow is making a post of thephilosophyforum." It looks like he's saying things exist in description but never in the moment.
In the end he doesn't quite grasp consciousness, he says "qualia doesn't exist" when he should say "qualia cannot be described, so it has no relevance to describing our experiences."