Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
So, here it is:
Quining Qualia
Let's take a closer look.
Going over my own notes, I found an admission that I did not understand qualia - from 2012. In 2013, I said I do not think that there is worth in giving a name to the subjective experience of a colour or a smell. In 2014, I doubted the usefulness of differentiating a smell from the experience-of-that-smell. Never understood qualia. I still don't see their purpose.
So I have some sympathy for Dennett's take here: to deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.
No definition of qualia. But providing such a definition, to be fair, is not up to Dennett, if he is rejecting them, but up to their advocates. Instead we get:
SO, can we list these?
Quining Qualia
Let's take a closer look.
My goal is subversive. I am out to overthrow an idea that, in one form or another, is "obvious" to most people--to scientists, philosophers, lay people. My quarry is frustratingly elusive; no sooner does it retreat in the face of one argument than "it" reappears, apparently innocent of all charges, in a new guise.
Going over my own notes, I found an admission that I did not understand qualia - from 2012. In 2013, I said I do not think that there is worth in giving a name to the subjective experience of a colour or a smell. In 2014, I doubted the usefulness of differentiating a smell from the experience-of-that-smell. Never understood qualia. I still don't see their purpose.
So I have some sympathy for Dennett's take here: to deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.
No definition of qualia. But providing such a definition, to be fair, is not up to Dennett, if he is rejecting them, but up to their advocates. Instead we get:
What follows is a series of fifteen intuition pumps, posed in a sequence designed to flush out--and then flush away--the offending intuitions.
SO, can we list these?
Comments (2977)
There is a way this cauliflower tastes to you right now. Well, no. the taste changes even as you eat it, even as the texture changes as you chew.
As a tool for convincing those who disagree, this strikes me as singularly useless. Dennett will say there is nothing missing from the machine description; advocates of qualia will say that there is...
Except that they cannot say what it is that is missing; qualia are after all ineffable. But this never stops their advocates from talking about them...
Meh. Undergrad speculation. Add Intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine. Qualia gain no traction here, either. intuition pump #5: the neurosurgical prank. Back to Wittgenstein: how could you tell that your qualia had been inverted, so that what was once blue is now red, as opposed to say, your memory had changed, so what you always saw as red you now recall, erroneously, previously seeing as blue? Intuition pump #6: alternative neurosurgery
That does not follow. Terrible reasoning. What good is it to analyze or critique some notion or concept without comprehending it fundamentally? I agree, there is no better source than the advocate, but if the advocate cannot provide an adequate definition for us to work with, we are all just making shit up - masturbation my friend.
I believe that there is some authority on qualia, who is the first philosopher to mention it? It would be more philosophical to address that person's ideas. My goal here is edification - to quine quining.
Whence the boundary of the white triangle? In the perception or in the judgement? Hence, intuition pump #8: the gradual post-operative recovery; is the recovery in the quality of the qualia or in the judgement that ensues?
And if you cannot tell, then what is the point of introducing qualia?
Intuition pump #11: the cauliflower cure. The cauliflower tastes exactly the same, but is now delicious...
These two perhaps play on the public/private ambiguity of qualia. One might respond that, since the cauliflower is now delicious, Dennett is not experiencing the same taste; or insist that those who think phenol-thio-urea tasteless are indeed in error.
The point here seems to be that even if there were qualia, they need not count as intrinsic to consciousness. Needs more consideration.
There's danger here of following Kripke rather than Wittgenstein. However the point must stand, that recognising the rule one is following consists at least in part in being able to carry on with the rule; but nothing in a single instance allows for this. Hence, if a qual (singular of qualia) cannot by its very nature recur, there can be no grounds for claiming that some rule has been followed; if that be so, there can be no basis for differentiating a qual; hence, no qual and no qualia.
What additional information is to be found in qualia?
Arguably we have here three qualia; the first open E, the harmonic, and the second open E. Is the point here that as the ineffable becomes the subject of discussion, the qualia is less ineffable...?
Seems to me that there is nothing that talk of qualia is about. In so far as talk of qualia is usable and useful, it is no different to talk of colours or tastes or what have you. In so far as something is added to the conversation by the addition of qualia, seems to me that Dennett is correct in showing that there is nothing here to see.
Fair enough. Let's talk of colours, smells, feelings, tastes, timbres and tunes then. If that's umweildy, we can use the acronym: CSF3T. As is the case with LGBT, this acronym may evolve, i.e. anyone can add to the set.
Problem solved, at least temporarily.
That's true. We can speak for instance of the gorgeous reds of Georgia O'Keeffe.
Red Canna, 1919
The issue is that since the PNC is inapplicable saying things about qualia becomes difficult but not impossible.
I find it odd that it's presented as "watching you eat cauliflower" (in the third person) and then going on to describe the taste and texture in the first-person. How do you know what the taste and texture of cauliflower is like, or that it changes, by watching someone else eat?
Anyway, even if there is a particular taste and texture of cauliflower at time t, and a different taste and texture of cauliflower at time t', then Dennett (or Banno?) has already acknowledged the first-person, qualitative aspect of the experience of eating cauliflower, which they are apparently seeking to deny.
Sure, if f(x,y) is unique for x and y, you can talk just in terms of x and y, and ignore f. f doesn't add any new information. Likewise what Dennett's intuition pumps demonstrate is that, when considering a particular individual interacting with a particular object, there's nothing added by considering the objects of subjective experience of that individual of that object. The subject and the object suffice.
Quoting Banno
This one never sat well with me. If my memory of grass looks like what I think of as green, and the grass before me looks like what I think of as red, both the memory of green grass and the present experience of red grass ought to be on equal footing. All Dennett can really say is that we don't know *which* qualia changed, not whether qualia changed.
The last thing of interest to me, upon the occasion of experience, is what the experience is like; given enough experience I already know what it is like, and if not enough experience, I wouldn’t have to means to know what it is like anyway. I’ve seen the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in person as a simple thinking subject, and I’m here to tell ya.....there is NOTHING that experience is like. And to say that experience is like, or similar to, an equally first person experience of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, does nothing but take away from each that which belongs to it alone. When asked about the former, one never offers the latter as a similarity, which makes explicit the “what it is like” explication, these “properties of conscious experience” subliminally attached to subjectivity, has no more qualitative authority then the representations they were theoretically meant to replace.
It is an indubitable aspect of the human condition to progress, not to leave well enough alone, but rather, to advance for the sake of knowledge generally. Granting that the concept “qualia” is nothing but the speculative evolution of the concept “representation”, it remains questionable as to whether qualia advance speculative epistemology any more than representation already has.
I think Dennett might be confusing the origins of quale with its existence. Based on contexts clues from his thought experiments, is seems to be arguing for a socially constructed version of qualia. That is debatable, but one idea. He talks a lot about how it is a public event, that is shared. It needs context of language, inputs from environment, etc. However, to deny that indeed, we have first-person content, would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather, there is something "sticky" about actual sensations, if you will. The point of the hard-questioners is that for all the third-person representation of phenomena, it never gets at why it is accompanied by or is "the same thing as" the sensation. Why is "green" the same thing as a certain frequency on wavelength hitting rods and cones, etc. We can keep heaping on more stuff, but then this is the "Cartesian Theater" or similarly the "Homunculus" fallacy. It is simply pushing the problem back to another spot.
The purpose of an intuition pump is to challenge an intuition about a claim. It isn't a formal refutation, knock down argument, noticing a contradiction. It's an attempt to reconfigure someone's perspective on something by describing a (possibly imaginary) scenario and analysing how the scenario should be interpreted.
Why is that appropriate here?
The standard for demonstrating the metaphysical structure of qualia, and in some cases their existence, is an appeal to intuition rather than a philosophical argument or scientific study. If an appeal to intuition alone may be used to support any (perhaps nascent) qualia account, using equal evidential/logical standards for (perhaps nascent) accounts of qualia suggest that appeals to intuition alone may be used to support criticism of qualia.
Another aspect is that if an appeal to intuition alone suffices to determine or otherwise influence the structure of qualia in a given account of them, that makes the idea of qualia a moving target with unarticulated structure. That makes the idea of qualia a moving target that can hide and change shape. Which is a situation we are all to familiar with on forum and find frustrating; don't just appeal to personal intuition and self evidence, and treat your opponents' criticism with the same standard of evidence as you use to support your beliefs. Here that's appeals to intuition.
So how to read the article? Keep in mind that the text is intended to change intuitions of what is plausible or implausible regarding qualia, if one adapts one's intuitions about qualia on the fly and appeals to their self evidence, keep in mind that the article is trying to meet you where you're at; appeals to intuition about a largely uncharacterised or unarticulated idea. If they suffice for the qualia advocate, they suffice for Dennett's criticism. If they don't suffice for you, then you should agree with Dennett about the article's method's appropriateness, and should read his intuition pumps in good faith as explicit counter-intuitions regarding qualia. His intuitions simply differ from yours, go read why, he's gone through the trouble of writing them down and analysing them.
A lot of them are about highly improbable "what ifs". Like your memory of green changing to red... What do this highly esoteric hypothesis achieves exactly?
Colors have been scientifically studied for quite some time, including their physiological basis. They can be coded in computers, and we know that they can affect our mood. I'm not talking of wavelengths here, but of combinations of wavelengths interpreted by brain processes within a certain environment to appear as colors, shines and hues to a subject.
We kinda know that colors exist. The concept 'works'. The categories (eg green vs blue) vary from one language to the next, and even from one person to the next, but the scheme works.
Of course, anyone can have a field day deconstructing the concept of color, complex and fleeting as they are, to next to nothing, as Dennet tries to do, but then we would miss an important, even vital concept. You can die for confusing a red with a green light...
Can we not try and destroy the concept of color, please, least we want to change all color codings in the world to something else? And least of all, let's not destroy this useful concept by way of highly esoteric thought experiments about brain surgeons able to switch green and red in your mind. It's philosowowoooophying about what would happen if pigs would fly...
Works in some way. As signalled by the scarequotes. How? What is that way? Is there more than one way? - That space of questions is (allegedly) left to the intuition by qualia proponents. If you'd like to deal with the article, I'll respond more, but since this is an exegetical thread I won't engage in something that will take us off essay.
Dennett is trying to say earlier, I think Dennett is mixing causation with metaphysics. The core problem seems to be, not that people can have different quale, but that quale even exist and their nature. To say its an "illusion" doesn't negate their existence. Rather, it is saying something about their causation. We refute the very fact that something isn't happening by saying "We think it's happening, but it doesn't" Well what is this persistent "thinking it is happening"? Even if it is socially constructed, a dual, mental event is indeed happening to that person, so what of it? Why? Dennett does not say anything about the nature. I am not sure what trying to show differences in people's quale would prove that there is no quale.
Nothing else is available, but you would be surprised how much we know through the scientific recording and analysis of intuitive, or rather introspective data. For instance, any optical illusion plays with some hiatus between our vision of an image, and the real image on paper. Scientists can study these optical illusions by asking people to describe their perception. And what is striking is that typically, everybody seems to see the same illusion. This shows that our visual "qualia" are reproduceable and predictable. It's useful research, and it is based on introspection.
Why add that?
What is gained by talk of the-qual-of-the-flower that is not found in talk of the red flower? I suspect we agree that the additional philosophical jargon is needless.
Again, what is added to talk of the difference between "700 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic wave" and talk of red by introducing qualia?
Yes; and such talk need make no mention of qualia...
That would seperate them from perception. THat's at odds with how they are used in the literature.
This is at odds with the notion that we can't know what a thing is in itself... since we do supposedly know qualia directly. As if they could be used in order to found some sort of certainty.
You can't directly know a thing in itself... unless you are that thing.
It's in the third person in order to introduce "it occurs to me that to you, cauliflower probably tastes (must taste?) different". The target seems to be the individuation of a quale... the taste to me is not the same as the taste to you; the taste to me now is not the same as the taste to me then. I agree with you that this seems to moss the point of qualia. Perhaps he put his weakest point first...
But for my part I will maintain that nothing has been added by talking of the Quoting Luke that is not found in "how this cauliflower tastes to you, now".
SO I still find the notion of qualia oddly hollow.
You seem to be agreeing with me...?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
A memory is also a qual?
So those who thought experience is something static and eternal were wrong. It doesn't present that way.
Why, a thing without itself makes more sense to you?
I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10.
Two seconds later, I'm thinking of the same number.
It's commonly accepted that the sort of thing I just described happens all the time.
Is there an argumemt that shows it doesn't? If not, voila: privacy.
Agreed. We have a number of concepts available already, such as "sense data", "sensations", "perception", and even "apperception" (the perception of perception, aka meta perception).
For any philosophical purpose, eg to establish the specificities and subjectivity of mental phenomena involved in perception, the subjective concept of "color" can suffice, in its relation to more objective light wavelengths. Or the concept of "music" in relation to air pressure modulation. E.g. a machine really enjoying music, or able to feel any easthetic experience is hard to imagine, providing an "intuition pump" about the asserted irreducibility of sensations to physical phenomena.
So I agree: who needs the philosophical term "qualia" when "music" or "colors" or "sensations" exist and can do any philosophical work that "qualia" was made up to do?
If you can't know anything about the think in itself, then why insist on talking about it?
It drops out of the conversation.
How do you know? What's your justification for thinking it is the same number? Could you never be mistaken here?
Sure. I could be mistaken and actually be a brain in a vat. What's my justification for thinking I'm not?
My point was that it's commonly held that humans can have private thoughts and experiences. I need more than "how do you know?" to seriously doubt it.
The next step is to recognise the damage the introduction of such a notion can do... see and .
Exactly.
Quoting magritte?
Qualia are a synonym for sensations that emphasizes the qualitative, as opposed to structural, aspect of sensations. The structural aspect is more amenable to description - verbal or mathematical ("I see two triangles and a square.") while the qualitative aspect seems ineffable ("The square is blue."). It also seems more conceivable how the structural aspect of a sensation could be encoded in a neural network than the qualitative aspect, which again seems to be a problem of description: we can more easily describe experienced shapes and their numbers in relation to configurations and numbers of neurons, than we can describe the quality of "blue" in relation to the qualities of neurons when we don't even know their qualities (we don't have a conscious experience of them, probably).
I would still say, how is it that one is equivalent to the other. We keep moving the goal posts, aka the Cartesian Theater fallacy. That's a fallacy I think was coined by Dennett, but ironically I think he himself violates. It's neurons encoding for this or that.. but then encoding itself has to be explained as for why it is mental states. The problem lies in positing a hidden dualism. Mental states exist, yes or no? If yes, whence mental states? We keep referencing another complexity of physical states. It's not like if you pile on more physical explanations, "poof" mental states appear.
Even if you can't know the thing in itself directly, you know it must be something; a thing cannot be nothing. And you can know the thing in itself indirectly - you can know its representation in your mind that is created via sensory perception, by mapping of at least some properties of the external thing onto your neural network. The representation is not the same as the external thing but there may be useful similarities between the two.
... leading on, we hope, to reconception of and improvement on the received wisdom. (Leading on to another round, etc.)
I always assumed that an "intuition pump" is to be admired as an artificial aid for getting the process going. Perhaps like agreeing of definitions "for the sake of argument", but more, er... erotic?
Seems to apply in the case of the Chinese Room, at least.
Turns out Dennett only really wants to disable all the pumps. Oh well.
Anyway, I'm often surprised at how amenable he (and if he isn't playing around) is to mentalistic talk.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quite.
Quoting bongo fury
Can't (yet) find a smoking gun to quote from Quining. But,
Quoting Olivier5
Hopefully, @Banno and Dennett mean, merely, external stimulus sets, while you mean, specifically, qualia (or some such) in the head?
Hence the "hard problem". And yet, mental events must be underwritten by physical events. There’s no information without some material support. Genes need DNA, a poem needs paper.
Why do you expect anything to be "added"? AFAIK, "qualia" is just a term of art for any phenomenal experience, including taste. I don't believe it's meant to add anything, or refer to anything, over and above taste (or other phenomenal experience). Maybe it is troublesome for materialism/functionalism, but can it seriously be questioned whether we have taste and pain and other phenomenal first-person experiences?
What Dennett means remains unclear to me, and I suspect to his proponents as well. Ambiguity has its advantages. As for Banno, he seems to accept that we experience qualitative sensations inside our head, such as colours, or the timbre of a musical instrument (the “sound of trumpet”). He just doesn’t think the word « qualia » adds anything useful to his conceptual tool box.
That, to me, is mentalism: confusing thoughts (neurological events) with pictures (or other symbols) and with pictured (or otherwise symbolised) objects.
I'm certainly not confusing thoughts with neurological events. That would be a category error. And mentalists are people with telepathic capacity, which I don't believe in.
Ok, what are they for you?
Quoting Olivier5
haha, at least that needn't be a substantive issue. I just meant, believing in mental furniture. Whatever you want to call that. Phenomenalism? Psychism?
Yes, the hard problem, agreed. I think most hard problemers would agree with the physical events part. As for information, I agree that information is instantiated in physical events, but is this not a case of Cartesian Theater yet again? Whence the first person aspect from information itself? What makes information experiential or have a subjective "what it feels like" aspect?
Thoughts are information, written down and processed by neurons.
Interesting. Symbols? Sentences? Images?
A certain kind of complexity seems necessary for our consciousness; from neuroscience it seems to be a dynamic (causal-spatio-temporal) kind of organized complexity (rich differentiation and integration). It seems that an object needs to be complex in this way in order to be "conscious". A single neuron is probably not conscious but a complex collection of neurons may be; but it's difficult to describe how because while we may be conscious of the quality of a collection of neurons we don't know the qualities of the neurons themselves and we don't know how the qualities of neurons compose the quality of a collection of neurons. The quality of the collection is not identical to the qualities of the constituent neurons because the collection is not identical to any of the constituent neurons; it is an object in its own right, with its own intrinsic/non-structural identity (quality).
You may think that a collection of objects is not an object in its own right but all objects you see around yourself are collections of other objects. What is a "real" object then? One that is not a collection, one that has no parts? But that may be just a special kind of object, an empty collection, that is no more "real" than non-empty collections. I think our problem with collections is that when we imagine an example of a collection we usually imagine something like a collection of apples and we see no usefulness in regarding this collection as a separate object and so we deny its separate identity. We may be right about the uselessness of such an identity but wrong about its existence. On some introspection, we then generalize this conclusion to all collections and conclude that only non-composite objects are "real". William James expressed something similar: a collection of conscious people does not have its own consciousness. From this we are tempted to conclude that a collection of neurons (which are probably unconscious themselves!) cannot be conscious. But as a I wrote above, a conscious object needs to have a certain kind of complexity, and examples like a collection of people or a collection of apples may be far from complex in this sense. It's difficult to imagine how the qualities of parts compose the quality of their collection (beyond perhaps some vague sense of "blending"), let alone if it is a highly complex collection and due to the significance of its dynamic nature the collection is not just a 3-dimensional spatial object but a 4-dimensional spatio-temporal object.
Quoting litewave
Agreed
Quoting litewave
It seems like non-structural identity (quality) needs to be explained. What is this such that a collection of neurons would instantiate it? Its pushing the Cartesian Theater to a different location it seems.
Quoting litewave
Yes, so why would a collection of neurons be qualitative, first-person experience without simply positing a dualism somewhere in there already?
If nothing is added, why bother?
Adding unneeded entities also adds confusion,
In my metaphysics, every object is something in itself (which constitutes its intrinsic identity), as opposed to its relations to other objects (which constitute its extrinsic/relational/structural/compositional etc. identity). A collection is an object too, so what are its intrinsic and extrinsic identities? Its extrinsic identity is defined by its relations to other objects, and among these other objects are its parts because none of the parts is the collection; the collection is an object in its own right, additional to the objects that are its parts. (The extrinsic identity of the collection constituted by its relations to its parts may also be called its "compositional" identity.) The intrinsic identity of a collection is something else than its parts or its relations to its parts, so it is not its structure; it is something structureless, so I also call it "quality". It is the "object in itself" that stands in relations to other "objects in themselves". Every object has such a quality (or we can say that every object in itself is such a quality) but only the objects that are complex in the sense we agreed above have "conscious" qualities, that is qualities that are contents of what we call "consciousness" (qualia or qualitative aspects of consciousness).
Quoting schopenhauer1
My view is that reality is constituted by qualities and relations between them.
It appears that some people do deny it. People vary in their ability to hold mental images. People who lack the ability say they didn't realize that anybody can do it. Maybe it's like that.
Yes. Qualia are elements of subjective experience. When we subjectively experience a memory, we just experience a different kind of qual. I admit when I said it before, I was just expressing my own discomfort, but since then I've gathered that the idea that memories are qualia isn't that controversial, even taught at colleges :o https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/what-is-cognitive-science/icalrepeat.detail/2007/11/01/179/-/memory-qualia
Quoting Banno
Yeah, I'm pretty much on board with Dennett, and so with you by extension. It's interesting to wonder what, if qualia explain absolutely nothing, the point of them is. To me, what differentiates qualia from the colder subject-object interaction is simply that our brain is dumping information (that is not necessarily relevant) into our consciousness for consideration. The redundancy is an aspect of the fact that it's not computed in advance what is relevant and what is not. The conscious part of the brain is an algorithmic problem-solver that apparently understands data in a certain, pre-processed way that makes it amenable to that sort of processing. The sorts of intuition pumps Dennett presents are not statements about the conscious brain's API but about the absence of new information in qualia themselves. And that's fine. We know the brain does an awesome job without qualia, far more than it does with. The question then remains as to why qualia exist at all, which seems to me a question of what form that same information happens to be required to be in for our conscious brains to do what they do.
...but I would not accept that wording. There's a slide going on here that I would avoid. It starts with the taste of milk and ends in nonsense such as disembodied sense-data... A large part of my objection to qualia is that they have fallen into being no more than neologised sense-data.
For the interests of philosophical discussion, I suppose.
But perhaps we mean different things by it. From the SEP article on Qualia:
Quoting SEP article
In my initialy reply, I was thinking of meaning (1), rather than Dennett's more restricted meaning (4). I consider myself a physicalist in the sense that I don't believe there is any other "substance" in the universe. My view/guess is that this issue is linguistic or perspectival, rather than substantial. However, I don't believe that the mind/body problem can be dismissed by pronouncing "there is no mind".
Quoting Banno
Indeed.
Yes, and some people are deaf or blind or lacking in some other sense(s). Maybe someone somewhere has been born without any senses or phenomenal experiences whatsoever, but that would have to be a rare exception.
Can you explain what it means to be constituted by qualities? Is that like a sort of pansychism?
So if qualia is equivalent to sense-data.. what is the objection of sense-data that you hold? If it is equivalent, what Dennett holds about qualia, is what he holds about sense-data. If this is so, then he thinks sense-data is an "illusion". However, how he uses illusions might be misleading. Rather, it is an illusion of origins, not the actual phenomenon itself. If it is about the thing-itself, then Dennett's illusions are nothing more than another name for mental states, which bring us back to square one: What ARE mental states?
You have no sensations? No sense of colour, the food you eat tastes nothing, and music doesn't exist for you? yours must be a rather sad life.
What IS matter?
What IS time?
What IS space?
This sort of questions is above our pay grade. We cannot know the noumenal. It's been known for a while.
Best to focus on questions which we can possibly answer, in my view.
Of course! Also humor, dreams, ideas and music. You don't have those?
Personally I believe that these questions must have some simple biological answer. Living organisms self-reproduce. Animals have a piloting system that helps them chose where to go. They try to protect themselves from hazards. Our immune system constantly fight against other organisms who try to squat inside our body. I conclude that there are many biological foundations for the sense of self, that such a sense is necessary for self preservation, self affirmation and self reproduction, which are characteristics of life.
Then why would a person claim to be a p-zombie?
Quoting Olivier5
I was ready to be schooled in information theory, or some such. But you revert to a pre-philosophical declaration of wonder. Which is fine. Don't you want to refine it into theory plausible as literal truth, though?
And equally, of course, in their literal theorising of what "holding a mental image" actually amounts to.
A better term might be "panqualityism", which means that reality is made up only of qualities. If you think that all qualities deserve to be called "conscious" then it is panpsychism. But I would reserve the term "conscious" only for qualities of certain complex collections.
SEP on qualia and sense data.
At best, a sense datum has properties which are introspectively accessible and are part of one's subjective state. In other words, a sense datum has qualia (or is associated with qualia), rather than is qualia. eg. If a sense datum of vision is the totality of visual appearances of which a person is aware [hide=*] (pay no attention to treating an appearance as a mediating object (unary relation) and an agent-environment (binary) relation at the same time :P) [/hide], and that sense datum contains an apple [hide=**](or sub-appearance/image which is apple-like, an apple-appearance)[/hide], the visual qualia associated with the apple in the sense datum would be the totality of "introspectively accessible" feelings associated with (or identical to) appropriate apple [hide=**](or apple-appearance)[/hide] properties. If the qualia is the red of the apple in my subjective state, it isn't identical to the light wavelengths of red or the apple's light reflectance/absorption profile simply because a component of my state is not part of the apple - the apple isn't the sense data or qualia featuring it. Keeping track of exactly what means what, and how you're carving up experience into those meaningful components is important.
A distinct way of fleshing that out would be to say that qualia are properties of "properties that perceptually appear to us", the subjective aspect of perceptual properties, and the perceptual properties constitute the appearance. Another distinct way of fleshing that out would be to say that perceptual properties (properties of appearances) which are also "introspectively accessible" and "are part of the subjective state" immediately count as qualia. Though that will make qualia have a representational aspect or be a means of representation of object properties, as they are now constitutive of an agent-object relation rather than being a (the subjective/felt) component of the agent's perceptual state (the current sense datum). [hide=*](If representational is uncomfortable for you, try "informative", like "the taste of cabbage (to me) is informative about cabbage properties")[/hide] Like my "red-quale" upon seeing the apple is in a correspondance/modelling relation with certain apple properties (not apple appearance properties) vs my sense-datum of the apple is in a representational relationship with the apple object and the red in the sense datum is simply a component of how that state feels to me. Those two accounts mark the distinction between (1) qualia being components of the agent-object perceptual relationship (qualia as relational components which may or may not be representational) and (2) qualia being subjective components associated with the agent-object relationship in a specific time/place/form (which might be a sense-datum, or other instance of experience).
Are the qualia "in the agent", are they "in the object", are they "in the relationship" between agent and object? Are they themselves when considered together equal to the perceptual relationship between agent and object, are they outputs of an agent's perceptual relationship with an object in the perceiving agent, are qualia object properties as represented in an agent? Are qualia subject properties in a correspondence relationship with object properties when perception operates the correspondence relationship? Need there be any correspondence at all? (eg, dream/hallucination quales)... All distinct theses.
You really have to pay attention to precisely what you're talking about if you want to talk about it. Come on qualia advocates, don't vaguely gesture towards qualia and equivocate-through-appeal-to-intuition just like the article accuses you of (while you dismiss it).
Cant you say that for anything, including your brain states?? Observed brains and their neurons change.
So qualia don't exist, but they change? What is it that is changing then?
Quoting Banno
How do neural activity explain the quality of taste? Sound like we taking about Suffern things altogether. Why would there be a report of taste if neural activity explained it all?
Well for one, a 700 nanometer wavelength electromangnetic wave moves through space but "red" doesn't.
But what are images, if not information? What are symbols if not information vehicles? What exactly is 'pre-philosophical' about images or symbols?
If you need to learn, then be ready to unlearn your prejudice about what constitutes a legitimate philosophical issue. I contend that colours as we perceive them form a significant field in neurology and psychology, a domain extensively studied by modern science as a sort of gateway to the hard problem; that colours and how to reproduce them were a major incentive for technological advances in chemistry, printing, TV, computer displays, and scores of other economically important domains; that there are several theories or systems of primary colors, complete with mathematical space coordinates and functions; that we can see colours for a reason: because natural selection built the system, wich is useful to spot berries and stuff.
Colours are an important part of human experience, economy, art of course, technology and science. What makes you believe philosophy has to deal with them with a ten foot pole?
Who claims to be a p-zombie?
Dennett.
Quoting fdrake
Just trying to make sense of your distinction, which seems valid (and appears to fit definition 2 of my own SEP quote on the different uses of "qualia" (above)). The qualia denier seems to have two options as a result: either deny there are any sense data, which seems very unlikely; or deny that sense data have properties, which is to deny a defining characteristic of sense data according to the SEP definition that you quoted.
I don't think this is quite true. One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. The project seems somewhat reminiscent of changing God into an ineffable feeling in order to preserve the notion when clearly it has been twisted out of all recognition from the standard use.
We can already describe quite adequately the associated mental activity which accompanies the reception of sense data. It's called our response. I'm not sure what benefit there is to reifying it to 'qualia', but, given the history of the term, I can see much unnecessary confusion and distraction in doing so.
Not meaning it literally:
Quoting Olivier5
A book literally contains sentences and images. Many societies encourage the view that brains do, too. I would need persuading. I thought you were about to try. But generalising to all of the things that a book can contain only metaphorically only punctures my intuition of the claim.
Third option; which I take to be Dennett's (then we can get back to the thread).
(1) People feel stuff. (Dennett agrees)
(2) There are theoretical accounts of how people feel stuff. (Dennett agrees)
(3) The concept "qualia" plays a central role in some of those accounts. (Dennett agrees)
(4) Using the concept "qualia" in one of those theoretical accounts in the commonplace ways in which it is used comes along with theoretical and/or intuitive commitments regarding the nature of experience; of how experience/feeling/consciousness/perception is theorised. (Dennett agrees, Quining Qualia is trying to illustrate and render implausible some of those commitments)
(5) Those commitments are inaccurate, false, incoherent or implausible (this is what Dennett's thesis is).
(6) Therefore the existence of qualia (as theorised or intuited) is false or implausible.
If we say that someone is an eliminativist about qualia, that will mean they believe that qualia do not exist. Qualia the theoretical concept. That does not have to mean that "People feel stuff" is false, it simply means that the kind of thing qualia tries to refer to does not exist in the manner it is theorised or intuited. See edit for more detail.
Quoting Luke
In context, the same theoretical move as above could be applied to sense data; denying the existence of sense data is consistent with belief in the claim that "People feel and perceive", it may mean denying that the intended referent of sense data exists in the manner it is theorised to. In the broader context of Dennett's work, this is what I take his Cartesian theater metaphor to target. Taking target at the idea that an appearance is then interacted with by another perceptual/bodily process to present it to/as that person's experience. eg: (A, bad) attributing the quale "red" to a tomato appearance which was seen vs (B, good) saying that the tomato was seen as red.
I'm sure whole books could be written about the distinction between A and B; the ontological status of perceptual features and how they arise in an agent's perceptual relationship with their environment (and objects within it).
If we keep getting stuck by confusing denial of qualia for denial that people feel things at all, we're never going to understand the issue.
Edit: the same theoretical move that I've just applied to qualia and sense data could be applied to the concept of feeling; if it were the case that the theoretical and intuitive commitments regarding "feeling" in our folk psychology/pre-analytical intuitions were inaccurate or misleading, then the same move that yielded "qualia don't exist" would yield "feelings don't exist" (as they are theorised or intuitied in our folk psychology). But you have to keep in mind that it that's quite a lot different from saying people don't "feel things" in any sense, "People feel things" could be false because we wouldn't feel things in the manner allegedly set out in folk psychology, which is providing the meaning of "feel" in "People feel things".
Brains contain cells. Actual, physical books contain pages. They do not formally contain sentences. At best they can produce and reproduce sentences, which is different.
Even our minds do not exactly 'contain' much. It's all a flux, 'streams of consciouness'. A stream does not 'contain' its water.
Last time I read a serious scientific book about memory (can't remember the reference, amusingly) it pointed that it's much easier to recognize a face than to mentally picture a face by appeal to memory. Therefore, our memory does not store pictures (the book concluded), unlike the memory chips of computers. It seems to store ways to recognise images, but not images themselves. Likewise for colours: we can recognise them alright, but if we close our eyes and try to summon the memory of "burgondy red", all we (I) can get is a faint echo of it, not the vivid "qualia".
The mind is a set of processes. It's not a static space with some stable, dependable 'furniture' in it. I think we can agree here.
Computers that are equipped with visual, sound, or pressure interfaces can feel things. One could say they have experiences. We imagine that the experiences humans and other animals have go beyond function to include awareness of a quality of being.
If Dennett is cool with this, then I don't follow the point he's hoping to make. Is he saying that when people believe there's some extra unspecified character to experience, that they're wrong? Well, since it wasn't specified, I don't care if it exists or not.
AFAIK that's part of his intentional stance idea. Say if you put an expression which always evaluates as true as the terminating-when-false condition which is checked in the iterations of a while loop, it might be harmless to say "the computer thinks it needs to go on forever". It's an explanatory strategy for what the computer is doing, even if the computer strictly speaking does not think.
The question is going to be how similar "thinking" in "I was thinking about you yesterday" when said to a lover is to the (metaphorical) state we ascribe to the computer in "the computer thinks it needs to go on forever". Is one thinking like the other? Is one imputation of thought like the other? Why and how much? - that kind of thing.
Quoting frank
If someone has a theory about how something works, its structure, its properties, it's on them to set out the theory. That people do not do this for qualia, or equivocate between the theoretical construct they're using and the fact that people feel things in some sense is shirking the burden of proof. The essay in the OP as precisely an attempt to study these intuitions in order to specify them and draw out consequences. To shift this burden of proof:
If he ends up saying something absurd; maybe it's on him, maybe it's because what he's criticising is nebulous and unspecified in the accounts of its proponents and it's hard work.
So, after the careless generalising, a strenuous particularizing.
Ok then, take two:
Quoting bongo fury
Please elaborate, for the benefit of those for whom sentences would normally (without notice to the contrary) be classes of printed inscription or sounded utterance, and images would be classes of inscription or illumination?
When Newton presented gravity, he explicitly said that he didn't know what it was. Were we supposed to wait until it was thoroughly explained to adopt the idea?
Quoting fdrake
Who are you talking about? Chalmers?
There are a number of meanings to the word "Book". I am speaking of the following:
A set of pages that have been fastened together inside a cover to be read or written in.
In this sense, a book is a material object, a set of pieces of paper bound together. Now, some of the pages might also contain ink, disposed on the page in such a way that someone trained to decipher these things might translate them ink dots into sentences in, say, modern English. Someone not trained to decipher them will fail to translate them of course. The translation into sentences happens in the mind of the reader, based on the physical ink dots in the book as he sees them. The sentences are therefore coded (written) on the book pages by way of ink dots, and can be decoded, but themselves are linguistic in nature, not material, and therefore they are not technically "contained" in any material book. You could write a sentence in blue ink, in red ink, in large font, in small italic font, in cursive, in stenography, even in bloody Morse code - it'd still be the same sentence; only its material support (the ink dots) will change.
I had the self refutation objections in my head. The other thread's OP link has Strawson explicating a version of it.
(1) Eliminativism towards (class of mental/phenomenal states with theorised properties relative to an account) is an instance of (class of mental/phenomenal states with those theorised properties relative to that account).
(2) Eliminativism is false.
A non-eliminativist using this argument doesn't have to talk about "that account" - their account - in the second bracket at all to try and refute eliminativism, but you do have to to examine the truth of the first premise. If it were the case that the class was empty, then (1) is false. "The second class is empty" would be true when the entities (like qualia) in whatever account do not exist in the manner they are theorised to, which is an eliminativist position regarding the class in question!
Given that this is a widespread refutation attempt; indeed, a philosopher as prominent and otherwise generous as Strawson targets Dennett with a version of it; the suspicions regarding qualia proponents being unwilling to talk about the structure of qualia seem quite well grounded to me. You can also see it on the forum, people who use qualia language to theorise/intuit experience don't pin down the structure of experience they're using or intuiting, they want to refute the eliminativist rather than discuss the structure of experience.
And likewise, you are not interested in experience either, you just want to refute the non-eliminativists. It's just another battle of the God Wars for you and Dennett. That's boring metaphysics trying to eliminate some other boring metaphysics, and throwing the baby with the bath water for good measure...
Nah. I'm an eliminativist towards qualia because how they're used seems to me to commit their user to an account of perception which relies upon a perceptual intermediary which bears or instantiates the qualia. That people's intuitions go towards qualia looks to me to derive from treating their experiences in a present at hand manner. Intuitions that treat experience/perception as present at hand resembles Cartesian Theater rather a lot. Appearance-objects-with-properties (sense data) that we experience, qualia being a type of property, and a perceptual intermediary being the object that bears it.
So I'm eliminativist towards qualia because I think that position reflects the phenomenology of experience; I don't think there are appearance-objects-with-properties, so I don't think there are appearance-objects-with-(subjective)-properties.
I'm also hesitant to say "experience", because that starts looking like treating "an experience" - an instance of perceptual relation - as an object rather than as a distributed agent-environment relation; a corpuscle of correlated interactions between a body, its social context and history, and its environment.
I didn't understand much of your post but I have no objection to this particular quote. If you don't want to address the human experience(s) in your own personal philosophy, I suppose that's your call but that's no ground to criticize others when they do address experience. Also, science is based on observation, which is a form of human experience last I checked, so I hope you don't do any of that complicated science stuff...
Read the links I provided, then. I did bother to reference the post, but I appreciate that it was very dense and relied upon familiarity with the terms. I could not think of a better refutation of your claim that
Quoting Olivier5
than showing you how interested I am in the structure of experience. Including showing my work. Can we move onto discussing the actual paper now please? And how it deals with the structure of experience?
If eliminativism here is the same as behaviorism, then this is correct. I think this is why behaviorism is fairly rare: because it implodes. It has to be qualified (ha) to allow humans the ability to theorize.
If by eliminativism we're just being reductive about qualia, then Strawson is pointing to the question that must have popped into everybody's mind when they first encountered Dennett describing qualia as illusive. How did Dennett not notice that this particular wording would invite Strawson's objection (that an illusion is an example of first person data, or qualia)? I could speculate, but who cares?
For Chalmers, first person data is not something bizarre or special. Neuroscientists deal with it regularly, as Olivier5 pointed out. Whether physicalism needs to grow (as it did when gravity and electromagnetism were introduced) in order to accomodate first person data as an object of inquiry in itself, is debated. Dennett denies that physicalism needs to change because there is no such thing as qualia, or at least he sometimes appears to be saying that.
BTW, arguably, the concept first appeared in Karel Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots, which was Marxist, just to point to some of the cultural background to the question.
I don't think it's the same as behaviourism in general.
If behaviourism is characterised by the claim that there are no internal states of any sort, then in order for a type of eliminativism to be consistent with the negation of behaviourism all it would require is that type of eliminativism was compatible with there are some internal states of some sort.
Specifically; it's prima facie consistent to claim that behaviourism is false, but all the common sense/folk psychological entities that we posit in explaining/describing internal states do not actually exist (as they are described/intuited/theorised). In that case, there are internal states, but the ways we describe them are not true verbatim. The ones we use might still be useful fictions, representative summaries etc. Though that's going to depend on precisely how one is an eliminativist. It might also be that there really are internal states associated with the words we use to describe them (like "emotion"), but that the words we use to describe them in their normal use correspond to a collection of internal states with radically different characterisations - rendering the use of the terms in their normal way occlusive and inaccurate. In that kind of scenario, it may be that we really have gotten the internal states conceptualised right in our normal use of the terms for some internal state categories - but not for others. So perhaps one can be an eliminativist towards what's gestured toward by a usual word we use for some category, but not others - like being an eliminativist towards emotion, but not pain.
TL;DR - eliminativism doesn't have to be the claim that "there are no internal states", it might be a claim that "there are no internal states of type X" or that "there are no internal states of type X as we commonly theorise/intuit/refer to them". That's the kind of intuition being pulled on when Dennett wrote about "the taste of cauliflower" in the first example; the taste? There's one? But it's a time and individual varying relation? It varies over the behaviour that promotes the experiences we aggregate later into "the taste of cauliflower"? Look at all this complication, surely there's some work to do in picking it apart...
Okay, you want to expose some particularly interesting section for discussion?
Note: Banno already convinced me to abandon the jargony "qualia" and use the concept of "sensation" instead. But for the sake of reviewing Dennet's use of the concept "qualia", I will make an exception.
Eliminative materialism wouldn't say there are no internal states. It just requires that all such states are of the central nervous system.
Chalmers wouldn't call qualia "internal" because of the notion of the extended mind.
Dennett is a reductionist. He believes all experience reduces to nervous system functioning, so that once we understand how vision functions, for instance, we understand all there is to know about the experience of vision. Qualia proponents deny that and point to Chalmer's p-zombie argument.
BTW, the most fun topic ever is property emergence and emergence of mind. We should do that next.
No one is disputing this. The physical causes are not disputed, but that there is a mental aspect is at question. What is the nature of this.
I would aim a bit lower than that. The true nature of things being apparently inaccessible, let's focus on how we perceive mental phenomena, and perhaps how we can explain our perceptions of them.
Back to qualia, then. Whether it's right to claim that qualia do not exist, at least as they are theorised/described intuited, is going to turn on how they are theorised/described/intuited. As I see it, the contribution Quining Qualia makes is to present us with scenarios that bring to light by challenging commonly held intuitions we have about qualia.
How that fits into the above eliminativism argument depends on to what extent intuitions/theories/descriptions using qualia are accurate and elucidatory of the phenomenon in question. Additional context is that the term is at face value rather vague and conflicted; eg it might refer to a property of a subjective experience, the experienced properties of a perceptual state, a retrojected aggregate over experiences ("the taste of cauliflower" being a singular posited quale), a flavour commonality that nevertheless instantiates into tasting-cauliflower experiences despite how taste subjective states [hide=*](flavour "notes", intensity, mouthfeel, cabbaginess vs creaminess vs toastiness depending on preparation)[/hide] depend on the stage of chewing, it might be a property of the subject that is present at all times over the eating of cauliflower, it might be a relation between the subject and the cauliflower that varies with time... All of those metaphysically distinct conceptions might be what someone is referring to by "the taste of cauliflower quale".
"the subjective state" vs "the subjective properties of the state" vs "the relational properties of cauliflower eating insofar as they relate to taste" vs "the time varying subjective state within cauliflower eating events" vs "an aggregate property over time varying subjective states within cauliflower eating events" vs "an aggregate property over people over time varying subjective states within cauliflower eating events" vs "an aggregate property over people over time varying subjective states over cauliflower eating events" ...
It's only obvious if you don't look.
Fair enough. I'm confusing all manner of abstract Forms with their Material supports. So much for my theory of how belief in abstract mental furniture arises from confusing internal and external materials.
Absolutely. It's not called the Hard Problem for nothing.
But this has been the problem with people like Dennett- it's always switching the hard problem for easy problems. But the heart of the matter is the hard problem. What are mental states, and what are they in relation to physical states? Anything else is just putting a "Do not disturb" sign up and pushing the Cartesian theater to another area of focus.
The problem is that physical states are always reducible to just another mental state. There is nothing necessary about a physical state, it is merely a notion that mind projects upon the raw substance of experience...if we call it "matter", it is the mind doing so.
Quoting Olivier5
This begs the question: whether or not "mental phenomenon" qualifies as an object of perception? Even if we arrive at an adequate answer for how we percieve mental phenomenon, and can explain those perceptions, we would simply be pushing the problem farther down the line. We'd only be able to explain the true nature of our perception of mental states as we percieve it, as an object of perception (as it is for us, and not what it is in itself)...in the end, we get nowhere that hasn't already been gotten.
Certainly this is the idealist and pansychist's view of things.
Absolutely. They are definitely hard perspectives to argue against.
Cant you just puncture it by denying God?
God is not necessary for idealism. But the notion of God is quite coherent and rational from an idealist perspective.
Whether qualia are appropriate to describe internal states, and indeed what the phenomenal structure of those internal states is, is a distinct problem from the hard problem, no? We're not talking about how phenomenal states arise or emerge out of non-sentient matter, we're talking about the appropriate description of internal/phenomenal states of sentient beings and what role qualia should play in that, if any. If we end up saying qualia do not exist as they are theorised/intuited, that still is consistent with keeping the explanatory gap open as we've not committed ourselves to any thesis regarding the emergence of phenomenal states from non-sentient matter! Solving the hard problem is a bridge between phenomenal states and physical states, dissolving it is showing there's no need of a bridge, the explanatory gap is asserting that there's a river in need of a bridge to cross [hide=*] (or a denial that such a bridge can be built) [/hide]. What we're doing in discussing this essay so far is staying on the phenomenal side to see if qualia help make a map of it.
If it turned out that keeping the explanatory gap open required relying on theories/intuitions which can be shown to be confused, inaccurate or false, only then would the hard problem dissolve.
Isn't this possibly a case of a straw man then? Knockdown qualia but not the real problem (the hard problem). Call it sense-data, mental states, subjective states, qualia. Its choosing a very specific kind of idea (qualia) to (possibly?) try to eliminate all mental states from the equation. If he's not doing this, then can you explain how he is not doing this? What is Dennett's stand if not on qualia then on mental states in general? If it is something like, "It's an illusion" (not just qualia but mental states altogether), then what the heck does that mean? The illusion is still "something".
I dunno read and analyse the paper and see what you think.
I read the pumps, and ask this still to you.
I think you've misunderstood the idea of the Hard Problem.
To solve the Hard Problem would be to provide a theory of phenomenal consciousness as opposed to functions. IOW, to solve the Hard Problem would be to explain qualia. No such comprehensive theory of consciousness presently exists. Some deny that it will ever be possible to achieve this kind of understanding because it requires turning the lens of science on itself, so to speak. A minority, people like Dennett, deny that there is anything to explain.
I think, so far, Dennett's inspiration has led you to see complexity in something as simple as the taste of a pumpkin (or whatever). Taste is influenced by your sense of smell, which is the only sense processed by your frontal lobes, the seat of emotion. That's why aromas and flavors are frequently accompanied by direct and primitive emotions. Some of that is the result of cranial reflexes. Notice sometime that certain smells can give you a sudden flash of being somewhere else, in your past. Maybe it's the smell of a certain kind of food. I had it once with the smell of a lilac flower.
The field of aesthetics is endlessly fascinating, whether it's about sound, visuals, tactile stuff, the way all of it mixes together with ideas and emotions, cultural influence, and philosophy. Yes, it's very complex. Nobody ever said it wasn't.
All attempts to explain the aesthetic sphere of life amount to mere vanity. It's complex but insubstantial. Science comes closest to giving us anything objective to rely on. Still, all scientific knowledge is based on appearance - as it seeks to tell us how things appear, and scientific fact is only an approximation of the truth (of how things are in themselves).
What you say is not specific to perception of of mental phenomena, it applies to elephants and atoms too. And yet scientists go somewhere that has not been 'gotten' by studying their perceptions of elephants and atoms. So there's a gap in your logic.
What the fuck kind of argument is that? Dennet tries to deny qualia need explaining but lilacs remind you of your childhood so...what? What on earth has any of that got to do with the article or with the 'hard' problem?
So far what should have been an interesting exegesis has been nothing but an Herculean attempt by fdrake to get at the issues (nothing to add, some really good insights there though) which has been met by a lot of vague hand-waiving of a level more suited to the smoke-hazed dorm-room. "Yeah but...like...I can smell lilacs, man? Crazy init?"
Note we don't know what matter is. We may never know, and yet we still study it.
If by "what ARE mental states" you mean "how can we categorize them usefully and think about their relations with other things", I agree with you that it's a good question. (My answer is mental events are informational in nature). But if you are asking about the true ontology of minds, I'm afraid you will have to wait forever for an answer.
Perhaps there is ellipsis in my reasoning, it doesn't change the fact that scientists would have to go beyond perception to study perception as such, and since that seems to be impossible so far, we are mired in perception - not a world of being, but a world of appearances - hence "gotten".
What do mental states, elephants and atoms have in common?
~They are objects of perception.
How do they differ?
~Nobody has ever perceived a mental state.
Mental events, like thought or emotion, nope. I can't even think of which perceptual faculty might be responsible for apprehending a mental event. Perhaps you could enlighten me.
Why?
A simple question follows:
Can you or anyone, even Daniel Dennett, describe, put into words, everything that's going on in your or their or his mind/head?
The answer is a resounding NO!
And that which you can't describe in words - the ineffable aspect - of consciousness is precisely what qualia is.
There seems to be connection with Wittgenstein's private language argument. Qualia can't be put in the public domain and thus, private language argument given due weightage, qualia is beyond the reach of language. What say you? :chin:
I suspect you also know something about your own mental phenomena, and this knowledge is based on a capacity for introspection. It doesn't come from nothing. The distinction between knowing and sensing is weaker than you seem to think: you know because you sense.
And yes, mental phenomena are subjective by definition. But MRI of brains can detect emotions, so self-reporting is not the only tool we have to study these things.
That was part of my intuition regarding the taste if pumpkins. I had to cut it short else Warhol prints and Keifer lead splatters would show up.
What intuitions did you encounter re: taste of pumpkins?
I'm not even sure that sentence makes sense, but if it does, I'm afraid I have no idea what you're asking me. The closest I could get to what might be an intuition about the taste of pumpkins is that they would taste like the last time I ate a pumpkin??
I figured that part of the exegesis would involve doing what he asks to see what happens. That's what drake did.
OK...might be getting somewhere, but still an awful lot of dots to join up...
Our mental (and physical) response to eating pumpkin is complex and varied - got that bit (smelling lilacs makes you think of childhood or whatever). So... that relates to Dennet's "surely it is quite OK to talk of the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t, and ask whether it is just the same as or different from the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t', or the way the juice tastes to Jones at time t." - there's some way pumpkin tastes to you at some point, right?
But then he goes on to say "right here we have already made the big mistake. The final step presumes that we can isolate the qualia from everything else that is going on--at least in principle or for the sake of argument. What counts as the way the juice tastes to x can be distinguished, one supposes, from what is a mere accompaniment, contributory cause, or byproduct of this "central" way." Which seems exactly the matter waived away. Just because tasting pumpkin initiates some pathway of responses, doesn't mean it's anything more to do with the pumpkin than the chair you're sat on.
Well said. We're in Merleau-Ponty territory. If I present a swash of prussian blue to you, I can dramatically alter your experience of it by what I put beside it. So the notion that there is a distinct prussian blue qualia is wrong. It would appear that speaking in that way would have to be a kind of shorthand.
But is it really a shorthand for something? Could it be that the mind is a sieve that electrical and hormonal events flow through, leaving behind words as markers?
Or better: is there a theory out there (involving qualia) that pictures the mind this way when all that really exists is words?
Wasn't he one of the first to raise the logical contradiction of some theory trying to undermine the reality of human subjective experience, from which all knowledge and theories spring?
I think Dennet's 6th intuition pump touches on this. It's my favourite pump, and often overlooked for it's implications. You could not tell the difference between inverted messages or inverted memory links. You'd have no way of knowing which had happened. Dennet uses this pump only to show that the supposedly private nature of qualia must, if they exist, be so private as to be unavailable even to ourselves.
I think, however it has wider connotations from a broadly neurological perspective. Associations, like the memory association Dennet imagines having been inverted, are all there is going on. The reason why intuition pump 6 delivers the punch it does is because it shows that there's nothing to the 'quale' other than the chain of mental events (and physical/physiological responses) of which it is a part. A seamless process of two-way interaction between our minds and our environment. At no point in the process of inference and error reduction have we ever finally 'received' the input from the hidden states of the external world, they're constantly in a state of two-way interaction.
:cheer: Have you read PoP in French? Is it the same in French as in English?
Yep. Banno and I discussed this one.
Qualia as experiential objects with intrinsic (non-relational) properties are MMP's target of criticism in the opening sections of Phenomenology of Perception:
Compare the above to the declaration of confusion regarding qualia Dennett expresses in the opening paragraphs of Quining Qualia. Further, consider the following skepticism towards "pure experience" in light of the idea that people do not experience qualia...
[quote="MMP]Pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike impact. It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that this notion corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudimentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the ape or the hen, [b]have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms[/quote]
MMP highlights the co-constitutive relationships of agent, environment and context in perception. Compare this to the cauliflower tasting intuition pump in the paper; Dennett alludes to the idea that "a" taste is a complex of relations between the tasting agent, the environmental context, and the cauliflower rather than a subjective raw feel. [hide=*](If you want more quotes of MMP's commitment environmental/context sensitivity of perception I can find them for you)[/hide]
[quote=Dennett]What counts as the way the juice tastes to x can be distinguished, one supposes, from what is a mere accompaniment, contributory cause, or byproduct of this "central" way. One dimly imagines taking such cases and stripping them down gradually to the essentials, leaving their common residuum, the way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell to various individuals at various times, independently of how those individuals are stimulated or non- perceptually affected, and independently of how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe. The mistake is not in supposing that we can in practice ever or always perform this act of purification with certainty, but the more fundamental mistake of supposing that there is such a residual property to take seriously, however uncertain our actual attempts at isolation of instances might be.[/quote]
[quote=MMP]The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’. A really homogeneous area offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception. The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore, not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception..[/quote]
Another correspondence between the two thinkers in this context is the attitude of skepticism towards "pure impressions" - raw feelings, subjective states of redness, "the taste of the cauliflower" and so on -, MMP denies that they are even conceivable as instances of perception.
Later MMP makes comments to the effect that people believe that these are instances of perception because they are attending too much to the object and the properties imputed to the perception by reflection upon the object. Those alleged properties of perceptions are instead results of insufficiently attenuated common biases of thought.
The skepticism towards what seem like natural intellectual moves in analysing experience that Dennett has? MMP has it too. I doubt anyone could come through any serious study of the Phenomenology of Perception and still believe, somehow, that MMP was writing about "subjective experience" and "qualia".
[hide=**] (I'm not trying to make the claim that MMP and Dennett would be besties, I'm trying to highlight that they're actually critical of the same notions of experience for broadly similar reasons.) [/hide]
I know about my own mental phenomenon from introspection, reflection, abstraction, but never has it become directly accessible to my senses, or anyone else's for that matter.
The distinction between knowing and sensing is about as antithetical as it gets. To quote Leibniz: "Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses, except the mind itself."
Quoting Olivier5
Either way, self reporting or MRI scans, neither give our senses direct access to mental states.
It was 30 years ago... I remember very little of the book, except that the text made more sense to me than Husserl. I actually never came back to phenomenology after that. Probably should.
I consider introspection as a sense.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Do we have direct access to anything?
Sorry (but also rather smug) to see I wasn't being at all original here,
Quoting bongo fury
Then, I suppose, you don't subscribe to the five senses tradition. How many senses have you identified?
Yes. To our own sensing, to our own perceiving, and to our own thinking. Everything else is always experienced indirectly - that is to say, anything that can be apprehended through those faculties must be mediated from what it is in-itself, to what it is for-me, viz. a sensation, a perception, or a thought.
What distinction are you drawing between sense data properties and qualia? You say that there are "additional properties associated with qualia", so what are the (non-additional) properties that you appear to indicate are shared by both sense data and qualia?
Quoting fdrake
Firstly, apologies if I have derailed the thread in any way.
Secondly, if Dennett grants that conscious experience has properties, yet he is trying "to illustrate and render implausible" the notion of qualia, then it seems that Dennett considers qualia to be something different from the properties of conscious experience. However, he does not explain how qualia differ from the properties of conscious experience, and he offers no alternative to qualia in order to better describe the properties of conscious experience.
Quoting fdrake
Understood, but how are qualia distinct from the properties of conscious experience? If Dennett is happy to grant that conscious experience has properties, yet qualia are not those properties, then what are the properties of conscious experience? Or are they ineffable?
When we take in sensory inputs it sets off a large set of reactions in the brain, like a cascade. Most of those reactions are immediate feedback loops with the sensory apparatus themselves, the majority of which take place without any conscious awareness. Those that do have conscious awareness are always in review, post hoc constructions to model what just happened and prepare a response aimed at minimising the errors in that model. So to say that the properties of sense data are anything like qualia is to say that one of the properties of flags is missed busses (sometimes a flag flaps in the wind, which sometimes catches a person's eye, which sometimes causes them to trip, which sometimes means they twist their ankle, which sometimes means they walk slower ,which sometimes means they miss their bus). We can draw a line from the flag to the missed bus, but we'd be considered insane to regularly talk of missed busses as being one of the properties of flags.
Quoting Luke
Here I was referencing Dennet's position that...
The additional properties being...
In exegetical sense I think ti's clear that he is not denying conscious experience has properties, but only that these properties are not of the nature associated with qualia.
I would go further to say that conscious experience does not have usefully definable properties at all. There's nothing it is like to eat cauliflower. There is only the entire sum of your current model at the time you happen to be eating cauliflower (as well as doing and sensing a hundred other things). It is unhelpful to talk about this process of inference as an 'experience' of something. The something here is part of the experience, not the cause of it. We make up 'the something' as part of our guess as to the cause of all the hidden states (including our own interception) that we have messages from, and constantly refine that model as new errors are found.
To put it another way, there's no such thing as a cauliflower for it to have qualia associated with it.
:grin:
True story (the flag and the bus).
Where does he say that they are additional properties? In addition to what?
Quoting Isaac
And yet, you stated earlier:
Quoting Isaac
Your position is that you don't need to deny sense data properties in order to deny qualia. But you deny sense data properties (without explaining the difference) anyway? Okay.
In addition to simply being properties of conscious experience. He says
I'm taking that to be equivalent to 'additional'?
Quoting Luke
Yes. (Except, of course, I think I have explained the difference). If there's something about my explanation of the difference you're still unclear on, I'm happy to expand, but the thread's not about my approach. I just wanted to clarify (as there seemed some confusion) that I was talking about Dennet's position in the quote you referenced, not my own.
Thanks, good points. I'll read it again. I agree that Merleau-Ponty criticizes the concept of 'elementory' sensations with arguments similar to Dennett, but he does so from a very different perspective. He finds eliminativism intellectually dishonest and absurd. What he is trying to do is perceive perception, so as to [I]improve[/i] his understanding of it, not to deny it.
Unlike many here, Merleau-Ponty realizes that all knowledge and all science comes from human consciousness and perception, and that science cannot effectively deny the minds that produce it.
In other words, Dennett says: qualia are magical and thus do not exist, while MP says: qualia are too simplistic, because perception is always a whole, a gestalt, and what animals perceive is not individual qualities ("red") but nuances and differences and contrasts between qualities (eg a "red" vs a "green"). Hence perception is systemic, not an addition of discrete, independent elements.
Note the similarity with Saussure, who posited that in language, concepts have relationships and differences between them from which they derive their meaning. "In language there are only differences."
I'm not sure I follow him all the way there, because in system thinking (and biology is systemic), elements do exist objectively and can be disentangled from the whole system, even though their full meaning is given by the whole. For instance you can cut a finger off, but then it dies. So do the colors described as "red" die when not compared to other colors? I'll keep reading PoP and chew on it.
Another important point, perhaps the central point of PoP is that perception is by the body and for the body, seen as far more than a machine: the body is not a mechanism to which a mind has been affixed (as in Descartes), but a part of the subject, and influencing the mind. I see this as very important, for two reasons.
1, because Merleau-Ponty takes biology seriously, unlike Popper for instance, who only thinks about physics as the 'queen science'. And biology imposes a whole series of constraints that can help understand the biological phenomena called "thoughts". Physics and chemistry are too distant from thoughts to offer much clues. Biology is much closer; brains are biological, and biology is most probably where a scientific resolution of the mind-body problem will come from, not quantum physics.
2, because what MP says is that there is no life without intentionality, without a fear or a desire or a goal. Perception is not a static, passive "impression" of an external object in our mind, it is dynamic, opportunistic capture. Perception grabs stuff, it is always a living body seizing what it needs to seize. There is an intention, a desire, in every perception. Because we are not passive machines but living bodies.
This last point helps a lot. For instance it explains why when you try to analyse a perception from a purely logical standpoint, you kill it, you morph it into something dead. It also explains why the same dish will taste much better if you are hungry then if you're not. "Hunger is the best sauce" as we say in French. It's all a matter of desire.
Dennet says absolutely no such thing.
Give us your interpretation then.
The idea here (as I faintly see it) is that the mind-body problem appears intractable if the body is seen as a dead machine, because a machine and a mind are too far apart, as Descartes noted. But the picture changes if the body is seen (as MMP does) as already intentional, already infused with information-for-the-purpose-of-living, information-with-intention. If this is the case then conscious perception can be seen as a mere extension of this fundamental biological tendency to "grab information for a purpose". The hiatus between a living body and its own consciousness is easier to bridge than between a dead machine and its ghost. So this perspective makes the hard problem a little less hard.
And there are things you can only say meaningfully about "Red" and not about "700 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic wave". Such as "I like Red". When people say that they explicitly mean "I like the experience produced when a 700 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic wave enters my eye" NOT "I like 700 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic waves"
What are the first order properties?
You're best placed to cast this in more exact terms, so stop me at any point, but some of that stuff the brain is doing includes:
- interpreting optical data as images;
- correcting the colour of images for ambient temperatures and adjacent colours;
- outline recognition;
- pattern recognition (oh, it's Isaac!)
and similar for other kinds of sense data (smells, sounds, etc.).
When I have a perception of my car, that is optical data that is imaged and preprocessed such that objects within that image are already discerned (with error), colours and distances discerned (likewise), kinds of object discerned (that is a car) and precise objects identified if possible (that is my car) by pattern recognition, and so on, all prerequisites for consciousness of my car.
This seems like a qual to me: an object of my subjective perception of the world that has properties somewhat like metadata. Since this is all internal, nothing is particularly added; this simply describes the API of consciousness and the formatting that the brain must perform to satisfy it. But neither is it non-real, in the same way that base 64 encoding a PDF isn't non-real.
The argument against them having properties appears to lie with our inability to say that this consciousness of my car is the same as my previous conscious perceptions of it, but this seems besides the point to me. If my brain has identified it as my car then it is a conscious experience of my car. The fact that it's night so appears differently, or is from a new angle, or is further away, i.e. the precise details of the image that makes it identical or not to others, is irrelevant. It is my car because my brain has given it that property, i.e. has assigned it that meaning or metadata.
Yes! "Perceptions as pictures viewed by the mind. Qualia as picture properties." is the view I think's being criticised. Intuition pump (1) about the cauliflower looks roughly to be:
(1) Let's take an experience of the taste as if it's a picture of a cauliflower eating event.
(2) How did we take the picture?
(3) Look at consequences of taking the picture that way.
It seems appropriate to characterise intuition pump (1) as calling into question the step in (2) - trying to get at the methods of splitting up experience that result in describing any aspect of our perceptual acts as qualia.
So there's two steps to intuition pump 1, the first is a description of something that happened. Denentt watches someone reslishing cauliflower and wonders how it is possible that they could relish it when Dennett does not. That opens a space of questions regarding the variability of taste. That space of questions is dove into after Dennett writes "A plausible hypothesis". Dennett's initial foray into that space of questions begins with another observation regarding the variability of tastes, "the same food tastes different to me at different times". That invites the positing of an entity "the taste of a food" which is taken to vary over times and people.
Perhaps it is a subtle point, but it is an important one. The beginning of intuition pump (1) is an attempt to get us in the frame of mind that qualia proponents are in when they describe their experiences after introspecting upon them. That it seems unobjectionable to qualia proponents means that it's working exactly as intended. It means Dennett indeed has understood the experience describing habits of qualia proponents sufficiently well to vogue as one. But then there's a swerve:
Dennett is inviting us to question the underlying experience describing habits that lead us to believe that carving up experience in that way is reflective of the structure of experience at all.
Note that "conclusion" is in scare quotes, that signals that the tacit inference Dennett is trying to draw our attention to is somewhere in the narrative progression between the first paragraph; in which Dennett describes his wonder that someone could relish cauliflower despite him hating it and links it to that things taste different over eating experiences; and the conceptualisation of the described content in the second paragraph; in terms of taste being a within-eating-event (time dependent) and between-people (person dependent) property. The conceptualisation arises from a natural and hitherto unexamined move in how the experiences are narrativised/described/packaged.
When we take this habit of description, the taste of cauliflower is deemed a time and people varying property of cauliflower eating experiences despite that the description of the experience alone lends no support for the theoretical act of positing such a time varying and people varying property. I believe the most important point is that "argument" for this metaphysical suturing on the manifold of our experiences is not stated, the positing is simply enacted in that description style.
[hide=**](Origin of the vocabulary choice of "suturing" and manifold:
Manifold suturing is a process by which a manifold is split up into different pieces by splitting it up with closed curves on it, the "closed curves" are experiential examples introspected upon, the different pieces are experiential components derived from analysis. Manifold suturing applied to the sensory manifold:
)
[/hide]
Dennett's next comments are targeted at the description style which has been enacted:
I bolded "counts as" as Dennett is precisely drawing attention to how our perceptions are sutured into components which become labelled as ("count as") components (properties) of the analysed perceptions [hide=*](Bringing in the MMP references: despite that the time varying people dependent property which can be split into instantaneous chunks "dot like impacts" is never present in the experiences analysed! It arises from an intellectual act of synthesis over experiences, not perception within experiences)[/hide].
The "supposing" is done by the descriptive style, and not the argument. I believe strongly that this is why it seems so obvious to people and why qualia proponents do not really understand Dennett - it's a question of him doubting that something is methodologically appropriate which they are so habituated to doing it's like breathing for them.
The issue of whether it's possible to always describe things in a manner that doesn't make the qualia positing moves is a separate one; in a discourse about the appropriate ways to analyse experience and see structures in it, the positing of qualia like theoretical entities should be able to be examined in that arena. We need to have different standards of rigour for an investigation into the structures of experiences and, well, day to day stuff.
Finally in pump (1), Dennett highlights that the fundamental mistake of conjuring a residual property is actually enacted by the description style. One becomes committed to the existence of such a residual property not by demonstrating its existence, but by enacting a mode of description which presumes without argument the existence of the residual property. Analogy: if I'm running away from a hallucinatory giant chicken, that I am running away from it does not mean it is really there, it means that I am behaving as if it were. The behaviour here is the descriptive practice that gives rise to the qualia hallucinatory chicken. The "supposition" that there is a giant chicken to run away from.
@Isaac - I think whether the "first order properties" or "second order properties" are called into question depends on which intuition pump we're talking about. Intuition pump (1) looks to me to be about first order properties and how they are ascribed. First order being eg. "the taste of this cauliflower to me now" and second order being eg. "(the taste of this cauliflower to me now) is private and subjective"
To "quine" something would be to dismiss it due to indeterminacy, right?
I take Quining to be the gross error that subjective processes can somehow be made objective and distinct for the purpose of quantization?
From Dennett's parody philosophical dictionary.
It says so in Quining Qualia in the second paragraph:
Read the bloomin' thing!
But to deny the existence of qualia wouldn't there first have to be someone foolish enough to insist that qualia as mental processes actually 'exist' in a philosophical sense of having identity?
Hey, you ended up in the lap of a phenomenologist and seemed to think you were where Dennett meant for you to be, so stop finger wagging.
BTW, also stop trying to wring meaning from the stuff Dennett says. He intentionally equivocates.
If you're going to respond to me without making an attempt to do any exegesis for the paper in question, I'm just going to ignore it from now on.
OK, so in brief (with apologies if any of this is stuff you already know, or misses the point, I just want to be sure we're in the same frame)
Consider that we've no idea what caused the signals which just arrived at our primary visual cortex. We're either expecting them (efficient) or not expecting them (inefficient) and the task is to minimise the surprise (processing requirements) associated with the very next signals. This is just basic Bayesian Brain stuff. This region (V1) delivers the V2 visual cortex with signals relating to basic stuff like outlines, texture etc. The V2 region is in the same boat, it wants to minimise surprise. One way of doing this is by suppressing surprising signals from the V1 cortex. If it did this randomly we'd be in trouble, so it does so according to a model of the signals it expects to receive. At this point the signal splits into two streams, dorsal and ventral, but all along these streams the process continues through layers of expectation models delivering their (modified) signals and being suppressed in turn by the model above.
At some point, several models in, the ventral stream reaches a region which models objects and it will feed forward to areas associated with the object 'car'. Meanwhile, the dorsal stream has been merrily progressing away on the question of how to interact with this hidden state, without the blindest idea what it is.
So.
Point 1 the recognition that it's a car is part of your conscious experience of the hidden state. There can be no quale of a car because modelling it as 'car' is part of the response, quite some way in, in fact. And what's more, plenty of conscious responses have already been initiated by this stage. The dorsal signal doesn't even know it's a car before it's deciding what to do with it (cue amusing but completely unethical experiment with monkeys who've had the connection between their ventral and dorsal signals cut and can pick up and peel a banana but have no idea what to then do with it).
Even if we were to call the sum total of our responses 'quale', we'd have to have 'car' as part of, not the source of, those qualia.
You could say that the responses were to do with what I later determined was a car, but...
Point 2 the models which determine the suppression of forward acting neural signals are themselves informed and updated by signals from other areas of the brain. So no more than a few steps in and whatever hidden states we might like to think started the whole 'car' cascade of signals have been utterly swamped with signals unrelated to that event trying to push them toward the most expected model.
1 and 2 together, I think, make it very hard to talk of the 'quale' of a car in any meaningful sense. If there are 'quale' they certainly can't be properties of any identifiable thing short of 'my entire brain at that point'. We could define them statistically - there are measureable functions of activity in correlated brain areas we could theoretically use to give the quale some very fuzzy-edged owner, some host for it to be the properties of, but I really think doing so would be an act of trying to fit the theory to the facts.
Either way, the private, accessible to introspection, but inaccessible to third party, qualia of 'red' is an absolute non-starter neurologically.
My understanding is that they are, for Dennet, simply the facts of the experience as we would relate it in, say, a story or a report. No different to the properties of an event.
Also see below...
...which I just noticed. Yes, I think that's true. Intuition pump 1 never really seemed like an intuition pump at all, as Dennet uses them, but more a definition of qualia raw, as it were. An honest attempt to at least start with " I see what you guys mean...but..."
As others have pointed out, the amazing thing is qualia exists at all. This three pound lump of meat in my skull produces a phenomenally rich inner mental life? How does that happen??? For awhile, the Hard Problem was swept under the rug by the likes of Dennett, but those guys are dying off. The energy is with the computationalists and panpsychics. I think they're wrong, but at least they're addressing the problem.
The problem being that you're incredulous?
My incredulity is that you find it at all difficult to believe that 80 billion neurons firing at a rate of up to 1000 per second could produce something as relatively simple as experiencing a phenomena. How many neurons did you imagine it would take? Another few billion? Should I contract some philosophers to investigate that for me, do you think?
Aye. I read it as an illustration of the kind of thinking that prepares someone to start parsing their experiences in terms of qualia. Another way of phrasing what the doubt is targeted at: if experience events have properties, in what manner do experience event parts bear those properties?
To perhaps illustrate it further: if we allow ourselves to do the usual thing we do, like go from: (1) "The coffee I had today tasted sweet to me" to (2) "The sweetness of the coffee I had today" to (3) "My subjective experience of sweetness from the coffee I had today", we actually describe the experience with different logical structures.
(1) describing a relationship between myself and the coffee I had today (it tasting sweet to me). That's of the form me (relation) coffee, x tastes sweet to y.
(2) predicating a property of the coffee ("sweetness") which I stand in relation to. That's of the form me (relation) (coffee property of sweetness). x tastes ( sweet ( y ) ).
(3) predicating a property of myself which is in relation to the coffee. (my subjective experience) relation (coffee). (sweet-quale-having ( x )) drinking-experience-forming-relation ( y ). Like "the coffee lead to me having a quale of sweetness as a constitutive part of my subjective experience of the coffee".
It's pretty clear that these don't mean the same thing; (1) is a relationship between object level entities in a domain (me, coffee), (2) is a relationship between an object level entity in a domain and a property defined over some unspecified domain (me, coffee property) and (3) a relationship between a property of me and an object of the domain (property of me, coffee).
The lack of domain specificity in (2) and (3) I think is what Dennett's gesturing towards in some of this paragraph:
If we conceive of the those properties in 2 and 3 as predicating only of me and the coffee, they actually lose context specificity [hide=*]( recall "independently of how these individuals are stimulated or non-perceptually affected", the context of body and environment has no place in that unary relation, it's just ascribed of "me" or "my subjective state"!)[/hide], the act of predication of the sweet quale to me selects the sweetness from an uncharacterised space of properties - that is, applies the sweet quale to me without consideration of my mood, my tastebuds, the time of day, the chemical composition of the coffee, the temperature of the water it was brewed with, the coffee:water ratio... If those things were impactful on the coffee experience (and we know they can be), the sensation of sweetness could not be modelled accurately as a unary predicate/property. There's just no place in a logical property for more than one term. That is to say, it's a higher order predicate of those things - at least a relation.
A qualia advocate might at that point say qualia means those higher order predicates, at which point the vocabulary of "red quales in my subjective experience" becomes suspect regardless.
Intuition pump (1) concludes with:
I think it is possible to read this as saying that "experience doesn't have properties in any sense", but I believe it's quite uncharitable to do so. Notice that he's talking about a "residual" property, residual after what? The introspective judgements that isolate out properties of experience from the totality of their relevant context, the residual property being what my attention is focussed upon during those acts of introspective judgements regarding a (memory of) experience - which will lead to loss of relevant structure, and a subtracting of details towards some entity which bears the remainder.
So, I think it's more likely to mean that intellectual act I did when talking about "the sweetness of the coffee I had today", fixing some aspect of a memory using introspection, will necessarily lead to error so long as I am treating the content of the sensation event as an entity while splitting it up (like a "picture"). The error being that there was some sort of experiential entity which bore that property, contrasted to the fact that the coffee tasted sweet to me.
It's jumping around the paper a bit, but I think that Dennett also is less suspicious of experiences being described using relations than experiences being described using properties:
The Maxwell House example I think goes into that. The "quite firm (epistemic) ground" someone has when describing their experience relationally; Chase and Sanborn have had their tasting relationships with coffee change over time, compared to the looser territory of cutting up aspects of experience using introspective convictions about one's feelings alone.
A flattening of standards between that which concerns people's self reports of experiences and that which concerns all else. I also don't think that commits him to the thesis that "self reports can be entirely discounted", just that they are "no better off than his intuitive judgements about (external things)". I think it's better to read this apparent skeptical attitude towards inner life as a compensation relative to Cartesian intuitions about the self-evidence of the structure of sensations and what they imply, not simply that they are had in some way:
Less a claim that psychic life is irrelevant, more a claim that there should be no special treatment for intuitive judgements regarding psychic life. Anticipating a counter argument; if someone tells you that they have pain in their head, I believe this is consistent with trusting them that they had one - if it turned out to be caused by a stiff neck, that they felt it in their head is still data about the pain manifestation, it just turned out that the felt location did not specify the location of the cause even if it was informative about it (stiff neck may lead to headache).
OK, what is your explanation for how non-conscious stuff, when assembled the right way, can produce consciousness? Because that seems like magic to me, and to date, materialists have utterly failed to explain the mind-body problem. As I said, they tried to brush it under the rug for awhile, but that's failed. Nobody takes Dennett seriously anymore.
Exactly. This is what I was trying to get at in my reply to @Kenosha Kid earlier from a neurological perspective. 'Sweetness' to the extent we can even identity the sensation is way down the line from the coffee hitting your taste buds. A whole ton of stuff has got involved before then including, crucially, stuff that isn't even part of the event right now. Which prevents the qualist from saying the 'sweetness' is a property of the whole event. A property of your entire life and the environment you've interacted with up to this point, maybe, but that's definitely not on table.
Quoting fdrake
I agree. I don't know but I think this is where Dennet I leading with...
Some people might say Dennet's denying there's anything to 'experience, it just goes from input to response, but I think he's saying, and I agree, that the recollection divorced from a response is incoherent. We always 'experience' events post hoc, never in real time. The experience is a constructed story told later (sometimes much later).
Quoting fdrake
Yes. I like the conclusion of the neural wiring pumps on this...
Actual psychopathologies can even confirm this.
Train's pulling in to my station....perhaps more later
1. Stuff exists that isn't conscious and can't feel anything: atoms, rocks, comets, dirt, etc.
2. When you take some of this stuff and make a brain out of it, and add a little electricity, the brain becomes conscious.
3. How does the brain become conscious?
And I ask them to give me an explanation. After we go over their explanations, they want to know the real answer. I don't blame them. I think materialism's inability to answer it is catastrophic to the theory, but that's just me.
@Kenosha Kid too, as this post is talking about problems with the qualia concept, previous post I made that this post is elaborating upon.
The impulse towards treating the sweetness as higher order predicates could already be wrong on Dennett's terms though, I'm unsure whether it would qualify as treating sweetness as a property held by an entity. I believe there is a possible tension there, depending on whether treating the experience as a greater than unary predicate in any sense commits the same "residual property" error that Dennett is alleging. The possible tension comes from:
If I'm devil's advocating it; if the error arises ultimately from treating experience as an entity which bears properties, how is it any better to treat it as an entity which bears relations (or other high order predicates)?
A possible rejoinder may be the claim that the perceptual relation is not between an experiential entity and an object, the relation is of x experiencing y. Dennett need not treat a perceptual event as an experiential entity which bears properties or relations, it instead may be thought that the perceptual event is that higher order predicate. IE, the experience itself is a relation or higher order predicate ranging over a huge parameter space/domain. Rather than an entity which goes into such a relation as a term/function argument - like seeing a red quale - or outputs from such a relation as if evaluating experience as function - like "i see the result of my seeing".
Contrast "I perceived (the content of my perception ( of x ) )" and "I perceived x". The first has me entering into a relationship with the experiential entity of the content of my perception of x, and the second is that I enter into a relationship with x. In the second, there's no experiential entity that I enter into a relationship with, I simply perceive some stimulus of perception. "I experienced a red quale" has me entering into relationship with an experiential entity, "I experienced a red car" has me, well, experiencing a red car. A quale parsing of it - seeing ( red ( car ) ), and a non-quale parsing of it - seeing ( red car ). I see the red on the car vs I see the red car.
There's a whole lot of ambiguity in that parsing though, as that non-quale parsing has "red" inside of what's seen, in that red functions as part of a perceptual stimulus as well as being in the percept, maybe - then we've got the realism vs anti-realism of perceptual features debate again. I imagine that if we're talking about perceptual feature construction we're already quite far from the paper and qualia, though. So I want to pre-emptively nip that in the bud.
The salient point in the devil's advocate is that the "fundamental error" seems to be claiming that or acting as if we experience experiential entities (which have or may be experiential properties), rather than experience itself being a mode of our interaction with entities.
That looks to me one way of fleshing out it being okay to say "The coffee tasted sweet today" but not "My subjective experience of today's coffee was partially constituted by a quale of sweetness".
Well, that's the question. If that's all they are, why introduce the term? Those who use the term might speak of "What it is like to see red", not of "red" as such. Qualia seem to want to do more than is done by words like "red". See for instance the first paragraph of the SEP article....
But how is "What it is like to see red" distinct from "Seeing red"?
Quoting fdrake
There's no real difference between the three, it's all a language trick. Expression 1 sounds objective but what does "tasted sweet" mean, if not some relation between the coffee and you (as in 2), and what is this relation, if not a sensation, the "sugar quale"? And what does "to me" mean, if not "in my mind"?
Note that:
A. You could objectively and scientifically measure the concentration of a specific sugar (in this case saccharose) in your coffee, verifiably so.
B. You can somehow perceive this concentration of sugar by tasting your coffee, and you are (I trust) able to sense if there is too little, enough or too much sugar for your personal taste. Your subjective assessment is probably going to align decently well with an objective measurement mentioned in A. This means that your 'perception' (or 'percepting' or 'sensation' or 'quale' or whatever you want to call it) is quantitative, and not just qualitative.
C. The taste of sugar is described almost universally as quite distinct from others, such as the taste of salt, and generally pleasurable within limits. This is probably related to its survival advantage (sugar is energy) and to the fact that our tongue includes taste receptors demonstrably able to sense five taste modalities: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and savoriness (also known as savory or umami).
All this indicates that there is such a thing as the taste of sugar.
The difference between a property of an object and an object is pretty big. "3 is prime" says the property "is prime" applies to 3, whereas "is prime" isn't even a number. What's the square root of the concept of prime? The answer is nonsense.
Not sure what you mean here. To taste sweet is an objective property of sugar? Not really. When you say"The sweetness of the coffee I had today", it's not about a coffee you didn't taste, is it? You had it.
I kind of panicked as my post wasn't at all driven by Quining Qualia itself. I should have just brought it back to the text.
Dennett's issue is not with the concept of qualia generally but with a particular definition of qualia, and I think his beef is not with the private or immediate aspects, but with ineffability and particularly the intrinsic aspect.
@Isaac above describes two example streams of unconscious processing of sensory data, one which pattern-recognises (the ventral) and one which contextualises (the dorsal). These might run in parallel, with the what-is-it part not aware or bothered by where-it-is, and the where-is-it part not aware or bothered by what-it-is.
(click to enlarge)
When I see the third image above, I see two cars, one to the left, one to the right, the left one closer, the right one further away, the left one yellow, the right one orange. All of this is immediately presented to me, by which I mean that, though I may determine these things over time as I focus on them, I do not have to consciously derive them by looking at them.
I think we can exclude the possibility that Dennett is unaware that raw sensory data (represented inaccurately as ones and zeros here) gets processed by the brain before it presents it to the consciousness (middle collection of images). And we can exclude the possibility that no such processing ever occurs. (As Isaac pointed out, the brain is good at identifying what is not worth presenting to our consciousnesses, like car engine sounds when you live in a flat in Manhattan.)
So Dennett is presumably okay with the fact that, consciously, I am immediately presented with a yellow car, for instance, not an indistinct image that I consciously have to decode, and that the transition from raw data to final perception is an internal -- i.e. private -- one.
His intuition pumps mostly revolve around connecting qualia over time or space. Is the yellow the same yellow I saw last night? Is the yellow the same yellow you see? Is it meaningful to even extract the yellow to compare? This is his issue with the intrinsic qualities of qualia: that you can meaningfully compare two. But this is not demanded by our conscious experiences. It is not our rational minds that generally determine that the car is the same colour as it was yesterday, rather the colour of the car is part of how we recognise it as ours.
He also dislikes the ineffability of qualia, that we cannot know our qualia better. But the above is a layperson's cartoon of how we can learn to know our qualia better in terms of whatever physical processes are occurring in between raw sensory data and perceived image. We can conceive of a Dennett's demon: an accounting for the history-dependent state of the subject plus a full knowledge of the input sensory data, plus a full understanding of the presumed deterministic process that the former enacts on the latter to produce an immediate world as presented to the consciousness.
We have to hear the filtered harmonic to hear it in the unfiltered 'note' (really a chord), but, once the brain is trained, it will present not a sole E to the ear but the higher E and other harmonics as well. Dennett's demon could account for this, could distinguish between an less well trained brain that presents the sound as best it can as a single note and one that has been trained to pick out the individual notes and present them all for conscious appraisal. The qualia then are different, and depend on what the brain does with the same raw sensory input. But we still hear the note(s), however they ended up.
Seven, with the sense of equilibrium.Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
You access these (reflexively) through some sense, in my view, through self-awareness, rather than directly.
Equilibrium as in physical, or mental balance? Do you correlate introspection/reflection and equilibrium with a particular organ (e.g. seeing with eyes or feeling with skin)?
Quoting Olivier5
That is where we differ. Self-awareness is immediacy itself, and not a faculty that mediates existence. Self awareness is what relates directly to its faculties of sensing, perceiving and thinking, and through them it relates indirectly to things that are sensed, perceived, and thought. Hence the inadequacy of self-awareness (as recognized by Nietzsche) - how much is there that we do not sense, percieve or think...infinitely more than we do. So much for the human endeavor for knowledge...luckily we can still seek self knowledge.
I think you're pretty off the mark here exegetically @Kenosha Kid,
If you are wondering about something which may be or fail to be "immediate", "intrinsic", "priviate" or "ineffable", I think Dennett would say you've already gone too far. What qualia?
In the opening paragraph, Dennett wondered how another person could relish the taste of cauliflower when he himself hates it. If a person goes from such an observation to asserting the existence of a taste quale which varies over people, Dennett already asserts that that person has made a "fundamental mistake":
I think the paper's a battle on all fronts; against qualia existence claims, against their typically ascribed first order properties (the creamy cauliflower taste quale), against their second order properties like ineffability (the ineffability of the creamy cauliflower taste quale).
That is a lot of work simply to discredit an already lame term that nobody ever uses, not even the lamest philosophers (I should know, I have an army of lame philosophers following me here at TPF, spewing the lamest shit ever passed off as philosophy). My sincerest aplopogees.
So, Dennett is not saying that metaphysical objects somewhat like qualia are impossible, but that the terminology used would need to be something unfamiliar. Not even necessarily novel, just unusual.
The cauliflower case is directly out of Heraclitus, label it 'relational' if you like. The problem is old, the solution is nowhere in sight.
Qualia are a valiant attempt to bridge the gap between subjective phenomenal experience and objective philosophy. If qualia cannot be fixed objects, then how can we communicate thought, feelings, and sensations in the language of philosophy?
Please post this on every thread
How does the first-order property (the creamy cauliflower taste) differ from the sense datum (taste)? You previously stated that the denial of qualia did not necessarily imply the denial of sense data.
How is this consistent with Dennett’s claimed acknowledgement that conscious experience has properties?
Gustatory? Seriously? How are you going to talk about "the ways things seem to us" by introducing terms like "gustatory quale"? Fuck "masturbation", more like "rectal bombarbment"!
I have other meaningless bullshit terms that we can make up shit about: "god, subject/object, soul, existence &c.
It’s the opening paragraph of the article - Dennett’s words, not mine. But go off.
I know, sorry for attributing it to you, it was a technical error, I quoted something you quoted. Nevertheless, it holds.
Tried to get at this tension here and here here. Maybe a decent analogy is:
If I write this program for my computer:
then I call it on arguments (1,2):
so it returns 3.
One way of explaining what the program did is: "the program added the natural number 1 to the natural number 2 and computed the result, it then outputted the result 3", but did my computer really add the natural number 1 to the natural number 2? Or was the process actually more like: "fdrake opened up a software environment and wrote in high level code and called it, the computer took that calling instruction and through a laborious process translated the input lines of code into machine code, which caused a bunch of transistors allocated for the task to enter into a specific complex of high and low voltage states, which gets passed up back a complex of circuits into the software environment and the display". If it's the latter, adopting the first description will be an inaccurate approximation that gets even the type of entities wrong; the physical process in the computer is not adding mathematical abstractions together, there aren't even any natural numbers in my computer; but it's a decent functional explanation for a demonstrative purpose. IE, the first is essentially a lie to children, which may suffice for some purposes but certainly not understanding what was actually going on in (in!) my computer.
If we describe our experience of a red patch as a combination of a shape quale and a colour quale combined in experience, perhaps it is a lie to children of the same sort. It maybe gets the type of entities wrong (do we have shape qualia or shape-colour qualia? Do we have the red-quale or the this-patch-red-quale?), it maybe refers to entities which are non-representative placeholders for the system in question (am I justified in believing that I am experiencing an experiential entity derived from the red patch or am I experiencing a red patch?), it maybe gets how they are combined wrong (am I justified in believing that there is an operation of typing/categorisation within my experience that apportions colour qualia independently of shape ones in the manner I do introspectively?), it maybe gets the mechanism of their identification wrong (I assigned "the natural number 1" to the symbol "1" in that code, but it isn't what the computer was doing as a matter of internal procedure - an act of intellectual blurring similar to the synthesis of an experience into distinctly typed entities which are claimed to be experienced together). I believe what is being gestured towards in part is that our "pre-theoretical" notions (and resultant qualia ones that leverage them) are not fit for task for understanding the structure+operation of the internal states of people (in!) - another part is leaning on that internal/external distinction itself in some ways (criticising the "private" part of qualia).
It is an old philosophical puzzle covered by much better philosophers, much better. Berkeley and Hume come to mind. From no scientific discovery since them has there been any progress on the question of q.
I tend to agree with @Kenosha Kid's exegesis generally.
This is how I read the article (in part):
(1) Ineffable
Dennett does not specify which qualia property is being criticised by which intuition pump, so presumably they are all under attack by every pump. He quotes Wittgenstein as part of his attack on ineffability, it seems. However, I consider this a misreading. Wittgenstein was railing against the idea of private meaning/language, not private experience:
Dennett is not claiming that the word "qualia" has a private meaning, and Wittgenstein is not a behaviorist in disguise (as much as Dennett might wish him to be). It seems fairly clear that for Wittgenstein some things are ineffable:
(2) Intrinsic
This seems to be Dennett's most forceful point of attack, which is well summarised in this section:
A vociferous attack on "raw feels". However, as I would respond to most of his attacks throughout the article, it does nothing to mitigate the opening definition of qualia as "how things seem to us", or more relevantly - in the first-person - as "how things seem to me". "[T]he way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell...at various times" will always be coloured by how I am "stimulated or perceptually affected", by how I am "subsequently disposed to behave or believe", and - probably among many other factors - by what judgments I make about those sense data. All of that is constitutive of "how things seem to me", or of how a particular taste, sound, sight, etc, seems to me at a particular time. In this sense it is possible that qualia might be considered as "intrinsic"; not in spite of the associated "stimulations", "perceptual affects", "dispositions" or judgments, but because of them.
That's at least a start of my reading.
Why do we need to get at truth here? How things seem to me is just that, irrespective of what any supposed truth of the matter may be. This is a requirement for illusions and the like to make any sense: if things did not seem to X to be a particular way--which is other than how they are/should be--then there could be no illusions or (e.g.) anomalies of colour perception.
Why should qualia advocates be required to provide physiological, third-person explanations? That's the concern of those who expect there to be an eliminative account.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
I doubt it, seriously. One reason is that human beings are quite opaque to themselves, able to hide things from themselves. There are such a thing as unconscious thoughts and this pleads against immediacy.
Apparently Dennett doesn't like the taste of cauliflower. He writes:
How can he possibly dislike something that by his own reckoning doesn't actually exist?
Quoting Nelson Goodman: Sights Unseen
Consciousness is just the tendency to be able to report on mental activity and it's caused by the neurons which produce language, movement and other awareness-mediated responses being stimulated by the neurons constituting the processing of sensory inputs to which that awareness relates. I'm genuinely dumbfounded as to how or why anyone finds this in the least bit difficult to imagine.
This says merely that Dennett is denying the existence of ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate qualia, or any slight variation thereof, which does not contradict my argument. The qualia that I think underlie our pretheoretical ideas are not much like those we're familiar with, since they are outputs of processes we are largely unfamiliar with.
Here Dennett is talking about existing theoretical ideas of what qualia are, and how any common element between them would be so meagre as to be useless. The reason for this is that, while:
it doesn't imply that familiarity teaches people anything, i.e. that the pre-theoretical ideas of qualia are any better than the theoretical, which is true, but again does not contradict my point.
Here Dennett is talking about the intrinsic nature of qualia, that we can isolate the taste of cauliflower at one moment and at another and be talking about the same thing. He's right, there's nothing to isolate in this regard. If you removed everything about one particular moment, you'd have nothing left to compare, hence I said:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Nelson Goodman: Sights Unseen
Indeed. Especially when the writer keeps casually and carelessly using concepts that he also contends are meaningless. This can only lead to confusion.
If there is no such thing as "how the taste of cauliflower appears to Dennett", why does Dennett dislike the taste of cauliflower?
How come I personally hate beetroot in any and all preparations, and how come I can spot that particular horrendous taste of beetroot in a mix of tastes eg mashed with other tubers?
Indeed. I hadn't noticed until you quoted it, but I think there is a tension there which I'd certainly not side with Dennet on, if that's what he's implying, but I'm not sure. I read that quote as saying that the one thing we can be sure of is that the expected response to sipping coffee (action, not experience of) has changed. This is not memory reliant because it's not internal - "Didn't I used to enthusiastically ask for a second cup?". So something's changed. We can drop 'sweetness' out of it altogether if we like. Event A used to lead to event B, now it doesn't so some A-B causal link is different. Without getting into Humean induction issues, I think we can say that much.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah. My memory of reading the text before looking at it again for this thread was actually just something like - "we can't tell if our changed responses to an event are because the interpretation of the sense data have changed or because our memory-associated judgement of them has changed. As such we don't have any privileged access to these 'qualia' than the neuroscientists do, let's drop the whole term" I'd actually forgotten all the more nuanced arguments leading up to and stemming from that, so it's certainly what I see as the central argument. If there's nothing privileged about our access, then there's nothing first-person and the whole matter might as well be discussed in the third-person terms we already have.
Not sure of the extent to which my reply here helps, but when you've had a chance to have a read of that...
It's really difficult to stick completely to exegesis when so much of the question of what Dennet might have been getting at requires some external 'rounding out' of what the issues are, so I sympathise with your posting dilemma. I'm happy to see if we can continue the subject matter here and if everyone gets annoyed about that then we'll just have to nurse our slapped wrists.
Quoting Isaac
Though I haven't been contributing, I've been reading along and I have an opinion on this (Banno and fdrake may think differently but probably don't): so long as you've read the article and you're engaging with Dennett's views on qualia, then go for it. It doesn't have to be only exegesis. I posted a warning yesterday just because there were some people posting who had obviously not read the article and were here just to spout their anti-Dennett opinions.
Carry on :smile:
Thanks, sorry for the cross-posting. Let's stay here :)
Quoting Isaac
Yes, I agree. In this case, we still have pre-processed data in our consciousness -- the shape, distance, maybe some colour -- but no metadata tag 'car'. There would not be a car quale, just some generic 'object' quale, i.e. there still exists an object of subjective experience as tagged by its outline.
Quoting Isaac
Thanks, that was interesting.
Quoting Isaac
Sure, that's fine. Here the 'car' quale means nothing more than that the image is presented for conscious appraisal with the 'car' tag, i.e. the 'car' neuron having fired with some degree of certainty.
Quoting Isaac
I'm not sure what responses you mean. What I said was that the car appears to me already identified as a car (except when it's not), i.e. I do not see the above image then work out consciously what the two foregrounded objects are.
Quoting Isaac
Again, not sure what all these goings on means. I'm really just talking about the identification of an object in my visual field as a car, which is what is required to have an object in my subjective experience that is a car.
Quoting Isaac
Its colour, though, is not present in the raw sensory data. For instance, if the ambient light of something is dominated by yellow, it will appear dominated by white, i.e. the brain shifts the colour. Ergo there is a stage in between raw sensory input and final image that colourises to some extent.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, I agree, this is Dennett's rejection of the intrinsic nature of qualia. I'm with you, and Dennett, on this, and I agree that this is what philosophers usually think of as qualia, incorrectly.
Thanks haha! I don't know why I did that.
I agree here insofar as you're saying that 'whatever we say of the realised car we can say of the unrealised grey blob', but that wasn't my intended target (sorry if my writing's not clear - in my defense I'm recently writing on a phone on the train and so I don't do as much overarching editing as I should). I brought up the {could-be-a-car} just to make it easier to imagine the conscious results cascading out of a sensory processing event. I've probably just ended up confusing matters. If you understood what I was saying about the conscious results which cascade out from the other firings extrinsic to the ventral pathway, then we needn't even worry about this blob/car distinction. The idea is that what we can say of one is what we can say of another - which, in terms of the subjective experience associated with either, is nothing much.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I may be reading more into 'with' than you intended, but to be clear about what's going on neurologically, the image is being 'presented' without the car tag. Much of what's going on, even consciously, is going on before the car tag. You later (perhaps even seconds later) re-tell the story as happening in a better order (saw a thing->worked out it was a car->thought 'I could drive that'). Expermenting on this is really difficult because of the time lag in fMRI and the non-specificity of EEG and the like, so take this with the very large pinch of salt attached to small sample sizes (neurosurgery patients). Nonetheless it seems as if it's very difficult to match your subjective report with the actual process, it seems we all lie about what happened.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
OK. Maybe I'm attacking the wrong target. To me qualists want to say that there is something it's like to experience red, there's the 'redness' experience, or the 'car' experience. To do this, they invoke the 'way it feels' in response to sensing 'red', or 'a car'. What I'm trying to show is that we cannot, even in principle, distinguish the 'way it feels' in response to red, or cars, from 'the way it feels' just right now in general. The cascade of neural responses is continuous, there's no break in higher level backward suppression at the point of seeing red, so the conscious 'feelings' are unattached. We attach them later in retrospect.
So however it feels to see red is however I decide it feels. Some responses I might attach to seeing red, others I might decide had nothing to do with the colour but were a response to something else, or something I just happened to be feeling at the time. And...what's crucial, picking up on Dennet's point in intuition pump 8, is that I might be wrong in a way that a third party could theoretically determine. I don't have privileged access here, there's no difference between first-person and third-person guesses.
This is really just by way of explaining what I mean, I'm not necessarily assuming you're suggesting otherwise.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Cool. I think we're much on the same page then, which makes it interesting to tease out any differences.
I think the former is typically epistemic: one knows (or doesn't know) what it is like, whereas the latter is (having) the experience. I would say that one gains the knowledge of what it is like by having the experience.
Mary's room might be a useful intuition pump for this discussion.. Mary has never seen red, but we ask whether she knows what it is like to see red. Dennett holds that Mary would know what it is like to see red without ever seeing red. His take is that one gains the experience, or the knowledge of what it is like, by virtue of having all of the other (third-person) colour knowledge. What red looks like is irrelevant and non-existent(!), it seems. Odd, then, that Mary would know what it is like.
Quoting Wikipedia
Dude, I'm the last person you need to apologise to. I'm the worst for this :)
Quoting Isaac
That's interesting. If I may summarise, then, the conscious perception of my field may include something caused by a car without the car 'tag' (recognition of car object with or without dorsal data), then moments later updated with that tag. So I consciously see the light caused by the car before I see the car.
But to clarify, it's not a conscious decision to identify a car, right? Whenever the car recognition output is presented for conscious consideration, it's not doing so because I'm studying a patch of light and trying to figure out what it is. This is all going on in the background.
Question: Am I right in saying that, as you describe it, data from our conscious perception is fed back into these myriad cascades and may affect (or indeed effect) some of these unconscious processes (e.g. I focus on a block of colour, causing it to be recognised as 'car')? Do these processes rely on this, or can we recognise objects just based on pre-processed data? This is again going back to the idea of sensory data categorised as unimportant, such as the sound of a car engine on a busy Manhattan block.
Quoting Isaac
Ah yes, okay. No, you're right, I think I just wasn't clear on what I was getting at. I agree that no meaningful qualia can be defined that is detached from the moment at which it is apprehended. That's the intrinsic value Dennett dismisses, and I agree with him (and you). What I meant about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater is that there still remain objects of subjective experience, such that I can see a car without consciously determining it to be a car (even if 1 ms ago I didn't see a car), and that this object is private (internal processing from my raw sensory input to instantaneous apprehension by me) and immediate (I see car as car object is presented to me, which may be some while after I see light from car), but not intrinsic or ineffable, and that these objects and the processes that yield them (e.g. neuron that recognises car) underlie our pre-theoretical conceptions of what theorists call qualia.
So while Dennett is right to dismiss ineffable-intrinsic-private-immediate qualia, that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be gained from considering less mystified, more scienticially-grounded ideas of objects of subjective experience, i.e. how we actually appraise such objects as car, taste of coffee, sound of gunshot, etc.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Here's the thing I don't get; if you've removed the ineffability, the difference between first person and third person epistemic standards, you've removed the idea perceptions obtain properties in the manner we introspectively ascribe them, you've removed the privacy, and you've removed the certainty, and you've hollowed out the distinction between intraworldly events and psychic life, what actually remains of ascribing "subjectivity" to a perception, other than "putting it into an agent as an object", when it's actually characterised up until that point as an agent-environment relationship? Doesn't "subjectivising" it already treat it as private entity that can only be introspectively accessed?
Pending... This is my question to Isaac. But my view is: no! The bulk of what the brain does is unconscious, that is we are not conscious that the brain is doing it. This will most of the time include things like recognising a car as a car. Is this introspective? Probably not as you mean it, which is a conscious effort. But mindless pattern-matching does not always work; this is why we need an algorithmic part of the brain to figure things out when pattern-recognition fails. (I'm being simplistic for economy.) This is identically the conscious mind, which might be provided with 'unidentified shape in periphery' (an output of outline detection) and can iteratively focus on details that dumb pattern recognition cannot. These details are fed back to the dumb pattern recognisers until we see 'car', or else not: I am not eliminating introspection entirely; it might be that some things we recognise purely in a conscious, algorithmic way. (Would seem odd to me, though.)
Quoting fdrake
This needs explaining. I don't see how any processes acting on my raw sensory input to produce my conscious perceptions can be anything other than private. I think you've got this the wrong way round: privacy is a prerequisite of ineffability, not the other way round.
Quoting fdrake
Yes.
Quoting fdrake
That the sensory data is an input to me, not you, that the processing is done by me, not you, and that the perception is mine, not yours, any one of which would guarantee subjectivity. Even if I could fully understand my experiences and describe them perfectly, they're still mine.
As the subject, this is my tendency to be capable of reporting -- but not just on any mental activity, on my mental activity. I'm wondering if there are pre-utterance steps where some subsystem perhaps tags the analysis and speech prep being done as "me related", or if there aren't, and why we need or don't need such steps.
This sense of proprietorship is known to be violated sometimes, in ways big and small, persistent and fleeting, from auditory hallucinations to insights that come unbidden.
I only skimmed instead of rereading, but it seems to me Dennett might have added here that I am generally expected to know non-inferentially, and perhaps infallibly, whose qualia are rattling around in my consciousness, and to know that they are mine rather than yours.
Oh, it looks like @fdrake and @Kenosha Kid are nearby.
I'm trying to highlight that the article is criticising privacy in the same way it's criticising other alleged aspects of qualia. There's a big difference between calling an experience private and saying that only one person has been so effected!
If you're talking about "the red in my subjective experience of the car", you are perhaps not talking about an "extrinsic relational property", you are talking about a unary property. Predicated of an experience-bearing "subjective state" of which that unary property partially constitutes. It follows some of the same structure of the quale which the article criticises. We're back in the situation I referred to before about experiencing experiential objects vs experience instances as a relations themselves.
That's an incomplete definition of consciousness. Reporting on mental activity isn't even a necessary condition for consciousness, let alone a sufficient one. Any definition of consciousness has to include first-person subjective experience.
How could you know whether anyone else has been “so effected”?
One thing I had trouble with in the article was the inverted spectrum intuition pumps failed to enable an intersubjective comparison of qualia, yet this seemed to be an argument against, rather than for, privacy. If qualia are private it’s going to make intersubjective comparisons very difficult.
Let me rephrase, there is a big difference between saying that a person has a sense datum/experiential entity with a given structure that only they have any access to of any sort (privacy) and saying that the same person has had a unique (idiosyncratic) experience. The former commits one to the existence of entities of a given sort with the property of privacy that stand in some relationship to experience, the latter only commits one to have been the perceiving agent in a perceptual event or perceptual relationship.
Banno and I talk about this previously. Dennett is pinging the Private Language Argument to suggest that only external justifications are acceptable for qualia.
I have a cousin who has perfect pitch. Dennett would say that I can assert that she can identify middle-C if she actually does it. Since I can't confirm that she has any experience associated with identifying middle-C, qualia is dismissed. She is not allowed to act as an eye-witness to her experiences because she could be wrong.
Banno and I agreed that the PLA doesn't rule out private thoughts or experiences, so Dennett's assertion seems to end up being bare. If I assert that I can't dismiss my cousin's experience, then I have common knowledge on my side, which means the burden is on Dennett. Note, that common knowledge is not being referred to as a justification for anything but loading burden.
It's not incidental that only one person has been effected. It's not like it just happens to have happened to one person: it can only happen to one person.
Quoting fdrake
Not in this context, no. The fact that that raw data is input to one person's senses, is processed by that same person's brain which is trained by that same person's past experiences, and is made available to that same person's conscious apprehension, makes it both private and idiosyncratic.
The problem is breaking off that last stage, AND is made available to that same person's consciousness? What is made available to the person's consciousness. Is it a perceptual object with properties? It's like a process completes and somehow outputs a distinct entity with qualia like properties which then somehow embeds into consciousness... But the process itself is not generative of those kind of properties at all. Is "what's happening in my head" a function output ("made available") after all my perceptual processes within a given time window have concluded, or is that availability making a part of the perceptual bodily process.
If the process goes:
Object->Perception -> Perceptual object -> conscious apprehension, with that last arrow being "making available"
Then we're in a situation where we have perceptual objects with private properties "presented to" the conscious apprehension. It's the same way of breaking up the stages as qualia:
Object -> Perception -> Qualia -> conscious apprehension
The only difference is qualia emphasises the properties of that intermediary perceptual object - between perception and conscious apprehension - in the first there is a perceptual object which has properties, in the second the properties have been split up before immersion into the chain.
If instead it goes:
object -> conscious apprehension, with the arrow being perception itself.
Then we're not committed to perceptual objects with private properties, because there are no intermediary perceptual objects to apply properties to to begin with!
I'm struggling for words - so we've separated out consciousness from perception - perception provides something to consciousness, that which is "made available" to it. Reiterating, that's the same kind of model that the paper is criticising, that there's this "mental entity" which has properties like privacy which is presented to consciousness (also the Cartesian Theater metaphor from Dennett's work makes the same point). Contrast this to having consciousness as part of perceptual processes, in that parsing perception doesn't present anything to a distinct faculty called consciousness at all. And in denying the existence of that which is allegedly presented, you deny that it is properties.
But that's different from saying "people don't taste stuff", because x gets a sweet taste from y is an extrinsic relational property - the sweetness characterises the perceptual relation between person x and object y, rather than an a perceptual object which is presented to x's consciousness being characterised by a sweetness property. The latter is a unary property of the private state (a quale! a "what is it like" entity-property), the former is a unary property of the relation (an extrinsic relational property, a "what is it like to me" relation).
I'm going to rephrase, because perception as I understand it is a kind of conscious awareness, i.e. perception is not the projection of light onto the retina, the electrical signal along the optic nerve, the cascade of neural activity that follows, but the availability to conscious apprehension, as in I perceive a car: a subjective experience of a car object.
I also disagree that the object can be included here, as it has no direct involvement whatsoever: it is merely the source of whatever mediates the raw data input into my senses.
Raw sensory data -> Pre-processed data -> Formatted object -> conscious apprehension
As Isaac has said, it's not this linear. It might look something more like this:
wherein the central boxes represent the mess of neural process between raw input and conscious apprehension, straight lines represent some pathways through this process, and curved lines represent feedback from conscious processes back to neural unconscious processes. The qualia are the objects of subjective experience, so are not necessarily pre-existing objects provided to conscious apprehension but are the objects for conscious apprehension. I likened it to the API of consciousness.
I've not shown all the pathways here, just a gist, but you can see for instance that 'outline of object' misses the top right box (which here stands for the ventral stream) and is presented to consciousness with outline detection but no what-is-it tag (no 'car' neuron has fired). The mind appraises this, triggering further neural processes including the ventral stream which updates consciousness with a 'car' object. You can imagine similar things for 'yellow car' and 'sound of gunshot', etc.
The crossed out object is 'sound of car engine' which is identified but is not presented for conscious appraisal because the brain knows it's not interesting and suppresses it. It might not identify it as 'sound of car engine' per se, but matches it will enough to 'we need to ignore this shit at night' at least :) @Isaac, am I getting any closer?
Quoting fdrake
And I think this is what is safe to rule out, although I expect rationalists will not like it. (Generally the idea that the brain is doing stuff that the mind is unaware of does not sit favourably, but that's just the way it is.)
That's what the article is criticising though, if they're not pre-existing objects, they solely permeate the "conscious apprehension" as objects with properties. It's like characterising perception as a packaging process for sensory data, and then some other distinct process passes the package as a whole to the "conscious apprehension". Then in reflecting upon our memories of perceptual events, we conjure the properties with some introspective process as if they were there in the perceptual process all along.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It's safe to rule out on the basis that not all datastreams our perception explores+captures out of the environment and our body result in a conscious apprehension, but not safe to rule out that apprehension itself is a component part of perception. The packaging/formatting occurs within the process of perception as a continually evolving model of data input streams and compensatory/exploratory activities, it's "never done" to be output to a "conscious apprehension", "conscious apprehension" is some feedback relationship of those data streams and the structure of our environment (and our history).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The only reason I chose to label that "perception->conscious apprehension" was because I believed you were talking about input data to conscious apprehension. It's a swerve in context to dismiss the second account on the basis of consciousness consisting of a sample of those data streams' features (there being "unconsciously" processed data aspects) but not the first! Try this phrasing: how something is apprehended ("what is it like to me" if conscious) is part of the perceptual process, rather than resulting in a distinct terminal point of a data stream that apprehends a completed experiential object of some kind (that bears "experiential properties"/qualia as they are usually used).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes! I'm coming at this from the "left wing" angle that how you've characterised qualia is still subject to the article's critiques. It's extremely hard to stop thinking in terms of perceptual intermediaries with private properties.
I quoted these from Merleau-Ponty earlier in the thread, who is critical of qualia for broadly similar reasons:
The "terminal point" (the last phase in your diagram) being a "pure impression" given to "perception", the "pure impression" allegedly has experiential properties, but is "inconceivable as an instant of perception". Perception being of sense data with qualia is the same idea as consciousness being of perceptual objects with experienced properties.
Compare that to "extrinsic relational properties" in Dennett's essay. "absolute terms" I'm reading as criticising the same idea that "red" inheres in the experiential object as a quale, rather than red being a property of my relationship with a seen object. I see x as red vs my experiential object has a red quale.
The "final stage" in which a completed perceptual object is transmitted "to" the conscious apprehension (or is not transmitted to it) is a transposition of what is perceived into a perceptual object - what is seen to seen properties of formatted objects that we have seen - rather than an instance of our relationship with our environment. "what is it like to me" - red, "what is it like", "what is my sensory object like? I guess it's like what I've sensed...".
Existentialists have long pointed out that experience seems to have no beginning or ending, and defies complete capture by a simple narrative (Kierkegaard), thus centuries of painting, sculpture, music, dance, literature, poetry, architecture, religion, and mysticism.
If denying the lone quale is our goal, then we won... against whoever its champion was.
I'm struggling to see how that is suggested by the above diagram.
Quoting fdrake
Which is present in the image but entirely absent in the second flow discussed here, which shows raw sensory data presented to our consciousnesses, as if how we see things is how they are read by our senses. This, at least, we know is wrong.
Quoting fdrake
Conscious apprehension, as meant by me at least, is nothing more than the subset of information about my environment (including my body) that I am presently conscious of, as opposed to that which I am not conscious of. Since we are at least conscious of them, I think it helps to bear in mind that, whatever else is going on, and whatever definitions of consciousness we prefer, this presentation is happening. The alternative is, as per that shorter flow, that our bodies just dump raw sensory data straight into our consciousnesses unadulterated, which we know for a fact it does not do. I never see, for instance, the upside-down image on my retina, or the rapid changes in view that my brain nicely stabilises for me, or the light correction to make the ambient light appear whiter.
So if your envisioned "feedback relationship of those data streams and the structure of our environment" can account for that, groovy.
Quoting fdrake
But this was Isaac's point and was already accounted for. The fact that what I am conscious of changes, is corrected, augmented, etc. was included in the rough, simplistic diagram I put up and described in the succeeding text. The fact that consciousness is not a terminal is illustrated by the fact that the brain sometimes withholds processed sensory data from conscious appraisal.
Quoting fdrake
But I'm not arguing that some disembodied red is a quale. If it's not an object of my perception, it does not qualify. The redness of a car is not a disembodied redness.
Quoting fdrake
Yes. Why not? I'm not trying to shoehorn objects of perception into some previous mysterious philosophy of qualia. I'm just saying that we have them and they serve a purpose. That purpose is not necessarily to do philosophy with or chat about them ;)
The reason why we have a philosophical idea of qualia is because "conscious experience has properties" and "each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do" and "whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time". Then some tradition of philosophy happens and those causes of that philosophy end up "so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia".
Dennett's quarry is of traditional philosophical, religious, and other cultural descriptions of properties of consciousness which, through ignorance, end up being nothing like the truth. Since qualia is a philosophical term, it is associated with those cultural defecations. So if there are no "ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate" qualia, fine. But we still, as Dennett says, have properties of consciousness, which is what is actually being identified as qualia even if the properties of qualia have been erroneously ascribed, i.e. the prior guesswork at the properties of those qualia is bad.
Carelessness makes trouble, but scrupulous analysis takes it.
With regard to the intuition pump of inverted spectra:
Assuming it is possible for two people to have different experiences of “subjective colour”, would this be a case (for each of them) of an “experiential entity with a given structure that only they have any access to of any sort (privacy)” or would it be a case of a “unique (idiosyncratic) experience”?
Right on. Quining Qualia is one big straw man.
I'm waiting.
Yep, that's about it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I see what you're getting at, and generally, yes, but I'm going to be careful unless I get called out on it later - we need to take care when talking about conscious awarenes. It's not a binomial thing, you are more or less aware of signals depending on your level of attention which varies. Here, I think, is an important issue which might touch on some of the stuff you're trying to work out with regards to the 'presentation' of the image as you put it. The 'identification of 'car' (to the extent that it happens that way - remember it's just one model with a very small sample size study to back it up) happens subconsciously. What you're typically aware of depends on what you need that identification for - Are you about to say the word that goes with the object, are you choosing the right object from others, are about to interact with it...Whichever following action requires you to identify it as a 'car' will determine how the fact of that identification reaches your awareness, if it does at all.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, cortices have backward acting neural connections whose job it is to suppress non-matching signals and they're often (but not exclusively) informed by the consequences of conscious recognition. A classic example is sensory priming where you are exposed to a distorted sound/picture/smell, you're then exposed to the undistorted version (which you interpret the meaning of at least partly consciously), then when you next are exposed to the distorted version it seems much clearer. Your higher models of what might be being said are suppressing the signals from your primary sensory areas which have all the 'noise' based on your conscious awareness of what the similar experience just resulted in.
All this is then adjusted post hoc to make a coherent story.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'm not sure what you mean by 'pre-processed'. I'm going to take a stab at it assuming you mean to ask if conscious awareness is a necessary feature of bacwkard acting signals. No, but it is usually involved at the higher model levels which, of course, will have an influence over all the models below them. Dream study is probably the best case study for this (again huge pinch of salt required here, very difficult to study), but it seems likely, because of the way memory storage works, that basic object recognition, including limited function, must be able to take place without conscious awareness because they do so during deep sleep dreaming, but appropriate response, form detail and complex function do require some conscious awareness because they only seem to enter stage during REM sleep where you're semi-conscious.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yeah, I think I agree with you there - but as I think @fdrake is getting at (though I've only skimmed the other responses - not much time this morning, sorry) that there could meaningfully be identified an object of conscious experience leaves absolutely nothing for Qualists. I don't want to be pedantic, just to clarify my position, but I don't think it would be be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater to say that Qualia are completely useless and have no place in studies of perception. The objects of perception to which qulaists would like to attach subjective properties, I think are not in danger should we reject qualia wholesale. That said, if we want to reserve the possibility of studying, say, the taste of coffee, We do need some fuzzy-edged set of responses we might associate most with it. I'm not opposed to that kind of grouping. Maybe these could be the new 'qualia', but I think, given the sullied history of the term, we'd better reach for something else.
Maybe in the way we've been interpreting it. To get his points, I think we would need to start with an externalist outlook, so recognizing meaning as something established in human interactions. Dennett wants to do to qualia what Quine did to reference: conclude that due to inscrutability, we can dismiss it. Something like that.
Note the question Banno has asked: why do we need to talk about qualia? I would say its mainly because of ethical considerations. I guess Banno has gotten busy, though.
Self-identity is a whole other massive topic, although it's related here, but like saying "I wonder what's in that wardrobe, Edmund". Broadly the idea of a me/other divide is important at a somatosensory level in the assessment of sensory inputs (that's my hand waiving about out there), but not at the reporting level (we can really easily insert ourselves into false memories, have out of body experiences, experience the emotions of others) here tagging stuff as me-related doesn't seem nearly so 'sticky' and is almost certain done post hoc (when we try to analyse past responses from memory). Where it's important again is in somatic responses, we need to know I moved my arm. Somatoparaphrenia is the condition studied to give insight here (where people think part of their body does not belong to them) and Alien Hand Syndrome (where people seem to assign the movements of their limbs to another identity). These seem at first glance to be perhaps similar, but the differences are revealing (I know I keep banging this drum, but these things do get misrepresented so I'm going to say it gain - very small sample size, very large pinch of salt). The former condition seems to be the result of deeper neural processing of sensory inputs not being sent on to neocortical areas - ie we don't get to assess the 'meaning' of the signals. This could be taken as evidence that the identification of 'self' takes place at higher levels than the basic somatosensory system. The latter, however - more on topic here- seems related to occipital cortex damage as simple as -"It doesn't look like my arm, so maybe it isn't may arm".
Interestingly (to me anyway), and this relates to what I was talking to @Kenosha Kid about, patients with somatoparaphrenia and Alien Hand will come up with and have deep beliefs about, all sorts of plausible real-world stories to explain their situation. It's something very common in most anosognosias, they're accompanied by an absolute conviction in the story explaining it. We need, it seems, some coherent story at a very high level (meaning it combines lots of input data) which explains the sum total of our sensory inputs.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
As with the allocation of responses to objects, I think any allocation of ownership to responses would be mixed, and mostly post hoc (with the possible exception of immediate bodily responses - like catching a a ball) so yeah, Dennet could well have added that to the list of things to be thrown out.
What measure of consciousness are you using then?
As I am wont of pointing out, the obvious problem with that is that Quine was mindlessly referencing some kind of stuff when he said that, by using the words "reference" or "dismiss" or "inscrutable"... :roll:
And this is what passes for philosophy in analytic quarters: utter conceptual confusion.
Quoting frank We use the concept of qualia like we use any concept: instrumentally, opportunistically. People who don't want to use it are welcome not to, and people who want to use it are expected to be able to define it, somewhat. But to try and dismiss or erase a concept is just ridiculous. Philosophy has nothing to do with shooting down concepts. That's a waste of time.
Quoting Isaac
Thanks again, Isaac. What action best describes scrolling down this page and coming across the picture of the two cars and identifying them as cars? I suppose, in a page of mostly text, an image is surprising and, when we become conscious of something surprising, the instinct is to identify it?
Quoting Isaac
Yes, I mentioned something similar to fdrake as an argument against the idea that raw sensory data is just dumped wholesale and unadulterated into our perceptions, in that instance the way the brain stabilises the image we see despite the fact that the eyes are moving. I can imagine that, as infants, we might have suffered a period of time in which the brain had to learn how to do this.
So there's a sense, then, in which our conscious perceptions are being assessed by our unconscious brains in order to fire/learn correction processes. Is it your assessment that this is done for the purpose of improving our awareness, or is that just a nice side effect?
Quoting Isaac
Anything that the brain does to raw sensory input before we are aware of the corresponding perception or correction thereto, e.g. sensory priming. For instance, I don't open my eyes in the morning and see the world upside down for a second. My brain already knows which way up to present the world.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, I think Dennett and fdrake would agree with you. My response to this idea was:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don't think it's a bad word for 'properties of consciousness', rather I think that prior theoretical models for what its properties are are wrong. There's nothing wrong with improving our models; we don't need to come up with a new word for our subject every time we present an improved theory about it.
And that brings us back to where we started. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater leads to confusion and opportunism. Strawson reads, deliberately or not, the attack on the precise definition of qualia as tantamount to saying that consciousness is an illusion and has no actual properties.
Not that this thread or Dennett's article is about judicious use of labels. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether we call them qualia or something else, so long as it's clear that 'qualia do not exist' means 'ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate properties of consciousness do not exist' and not 'properties of consciousness do not exist'.
We were talking about definitions, not measures. Any definition of consciousness is incomplete if it doesn't include first-person subjective experience (qualia). I'm not saying first-person subjective experience is a sufficient condition for a definition of consciousness, but it is a necessary condition. Agreed?
Right, and I think that if qualia are to serve as the updating of the old sense data theory they are supposed to be, then the assignment of the quale to me, the subject, has to be "early", before it's presented to my awareness -- it's not "sweetness" or even "the taste of apples" but "the taste of this apple to me, right now" that is supposed to be presented.
But then the subsystems for processing and packaging "input" from the world, which are admitted to be the domain of neuroscience, would have to be able to label their "output" making rather high-level determinations (ownership, context, particularity), would practically have to be conscious agents themselves. It would be as if the effectiveness of the hierarchical structure in place entitled subsystems operating under top-down constraints to take credit for being thus constrained and count the very constraints they work under as their value added, and all to set up entitling awareness to claim credit for much more than just playing its allotted role.
If that doesn't make any sense, it's only because I'm out of my depth.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Also @jamalrob because perceptual intermediaries.
Why not? It's a question of what the "object of perception" refers to.
Earlier in my discussion with @Luke I quoted SEP's characterisation of sense data. They have three parts to their definition:
They let you write things like: "the sense datum is presented to consciousness and it consists of the properties that perceptually appear to us", or "the sense datum is presented to consciousness and it consists of the properties we are consciously aware of".
A sense datum is then a kind of completed form of perception, an instance of what is perceived, which is then presented to consciousness. The chain for it goes:
object/environment -> sense datum -> consciousness
Or in accordance with what you wrote:
object/environment->raw sensory data->pre-processed data->formatted object ->conscious apprehension.
Now the "formatted object" in the latter chain satisfies the three components of the definition:
(1) Formatted objects are the kind of thing we are directly aware of in perception. The directness comes from being the antecedent element to conscious apprehension in that chain.
(2) Formatted objects are dependent on the mind. You seem to agree with this
(3) Formatted objects have properties that perceptually appear to us.
(1) Let's focus on the directness of the relationship between the formatted object and conscious apprehension. If we have characterised perception as this chain - there should be a component part of perception that corresponds to a formatted object being submitted to some other faculty in which case we become consciously aware of it. The submission relation should be unidirectional, it's an ordering of events in the process.
The point I'm making against this relationship between perceptual objects and conscious apprehension conceived as a receiver of perceptually formatted objects is that apprehension actually partakes in the formation process of the perceptual features that we are conscious of. There's no submission of a formatted object to a next step, the "submission to conscious apprehension" occurs as part of the formatting stage. AFAIK the formatting stage is the stage at which perceptual features are formed (by some modelling process) and attentionally prioritised (@Isaac) relative to the task one is doing.
The role that task relative attentional priority plays in determining what perceptual features form is well illustrated by the video I linked. If you do the task in the experiment, your perceptual processes will attune so hard to detecting task relevant features (ball passing events) you will only be conscious of large environmental variations that are task relevant. Whatever process is "apportioning conscious awareness" is running dependently on perceptual feature formation and vice versa. That makes the "arrows" go both ways! Conscious apprehension is interweaved in perceptual feature formation and attentional prioritisation (which also interweave in each other). So it's less a submission, and more of a feedback. And notice there's no distinct "conscious apprehension" faculty for perceptual features to submit to once formed.
So the argument goes:
(A) Assume conscious apprehension is a distinct, terminal stage of the process of perception.
(B) So if conscious apprehension had formatted perceptual objects submitted to it, it would be in a a unidirectional relationship with the perceptual process, but whatever "submission process" there is requires it to be a bidirectional relationship with perception.
(C) So from (B), we discharge (A) as it implied a falsehood. We have that conscious apprehension is not a terminal stage of perception, it is interweaved with perception.
Specifically, no formatted objects are "submitted to" a distinct faculty, in other words the "node" of conscious apprehension is actually a process interweaving "object formatting" (perceptual feature formation) and "attentional prioritisation". There's no such node, and if there were such a node the relationship could not be unidirectional.
Quoting Isaac
So with respect to Isaac's comments there, conscious awareness does seem to "come online" in the higher stages in the formation of our perceptual features. Conscious awareness seems to be associated with upper stages of the our perceptual modelling hierarchy, in which we have isolated [hide=*](or are isolating in an ongoing fashion)[/hide] the task relevant parameters of our body and environment and are acting upon them. But it's still in a feedback relationship with the lower level models - promoting certain actions, certain adjustments, the formation of certain perceptual features, the exploration of our environment to form new task relevant features etc. It doesn't look like there's a distinct "submission" operation to consciousness, it's more that the apportioning of conscious awareness is interweaved with a concentration of bodily effort and attention relative to a task.
Another way of making the point: that conscious awareness "coming online as it is" isn't in a temporal order with perceptual feature formation (this, then that), it's part of the hierarchical order within perceptual feature formation (this is an upper part of that). If the time part is weird [hide=*] (since the higher order parts time lag the lower parts) [/hide]; the apportioning of conscious awareness is a procedural component (systemic part) of perceptual feature formation - rather than a distinct procedure which the results of perceptual feature formation output to.
So how does that relate to the denial of qualia? Well, if we've undermined the existence of a thing which sense data are submitted to, and shown that the apportioning of conscious awareness is interweaved with perceptual feature formation, the thing that we'd applied properties to no longer exists as it is theorised. Part (3) of the definition of sense-data:
If we start thinking of our own experiences in this way, we're going to be talking about private properties that only we have epistemic access to, that inhere within a subjective state that comes from the submission of a perceptual object to it. It's like disbelieving in the existence of a hallucinatory giant chicken then still running away from it.
But if it's false, the sense data no longer have the properties that perceptually appear to us since they don't exist (since they are not in a direct relationship of procedural antecedence with conscious apprehension). If you want to "recover" the normal use of words to describe our experiences, you have to be extremely careful that in talking about "the properties that perceptually appear to us" you don't conjure an object submitted to consciousness which has those properties. In other words, the use of part (3) of the definition (eg, "my subjective felt qualities") easily leads to conceptions that commit the error in (1). If we're talking about "subjective felt qualities that are only in my consciousness", I mean they're... private in some way suspiciously similar to the qualia one criticised (only their receiving subject has epistemic access...) and so on. Thinking of felt qualities under the aspect of (3) commits one to a rabbit hole of qualia like entities.
If instead "the properties that perceptually appear to us" are not conceived as part of a "subjective state presented to my consciousness", they're conceived as part of my agent-environment relation specific to me at the time... They're then "extrinsic relational properties" of the sort given the okay by the paper. So, talk and write how you like, just make sure that how you talk and write doesn't conjure ghosts. And it's really only in this context that the ghosts matter.
Excellent analogy with the programming exame by the way to get at Dennett's point. Quale descriptions can be considered a constructed folk psychology fiction. However, if his implication is to jump to: "Because how we describe quale is inaccurate, thus experiential "feels like" phenomena is thus a fiction..well, thats a bridge to far.
This all feels right to uneducated me, but to be really convincing I think we should also have an account of introspection -- along the lines of, candid self reports look look like blah because this is what's available, or because the purpose of self reports is blorp and in fulfilling those requirements we represent internal processes or state in this familiar way. That's slightly frustrating though because you just cannot let people prone to say "I am now observing a tree" do this!
So step 1 would be figuring out what candid self reports of mental state really look like in the wild (or, you know, the opposite of wild, the lab), maybe noting what purposes they serve, socially for instance, but some of us talk to ourselves pretty regularly. I would guess there are several pretty distinct sorts of introspection. Is getting distracted in the middle of a task and then trying to remember what you were doing, by introspection, very similar to a verbal reaction to how good your sandwich is?
Quoting fdrake
If this characterisation is incorrect, does it imply that we can't perceive orange juice to be sweet, or cauliflower to be creamy, at a particular time? If no "final product" of perception gets presented to consciousness (at a time, or at all conscious times), then how can we make any judgments about what we perceive?
I don't think so? The problem with the "subjective state" isn't the "state" it's the "subjective". Similarly with "private state", it's not the "state" which is the problem it's the "private". Denying that perception has properties associated with it (a kind of "there are no minds" thesis) I believe is quite different from saying that when someone tastes something sweet it is predicated of a relation between some perceptual stimulus and the perceiving agent, rather than of a subjective state inherent in the agent produced by a perceptual relation.
Another way of saying it: sweetness as an aspect of a taste relation vs sweetness as an aspect of a taste object. The "instances" of perception as well as their properties become seen as extrinsic (articulated over an environmental+bodily context) and relational (between the agent and that context) rather than intrinsic (embedded within a a subjective experiential unit "in its consciousness") and unary (as a component part of such a unit).
Also consider this bit from the essay:
Adding "subjective" to something has an uncanny way of moving it into someone's head.
Edit: as an analogy, "isn't it true that society has abolished all gender inequalities?" said an audience member in a lecture about gender inequality, "how like a man to say!" replied the lecturer. The rhetorical device used there took the audience member's perspective and put it "inside" of one of the constitutive elements of what was being spoken about.... "isn't it true that when we eat stuff it has a taste?" has the "how like a subjective state!" posited in the statement.
But when I experience the redness of a tomato, I experience it not as a relation between me and the tomato but as something that is confined to the tomato. So the experience of redness is intrinsic, not relational. Of course, the experience of the redness of the tomato is caused by a perceptual relation between me and the tomato, and it stands in the relation of being a part of my consciousness as a whole, and it also stands in relations to other parts of my consciousness, but the redness of the tomato is not experienced as a relation, and in this sense this experience is non-relational.
I wonder if there is really any difference.
Being a relation still involves a combination of, or an interaction between, a subject and an object(s). Object(s) are still filtered/perceived by the subject (or by the subject's brain/body) in a way unique to that brain/body, even if colour or sweetness are labelled as objective properties. If there were no subjective aspect, then you should expect to find that we all have the same subjective (objective?) experiences. However, many of Dennett's examples demonstrate that this is not the case. For example, the case of cerebral achromatopsia in which a subject reports that "everything looked black or grey". I have never had this type of experience before. If colour is an objective property then why does the subject report seeing (e.g.) "bright blue objects as black"?
My failing to recognise the purported distinction is not helped by the fact that Dennett himself seems to be attacking a particular characterisation of qualia, rather than all qualia, as @Kenosha Kid raised earlier. For example, Dennett states:
As opposed to what other ineffability?
As opposed to what other privacy?
Most of the time it seems to be planning. We can recognise planning quite well as systems specific to imagining a scenario seem to be associated with the same neural pathways as would be used in the actual scenario. Not that this is relevant here, but this happens to be my personal favourite 'consciousness' explainer. The reason why we feel like we're living some story is because we're constantly scenario-planning and to do that we have to integrate our current environment into the 'the story so far...' section of the film. What seems to us as 'being instantly aware' of the scene we're in is really a set of imagined actions taken within that scene. So, to use your example of seeing a picture of a car on a page of text, what you later report as 'instant identification' is really instant simultaneous planning of potential scenarios - 'What word would I reach for if I had to communicate that object, what body positions would I take up if I had to interact with that object, what endocrine response would I need if that object came closer, what other systems would I need to bring online if it moved, made a sound...and most importantly of all...what sensory input am I likely to get next as a result of the shapes in this one.
There's quite a lot of evidence for this theory, in the form of seeing these areas light up in response. Interesting aside, there's some consideration that Schizophrenia might be caused by something as simple as getting the post hoc story of these mental events the wrong way round (so that the 'what if...' preparations seem to precede the sensory cause, and therapy aimed at this has has some success.
Anyway, I'm rambling. The point is that there's no reason to think that 'identifying the object' is an event in any singular manner. At best it's a collection of predictions about what might happen next and how you might interact with it in a whole bunch of different brain areas. We only really bring these together for the purpose of the next set of predictions the 'story so far...'
It think this is the main point of attack on qualia, even in the most public, effable, and extrinsic use. There really doesn't seem to be a single act of 'recognition' at all. I do see what you're trying to get at (I think) by saying that, the way it seems to you (recognition) has to still be something and we can use that, explain it etc just like any other mental phenomena. I think that's true, but then 'qualia' would mean something more like 'plot device' and I really don't think that's where qualists wanted to go with it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Another fascinating (to me) aside, but I must stop getting sidetracked. Have a look at this paper, if you fancy, it's really interesting.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The theory goes that surprise in costly, so brains have evolved to minimise it. There's even a theory that surprise opposes self-constitution and so life itself evolved to minimise it!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I could almost get behind that but would have to add that consciousness may not be the kind of thing that has the kind of properties we're talking about. Consciousness seems to be a set of processes, story building. If that were true, and we were to say "one of the properties of consciousness is...", I'm not sure how to complete that sentence without just offering the definition itself. Surely it should be "one of the results of consciousness is..."
You said "Reporting on mental activity isn't even a necessary condition for consciousness, let alone a sufficient one.". To make such a claim requires (as far as I can tell) an empirical data-set which includes people being conscious but without any reporting activity going on. In order to acquire that data-set you'd need a measure of consciousness so that you can tell the people with no reporting activity are nonetheless conscious. I just wanted to get clear what that measure is you're using, otherwise I can't have any real understanding of what you're saying.
Quoting RogueAI
I don't really know what 'first-person subjective experience' is in this context.
Yes, that's very much the way I see it. 'The way the apple tasted to me' is simply not something that one has access to at the same level of consciousness as the '...to me' part operates. It think intuition pump 7 illustrates this well. Chase has no more access to the 'taste' of coffee he's processing than the neuroscientist might. The cascade of mental events that his chemoreceptive system started when he sipped coffee has simply had more consequences than he can later gather up and report as being 'the taste of the coffee' in anything other than an arbitrary and constructed manner, and it's only later that ...to me' even enters the picture. For a start, the coffee would undoubtedly signal one response to maybe' sweetness' in one part of the olfactory system, and another to maybe 'sourness' in the occipital system in response to say labelling (the label 'Bitter Coffee' for example). so which one would be 'the way it tasted to me''? Yeah, it makes no sense at all at that level.
The best I think we've got is 'the way I later chose to report the coffee tasted to me'.
@Kenosha Kid. It looks like @fdrake has already said what I just answered to you - I should really read the whole thread before replying.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, an important point to make in understanding this. The order in which our sensory signals are received and processed is not that in which we consciously report them as having done so (even to other systems in the brain). so , a classic experiment with this is the advancing circle. The subject is shown a series of flashing dots with circles around them, they flash in sequence to create the illusion of movement. The dot and the circle are in exactly the same place (one around the other) and the brain obviously see them at the same time, but depending on the direction of the induced movement you'll see the circle as being either slightly ahead or slightly behind the dot. You brain re-arranges the timing of the signals to suit what it thinks has most likely happened. a more mundane example is switching a light switch on. You see the light before you feel the switch move. Your conscious knowledge of how switches and lights work re-arranges the signals temporally so that they seem to line up with the order we model them as being in.
Dennett has his own schematic for sensory processing in the brain. Are you familiar with it? What's your assessment of it?
Both bitter and sweet, obviously...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste
You said:
That's a terrible definition of consciousness. Consciousness is more than "just the tendency to be able to report on mental activity". You're conflating being conscious with reports of consciousness. They're not the same thing. Not even remotely.
That claim is self-evident. Again, reporting consciousness is not the same thing as BEING conscious. Do you think it is??? What an absurdity.
Are you ever conscious when you're not doing any reporting activity? Are you ever in pain without telling anyone about it? Yes, you are.
You need a data-set to tell you that people are conscious even if they're not reporting it? No, you don't. That's silly.
Lame.
Quoting RogueAI
Quoting RogueAI
You responded to a series of reasoned posts with an insult, an appeal to self evidence (self evident to you) and a bare assertion. Make an argument engaging with posts or the source material.
If I give you a paralytic agent, you'll be conscious, but your reporting function will be off-line.
The two are not identical.
Do you think reports of consciousness are the same thing as consciousness itself? That's absurd. What more needs to be said against that? Obviously, you can be conscious without reporting about it. Do you disagree with this?
We're way off the rails of the article, though.
Dennett's goal was not to slam dunk, but to just shift the burden regarding qualia.
What would it take, in your mind, to do that? What evidence would convince you?
That's where I'm at. There's no argument or evidence that is going to get me to think, 'Hmmm...maybe I don't have qualia after all..." Consciousness/qualia deniers are like flat-earthers. They even argue the same way, retreating into stuff like "well, I don't know what that means" when they get pressed into a corner. As I said, it's frustrating talking to such people. I probably shouldn't.
:lol: I probably shouldnt either.
Over and out :up:
Quoting RogueAI
I guess I'll take you both at your word that you're not prepared to discuss it seriously and leave it at that. I wish you would've saved us some time and not engaged.
fdrake, referencing an authority like Searle IS taking the discussion seriously (I can't find the exact quote-I think it was a Ted Talk). The point is germane: no matter what anyone says to you, no matter what arguments they give or evidence they show, you're not going to conclude you're unconscious. That would be absurd. Do you agree? Or could you be persuaded into thinking you're a zombie? No, you couldn't! You know you're conscious. How can you not know that? This is why these discussions are frustrating. You know you're not a zombie. You know nothing anyone can say to you will convince you you're a zombie. That was my entire point in paraphrasing Searle.
And I also tried to discuss this with you seriously. I'll repost:
Would you care to comment on this? Are reports of consciousness the same thing as consciousness itself? Obviously not, so Isaac's claim: is wrong, isn't it? There's more to consciousness than "just the tendency to be able to report on mental activity".
I'm passing familiar, but only in that it's been brought up as being compatible with a Bayesian inference model (which is my preferred model). If you have any sources, they might be relevant here?
I said 'reports of mental activity', not 'reports of consciousness'.
Quoting RogueAI
No, it doesn't seem so. Look at the memory studies of dream states, there seems to be an extremely strong connection between reporting activities and consciousness. I can't actually think of a contemporary model of consciousness in cognitive sciences which doesn't include reporting. I expect there is one, it's a very wide field, but the inclusion of reporting activity is certainly a common view. When you're conscious, some process is switched on which allows reporting of mental activity to working memory, activities which are not thus reported are those we're not 'conscious' of.
Sorry everyone. 'Reporting' means logging to working memory. I should have made that clear.
On second thoughts, though, less sorry because I don't think I've written anything so stupid as to warrant an assumption that I'd mean something like "we're only conscious when we're talking". A little charity (or inquiry) might help, in addition to me being more clear about my terms.
OK, you're conflating mental activity with reports of mental activity. The point is the same: consciousness/mental activity is different than reports of same. Agreed?
"Are you ever conscious when you're not doing any reporting activity?"
"No, it doesn't seem so."
That is logically equivalent to: you are not conscious when you are not doing reporting activities. Is that the claim you're making?
In what field other than the whole consciousness/qualia field is this...
Quoting RogueAI
...considered an argument?
There's something I find so odd about all this. The counter-arguments to any questioning of what's going on is "but we know X, you can't deny it", and yet it's apparently the 'hard' problem? We both unquestionably know it and simultaneously find it the hardest problem in philosophy. Is God messing with us?
I don't see how. Are you suggesting that logging to working memory is not a 'mental activity'?
Quoting RogueAI
Yes. That's right. You have read my explaination of what I mean by 'reporting activities'?
Isaac, do you believe it's possible you're not really conscious right now, as you're reading this? Do you think you can be talked into the belief "I am not conscious right now"? If no, then I guess what I was saying about Searle makes sense, doesn't it? There's just no evidence or argument that can persuade someone they're unconscious, is there?
If yes, and you really think it might be possible you're a p-zombie, all I can do is say, wtf? And you wouldn't be the first (self-described) p-zombie I've run into in philosophical forums. The things some people talk themselves into believing...
Of course you have an explanation of reporting activities. Reporting activities can't possibly mean reporting activities. We're talking about "reporting activities". I'll pass on that rabbit hole.
I don't see how my ability to judge whether or not I'm conscious has anything to do with either the neurological basis of consciousness you originally raised, nor whether the set 'qualia' under consideration has any proper members as we're here discussing.
This kind of talk is exactly what I meant by my comment you've quoted above. Any and all discussion about the complexity and neurological underpinnings (together with the philosophical implications of such) are assumed to have been properly addressed by nothing more than an outraged cry of incredulity.
Quoting RogueAI
Can't make any sense of this.
Versed would inhibit memory formation, but I see what you're getting at. It just seems that you're defining consciousness as "when you're conscious."
? - Typo, possibly.
Quoting frank
Well, at least I'd be right then! Any explanation has an element of tautology, no? 'Tides' are the action of the Moon's gravity on the oceans - "sounds like you're just saying 'tides' are tides"
Versed? The generic is midazolam.
Quoting Isaac
True.
Oh! The benzodiazepine. My mind went straight to versed as in 'well-versed' and got stuck there.
Yes, but the effect of benzodiazepines is not on the primary working memory, it affects the formation of new stored memories.
Now if you mixed it with Fentanyl...but then you would indeed be unconscious.
Gotcha. :up:
Brains doing statistical analysis?
Isn't it rather that what neural networks learn using feedback, Bayesian models use feedback, and hence neural networks can be described in Bayesian terms?
That is, the architecture of the brain is connectionist rather than Bayesian.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but rather asking for clarification.
I agree with this as a phenomenon, but that seems a rather anthropocentric idea of consciousness. When speaking of objects and properties of awareness, I would expect a lower order to have something in common with other animals. My chihuahua can see what's before her, recognise other dogs, and let the poor bastards have it like the walking fiery female Latino cliche she is. Frogs are pretty adept at recognising flies and firing their insane tongues flyward. We're presumably not accusing all animals of compulsive narrative-building, although I agree that does describe humans well.
Quoting Isaac
I don't think that matters. If I've suggested that recognition must be a singular event, it was merely an artefact of speaking approximately about things I'm hazy about.
Quoting Isaac
Thanks, reading now (when not typing this).
Quoting Isaac
I assume consciousness is, at root, a set of processes. But there are also unconscious processes, and they seem to feed into each other such that those unconscious processes provide data to the consciousness set.
Quoting Isaac
I find the feedback aspect perfectly reasonable, and I would expect consciousness to be some higher-order set of processes. I don't think either really speak to the impossibility of outputs of unconscious processing being made available for conscious awareness. I don't really have a strong idea of the case against this...
My feeling is that there is some crossed wires about what we're talking about. For instance, I did not intend to suggest any particular structure for conscious or unconscious processes, nor that consciousness is some intended terminus for unconscious processes, but these appear to have come across as vital to my point for both yourself and fdrake, so mea culpa.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to turn this around. We could dismiss qualia on the basis that:
a) there is no conscious/unconscious distinction at all: that everything that might constitute a conscious object or property is either already found in the raw input to our senses (to which the brain does nothing at all) or, if the brain does some things, it always does so in a way that we could be conscious of;
b) there may be a conscious/unconscious distinction, but there's no actual content to consciousness; it is one thing or no thing.
(a) would rid us of the idea that we become conscious of the results of unconscious processing of sense data, i.e. the immediacy of qualia, but begs the question why I am conscious of some of these processes but not others, e.g. irrespective of how I learned to invert my view of the world, why I am not conscious of doing it now.
(b) would get rid of properties of consciousness, which would beg the question of how I can be conscious of 'car' or 'Halle Berry's face' or distance or colour or anything else at all.
As far as I can see atm there are unconscious processes, whatever their structure, that act on sensory input, and we have consciousness of the results of those actions, whatever the structure of consciousness. The unintended implications that e.g. there is some teleological submission process, or some terminus at consciousness, or some implied specific structure to consciousness, aren't really what my argument is about. It is simply that we are conscious of results of unconscious processing.
In a broad sense, yes, the term Bayesian Inference, Bayesian Brain, Active inference... all pretty much interchangeable and broadly refer to the same model - that the brain is organised into hierarchical areas which suppress signals from areas beneath them on the basis of prior assumptions about the nature of the signal they're expecting, but updating those expectations in accordance with the function of the combined signals - just like Bayes theorem.
In literal terms, there have been a number of experiments done where (for example the dissonance between expected distance and actual distance between ridges in a ridged pattern) have been calculated using Bayes theorem and the function of the results from human subjects also plotted. The two functions ('Bayes by maths' and 'estimates by humans') are almost identical to the millimetre, so in at least a few stripped down, (overly?) simplistic cases the brain is somehow doing Bayesian statistics, yes. It's not as far fetched as it originally might sound, a fairly simple neural network can be designed computationally to carry out Bayesian calculations. Neurons could quite feasibly do it.
Your dog probably forms stories to integrate dissonant information too. The frog maybe not so much, but then the frog probably doesn't have much by way of object identification either. The two seem to go together. Have you seen the experiment where the baby birds will beg at any yellow diamond. they don't get the point of piecing together all the parts of the mother bird, just two angles and the colour. there may still, however, be a proto-story developed, just a very limited one, but here's a lot of people think that's what the neocortex does. anything without one can't do it, anything with can.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Ah, that sounds likely then, it's not an easy topic to have clarity of expression in, one really needs to start from some agreed basis and proceed from there. One of the most compelling take-aways from Dennet here is the way in which talk of Qualia throws us in at the middle without having any clear idea of how we got there.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I see. It seems then that our disagreement (small such as it is) is only over whether dismissal of Qualia in their entirety puts this idea at risk (throws the baby out with the bathwater, as you put it). My feeling is that the idea here is so generalised and applicable to a field much wider than qualia, that dismissing all talk of qualia maintains the conscious awareness of the results of unconscious processing completely intact. There are plenty of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientist working under the former assumption without ever mentioning qualia or anything like them, so I think it can work. (there are, of course also plenty who do - much to their shame!).
Yeah, I see what you mean. Is the calculator calculating? It would be badly misnamed if it weren't. But yes, a tricky distinction.
Yes, a peril of cognitive psychology, particularly computational approaches. As soon as you leave the influence of the neocortex you lose intention and then the language we use to talk about the processes starts to sound weird (to those who care about that, many of my colleagues used to use intentional language about neurons without a care - I cannot do so without cringing a little). We would be fine if there were a neat cut-off, but there isn't - so I tend to just use it and cringe away. It made my lectures more visually entertaining anyway - "the posterior superior temporal sulcus suppresses (ugh!) signals from the v4 region which is expects (yuech!) to be in conflict with it's predictions (eurgh!) of social status"
Yeah, depends what you mean by 'explains'. There are different standards for what constitutes a satisfactory explanation in different fields. I'll freely admit I've never been entirely clear on what philosophers want of an 'explanation' such that it satisfies their criteria for one.
Neither have philosophers...
Is there something you are trying to explain? If yes, what others are trying to explain is kinda secondary.
Do you think intention is emergent? or an illusion?
Quoting Isaac
It is tricky. The nascent way we split up phenomena and describe them isn't a neutral process of observation and recording with respect to the topic of the thread. Reading off features from our perceptions involves the same process by which perceptual features are formed (to some degree anyway). If the devil is in the details of the formation process of perceptual features, the way we read off features from already formed perceptions effectively has a sampling bias in that regard. We're sampling from an already formed space of features introspectively rather than looking at the process of perceptual feature formation which is constructing the elements of that sample that we later sample from with another (related) process.
Yep, this looks like we are getting somewhere towards the hard problem. That to me seems like indeed, a formal version of what is called the Cartesian Theater problem. Related is also the homunculus fallacy.
Reminds me of one of our prior conversations:
Quoting Isaac
It was more that there is a reason why we have a concept of qualia, and that reason holds even if theories about what qualia are do not, and it seems to me that all of the problems lie with older, less scientific theory and not with the existence or not of properties and objects of consciousness, the things underlying the belief that qualia exist. There's a sense here with how Dennett is being interpreted, not just by Strawson but by yourself and fdrake, that since theories about qualia need improving, the term must be jettisoned. I can't think of any other field where this would be the case. Gravity was modelled as a force field for centuries. When Einstein discovered it was actually geometric feature of spacetime, he didn't jettison the term 'gravity', and that's a pretty fundamental distinction, much more so, I feel, than the difference between ineffable, intrinsic, private, immediate qualia and merely private and immediate qualia.
Renaming gravity because we previously identified it as a force field when it's not would have been extremely confusing and lo there is extreme confusion about whether consciousness is real or not. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater means we get people like Strawson leading people to believe that Dennett has claimed that consciousness is an illusion, because the contents of consciousness are an illusion, when nothing of the sort is claimed.
If I say Pete is 5 ft 11, with brown hair and hazel eyes, and his eyes are in fact grey, does Pete not exist? The existence of the referent is not dependent on the accuracy of my description. When you say 'qualia' do not exist, obviously that is going to be interpreted as 'the referents of qualia do not exist', which is precisely what we have seen, when in fact Dennett is saying that the theoretical description of qualia is wrong (and, furthermore, that qualia themselves, while real enough, are not scientifically useful).
Quoting Isaac
And presumably they're talking about the same thing, just using different terminology.
Yes, I find this the problem with Dennett. He doesn't seem to approach the hard problem. He keeps trying to hack away at easier problems. The question that people keep throwing back at him, is so what about the hard problem. And in answering this, he keeps going back to people's misconception about qualia which is confusing because that is not the hard problem. I'd rather Dennett just admit, "Fuck it if I know, but here are problems that are easier to possibly get an answer."
Indeed, I was just reading a paper about how the process can cause information loss and, you're right, we can hardly discuss perceptual features not present due to the processes that lost them. And to this extent qualia may not be useful scientific concepts, as Dennett said. That said, there is, as both yourself and Isaac have pointed out, feedback between what we consciously perceive and the unconscious processes that form those perceptions, so any complete description of perception must surely account for what is perceived.
Aye. I imagine that the kind of accounts philosophically split along two lines:
(1) How are perceptual features formed?
(2) What is the phenomenal content of a given perceptual feature?
The first admits of functional explanations (it's a "how" question regarding a process), the second evokes an apportioning of phenomenal content to perceptual features, and we might be in a similar situation to the debate we just had (perceptual features are "submitted to" a phenomenal content receptor vs phenomenal content ascription is interweaved with the process of perceptual feature formation).
I strongly suspect that relating to our own perceptions in a manner that doesn't produce these conceptual traps upon reflection is a laborious, ongoing fight. A "relearning how to see".
Edit: I'd suggest that the "phenomenal content" of a given perceptual feature is the perceptual feature itself - or perhaps "the most attentionally prioritised aspects of the nascent perceptual feature components", or when introspecting "the attentionally prioritised aspects of the remembered/introspectively targeted perceptual feature", there's a lot of information loss involved - but Hard Problem enthusiasts wouldn't like that.
Yes, I think so too. And relearning how not to see, or hear in particular. Nonetheless, regarding:
Quoting fdrake
we can still separate data in a third person way into what we are conscious of in a first person way -- phenomenal content -- and what we are not. As I said before, this does not imply a particular structure; it merely observes that we are conscious of things like 'the car on the left' but not conscious of things like 'transformed orientation of car on what is now the left'.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, maybe. The qualia then exists by virtue of us being conscious of it as opposed to not conscious of it rather than packaged and sent into consciousness pret a manger, which isn't really what I was getting at. The important point is that 'the blue car' is not in raw sensory input; it is something the brain adds because it has learned to do so, and that process of recognition is not part of that higher-order set of conscious processes (which may just be because the brain has also learned not to bother amplifying that sort of thing). Or, in other words, whatever triggers those processes are not perceptual features.
Wouldn't it be both? Only tangentially related, but if an effect is emergent, then any reification is an illusion. Flash a bight magenta light on a white background, when it's removed a green shape will appear in its place, yet no green light was shone. This effect simply emerges from the combination of magenta light and antagonistic processing in the retina. It's still what we commonly call an 'illusion'.
Yeah, my concern is still with...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
@Kenosha Kid, I'm still not sure I'm prepared to accept that picking a point in an ongoing feedback process and labelling it the 'result' doesn't set us off on the wrong path as far as perception is concerned.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
True, but we have jettisoned phlogiston, humours, elan vital, and ether, (haven't we?) so is it not still a case of deciding what category qualia fall into?
Quoting fdrake
This is an important point. In my discussion with @Kenosha Kid we've been talking about the way the brain constructs a narrative post hoc to unite it's streams of input. If what we want, for whatever reason, is to grasp what going on beneath the surface, we can't be using our intuitive feeling about it as a guide, we can establish pretty early on that that isn't going to give us an honest answer to that inquiry.
I contend that a lot of this really is a debate about whether consciousness is sort of an immediate (instant) "gestalt" of experience or if it is a construction of micro-processes of neurons. I don't know if any modern philosopher would doubt that it is the latter. But to say that hard problemers don't recognize this would be running towards windmills. You cut the corpus collusum, you take away this or that part of the brain and, who would have thunk it, a cognitive capacity disappears! Also, the electro-chemical firings of neurons, and their networks happen in certain parameters like microseconds, etc. This is all recognized. That is not moving closer to the hard question though. It's playing in the same well-trodden sandbox. You can move the Cartesian theater anywhere you like, but its always set up somewhere.
If a property is emergent, it has characteristics that are not seen in its building blocks. A tornado is an emergent entity. If I'm reductionist regarding tornadoes, I would claim that the concept of a tornado is misleading. There are no tornadoes and to the extent people believe otherwise, they have bought into an illusion.
If you get a chance, read this article. I'd be interested in your viewpoint.
You're point there seems close to the point I am making here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Would you agree that is similar to what you are getting at?
If it's a process, surely it has a result. For instance, what would you call the single firing neurons in response to Halle Berry's face? If it is something we are conscious of, and it is not an input to that process, it is a result of that process, no? I'm not saying that's the entirety of the purported qualia, which must remain the net experience of Halle Berry's face; nevertheless there are processes occurring which feed into that experience, not instantaneously, sure, with feedback, sure. But it's doing something which adds to our experience.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, because the referents didn't exist at all. The referent of 'qualia' is 'properties of consciousness' and, as Dennett says, these exist.
Yes. Knowing how tornadoes work requires more than understanding the mechanics of moving dust, and we can understand tornadoes without knowing anything about quantum physics.
I think we are agreeing.. My point was sort of the epistemological paradox of emergence. We know of all other emergence through the process of cognizing it. At what epistemic level do tornados exist? Everything we know about emergence happens within the epistemic framework of a "viewer". Without the viewer, what is it from something to move from one level to another? What does that even look like? There is always a sort of hidden viewer in the equation. I guess I hear key words from types trying to answer this like "top-down causation" but it seems like a modern way of positing Descartes' God that is a necessity for everything else to exist.
Yes, we die.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the flippant answer).
Take calculating some iterative algorithm that has no p-type solution. The step you happen to be on isn't the 'result' of the process, it's just the transient stage you're currently at. If we did want a result it might more properly be something like 'you're going to doing this forever', or 'you'll never get a number below 100', or some such limit. That's the way I'm seeing perceptual processing, from day one the perception is not a result, its a prediction to be input into the algorithm generating the next perception...
But we might actually be getting into the weeds here. I think we're not so far from one another. It's interesting to hear how you see things differently, though.
With sufficient pedantry, what demarcates the steps of the "iterations" of perceptions would also vary too, no? There's no guarantee that update steps correspond 1-1 with "instants" of perception as we'd introspectively, pre-theoretically or even experientially in this case draw the line. The indexical progression of update steps within the updating procedure isn't the same thing as individuation of situated ("subjective") states. It seems there must be indexical progression without reportable changes [hide=*](reportable changes being read as a precondition for change in situated state)[/hide] precisely because selectively apportioning working memory is a component of perceptual updates! The progression of situated states looks to have a slower clock than the indexical progression within algorithm (Libet's delay) and between its components (reflex triggering before conscious awareness that it was triggered).
Regardless, it does seem important to be able to study the "perceptual moment" and to give an account of how that arises from the steps of the updating procedure. Even if that perceptual moment is still a "finite stretching along in time" (as Heidegger puts it) so even "instantaneously" has temporal dependence (priors + expectations).
The now classic answer is: when the whole is more than the sum of its parts. That is to say, when there is a discernable and somewhat functional structure to the thing. A car for instance is far more than a pile of parts. It's a structure made of parts. Assembling those parts in the right manner for the final structure to work as a car requires skills, tools and work. When you lose a part (eg a wheel), it usely results in the car becoming dysfunctional and needing repair and part replacement.
Likewise, a living being is far more than a pile of atoms: it's an extremely complex structure made of atoms. This structure is able to maintain itself in spite of losing parts (molecules) all the time, by absorbing other molecules from its environment: you perspire, you drink for instance. To a degree, a living organism / structure is self repairable.
A car has been built and repaired, but a living being hasn't been "built" by anyone (in a Darwinian outlook at least - I trust we share such an outlook). So in the case of the living being, the bio-structure emerges somehow, as an extension of one (or two) other living organism, in the form of some seed. Darwinism avoids infinite regress here: evolution is then seen as the slow emergence of life, over at least 4 billion years, which ultimately gave rise to individual x of species y. Note that by and large, ontogenesis follows phylogenesis, so the emergence of an animal from a egg recalls the emergence of its entire biological ancestry.
But what is emerging into what? How? Similar to the hard problem, you can tell me that these atoms and those atoms come together, but if the whole is greater than the parts, how is it that downward causation or top-down causation works without a viewer? To say it does it just does once things are combined is to beg the question of how the parts that created the whole created a new phenomenon. Certainly a viewer cognizes the results of combinations of parts to whole. What is that on its own without the viewer though? Before you answer this, keep in mind there is no viewer here. What is happening is not like what a human perceives happening just without humans. Rather it is the thing-itself, It is happening outside cognition. How is it this new epistemic event occurred. I remember @apokrisis used to refer to this as the "epistemic cut". And then he would go on a whole tangent on Peircean semiotics. Without invoking that particular philosophy, I think the term is useful so I'm going to use it.
Last week, I studied Dennett's paper in the other thread which gave rise to this one, and found it compelling enough to reject the concept of Qualia, based upon it's having been rendered useless as a means to add anything other than unnecessary complications that actually inhibit our understanding of consciousness or conscious experiences. I suspect that's similar to 's take as well.
I agree with Dennett's characterization of what those who argue for qualia/quale are doing, when he says the following...
I think that the above quote is the most important point of the paper, although my reasoning for that may be too far off topic. The quote above has been discussed at length in terms of how the brain works, and in terms of how human perception models work, and although I've found those conversations very helpful, interesting, and relevant to the paper itself, I've also found that there's still much missing in terms of what consciousness consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon, despite the fact that I wholeheartedly agree that there are no such things as the way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell to various individuals at various times, independently of how those individuals are stimulated or non- perceptually affected, and independently of how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe.
What's missing is the explanation of how those individuals are stimulated or non-perceptually affected, and how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe that adequately describes thought and belief itself(consciousness). "Consciousness" as described by proponents of "qualia" is based upon a gross misunderstanding of what consciousness consists of, and how it emerges(here I'm quite fond of the discussion regarding whether or not perceptual features/properties/quale can be divorced from the actual individual's history and retain their unity as an entity).
I'd like to see that part of this topic gotten into in quite a bit more detail, but perhaps an aim to adequately explain how consciousness emerges, and what it consists of, is too far off the topic, because Dennett was not concerned about that in this particular paper.
I somewhat agree with this, if we grant Dennett's arguments for quniing qualia. However, you do seem to be espousing illusionism in this paragraph. Which would be that we're being deluded by some trick of cognition into thinking sensations of color, sound, paint, etc. are something they're not, which is some form of the private, ineffable subjectivity.
If there is such an illusion, the mechanism needs to be explained so that we can see how this illusion comes about. The problem I and many others have with this approach is it implies that sensations themselves are illusions, because that's the only way to avoid espousing qualia. Which would imply that we only think that we see color, hear sound, feel pain.
What could that possibly mean? And what does that do for epistemology if our sensations are themselves illusions? And aren't illusions themselves experiences?
The hard problem arises here because we have sensations of a world which is different from our objective explanations of that world. Red isn't a certain wavelength of light, nor is it certain neurons firing. Red isn't part of our scientific explanation of the world. And yet we all have sensations.
Even if we dispense with qualia as incoherent, we're still stuck with the secondary qualities of perception, along with dreams, inner dialog, imagination, hallucinations, etc. We still have a modern form of the mind/body problem. It doesn't go away just because we ditch a problematic term.
That's a problem, regardless of how you characterize it, and whether it's the end result of a reporting mechanism. There needs to be an explanation for how the sensations are produced.
Is that a metaphysical question?
Yes.
Kind of similar to arguing over the coherency of qualia.
What is emerging is a functional structure. How is the core of the problem.
Embryology has made progress and so has evolution theory, but neither can fully explain ontogenesis or phylogenesis, respectively.
Generally, in biology, the process of creating a new structure involve folding a line or a surface onto itself to create a 3d structure, like an origami. In other words, your "epistemic cut" often looks like an invagination, an indentation, a wrapping. A fold. The folding is automatic. The archetypical example is the folding of proteins, in which a chain of amino acids folds into a functional enzyme:
There is something fractal in this capacity to create structures with lines, or surfaces:
Flower blooming
[img width=300]https://i.gifer.com/6cPA.gif[/img]
Embryonic development of the human face
In all cases, note the rather surprising approach: the seemingly infinite production of new flowers at the core of the inflorescence, the apparent absurdity of the face development. This is what emergence does look like: it's not designed and built like a human architect or an engineer would have done it. It grows, a certain growth is happening, that leads in surprising ways to a familiar structure (a plant, a flower, a face).
In summary, a line folded many times can create a structure. This would be how the DNA linear code can produce a 3D organism. Nowhere in that DNA code can one find a map of the individual it belongs to. It just codes for self-folding proteins, who act upon each other and their environment in ultra complex feedback loops to produce a biostructure.
Emergence is a self-folding origami.
Quoting schopenhauer1
In biology, the short answer is through feedback loops. The classic example is a thermostat that can regulate a room temperature. Life is essentially a set of feedback loops, at all levels, everywhere. From the biochemistry to the cell to the organism to the ecosystem and back (of course!). Note that once again it is some kind of folding, but not a topologic one this time: a folding of causality, a causal fold.
I was perhaps unclear. By the result of a process, I mean a single execution of some brain function, for instance V1. One of the things V1 is responsible for, as I understand it, is edge detection. An 'edge' is something we are conscious of, but it's not something distinct in raw optical data, i.e. the inputs to V1. It is an output or result of V1. Yes, that output might be modulated by new data or future feedback; nonetheless 'this edge' is an output of a particular process of V1. This would be analogous to the result of a single iteration of your algorithm, not some potentially unattainable final answer.
This is just lovely. What an excellent post.
Quoting Marchesk
Yawn.
Quoting Marchesk
Red isn't part of our scientific description of the world? That's a step too far. We have plenty of science around red, blue, green and so on. Physical science, involving frequencies, and physical and chemical structure; physiological science, involving retinas and cone cells and so on; Psychological science, involving illusions and language...
Red in not incommensurate with science. We are able to take casual talk about red and translate it into talk that is more 'scientific'; if we could not, we would have good reason to doubt the utility of science.
Here I have in mind Davidson's argument in On the very idea of a conceptual schema. It's not that we are dealing with conceptual schemes that simply cannot be translated one into the other.
The case is more interesting with intentions and intentionality. See my thread on Philosophy and jigsaw puzzles... I'm reading Mary Midgley, who expresses similar views. Could there be a neural equivalent of "I want scrambled eggs for breakfast"?
But that's nothing to do with qualia; their role here has been to add confusion.
As Block and Lanier have argued, we don't know whether the red sensation is itself biological or functional. So a computer might implement the same functionality and not have red sensations. Or maybe it does, and so do meteor showers and nation states on the occasions they implement said functionality. Both of which imply some sort of weird identity that's absent from the biological or functional concepts.
But this is most plainly put is Locke's primary qualities being used in science, while the secondary qualities themselves remain unexplained. Somehow the primary qualities in an organism results in secondary ones, but so far no explanation has shown how. Thus, the hard problem remains.
Take out the loaded term "objective" and what do you have?
Red is used in explanations. I handed you that cup because it is red.
Introduce the problematic division of objective and subjective statements and of course you end up with an inability to bridge the great divide that is the hard problem. It's sitting in your assumptions.
That's not scientific. The red isn't the reflective surface, it's not the lighting, it's not the activated cones, it's not the electrical impulses going to my visual cortex, and it's not the neural activity.
Unless you wish to defend either color realism or mind-brain identity.
Quoting Banno
You don't need to. Just use the terms of sensation and the terms of neurons, electromagnetic radiation and molecular surfaces and you'll see there's a mismatch. Ordinary language analysis doesn't help here.
And...?
Again, if you assume a distinction between objective and subjective statements, you shouldn't be surprised to find that you can't bridge the gap you created.
Quoting Marchesk
We end up with two different ways of talking about the same thing. The coin is an alloy of tin and copper; and it can be exchanged for a bag of lollies. That's not a mismatch.
The distinction falls out of whatever language you wish to use, because our perceptions of the world and mental processes differ from the world.
Quoting Banno
But you agreed earlier in this thread that red isn't electromagnetic radiation of certain wavelength. Are you saying now the entire process is identical to having a red sensation?
Painted using a matte house paint with the least possible gloss, on stretched canvas, 3.5 meters tall and 7.8 meters wide, in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
An anti-war statement displaying the terror and suffering of people and animals.
Two ways of talking about the very same thing.
Do we need to reduce one to the other?
Thinking for a wee bit ...
Although the original is identical to the materials which make up the painting (when arranged in that particular fashion), the image itself can be reproduce in other media, such as the digital version you posted. So although we might be tempted to say that a red cup is identical to the process of perception of seeing a cup, we can also produce red cup experiences in dreams, imagination and hallucinations.
So then it would seem sensations like images can be produced by different processes.
It's the conclusion that counts here. What do you conclude?
What are sensations of color?
What are these things you called "sensations of color, sound, paint, etc."
I've no idea how you've arrived at that from what I wrote.
On my view, an illusion is always of something else that is not an illusion. I wouldn't call Qualia an illusion, unless it is an illusion of what counts as an acceptable accounting practice.
To quite the contrary, I would call it a failed philosophical attempt at taking proper account of what conscious experience consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon. A failed attempt at setting out the pre-theoretical, basic, and/or fundamental elements of conscious experience.
Why thanks, glad you liked it. Who said philosophy is the capacity to marvel?
Yes, that's true. Libet's a good example. Also various temporal re-arrangements that have to be carried out to accommodate the expected difference in time it takes for signals which we expect to have been caused simultaneously to reach our working memory via their various routes.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, at issue here in reply to is the extent to which we can usefully identify and segment off a 'result' of all this subconscious processing as some property of consciousness. I think we all agree that any such segmentation will be arbitrary, but is it useful to inquiry and does it need parameters in order to continue to be?
I think one thing that prompts a use of qualia is a desire to be able to work backwards as a explanatory precess, so to be able to take the fact that I can describe how my last sip of tea tasted and explain it. The first step qualists take is to say that because I can describe how my last sip of tea tasted (or carry out any other response) there must be some way my first sip of tea tasted. This is obviously false and we can move on from this simplistic view. So the real issue is whether there's some intermediary step between the subconscious parts of the brain responsible for forming models related to taste, tea, cups, misty mornings, headaches, work stresses...and the resultant formation of words, or actions which we'd like to be able to say 'resulted' from that mix. The best candidate would seem to be something like the sensory memory or the working memory, but Libet's work (and others) seems to throw the latter into question, much of what's stored in the working memory is stored after the event it's supposedly initiating has already been initiated, It's there to explain the action we just took, not determine it. So perhaps the sensory memory? For those that don't already know, this is a theorised, even shorter-term memory than the working memory. It stores (keeps online is a better description, given the tiny timescales we're talking about) some of the neural responses to some fairly high level sensory representations (so a little combination, filtering and suppression has taken place, but not the full works). Maybe whatever is in the sensory memory is in there long enough to count as a 'result', a 'step' in the processes even thought he rest of the process is continuing along behind it, the holding of that data, even for a fraction of a second, could break down a continual process into steps. If so then such holding is based on surprise (as active inference devotees will not be surprised to learn). We break up the continual algorithm into chunks using very short term storage based on the points in the process where we were surprised.
We can just call it phenomenal consciousness.
Why not just work backwards from the fact that there is some way the first sip of tea tasted, as described or reported by a subject? It’s as though non-qualists want to pretend there are no pre-theoretic (or simply first-person) perceptions. But aren’t they precisely what is attempting to be explained?
Because there is no such fact. Dennet's just taken an entire paper showing this, we've just taken 13 pages of discussion showing it. I mean this in the most polite possible way, but you need to counter one or more of the specific points raised which show that there is no such fact, returning to the assertion that there is just puts us right back at the beginning again.
In short, to answer your question, we did start there. Then we worked out that there was no such fact of how the sip of tea tasted, and so we moved on.
Folk keep trying to set out the nature of the ineffable, and complaining when other folk point out that they can't.
There's nought queer as folk.
Then what are you trying to explain? The mistaken belief that we taste tea? Or that people make reports about the taste of tea (even though there’s no such thing)?
Trying to explain by what? I'm not clear here whether you're asking what inquiry into perception is trying to explain, or what dismissing qualia is trying to explain.
Aren't you trying to explain something when you say, for example:
Quoting Isaac
What are you trying to account for here?
Someone once observed that "what can be shown cannot be said", such as the colour red, or the Guernica painting. Others think that seeing a painting and talking about it are just two different ways of talking about it.
There I'm just trying to throw a bone to @Kenosha Kid's idea that we might have a defined step we could meaningfully talk about in the otherwise seamless process of perception-inference. I wasn't sure if I'd understood Kenosha's point properly so thought I'd try to lay some potential bridges. The actual idea that there's a way tea tastes to me which is stored somewhere in my brain (or mind, for any dualists out there), has, I thought, been discarded quite some way back. We laid out a fairly exhastive exposition and were met with nothing but "...but it's obvious there's qualia", so I'd kind of moved on from that argument to just the specific point Kenosha was trying to make.
I wasn't referring to (and I thought you weren't referring to) a way tea tastes to you that is stored in your brain, but to a way tea tastes to you when you taste it; the fact that it tastes a certain way to you (that you perceive it to taste a certain way) in that particular instance.
Quoting Isaac
As Kenosha keeps pointing out, to apparently deaf ears, Dennett does not deny that conscious experience has properties.
And I did raise a similar point earlier in the discussion, with references to the article, here:
Quoting Luke
Are you assuming that subjects are completely mistaken in how things seem to them?
At the very least, I believe that things can be shown.
So where is that 'way' if not in the brain of the person doing the tasting? And yet we can make a complete account of chemosensation->talk (or any other response) without either requiring such a fact, nor finding evidence nor mechanism for one. So why would we continue to assume such a thing exists?
What (else) is chemosensation supposed to account for if not taste?
The signals which chemosensory neurons send to cotices higher in the hierarchy. Nothing more. Beyond that you start to see the influence of a whole slew of non-chemosensory systems getting involved, feeding back to the chemosensory neurons, suppressing certain signals, re-iterating others. One if the many paths taken ends up (together with input from a hundred other unrelated paths) in the stimulation of the motor neurons responsible for forming the words "this tea tastes bitter". Where in all that is the 'taste' of the tea?
Could be any one of a large number if reasons. That's the point of rejecting qualia. We wouldn't know, at least not by introspection. Most likely is that they expected it to taste bitter, chemosensory neurons didn't keep any signals in the sensory memory long enough to trigger a revision of that expectation. But it could as easily have been because everyone else in their social group said it tasted bitter, or that their tounge wasn't working, or that they're having a bad day and want to find fault. What it's not (at least we've good reason to think it's not) is because there's some way the tea tastes stored in the brain which we seek out when wanting to make an accurate report of it.
I saw a reality TV cooking show once where contestants were blindfolded and given small cubes of different types of foodstuffs and they were asked to guess what each foodstuff was. They later reported that identification was difficult due to being blindfolded and because each foodstuff was presented as the same uniform cube. However, several of them were quite good at it, getting through about 6 or 7 cubes each before giving a wrong answer. This would not seem possible if they did not have some flavours stored in their memories, and if there were not some constancy to those tastes in order for them to be able to correctly identify those foods.
Does tea have some taste for you?
I'm not trying to account for qualia. I'd be trying to account for behaviour, neuroscientists would be trying to account for neural activity. There's no need to account for qualia because there's no cause to think they exist to require accounting for.
Quoting Luke
No. I have a range of responses to drinking tea, a range of words I reach for if asked to describe it, a range of actions I take associated with it (but also associated with all the other aspects of my environment at the time).
The argument that's been fairly exhaustively presented is that our intuitive sense that there's a way tea tastes to me (at time t) is mistaken, as many intuitions turn out to be. It's no good arguing against that position by stating that we all have such an intuition, we knew that, that's where we started, we're now checking to see if it makes sense in the light of Dennet's charges, the insights of neuroscience etc.
Then what informs your response, or your "range of words" you reach for if asked to describe it (to describe what?)
All number of things. In neurological terms, it's the firing of whatever neurons have pathways leading to speech centres, in psychological terms it would be my beliefs about the effect those words would have compared to the goals I have the time. I can't see referring to the entire state of my mind at the time of sipping tea (regardless of the source of those states) as 'the taste of tea' being useful in any sense.
If someone asks you "how's the tea?", you respond in neurological terms and/or strategic terms? The flavour never enters into any of your responses? What if someone asks whether you can see, hear or smell something particular. "Can you smell smoke?" You either answer in neurological terms or say what they want to hear, which is presumably "no"?
Yes. That's how people work, they say and do things with an aim to have a certain effect by doing so.
Quoting Luke
Why would telling them what they want to hear be my only strategic choice? But yes, if it were, that's exactly what I'd say. More to the point, if I really didn't want to think there was smoke I would demonstrably be less likely to interpret chemosensory signals as indicating that there was.
Our ability to talk of taste is not reliant on the unique existence of a referent for that talk. It's reliant only on the fact that it does the job we need it to do. If saying "this tea tastes bitter" to the waiter gets more sugar put in it, then it's done its job even if there's no referent. Indeed it does the job better that way. If I want a world where waiters add sugar in response the word 'bitter' then I'd better hope it's one in which 'bitter' has a public meaning based on use, not a private one based on subjective internal states.
Okay, so our perceptions get coloured by stuff. I'm just trying to get at whether or not you can smell smoke at all, or whether you've ever smelled smoke.
Quoting Isaac
So there is a way that it tastes? Otherwise, why would you want sugar added?
Smelling smoke and 'the way smoke smells' are not the same thing. The first can be described entirely as a process without introducing new facts. The latter has introduced this new element without cause 'the way...'.
Quoting Luke
No, there's no need for one, I want sugar added because I've learned such an action changes my internal states in a way that seems desirable. Again, if you want to call my entire mental state at the time 'the taste of tea' be my guest, it just seems to add unnecessary confusion. Maybe I want sugar added because I'm hungry or tired and the story I tell to account for that is 'the tea was bitter' do you want to be describing my state of hunger and tiredness within 'the taste of tea'? It's not really 'of tea' anymore by then is it?
What internal states? How do you sense that it is desirable? How do you know that it will be again?
Quoting Isaac
I don't want to call your entire mental state the taste of tea. I just want to know whether you can taste tea. It strikes me as abnormal that you can't.
Quoting Isaac
I just want to know whether the tea tasted bitter to you (or seemed to), for whatever reason. From the outset, Dennett defines qualia as "the way things seem to us". You don't need to know all the reasons why things seem that way, only that they do.
Those are both massive questions. Short answer neural networks and predictive models. Perhaps if you could explain the relevance I could be.more specific, as it is you've just asked me for a précis of the whole of cognitive psychology.
Quoting Luke
I can't tell if you don't understand the distinction I made earlier or if you disagree with it because you haven't referenced it at all here despite repeating the notion to which it was an answer. I'll say again - there's a difference between tasting tea [the process] and the taste of tea [the ontological commitment]. I can taste tea. I don't believe there is a thing which answers to 'the taste of tea'. Two different ideas.
Indeed, but yet we have an experience of tasting the tea. That's the hard problem.
Oh okay. I misunderstood. I agree that illusionism fails in this regard. And Dennett is sometimes hard to pin down, but I think he has outright supported illusionism at times, even though he says he doesn't deny consciousness. Because for him, consciousness is completely explainable in functional terms. It only seems like it's something more to us.
But that seeming just won't go away so easily.
We don't. That's the easy solution.
So you outright deny that we have conscious experiences. How does that work for you? You tell yourself it's only seems like there is a taste of tea when you sip?
To be fair, I have a few times tried to believe this upon reading some well argued paper, but I always go back to the warm embrace of the hard problem. That seeming is bloody hard to dismiss.
Do you think the taste of the tea is an experience that stands on its own? By "on its own", I mean not in distinction from all the other taste experiences you've had or expect.
I'm just thinking that taste, like color, is this little system that allows distinguishing one facet of your experience from another, one sort of experience from another. We label different ways of making these distinctions, but it could be we're not so much noting "red" as a sort of plenum, complete unto itself, but just tracking differences, changes in what's going on with us.
I know I'm not expressing this well, but I think you've spent more time on this stuff than I have, so maybe you can see what I'm getting at.
I don't know, just thinking about how one might try to approach explaining consciousness. Somehow you have to show how the act of discriminating becomes a conscious sensation.
Then again, maybe it happens with the integration of the various discriminations into a unified experience that is the center of attention. It still seems like trying to marry two fundamentally different categories. One for objective observation and one for subjective experience. But maybe it can be done?
You mean to tell me you didn't notice that adding sugar changed your internal states in a desirable way until you learned about neural networks and predictive models? Did adding sugar have zero effect on your internal states before that?
Can you read this? Can you see this writing? If so, does it appear to have any colour?
But maybe that just is consciousness, not immediately, not straight from the senses, but the continual updating of your model of a world of objects. That sounds pretty close to what we'd expect a conscious organism to be doing, responding to change in a way that enables planning. Is there an alternative that doesn't require a Cartesian theater?
Quoting Isaac
You appear to have changed your opinion between these two quotes. Otherwise, I don't understand the distinction. You can taste tea but it has no taste?
I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. The way we interface with and interact with our environment is way more complicated than that.
Except that you're just substituting "continual updating of your model of a world of objects" for the world of sensory objects and feels we experience. Somehow that updating of the model has to lead to colors, pains, etc. Computer simulations can continuously update their models and we don't take that as evidence for consciousness. There is nothing it's like to be a computer program, at least none we've created so far. That is to say, computer models don't have sensations. They don't see a colored in world, feel the coldness of the wind, smell the fragrance of flowers, feel the heaviness of a long workout in their joints.
Something has to make the model feel. Breathe life into the algorithms, if you will.
I'm not entirely in agreement with Dennett, because I'm not a physicalist, and for good reason. However, he has successfully rendered the conventional notion of Qualia false at best, and devoid of content at worst. He showed that it is an accounting malpractice.
What I want to say is, I hope not!
If objects are discriminated in my modeling of the world based on visual information, that aspect of object formation or object identification just is what I think of as "color". @Isaac probably has a way better handle on this than I do, but I would guess there's awareness as we understand it just in case something goes wrong and system 2 needs to get involved. Awareness is just kept in the loop, so to speak. Stuff system 2 can't do anything about anyway is never included in that briefing (autonomic functions), and on occasion things might be going so predictably that system 1 skips some updates -- like when I'm driving home from work and sometimes find that I have successfully driven a few miles with my thoughts elsewhere.
Okay, so back to "I hope not". Since color is at most a side effect of my unconscious model-building, there's no reason to think I have any way of processing colors themselves, if I somehow received them as input. Do you see what I mean? Color as I know it, is part of the object discriminating process I'm constantly engaged in while awake, completely bound up with the functioning of my visual systems. There's nothing there that deals with colors, just stuff that, throughout my interaction with my environment, leaves behind what I think of as colors.
This is my argument but even I'm having trouble imagining it! Maybe I can describe it this way: you know how people like to color-code things? Or how a kids toy piano does each of the keys in an octave a different color to make it easier to spot them and remember them. Color as we think of it should turn out to be itself a sort of color-coding. We combine the "testimony" of our various senses in our object models, but since the sources combined are orthogonal and can give rise to different sorts of possible actions, we tag the contribution each source is making, and the part of the object sourced visually is tagged by what we think of as color. But what matters for color-coding is just the system of differences, and that it is orthogonal to the tagging used for the other senses, so we can match appropriate possible actions to our environment. (Something's color doesn't tell us how much it weighs, for instance; we'll use our proprioception for that, gauging the resistance we experience when we try to lift or move it, that sort of thing.)
Quoting Marchesk
I think maybe we don't really either, not in the way typically imagined. I want to say what has to be avoided to start with is an image of experience that is at all static. Empiricists have this model of experience as chopped into a long string of instants -- your visual field is like this, then this, then this, and you have to make these inductive leaps to tie it all together into any kind of coherence. But there's nothing like this really going on, is there? We are, while awake, in constant multifaceted contact with our environment and processing an unending stream of data which we constantly project into the future and take action on. All of these point-like experiences we seem to construct retrospectively, I'm not at all sure anything quite like that is ever actually happening. Feeling the sun and the wind is bound up with all the rest of the process of living, testing, responding, projecting. We never stand still long enough for any sort of input to become present to us in this revealed sort of way; we're already involved with whatever it is, expecting it, seeking it, avoiding it, using it, regretting it, whatever. We're really nothing at all like cameras, you know?
Bleh. I'm way out of my depth but felt like rambling. Maybe you'll see something in here somewhere worth responding to.
I don't know that this is a fact... Our eyes resemble cameras quite a lot. They have an aperture, a lense and a photosensitive surface on which the image is captured.
If you are not color-blind, you can distinguish a green from a red, or a dark red from a light red, or a movie in colors from a movie in black and white. How you spot the difference, if not through some qualitative difference in what you see?
Yes. It's not that hard to catch oneself storytelling, in fact it's quite a common therapeutic technique to do so. That's why I think you really need to engage with the text here, Dennet's arguments are doing exactly that and it's pointless me repeating them here. I assume you've read them, so apart from the overall "Nah!" that is obvious we're not going to make any more progress until you pick up on one of them and say exactly why it doesn't work for you.
There really does only seem to be a taste of tea, Dennet takes us through step by step how what we'd like to think is the taste of tea is not what it seems. I've added a bit of gloss from modern cognitive psychology, but, as I said right at the beginning, Dennet's argument is that our intuitions are mistaken, so it's pointless responding to that with reference to those same intuitions.
That could explain why Dennett rarely makes any sense: his intuitions are simply mistaken.
I really don't understand what this question has to do with the answer I gave you. You asked me why people add sugar, I gave you an (admittedly behaviourist) answer I could have answered in neurological terms, evolutionary terms, endocrinological terms... What perspective did you want the answer from?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Exactly. I'm trying to explain the difference between there being 'a taste of tea' and the process of tasting tea. We're not going to make any progress if you don't engage with that distinction - do you understand it, do you find it implausible (if so, why) do you find it plausible but it doesn't answer your concerns (again, if so, why)? Your incredulity that I could think this way is noted. It's not, in itself, an argument. If you think me an idiot, then there's little point in continuing a discussion, If you don't then there's obviously something there to be unravelled isn't there, so that might be an interesting thing to do, no?
As a general principle - if you really think what I'm saying is the equivalent of me saying there's purple jellyfish on the moon, then why engage at all, I'm obviously a lunatic? If not, then it doesn't help to just restate your incredulity.
Quoting Luke
It appears to be black. As I just said to Marchesk, there's little point in arguing against a essay suggesting our intuitions are incoherent by just referring back to our intuitions. We know our intuitions are often that objects have sensory properties (this writing is black). Dennet's just written an essay showing how those intuitions don't hold up to analysis, they're inconsistent in certain cases which shows them to be at the very least in need of modification. What we know about how the brain works supports Dennet's view. It's no good re-telling us that we do indeed have intuitions that objects have sensory properties, that's where the whole inquiry begins, we move on from there to explore some of the problems with that intuition.
I'm not saying that either. I'm just trying to get people to admit that they do, in fact, taste tea when they drink it. Non-qualists seem very reluctant to admit it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Depends which way you look at it. I take a sip of tea and taste it almost immediately. I don't need to know what's happening from a neurological or any other standpoint to have it seem that particular way. Scientific knowledge might help me to understand why it seems a particular way on a particular occasion, and that knowledge might even change how it would otherwise seem (without the knowledge), due to expectations. But it's still going to seem a particular way (barring exceptions).
This was the reason for my reference to cerebral achromatopsia in the article. Unless subject's reports are taken seriously - that they do, in fact, "see bright blue objects as black", for example - then what would cerebral achromatopsia even mean? @Isaac would have us believe that it can only be about what subjects say - about their verbal reports (or behaviour) alone. How things seem to a subject is supposedly irrelevant (or even non-existent). But if how things seem to a subject is irrelevant, then why elicit responses from subjects about how things seem to them? What if they were to answer only in, e.g., neurological terms? It would be like taking part in this discussion.
No, I asked why you add sugar.
Quoting Isaac
Yours.
Quoting Isaac
What if we remain unconvinced by (or just want to question) the article and its implications? For example, does the article say or imply that we don't really see colours or taste tea? Does it say or imply that tea doesn't have a particular flavour or that red doesn't have a particular colour? Does it say or imply that we should jettison talk of qualia altogether, or that we should no longer trust our intuitions on these matters? Maybe I've misunderstood the point of this discussion.
If there are philosophers who imagine qualia as discrete packets of sense data, I don't know who they are. It's not a mainstream view, and I don't think that was really the idea Dennett was trying to undermine with this essay. I think he was trying to show that qualia is beyond our grasp in an externalist context, along the lines of what Quine did with reference.
So I think if Dennett was the Alps, most of the discussion in this thread has been in the Andes. A strawman has been destroyed. What we actually mean by phenomenal consciousness, experience, or qualia, remains.
There are our intuitions about our sensations, and then there are our sensations given to us in experience. I saw colored objects and tasted tea long before I knew anything about qualia. And I even noticed that my taste of certain foods or drink changed over time.
Seeing a colored in world isn't an intuition. It just is there in your visual field. Same with tasting tea. Reflecting on the nature of those sensations is where intuitions start to come in to play.
There is a potential epistemic minefield in this approach. If we can't trust our sensations to be real, why trust that there is a material world at all? Empiricism is based on investigating phenomena, but those phenomena appear to us as having colors, making sounds, etc.
Even if Dennett does so for the ineffable, intrinsic, direct, private definition of qualia, it still leaves sensations to be explained. And not just for perception, but all conscious mental activity, only some of which is made public to others through language or behavioral inferences.
And that's why I think Dennett ultimately ends up espousing or implying some form of illusionism in other talks or papers he's written. It should be noted that He did use to defend skepticism about dreams, claiming that we only come-to-seem-to-remember upon awakening. Because dreams present a similar problem, perhaps an even more difficult one for physicalism, since dream content isn't based on perceiving an external world.
But dream research since then has supported dreaming as an activity that happens while you sleep, not something invented as you wake up (or at least not always). And lucid dreaming is a thing.
The consciousness debate seems to mostly revolve around perception for some reason, but consciousness isn't limited to that. If you can daydream while driving a car, what is going on in Dennett's account?
Well, one can meditate and focus on a particular sensation or object for a time.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure, it's dynamic. Perhaps some of the traditional intuitions of qualia are flawed because of not taking this into account?
The thing with colour etc being characterised as extrinsic relational properties means they don't collapse down to either being subjective or objective. A subjective state of colour is "in" your mind. An objective state of colour is "in" the perceived object. Characterising colour as a relational property makes it neither wholly in the head nor wholly in the object, it's a property of the relationship between the two of them.
If you're thinking of "the subjective state of colour" as "a perceptual relationship between a subject and an object" which "only the perceiving subject has access to", which "isn't an objective property of the perceived object" and which "is a property of the subjective state", that's not characterising colour as extrinsic and relational, that's characterising colour as private ("only the perceiving subject has access to") and non-relational ("is a property of the subjective state"). It's as if upon characterising perception as a relationship between a subject and an object, the properties of the relationship have been moved inside the subject. Rather than having those properties of perceptual events being of the relationship between the agent ("subject") and their environment ("object") and occurring in same scope as environmental and bodily events.
Dennett and the interviewer here talk a bit about the relationship of Dennett's criticism of qualia and undermining the subject-object distinction. Undermining it, not collapsing it to one side.
@Isaac@Kenosha Kid@Marchesk
So back to the paper, there's some skepticism regarding first order properties of qualia in intuition pump #1 - targeted at their conditions of individuation. But he's also going to throw shade on the second order properties of qualia. Those second order properties are:
(1) ineffable - one cannot transmit a quale over the information channels of language, and being in the same functional, behavioural or intentional state as another in the same circumstance does not count as bearing the same quale.
(2) intrinsic - eliciting (an instance of) the quale requires having an experience which bears it, one only "has access" to the quale when one is having (or has had) an experience generative of it,
(3) private - interpersonal comparison of first order experience properties is systematically impossible (Dennett's cauliflower taste != other person's cauliflower taste)
(4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness - the first order properties (the taste of cauliflower) are what is presented to consciousness.
Dennett puts those second order properties in the context of a distinction with intentional, dispositional and functional properties:
I bolded the sense data bit, it's construing sense data as the output of senses to discriminatory systems - distinct from construing sense data as perceptual features presented to consciousness, as perceptual features are formed in an interaction between how the environment+body is sensorially sampled and discriminatory systems.
The claim seems to be: qualia (as Dennett is attacking) are a distinct type of property from intentional, dispositional and functional properties of internal states. Those four second order properties are treated as the distinguishing features of qualia from intentional, dispositional and functional properties.
Let's try not to get trapped in the Motte and Bailey situation Dennett describes:
in the thread any more. In terms of the paper, we're trying to look at whether it's appropriate to distinguish qualia from functional, intentional and dispositional properties. No one wants to deny that people can taste coffee.
The problem with this is that we can have color experiences independent of perception.m, such as in dreams or by directly stimulating the visual cortex.
You can have coloured features in dreams without the same flavour and intensity of sensorimotor feedbacks we have when conscious, that's not quite the same thing as perceptual feedbacks between agent and environment. Nor does the fact that we dream establish that the coloured features in dreams are not functional, intentional or dispositional properties of those states. Can your dreams have a visual component if your brain patterns are far removed from representing colour patterns, eg if you've been born blind or become blind at an early age? Probably not:
That blindness sufficiently early in a person's development can screen off visual imagery from being present in dreams suggests that even though blind subjects may have had visual experiences, visual imagery in dreams - that is, the presence of "colour qualia" in dreams - depends upon the functional characteristics of a person's sensorimotor systems and how that information is currently processed. "Functional", "how" - we're still in the scope of extrinsic relational properties. It's more likely to be the case that visual imagery in dreams occurs without the usual perceptual stimuli for vision, but that visual imagery in dreams is part of the functionality of the person's sensorimotor and discriminatory systems regardless.
Right, but the consciousness debate isn’t limited to perception, and the fact that other ways of stimulating the relevant brain circuits leads to conscious sensations locates those sensations in the brain. Also, I disagree that all non-perceptual states are less complex, It really depends on the brain and the experience. Some people are very good visualizers. Some can create music in their mind. Mental abilities and experiences range quite a bit. Take the right hallucinogenic and you can have very vivid color sensations.
Probably so, but I don’t see how this makes the sensations extrinsic if it’s the brain circuitry that produces the sensations, not any other part of the perceptual process. So then we’re left debating whether the relevant functions or neurons are themselves conscious, as in some sort of identity.
It seems to indicate that a person will not have visual imagery in their dreams if they have not had sufficiently recent visual perceptions [hide=*](edit: I guess, more precisely, have not had the capacity to perceive visually for a sufficiently long time or during a key developmental period and sight has not been otherwise restored)[/hide]. Whether a property is Intrinsic/extrinsic, in the article, I think is ultimately a question of access to it, access to what [hide=*](phenomenal state as a subjective entity vs situated state with no subject/object distinction)[/hide] type of access (epistemic, causal relation, questions of "transduction") and properties of those access types (infalliblity, privacy etc).
Regarding the transduction thing, here:
Dualism of scheme and content. Davidson would tut at you.
[I]Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: la Baronne de Crussol[/i]
It only seems that way.
[I]A page from Paul Klee's notebooks[/i]
[I]Paul Klee: In The Begining[/i]
A fact you can’t know without being told the dress seems to be red.
Mark Rothko: Orange, Red, Orange
That we see the squares for A and B as different shades of gray is a visual illusion. Does this mean we only seem to see two shades of gray? That the illusion of color difference is itself an illusion?
Or is the seeming to have a conscious experience the what it’s like for any conscious activity? There is a what it’s like to see red because it seems we see red. You can’t have a seeming to be conscious without there being something it’s like to be seeming.
The seeming is consciousness.
Is it, really? Where, exactly, is the illusion? Do you see A.)....you are being TOLD there is an illusion, and B.)....you are being COERCED, by means of the subtlety of the declared illusion, in conjunction with the manufactured proofs thereof, into contradicting your own experience.
In a way, though, you’re correct. It is amazing what folks will do to convince themselves that what they know can so easily be undone.
I don't see qualia, I see pretty pictures.
It's pretty easy to argue through shitpost isn't it?
The illusion is that you perceive the A square as markedly darker than the B square, while in fact they are of the exact same shade of grey... (I actually had to check on MSPaint by sampling each hue, and I can confirm that they are the same)
I already knew that our visual systems compensates for light color and intensity but still, this is pretty incredible.
See my discussion with Luke here, this is related to covered ground.
Although you call the former a "lie for children" it is still the case that whatever explanation you want to use to explain what's "really going on" cannot CONTRADICT the lie. Assuming the lie is true, ie, the program being explained is the same in both explanations and the lie explains the algorithm accurately. If your explanation says at the end that ".....back a complex of circuits into the software environment and displays 5 on the screen" your explanation would be incorrect.
In other words, if you "collapse" the in-depth explanation is must agree with the lie for children.
If you want to call "A red patch is a combination of a shape quale and a colour quale combined in experience" a "lie for children" I'm fine with that. I am not advocating a certain explanation of our experiences. BUT, if the explanation you want to replace the lie with ends with "....and as a result, after a 700 nm wavelength enters khaled's eye khaled experiences nothing" then THAT I have an issue with because it contradicts my experience. When you say "Qualia doesn't exist" do you mean:
1- Qualia is an abstraction that doesn't accurately explain how experience occurs.
or
2- Tea tastes like nothing and you are all philosophical zombies which think they're not philosophical zombies.
I don't care if you want to argue for 1. My problem (and I think most people's problem) is if you are trying to argue for 2.
or is it something else entirely?
If you want to talk about whether the properties of experience are appropriate to distinguish from functional properties/"extrinsic relational properties", please do so. Or otherwise engage with the paper or its ideas.
When Dennett claims to be a p-zombie, he's not saying that he's incapable of experience. He's saying that the distinction between p-zombies and humans makes no sense. Notably, Quining Qualia doesn't talk about p-zombies.
When I read it it sounded like he just put this part: Quoting fdrake
Not to sound ridiculous but then immediately dismissed it.
What notion exactly is Dennett trying to attack here?
A bunch of things, as I read him:
(1) The idea that qualia are experienced. Disentangling "I tasted the tea", taste there is a relation, from "I had a tea taste quale", tea taste there is a property (and there's a question of what bears the property!). I went through that previously in the thread.
(2) He's trying to highlight that standard moves philosophers make when introspectively analysing experience have serious problems. Going from "The coffee I had today tasted bitter" to "Coffee taste experiential properties are time dependent" will be done by invoking (1) and not noticing.
(2a) There's the issue of if qualia are properties, what are they properties of? And how do those entities which the properties are predicated of behave? That's related to the "experiential entity" discussion @Isaac, @Kenosha Kid, @Luke and I had.
(3) He's throwing some skepticism on the idea that the first order properties of experience (like tea having "a taste") are individuated like we introspect/label them to be by highlighting that those first order properties are contextually variable.
(4) He's trying to show that common second order properties of qualia are untenable (the list of four things I've brought up).
(5) All the above are done in the context of distinguishing qualia from functional, behavioural and intentional properties - Dennett is arguing against making such a distinction (ie, the argument in paper is for the claim that experiential properties are functional, behavioural, intentional).
Quoting khaled
I think Dennett would actually approve of "Seeing is qualia", since that emphasises that experience is relational. The caveat is whether the relation is moved "into the head", which a discussion I'm having with @Luke and what I imagine @Banno 's been gesturing toward. There's also the (2a) question of whether an experiential entity is mediating the perceptual relationship.
The underlying dispute there is the subject-object distinction - I believe Dennett's views undermine it without trying to collapse it to one side (idealism vs global eliminativism towards minds), and he's expressed approval of the claim that his works undermine it in an interview.
People attack Dennett like he's an eliminativist towards minds, he's not.
Ok.
Where might I ask? And just to clarify Disentangling "I tasted the tea" is not done by saying "When you drink tea no tasting/experience of any sort occurs, that's just an illusion"
Quoting fdrake
I don't know anyone who thinks qualia are individuated (although they are admittedly labeled that way). Anyone who's tried a blind taste test would know.
Quoting fdrake
Even I don't agree with that one. I'd classify qualia as a phenomenon. Something that happens as a result of sensory input that is different from the chemical and physical reactions.
Quoting fdrake
I don't know what any of those 3 are but I'll get there eventually.
Quoting fdrake
These?:
(1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness
Quoting fdrake
He sounds like it!
Just sayin’ I don’t hold the same incredulity, that’s all.
It's a clear misreading.
Quoting khaled
I tried to open up that line of discussion on page 3, that post concerns trying to locate what a quale is and the ambiguities in it. This response to @Kenosha Kid deals with the distinction between qualia as perceptual entities vs perception as a relation. There's more, but if you want to look for it in thread, it's discussed between @Luke, @Isaac, @Kenosha Kid and I.
... or here, where he background is a color gradient and progresses from dark gray to light gray. The horizontal bar appears to progress from light grey to dark grey, but is in fact just one color:
Dennett thinks people endorse things like hardness or redness because they're doing the best they can to interpret neurological functioning, not because those things are properties of experience. He speculates that the illusion of phenomenal consciousness may arise from verbal streams. In short, he equivocates. He does the same thing with free will.
Yes he does. Because he wants to have his cake and eat it to. So he can't bite the bullet and just eliminate free will or consciousness outright, as he considers those to be concepts worth salvaging, as long as he can redefine them to remove any of the problematic implications.
So he wants to say of course we're conscious of colors and sipping tea, but it's only in a functional, dispositional sense, not a phenomenological one. And he has endorsed illusionism elsewhere, calling consciousness a magic show in support of the position Keith Frankish has argued for.
What two types do you think Dennett is equivocating between? And can you provide a link to some of his work that demonstrates the equivocation?
Dennett states in Quining Qualia that he grants the existence of consciousness, but then in Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness, he defends the argument that consciousness is an illusion as a good starting place for dissolving the hard problem in favor of explaining the magic trick.
Quoting Quining Qulaia
Quoting Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness
Which just sounds like he wants to say we're conscious, but not really. Kind of like an anti-realist about dinosaur fossils. He's also expressed the ideas that consciousness might be a trick of language, a trick of the reporting mechanism, or just introspection giving us the wrong idea. But whatever it is, consciousness isn't what we think it is. Which sounds like eliminativist talk.
Anything but phenomenal. And if there's no actual subjectivity, then there's no actual consciousness as the word is used in these debates. Which means we don't actually have color, sound, pain sensations.
See the critique section of this wiki article on heterophenomenology. Compare his description of it to that of colleagues who talked to him about it. The equivocation is his use of "conscious experience" when he means something like reports of conscious experience.
The core of this topic is philosophy of science. Essentially, Dennett wants to dictate metaphysics for scientific research. If scientists discover that we really don't see red and just think we do because of verbal streams, my mind will be blown, but I'll accept good research. Dennett wants to decide this without research.
Interesting. Still, that human sensibility is susceptible to hoodwinking, is hardly contestable. Seen one constructed illusion, seen ‘em all, right?
Right. The point being that the image you are seeing is at an obvious, demonstrable variance with objective reality, but that this variance doesn't go away no matter how often you are shown the image and convinced empirically of your illusion. The illusion is stubborn, it is replicable, and therefore I must conclude that our visual cortex can create an image that has some stubborn reality in it, I can recognise the optical illusion if I know it, but can't chose to not see it, and yet it is markedly different from the objective image sensed by our retina.
Ergo qualia sunt.
So.....qualia advocate, then? What part are they playing in these illusion scenarios, do you say?
Ok, but some illusions are actual seemings, re: the bulging part of the checkerboard, and some illusions do not seem so but must be illustrated as such, re: the shaded square and the shaded bar. What then of qualia?
How is this supposed to bear on the controversy whether there is a mental picture?
Is a zombie, with no mental picture, not expected to distinguish the greys, by the same unconscious reasoning?
First a duck, then a rabbit are each seemings in themselves, yes. Easily understood. Shaded bars are not illusory seemings, insofar as I do actually intuit a shaded bar from a given appearance, and as such, some qualia (phenomenal representation) pertains to it, and will so pertain until I am shown the illusion, which suffices as a qualitatively different appearance, with different pertinent qualia (phenomenal representation), facilitating a different experience.
Nutshell?
The key point is that the illusion doesn't go away, it is stable and replicable, not just a fleeting moment of illusion: a stubborn one. Optical illusions are also universal: everybody seems to see the same illusion. This means we have some reason to assume that you see more of less what I see, that your qualia is my qualia, because even when their are 'wrong', they seem to coincide.
What is your conclusion? Sure, there is a difference between what you see and how things are.
And if that is the case, then there is a way that things are that is distinct from how they appear.
That is, realism.
But what is the relevance of this to qualia?
That "not really", presumably the additional part is phenomenal consciousness. If nothing less than phenomenal consciousness will do for that objection, it's begging the question. As that's actually the assertion of a disputed point.
Eliminativist with regards to what? Dennett's clearly an eliminativist towards qualia, I think he's an eliminativist towards phenomenal consciousness as usually construed, but I don't think he's an eliminativist towards minds. I think the claim is that the mind is a narrative built with representational approximations which are equivalent to neural-bodily functions in some way. As an overall statement of Dennett's position, I've found two quotes from "Illusionism As the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness":
Dennett's denial of phenomenal consciousness looks ultimately to stem from trying to undermine the distinction between phenomenal properties (whatever it is) and functional, behavioural, intentional and reactive properties of the body. But then there's the question of why he thinks it's an illusion:
The position seems to be: perception is a representational relationship embodied by the workings of... our body and brain. The representational relationship ties intentional objects with distal causes when it's working well - indeed, tying intentional objects to their distal causes is a success criterion for normal instances of perception. But what are the "intentional objects" themselves made of? Nothing at all, says Dennett. Just like we don't think imaginary objects are substantial.
So it looks like - denying that phenomenal consciousness exists turns on undermining a distinction between what is phenomenal and what isn't (without collapsing it to one side). Then in answer to the question of what is the nature of experience - it's kinda like being an unreliable narrator of your own autobiography, no "you" outside the text, so in that sense it's an illusion.
OK, there is some stability to the way things appear to us.
That can be said, tested, verified, and all without invoking qualia.
From what you have said previously, I would have supposed that you would join me in rejecting a notion that has a place only in philosophical discussions. Qualia are such a notion.
Now I haven't read all that has been written here, so I'm not too sure if you have taken a position. Care to elaborate, just for me?
I did read the Wiki article, and I looked at the paper abstract it cited. Between what and what do you think Dennett is equivocating?
Conscious experience and 3rd person data about conscious experience.
And why do you think he is equivocating between those things? Do you think Dennett thinks conscious experience is 3rd person data? Or that 3rd person data is conscious experience? Or that there's no difference between the two for him?
He thinks that 3rd person data is all there is. Yes, there's a little nuance to that, but that's essentially it.
What is externalism in this context?
There's mental content externalism, and other siblings like knowledge externalism.
The wisdom in it is that a lot of mental content is related to communication, and it's clear that meaning is, in large part, bound to social interaction. If you take that kernel and expand, you end up hollowing out all the stuff folk psychology labels as internal: intention, referencing, thinking, and for Dennett, even feeling.
The book I'm presently reading refers to this as "the shadow of Descartes."
Keep that in mind...
Well when:
Quoting Olivier5
Then no. You cannot confirm stability in said qualia without referring to it. That would be like saying “We can all agree that this table is 2 meters wide without referring to the concept of meters”. Unless you don’t mean the same thing as Olivier when you say “Qualia”
It IS possible to say “this table has had the same width for x time” which technically doesn’t refer to the concept of meters directly. But even then without the ability to measure meters you wouldn’t be able to confirm that. In a visual illusion, not only can we agree of its persistence but we can also “describe” how it seems like to us (a bulge in the board) which is an example of us specifically talking of qualia. And this talk does have some meaning. If I tell someone “this is a visual illusion in which you will see a bulge in a checkerboard” that sentence will be testable for them. Similar to how specifying that a table will be 2 meters wide is testable.
Quoting khaled
The board looks like it is bulging, but it isn't. Nothing is added to the description by putting it in terms of qualia; hence, the term is of no use.
How do you say "The board looks like it is bulging" in terms of qualia?
This thread is supposed to be about Dennett's paper and the implications thereof. His paper sets out in quite some detail, the problems encountered when treating Qualia the way in which they are treated here. He sets out how the way they at first seem has implications on analysis which are undesirable at least, incoherent at worst. There has then been several hundred word posts from @fdrake, and myself providing more detail and, hopefully, some further exposition of those incoherencies.
This conversation is not going to get anywhere if you don't actually address one of those issues. Just re-asserting that
Quoting Marchesk
...for example, is just starting back at the beginning again. We know that's the traditional view. Dennett goes on to show some problems with that view, you have to address those problems (preferably by quoting from the text) in order to progress here in any meaningful way.
It seems to me that the advocates of qualia have entirely failed to address the criticism in the article.
The term is a bit jargony but I can see if no precise substitute. "Sensations" could work but it's kind of vaguish.
I would like to thank and for their contribution to this thread. You guys are amazing!
Yep.
Quoting Olivier5
Read the text...please, and then quote from it a section where you think Dennett's contradiction of the above fails and explain why. Anything less is pointless, we're not doing a poll of what people reckon, we're doing exegesis and discussing implications of a text.
Read the thread... please try to understand the points being made. The trick is to get out of your denial mode of thinking, to open your mind to new ideas. You can do it.
One of the points that has been made is that Dennett is ambiguous and equivocating. In this text he does not actually put forth a clear argument that one could address, but smokes and mirrors. Go and read his text, and try and summarize what it says. I predict you won't be able to.
Nothing is added to the description of the board. That is true. But it is not the goal of qualia to describe the real world but to describe how it seems to us. And so by saying “the board looks like it is bulging” one says something about our experience of the world that cannot be said by giving the person a description of the board itself.
For example saying “getting stabbed hurts” does not add anything to the description of a knife stabbing someone. But it is still a meaningful and useful statement because it describes what getting stabbed will seem to us like, in order to discourage getting stabbed.
Of if you refer to the programming example I cited earlier on page 16, sure a description of the algorithm of a program doesn’t add anything to the description of what actually happens to the computer when the program is run. But a description of an algorithm is usually infinitely more useful than a description of what transistors do while the program is running. If you want to say that algorithm are an inaccurate abstraction that’s fine, no one is disagreeing. But when you say “algorithms don’t exist” you make it sound like “it is impossible for a computer to follow instructions”. That’s what’s happening here. You don’t say “Qualia doesn’t exist” unless you’re claiming someone is a P zombie. Otherwise “Qualia is an inaccurate abstraction” will do. As for Dennett, he seems to be saying both at the same time to me. “People have experiences, but Qualia are not an accurate description of reality but actually people don’t have experiences”
And I don’t get your question. “The board seems to be bulging” is the qualia I am experiencing, a description of the world as it seems like to me. Same as “the apple seems red”. The apple may not be red, but saying that it seems to be red was never intended to describe the apple itself but rather to describe the experience of seeing it.
I wonder if there are several errors going on:
1) People don't recognize the dualism of the "fiction" of experience vs. the "reality" of the scientific description of the event. It doesn't matter what it's called- it becomes a dualism. The hallucination and the reality. The illusion and the really real.
2) People misplace a debate about origins with a debate about the nature of the event. They displace a debate about causation with a debate what is nature of the phenomena itself. What are mental events is the question, as it is compared to physical states. If you just deny mental events, well I guess it's like Trump denying any news that he doesn't like :rofl: . It's just fake, right? But unlike Trump, the very thing used to call the news fake (experience) is being denied. The goal post moves from the nature of mental events compared with physical to "Well, I'm not denying it per se.. just that it isn't what we really think it is". But that's not the question!!
Here I go I guess:
His description of the “properties of qualia” are not how people use them usually. And his intuition pumps fail to address why his own properties are untenable. I’ll start with the ones I can remember right now.
1- Private, 2-Accessible. He claims qualia are private in the sense that they are only apparent to the person experiencing them and accessible in the sense that they are immediately apparent. And to show this is untenable he proposes a thought experiment where someone has their taste buds altered to change their experience of sugar. He then says “gotcha, actually I could’ve just changed his memory of the taste of sugar and he would still think the same thing, therefore he can’t know what went wrong (either his taste buds were changed or his memory of sugar was) therefore he doesn’t have intimate private accessible knowledge when it comes to his qualia”. I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ve read this part 5 times and no matter what it seems like BS.
When people say qualia are private and accessible they mean that they are immediately apparent to them and only them. What he disproved was “I can tell exactly what goes wrong if I wake up one day and sugar tastes different”. That is not a contrapositive statement nor can I tell how it’s even related to the two properties he’s trying to disprove. That has been my general experience with the paper. He “disproves” something by saying completely unrelated bs.
Dennett: I shall now disprove that 1+1=2. When you put a male mouse and female mouse in a room you end up with three mice, therefore does 1+1 really equal 2????
Figure 1. Rectangles A, on the left, look much darker than the rectangles B, on the right. However, rectangles A and B reflect the same amount of light.
It works with colors too.
[img]https://bioperipatetic.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/munker-illusion.jpg
[/img]
Figure 2. The two rectangles on the right look much darker than the ones on the left. However, they are of the same actual tint.
Thanks for at least trying.
Quoting khaled
How are you assessing how people use them usually, just anecdotally, or do you have some sources?
Quoting khaled
That's the trivial part, and not even part of his argument, Dennett says
The argument is
a)
Then in b) he dismisses the possibility of seeing them as logical constructs
Which leaves c) that qualia have an empirical status, they are firstly created by the senses and secondly judged by our aesthetic and rational feeling.
Intuition pumps 8 through to 12 then show the increasing problem with treating qualia this way - namely that there is no way of distinguishing the production of 'qualia' from the response to 'qualia', thus demonstrating that our 'qualia' themselves are not actually accessible at all. At best we could infer them, but if we did so we would be no better (worse in fact) than a third party.
Anecdotally.
Quoting Isaac
Then why did he spend the first 5/6 intuition pumps on it?
Quoting Isaac
What do you mean? The purpose of the paper is clearly NOT to argue that this strong temptation exists. How is what you quoted a premise in his argument? “People usually respond with x” therefore what?
You probably mean the bit about how no knowledge follows about the psychological states of the two. And to that I reply: So what? That doesn’t make the concept meaningless or useless. Again, by borrowing a programming example: No knowledge about what happens in your computer follows from knowledge of the algorithm of the program being run. That doesn’t mean that talk of algorithms is meaningless or useless. The INTENT when talking about algorithms is NOT to explain what happens inside a computer. Just as the INTENT when talking about Qualia is NOT to explain what processes cause it.
Those also suffer from the same problem for me. They seem to “disprove” something by saying something completely unrelated. I’ll take #8 as an example. Dennett proves that (again), we cannot tell if our experiences are changed due to a change in memory or due to a change in the actual Qualia. He says this to imply that somehow that makes Qualia “not empirical”. He shows that no theory will be able to tell which “actually” happens. But that’s not a new situation in science. If you see a ball moving up, does that mean the ball is moving up or you’re moving down? We can’t tell! Oh no! And yet physics I’m empirical.
But most importantly, he hasn’t disproven what he set out to disprove. Again, “No theory will be able to tell how Chase’s experience was changed” does NOT in any way disprove “That chase is tasting X is an empirical fact”. And once again, they’re not even related statements. To disprove the first he must find a situation where Chase literally cannot tell whether or not he is tasting coffee and no one else can tell either. And by that I don’t mean that he can’t tell whether or not this is coffee or orange juice, no, he needs a situation where Chase is unsure whether or not he’s tasting something in the first place to disprove “Chase is experiencing X (in this case the taste of coffee) is an empirical fact”. Good luck with that one!
Oh it's a clusterfuck unfortunately. Most of the discussion derailed into Dennett's broader points. And it's not really a discussion of them either, it's more "he's wrong! have you considered this extra textual thing?" (link to previous thing or explanation of misinterpretation) "he's wrong! have you considered this extra textual thing?"
And if we're limiting our discussion to Quining Qulia, does that preclude any responses to it from professional philosophers? It's hard for me to just focus on one paper, given the richness of the wider discussion, and given that Dennnett has his share of unconvinced detractors. It's not like the consciousness debate ended with this paper.
It should be pretty obvious how to productively engage in a reading group thread. A combination of text exegesis, contextualising that argument in their broader work - refutation and critique after demonstrating understanding. Refutation and critique in response to demonstrations of understanding.
You don't have to just agree with the humourless nuts p-zombie man, it would be preferable if you engaged with his arguments.
(1) What do you think Dennett's position is in Quining Qualia?
(2) How do you think he argues for that position?
(3) How does that relate to the maxim "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality" (Searle) assertion you've been using your photos to intuition pump for (as I've read them anyway).
@frank
Same questions for you, with changed (3):
(3) How does Dennett's position lead to an equivocation between "3rd person data" and "1st person data"? Why does Dennett believe they are the same thing?
I hope you take this in the spirit its intended, which is friendly: why are you trying to exegesize this article when you don't know much about philosophy of mind? You showed that you don't have a clear understanding of the Hard Problem (which you do need to understand), and after I've mentioned repeatedly that we need to take Dennett's externalism into consideration when interpreting him, you still don't seem to understand what I'm telling you.
A while back I tried to engage Banno on the question of "quining" things. It would have been helpful if we had explored that a little further, but you responded by telling me to read the bloomin article and you pointed out a simplistic meaning for something you should know is not at all simplistic.
As it is, it wasn't a clusterfuck. It was like you and your buddies were riffing on the article. Which was cool. But your buddy Isaac seemed to get the impression that this article locks in a rejection of qualia, while you maintained that we're not rejecting qualia at all, just certain rarified definitions of it. Other people intruding into your thread are not the problem here.
(1) What is Dennett's argument in Quining Qualia?
(2) How do you think he argues for that position?
(3) In what sense is Quining Qualia an argument for externalism of mental content? How do the different intuition pumps try to demonstrate the necessity of environmental relationships for mental content to be configured as it is?
If you've got enough time to tell me I know nothing about anything, you've got enough time to enlighten me.
Dennett argues fairly convincingly(by my lights anyway) against the ineffability, intrinsicality, privacy, and direct apprehensibility of the properties of conscious experience, and in doing so effectively grounds his rejection of qualia. It's worth noting that he does all this by offering physicalist explanations of actual counterexamples(intuition pumps) that are germane to historical notions of qualia/quale. In doing so, he shows that the properties of personal experience that make personal experience what it is, are not special in the sort of way that proponents of qualia claim.
Dennett's aim(I'm guessing) was to use a physicalist framework to effectively explain all that quale and qualia are claimed to be the only explanations for, and in doing so show that there is nothing ineffable, intrinsic, private, or directly apprehensible about the properties of conscious experience.
... I mean... he's literally written what the purpose of each group of intuition pumps are for.
Quoting khaled
..therefore...
...in the piece I actually quoted.
Quoting khaled
No. It makes that particular potential use pointless. The paper is a gradual dismantling of the coherence and utility of the concept. If you agree with Dennett here (that the concept doesn't help in this psychological manner) then good, move on to the next paragraph and see if you also agree with his dismissal of the next use. It's like I'm teaching you how to read a paper here.
Quoting khaled
How so? If I know the algorithm causes an output to, say, an Ethernet card, then I can predicted a voltage there. How is that not knowledge about what's happening in my computer?
Quoting khaled
No one is suggesting it is. The Chase/Sandborn section is about private access to qualia, not causes.
Quoting khaled
No. He's talking about our responses, not our 'experiences' and he's comparing them to the change in sensory input, not qualia - are we reading the same section here? The point is to further undermine the idea that we have introspective access to qualia. Chase cannot even tell if his qualia have been inverted.
Quoting khaled
Why would anyone be trying to prove anything about tasting? Dennett is not trying to prove that people can't taste things, so I can't think of any reason why you'd see the lack of such data as a problem for his argument.
That's a bit strong. I believe Dennett's argument is that the concept is incoherent because it cannot support all four properties given his intuition pumps showing otherwise.
But saying that therefore nothing to all four about conscious experience is going too far in this paper. Take privacy, how can some conscious experiences not be private to the individual? We don't and can't always know what someone else is thinking or feeling, therefor some of their experience is private.
I do need to go back and reread the paper to respond to fdrake's questions. So I may follow up on this after doing so.
But it’s worth noting that I don’t agree that it was ever intended to be used that way. So his “opposition” here is meaningless. It’s like opposing quantum theory on the grounds that it doesn’t explain how we evolved from dinosaurs. That’s what I was trying to highlight in my comment
Quoting Isaac
That is what I did when going to intuition pump 8 as an example.
Quoting Isaac
Algorithms don’t cause outputs. Running a program programmed with a certain algorithm does. An algorithm is just an abstraction. It doesn’t DO anything. An algorithm doesn’t even have to be written in a programming language.
Quoting Isaac
Probably not. I’m talking about this:
Quoting Isaac
It’s not tasting specifically that’s just an example. Dennett said that qualia cannot be a logical formulation, but must be an empirical fact to satisfy its defenders (your quote). But in the intuition pump designed to prove this (8) he did nothing to actually prove it.
Quoting Isaac
He is trying to prove that “I am tasting something” is NOT empirical knowledge. In other words that someone is experiencing so and so qualia is NOT imperial fact. But he completely failed at doing so.
[quote=Quining Qualia] My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special.[/quote]
Quoting khaled
So the board appears to bulge, but does not really; and this is a private thing, despite our shared talk about it.
And this is the sort of thing you would call qualia.
Not disagreeing here - just checking if this is what you want to assert.
I do not think that Dennett is denying that some thoughts are private, in the sense of being unspoken.
Take that experience and strip it down by removing all public, external, and effable properties thereof...
What's left?
That's a self report.
"It appears that I see color, feel pain, etc." is a self report. You're reporting to me about yourself, via common language use. Self reports are existentially dependent upon common language use. Common language use is public, external, and effable.
...know...
So you have a justified true belief?
And we don't know that you see the board as bent?
And this makes sense to you?
Now if you have no experiences of your own, I can understand why you would confuse self-reports and language with experience. But I suspect you do, and like Dennnett, have convinced yourself that it’s a trick of your brain.
I thought you thought qualia were somehow special; but this puts them on the same footing as chairs and other stuff, doesn't it? You and I agree that this is a wooden chair, and that the board appears to bulge...
SO were is this getting us? How are qualia distinct from chairs?
The chair looks like wood, but turns out to be plastic.
One wonders what Dennett means by unspoken thoughts. Surely not “inner dialog”?
Thoughts that might be spoken, but haven't been; as opposed to thoughts that supposedly cannot be spoken. Like, perhaps, qualia.
But how to make sense of that?
Qualia are the secondary qualities of perception. They’re not properties of chairs.
Thoughts I hear in my head. Or see in my imagination. Or remember with whatever sensory modality.
Quoting Banno
Since we’re both human, we have similar enough experiences in which to build language upon. But do note the limits of communicating our experiences to one another.
I asked you to strip the experience down of all that is public, external, and effable. Your report will come via language. That's not a problem. I'm asking you exactly which properties of that experience can stand on their own after you've removed the public, external, and effable?
Quoting Marchesk
My characterization. Not Dennett's.
Something that can’t be communicated, apparently. Insert Luke’s comment on showing here.
Experience is a synthesis, not an aggregate. Experiences cannot be disassembled, they may only be analyzed.
Beware misplaced concreteness.
Can you please break down an experience you've had and show me/us which bits are qualia and which aren't? Or how qualia apply to it? Describe your keyboard or something!
If the entire experience is qualia, how does that idea work with qualia being secondary properties of perception?
So you're characterising qualia as relational properties of sensation causes and sensations? As Lockean secondary qualities?
Okay. Take me through this. If what's important is the appearance, how is the appearance distinguished from the relational properties of sensation causes and sensations?
Deflation of qualia would benefit philosophy and science.
With exercises meant to demonstrate that a person's reports about qualia are vague, confused, and unreliable.
It would better be seen as fleshing out why qualia should be handled in an externalistic way.
Isn't that kind of obvious?
What do you mean by deflation? Considering the article never uses the word, it needs explaining.
Quoting frank
:up:
Quoting frank
Okay, what do you mean by externalism here? Again, seeing as the article never uses the word, it needs explaining.
Quoting frank
Not to me. How do they do it?
When you say the appearance seems some way to us, what do you mean?
Here is what it seems to me you mean:
(1) Appearances are secondary qualities. In other words, appearances are relationships between perceived objects and the perception of that object.
(2) Every appearance inheres in a subject.
(3) The appearance has, as a property, a way it seems to the subject it inheres in.
Does that sound about right?
Quining?
Quoting fdrake
This is where we disagree. You need to know what externalism is to understand Dennett.
Quoting fdrake
I've already discussed the PLA one twice. Banno threw out the machine one early on. Which one did you want to discuss?
I'm feeling this unnecessarily nasty vibe developing. Better yet, let's drop it, ok?
"Denying resolutely the existence of something which seems important" (paraphrase) seems to me much different from, say, saying that convention T suffices as a theory of meaning for sentences. What is being deflated into what and why?
Quoting frank
Can you tell me what I need to understand about externalism to understand the argument in the article?
Quoting Marchesk
Woop woop.
Quoting fdrake
Do you further identify the "seeming" as a quale? Is that the qualish bit?
If you can't tell me in basic terms what externalism is, we're done.
About mental content? Roughly the idea that the content of mental states of an agent is differentiated by that agent's (history of) agent-environment relationships. As I read Dennett, he's an externalist with regard to mental content, and broadly some kind of representational functionalist with respect to that content.
An internalist wouldn't disagree with this.
I guess I failed your test then.
Okay, a brave attempt at a summary, but you stayed at safe distance from Dennett's actual argument, only evoking his "intuition pumps" without trying to summarize any of them, so the argument is not transparently described. Let me try and fill in some blanks.
First, I agree that the broad intent of Quining Qualia is to disqualify qualia as a useful concept. This implies that according to Dennett, philosophical concepts can have clear-cut qualities, and that these clear-cut qualities are accessible to our consciousness, that we can assess them logically and objectively. In other words, it assumes that concepts can be unambiguously defined, assessed and critiqued, which is a false premise. No philosophical concept worth its salt can be defined without ambiguity, and the concept of Qualia is no exception. (And in fact the paper later recalls Wittgenstein's skepticism regarding the possibility of a private language…)
Which is why concepts are hard to kill. They resuscitate in far less than 3 days. The zombies here are not us but them concepts. Which is interesting because you can crucify them again and again, usually on a cross made of other concepts. Such as the concept of intuition used by Dennett here. But these other concepts are no less likely to be doubted and poked around, they have not been vetted as well-defined by anyone…
For Dennett, intuition is evidently some kind of humor or juice that can get pumped up. So let’s scan through his pumps.
Intuition pump #1 (watching you eat cauliflower) openly pleads for the existence of qualia. Dennett says he cannot “isolate the qualia” but still hates that taste of steamed cauliflower…
IP#2 pleads for the qualia of wine taste to be an important enough motivation to conceivably drive the design and construction of wine tasting machines. I hope Dennett is not suggesting that the machine could enjoy wine, nor that we should produce wine so that machines can drink it?
The moral of IP#3 and #4, as per Dennett himself, is that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology, and therefore qualia are ineffable and private after all.
IP#5 and 6 (the neurosurgical prank and alternative neurosurgery) plead for our capacity to notice a discontinuity in qualia. If qualia did not exist, the subject would perceive no difference at all.
Intuition pump #7 (Chase and Sanborn the coffee tasters) seem to imply that qualia are subjective and private, but that memories of qualia are often unreliable, and that tastes changes over time.
In IP #8 (the gradual post-operative recovery) some scientists have objectively and verifiably inverted poor Chase’s qualia. When Chase reports otherwise, they insist that they did so even and that Chase is incorrect. Therefore the scientists affirm the objective existence of qualia, because you cannot change something that does not exist, and then insist that you did change it... That Chase reports otherwise is neither here nor there; it could simply be due to him trying to fool the scientists.
Intuition pumps #9 and 10 are closer to everyday experience. #9 is about acquired tastes like beer and IP #10 is about that fact that phenol-thio-urea tastes very bitter to some, and is tasteless as water to others. This proves that tastes can evolve, and they can depend on people: I don’t find bitter what you find bitter, apparently. But IP 10 also proves that tastes are genetically mediated, and hence have been selected throughout evolution. This means that a qualia such as “bitterness” are a product of our biology, which is an objective fact, and this fact lends them objectivity. Qualia can be studied through genetics, for instance, as in the case of phenol-thio-urea.
IP#11 (the cauliflower cure) is equivalent to IP#7 (Chase and Sanborn). Dennett’s experience of cauliflower is dramatically affected (for the better) after he eats a pill. He feels a strong qualitative change but since he cannot say if he was wrong before or what, he concludes that the taste of cauliflower does not exist (but now he likes it a lot…).
Intuition pump #12 (inverting spectacles) is about a well-known phenomenon: after wearing inverting spectacles (up is down and vice versa) for several days subjects make an astonishingly successful adaptation and seem to see things normally. It is similar to IP #8 where Chase's taste buds have been unethically inverted, but it is more real and less gross. Similarly to IP8, the scientists studying this know very well that the spectacles are inverting visual perception. So like IP8, IP12 proves only that qualia are real, objective, scientific phenomena.
Intuition pump #13 (the osprey cry) is about the difference between a verbal description of an osprey cry and hearing it. “So that's what it sounds like, I say to myself, ostending--it seems--a particular mental complex of intrinsic, ineffable qualia. … [but] from a single experience of this sort I don't--can't--know how to generalize to other osprey calls. Would a cry that differed only in being half an octave higher also be an osprey call? ” So first he understands a qualia then he wonders about how many of them ospreys he would need to hear to know the qualia of the osprey cry…
IP #14 (the Jello box) is a confused way to ask once again “whether your blue is my blue, your middle-C is my middle-C” and is thus similar to IP #1: qualia can differ from one person to the next, and are thus highly personal and subjective.
IP #15 (the guitar string) speaks of our capacity to disentangle harmonics in a guitar note or notes in a chord. “The difference in experience is striking.” And later: “you are still responding, as before, to a complex property so highly informative that it practically defies verbal description.” It’s is hard to leave this IP without an intuition that musical beauty is indeed complex and ineffable, even if it can be – as in this case – further broken down into sub-elements. And that’s the point he is trying to make of course, but you still cannot verbally describe fully the sound of a guitar, while you can still recognize it, even after this IP. Even if a sound can be broken down into its components, and perceived as such, even if a patch of color of your computer screen can be broken down in red, blue and green dots, even if qualia can be broken down in elementary qualia, that doesn’t make the elementary qualia any less ineffable.
So as per the paper’s “intuition pumps”, qualia are ineffable, subjective and personal, but also objective, scientific phenomena. They are economically important (and thus wine tasting machines are potentially profitable). They can be very beautiful. And they sometimes force even those philosophers who doubt their existence to give up forever on steamed cauliflower...
Correct. It is private in the sense that you cannot be sure that others see exactly what you see. But it is universal in the sense that we all report seeing something different from the objective image.
I agree with this. The proponents of qualia and quale are the ones who attempt to decouple, sever, and/or otherwise separate some aspects of consciousness from the ongoing process, which is what experience amounts to.
No.
Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of?
The various color, sound, taste sensations, but those are words used in language, so naturally you will complain that I'm using language.
Au contraire, it is the qualophobes who discard experence for the functional, dispisotional properties of the process.
No, I won't. We must use language.
So, let me see if I have this right...
Color, sound, and taste are - according to you - properties of private experience that exist in their entirety prior to language use.
Are you ok with that?
I've no idea how you arrived at that summary. I'm not equipped to disentangle it.
Depends what you mean by "same scope". It seem obvious that the relationship is "inside the subject" if only in the sense that it is the agent's perception (i.e. for the agent, perceived by the agent).
Quoting fdrake
It only seems to make sense for it to "collapse" to the side of the subject. Barring panpsychism, it could not "collapse" to be a conscious experience or perception which is for, or had by, the object (except, perhaps, where the object is another subject).
Thanks for posting the interesting video. Judging from the article, I was under the impression that Dennett wanted to eliminate qualia or perceptions. However, judging from the video you posted, it seems he wants to eliminate the perceiver (or the 'I') instead. Transcribed from the video:
However, I didn't find his eliminative account of qualia (e.g. seeing the colour blue) to be very convincing:
Most of this seems to rely on the elimination of memory (he goes on to talk about a case of Alzheimer's). I wouldn't dispute that consciousness relies on memory.
Quoting fdrake
I've noticed that Dennett's attack on the Cartesian theatre seems to be what you find strongest in his position. I wonder if qualia can be retained without needing to commit to a Cartesian theatre view. For example, might we say that perceptual features are present to consciousness, rather than presented to consciousness?
I'm going to restrict my comments to privacy, as I think most qualia advocates would agree with Dennett that this is one of the properties of qualia.
According to a common definition of privacy, it is "the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively."
My definition of private qualia, or the reason I would consider qualia to be private, is that nobody else can experience your conscious experience. More poetically, nobody else sees the world through your eyes (unless, perhaps, it's via a transplant). In other words, nobody else has the conscious experience produced by your particular body.
I consider it quite clear that in some cases other people have very different conscious experiences to mine, because they are blind, deaf, colour-blind, synaesthetic or one of many other well documented differences. I also expect there could be more minute differences in other cases simply because no two bodies tend to be identical, but this becomes more about ineffability or intriniscality than privacy. This does not rule out that there may be a range of similarity shared by those whom Dennett refers to as "the class of normal observers".
I base my remarks below on the definition of qualia-privacy given above.
This seems problematic for Dennett's argument against the property of privacy. Unless another person's experience can be accessed and verified (i.e. unless it can be experienced), then it remains private to that person.This seemed to be the purpose of Dennett's next intuition pump, which I consider to be a potentially good argument against privacy, although he does not address it directly:
Does this imply that if I wear the apparatus then I can experience another person's experience? No. Because I wouldn't be seeing (via my eyes) what another person sees via their eyes. That would be double transduction. Regardless, this is not Dennett's focus. Instead, he worries about the "correct" orientation of the plug:
Shouldn't the technician already know the "right" orientation and be able to faithfully transmit every detail including colour? Anyhow, whatever colour/rotation the Brainstorm wearer "sees", the experience remains private to them. Amazingly (I find), the upshot of this intuition pump for Dennett is "that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology". This only supports privacy! Otherwise, intersubjective comparison would be possible.
Dennett concludes: "Since ex hypothesi the two different surgical invasions can produce exactly the same introspective effects while only one operation inverts the qualia, nothing in the subject's experience can favor one of the hypotheses over the other. So unless he seeks outside help, the state of his own qualia must be as unknowable to him as the state of anyone else's qualia."
Dennett is looking in the wrong place again. Whether the subject's qualia are inverted or whether the subject can determine the "right" source of his qualia is irrelevant. Infallibility about the origin of one's qualia is not one of the four properties that Dennett claims to be arguing against. While I might claim to be the only one who can know how my qualia seem to me, this does not imply that I am the only one who knows the causes of my qualia. The unconscious processes that cause qualia are irrelevant to the properties of one's conscious experience, especially privacy.
All the more support for privacy, then? None of this helps overcome the intuition of pump #3, that "our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors". Our experience remains private unless we can do something to disconfirm the existence of different subjective colours.
I find the rest of the intuition pumps, including the coffee tasters, are mostly about infallibility, which is not one of the four properties Dennett claims to be arguing against.
This seems like an admission of privacy.
If I cannot confirm whether "your blue is my blue" or "your middle-C is my middle C", then something does remain of privacy. Dennett's acknowledgement that "people experience the world quite differently" also appears to indicate a remainder (non-elimination) for the other properties of intrinsic, ineffable and directly apprehensible.
I agree: qualia are private because of propriety or ownership, i.e. only I (my body) can have/experience them. Nobody else (nobody else's body) can have my qualia. In other words, nobody else can experience my experience. Dennett responds:
For those of us who have not fully accepted/understood this "banishment", where in the article does it occur with regard to privacy?
I never said they did. You asked about whether they provided knowledge of out puts. They do.Quoting khaled
Quoting khaled
This seems a common theme of misunderstanding, also in @Marchesk's view that just 'seeming' can be called qualia
Fortunately, Dennett's argument in this respect can be really simplified -
1. Proponents of qualia need p-zombies to be distinguishable (or wine-tasting machines as used in the article), they cannot have it that p-zombies and wine tasting machines have qualia. So a model of experience which goes
sensory input-> response
has to be ruled out, otherwise the wine tasting machine and p-zombies have no different an experience to use (both take inputs and produce input-appropriate responses
2. So, in order to salvage us fro p-zombiehood or from being replaced by wine tasting machines, the model of experience has to go
a)sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response
3. But Dennett's third set of intuition pumps show that if we make neurological changes to path (a) - from object to qualia, or path (b) - from qualia to response, we cannot tell which change has been made. We cannot examine our 'qualia' independently to tell if they've been changed by a modification to path (a) or if instead we've simply been subject to a modification of path (b).
4. So if we can't access our qualia introspectively - to do psychological or philosophical work with them, and we can find no evidence of them from external investigation (by neuroscience), then why are we persisting with them?
Or to put it even more simply - qualia are a theorised step in a perception-response process which we cannot access independent of either input (perception) or output (response) and for which there is no other evidence - so what are they are they theorised for?
Quoting fdrake
That conscious experience is the dispositional, relational and functional properties of the biological systems responsible for conscious experience, and nothing additional. This part is key:
[quote=Qunining Qualia]Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia. Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special.[/quote]
And this part right after:
[quote=Qunining Qualia]The standard reaction to this claim is the complacent acknowledgment that while some people may indeed have succumbed to one confusion or fanaticism or another, one's own appeal to a modest, innocent notion of properties of subjective experience is surely safe. It is just that presumption of innocence I want to overthrow. [/quote]
Which includes my attempt to avoid any sort of strong statement about qualia properties which might be subject to quining, although I did defend privacy.
So what is being left out in my view after accounting for dispositional, relational and functional properties, that science can discover? The sensation itself of colors, sounds, feels, etc.
A series of intuition pumps meant to walk the reader through disabusing them of the intuition that conscious experience has any sort of qualia-like properties (ineffable, intrinsic, private, direct). It should be noted here that Dennett is doing the intuition pumping. He has constructed the pumps to arrive at his conclusion.
I just summarized each and every of his 15 "pumps", and then examined it... I am aware it is hard to do, it took me the evening. But now I can prove than none of these pumps amount to a serious conceptual critique, that the idea that scientists could invert one's qualia attracts attention to the fact that qualia are objective, scientifically studied phenomena, for instance.
I predicted that you won't be able to summarize the argument followed. And indeed you couldn't, and now that I have summarized it for you, you cannot even deal with it... :-)
Here is the crux of the matter, for me anyway. Dennett does not think the appearance of having sensations can be considered qualia in any meaningful sense. Therefore, it's a faulty intuition. Thus why elsewhere he thinks illusionsim is a good guess or starting point for dissolving the hard problem, or answering the hard question as he calls it. It's a magic trick in the brain, and the only thing left is for neuroscience to show how the trick is performed. Or something along those lines. I believe he's offered up several possibilities, but at any rate, there is nothing ineffable, intrinsic, private or direct to the appearance of seeing colors, etc.
And since that's the case, the appearance can entirely be understood from a third person perspective, when the science advances enough. What I take from this is the appearance of consciousness is not really an appearance. It only seems like it on reflection. Keith Frankish in his paper is careful to point out that the illusion itself must not lead to qualia.
It is a denial of phenomenalism.
The first section of the article does seem to cause a lot of confusion, maybe Dennett could have been clearer. What he does in intuition pumps one to six si 'steel-man' the arguments for qualia. So your reading of them is basically spot on. He's showing how the concept of a private, ineffable, accessible, irreducible quale comes about - what intuitions lead us to think such things might exist. He litters the discussion of these intuition pumps with forewarnings of the paradoxes to come, but they are not, on their own, meant to show qualia are not any of those four things, they're really meant to show how it is that we come to think they are (put in a way which foreshadows later problems).
So
Quoting Luke
Yes. That's right - hence the idea that qualia can't be something which can be explained by
sensory input-> response
he's laying out how qualia (as conceived) must be in the form of
a)sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response
in order to salvage our sense that the brainstorm machine would not give us the same experience.
Quoting Luke
Yep, that's right. This is what Dennett is trying to show here, but - crucially - this is only possible under the second model of experience. If we were to adopt the first model it would not be the case. Again, he's showing us how qualia (as conceived) must follow the second model (which he will later demolish) in order to have the properties we ascribe to them.
Quoting Luke
Not irrelevant, no. But Dennett does not talk about the relevance here, he's saving that for later (pumps 7-12). It just needs to be bourne in mind that there must be an origin of qualia which is not part of qualia. Just re-affirming the first path of that second model - qualia are not perception, they must be the result of perception.
Quoting Luke
Yep, again intuition pump 3 is not meant to be solved by pumps 4-6, it's part of a sequence of pumps which show how we got here (with paradoxes).
Quoting Luke
These pumps are not about infallibility. The point of them is to show how fallibility on both paths of the second model I showed above make the concept of qualia useless as defined. Basically, if we cannot tell whether the causes of qualia, or the responses to qualia have been tampered with, we cannot access qualia independently - so what use are they?
Quoting Luke
It's not so much the independent property of privacy that's been banished. The argument is more like - in order to have the four properties ascribed to qualia they must be conceived of like this, but when conceived of that way, we can neither access them, nor talk about them, nor do we have any neurological evidence for them, so what the point in theorising their existence?
I think a problem here is supposing that qualia is supposed to be able to tell us something about our neurology. But maybe the qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). You end up with the same qualia.
That's the point of the though experiments. The only thing we can say we end up with is a relation between the sources of sensation and the response, but the wine-tasting machine has a reliable relation between sensory sources and response, yet we want to leave it without of qualia. If qualia are just the whole process from sources of sensation to response, then wine-tasting machine have it, so do p-zombies.
Regarding privacy, one might say our mental activity is not radically private, in that an advanced enough science and technology could reveal the exact neural correlates for all mental activity, and from there infer exactly what is going on. It could even be piped into a monitor and speakers, or a VR device. Dennett mentions the Brainstorm machine.
And sure, I grant that much. The problem comes in with experiences we don't have the ability to experience. If bat physiology reveals that sonar creates a sensation in bats, but this is unlike any of our sensory modalities, then we can't know what that is. People born blind from birth, or who have suffered a neurological condition removing their ability to experience color, are presumably in this position with regard to vision. They understand many humans "see", but what that means to them isn't a colored in world, since they have no such experiences to compare to. They know the language of course, and learn how to use it, but they don't know the experience.
And that is what is radically private about consciousness that science cannot give us, without rewiring our nervous systems, or enhancing them.
Qualia are the resulting sensations that consciousness is made up of. But we only know that from first person experience. Solpsism is a difficult position to refute because of that.
So yeah, you could theoretically be a p-zombie, and the wine-tasting machine gives us no indication otherwise, so it probably is, unless one endorses panpsychism or functional qualia (Chalmers).
I thought qualia were a property of perception, rather than a product of perception. If I perceive a blue door, the blue isn't something that follows from the perception, it's a part of it.
What sort of response do you mean?
Yeah, I'd be tempted to agree with you here on a pragmatic level. But this doesn't show that such experience is 'necessarily' private. As you say, theoretically scientists could one day re-wire our nervous system such that we have the memories and stored neural pathways of a bat and then we would 'know' everything about the experience of sonar before we receive our first ultrasonic sound-wave because all that there is to the knowing is in those neural structures.
Yes. That's what they're theorised to be in order to distinguish us from wine-tasting machines. But theorised that way, they can't also be private, ineffable, intrinsic and accessible.If
Quoting Marchesk
...then they're not accessible. Only the beginning and the end of those pathways are accessible.
I should have added that science can't tell us that that bat necessarily has a sonar sensation, only whether it has recognizable neural structures (by comparison with ours).
It gets harder the farther from human you go. Ned Block goes into this in his The Harder Problem of Consciousness paper, using Commander Data as an example. Philosophers have imagined weirder scenarios, such as Chinese Brains and meteor showers that might instantiate analogous functions for conscious sensation.
Or at least, that's what the abstracted third-party account tells us, according to Dennett's setup. Doesn't change my first person experience.
Yes. I should have written sensory input. Sorry - I've edited back, so thanks for that.
Quoting Luke
Any reaction that indicates we've had some sensory input, could be internal (like drawing a memory back into the working cortices, or external like rejecting bitter coffee.
This begs the question. Science only "can't" tell us that if you assume your conclusion that such sensations are private and intrinsic. If you don't, then science has merely failed to tell us that so far.
So why were you tempted to agree that science needed to modify our nervous system in order for us to know?
No, the intuition pumps 8-12 show that we cannot access these 'qualia'. If we could, then we'd be able to tell which pathway had bee tampered with. As we can't, we don't have access to them as a separate step. If they're not a separate step the wine-tasting machines have qualia.
I meant that if science could modify it such as to give us the wiring in response to sonar, that the bat would have developed over it's lifetime. I'm just saying that I don't think we could just be given sonar and assume we'd respond to it in the same way as a bat. We'd need the whole shebang to do that 'out of the box'.
[quote=Quining Qualia]To put the matter vividly, the physical difference between someone's imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow might be nothing more than the presence or absence of a particular zero or one in one of the brain's "registers". Such a brute physical presence is all that it would take to anchor the sorts of dispositional differences between imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow that could then flow, causally, from that "intrinsic" fact.[/quote]
This illustrates Dennett's denial most vividly. A difference in conscious experience could be nothing more than the equivalent of flipping a bit. And it is that which I just cannot agree with, whatever the status of the qualia properties.
What could it possibly mean to say that the difference between imagining a purple and green cow is a 1 or 0 (or the neural equivalent)? A 1 or 0 isn't purple or green. Neither for that matter or rgb values in a computer. They are just encoded for an output device that does produce the wavelengths of light we see as combinations of red, green and blue.
Intution pumps 8-12 look like we don't have direct access to previous qualia such that we can answer the question, Just the memory of them. And memories are fallible reconstructions. My memory qualia of tasting the coffee years ago might not be the same as it was when tasting it then. But that doesn't mean there is no qualia when tasting it now.
Dennett denies there is because it doesn't do any third-party verification for him. That's his loss.
Quoting The Qualities of Qualia
This accords with my response. We know first hand of the qualia we're having now, even though we can be wrong about the qualia we did have. Dennett thinks thinks you have to be in the same epistemic position toward both for direct apprehension to work, but that's not necessary.
You can't tell a blind person what it's like to see color, no matter the words you use. There is something inexpressible for sensory modalities.
Quoting Qualities of Qualia
Which is just saying that language has its limitations. The world is more than language, or whatever is dreamt up in Dennett's denial.
Exactly. So the more thought experiments Dennett piles up to try and disqualify qualia, the more he affirms that qualia can be affected by genetics or by neurosurgery, the more he is proving that there are such things as qualitative differences in perception, and that they can be scientifically studied... :cool:
I think what he means is:
Imagine you're giving me a taste while I'm connected to an angiogram or whatever. You give me some yummy assam tea and see that blood flows to a certain area of my brain, so you're confident that I tasted the tea functionally speaking.
You ask me what I experienced and I say: "I rasted malty strong tea." Since that's what you think assam tastes like, you believe I must have experienced the tea as you have.
Dennett says hold up. There is room for doubt. Instead of discarding this doubt, focus on it.
In the face of that doubt, how would you defend your belief that there was qualia associared with my tasting?
Why is it only possible under the second model of experience (sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response)? Are you saying that an intersubjective comparison of qualia would be possible under the first model of experience (sensory input-> response)?
Quoting Isaac
What use are they for what? Qualia are "the way things seem to us". Why do they need to have a use? Aren't you just expressing the hard problem with that question: why do we have qualia if they make no functional difference? If we don't have them, then it's an illusion of an illusion.
Quoting Isaac
Can "the way things seem to us" be theoretical? Anyway, pumps 7-12 is where most of the "demolition" occurs?
Let's see... In the unlikely hypothesis that I cared to know for sure how my tea tasted to you, I would try to figure out if you have any reason to lie, and what it could be. Politeness could be a reason for instance. I offered you some fancy, expensive tea, so you may want to reassure me that the tea was good even if it actually tasted like Jell-O to you... To rule out this rival hypothesis I would ask again, adding: "I am trying to study the taste of tea from a scientific viewpoint, hence the scanner, so please don't try and be polite or anything. Do tell me exactly how the tea tasted like, please, even if it tasted nothing." Then I will watch your body language while you respond, check the electroencephalogram and conclude one way or the other based on this additional data, if I can. I will decide whether or not to trust you.
No I asked whether or not they provide knowledge of what happens in the PC as a program using them runs. And the answer is: they don’t.
Quoting Isaac
Which would be fine from a panpsychist perspective but aside from that.
Quoting Isaac
I fail to understand how: “We can’t tell how our Qualia went wrong if it goes wrong” leads to: “We don’t access our Qualia introspectively.
Quoting Isaac
Or it could be: Sensory input -> Response + Qualia
Qualia doesn’t need to be part of the process, it could be a secondary effect resulting from our brain processing. But even barring that too:
Quoting Isaac
Because they are useful. Let me just translate this to algorithms real quick.
1- Proponents of algorithms need there to be a difference between a computer that is running a certain algorithm (technically it’s “running a program programmed with that algorithm” but I’ll use this as shorthand) and one that isn’t
Thus input -> output
Has to be ruled out
2- so in order to maintain the difference between computers running algorithms and ones that aren’t it must be
Input -> Algorithm -> output
3- However if a program doesn’t produce expected results we cannot tell if the problem is in wrong input or some mistake towards the end that changes the output.
4- so if the algorithm designer can’t tell what went wrong, and we cannot open up the computer to find the “algorithm” inside then what use is it theorizing about them?
Or to put it even more simply - algorithms are a theorised step in a input-output process which we cannot access independent of either input or output (again, not sure how “can’t tell what went wrong” translates to “can’t access at all” but those are your words not mine) and for which there is no other evidence - so why persist in using them?
Answer: Because they are still immensely useful.
“I see red” is a much shorter description than the description of everything my brain does at the moment of seeing red. Just as an algorithm is a much shorter description of what you can expect a computer to do than a description of which transistors do what.
Am I missing something or is it quite easy? E.g.
Again, this seems neutral with respect to the question whether we need to posit an internal as well as an external stimulus.
Yeah......”raw feels”....”seemings”.....are themselves modes of thought, in as much as a subject can neither ask himself nor tell himself about the “seeming” of a sensation, unless he already has something with which to juxtaposition to it. Any “seeming” implicates a presupposition that must be contained somewhere in the ongoing process, hence “seemings”, or the qualia meant to represent them, cannot be detached from the process in which the juxtapositioned elements are contained, in effect, making them superfluous.
(Incidentally, which is the primary reason “the friends of qualia” needs qualia to be empirically obtained, as opposed to the standing of “a theorist’s useful interpretive fiction”, in order to justify their reality, because epistemologically they are not necessarily so.)
On the other hand, if the predicates of such seemings are pure a priori considerations, in which the subject is not consciously involved, wherein the cognitive system is asking itself about the relativity of a “seeming”, which both speculative epistemology and methodological naturalism actually require, seemings are irrelevant with respect to conscious investigations of the general nature of the system in which they are contained.
(Incidentally, if this is the case, it is why Dennett then relies on the notion that qualia are altogether too ill-conceived to be “exactly” defined.)
“....Thus, the criterion for the possibility of a conception (not its object) is the definition of it...”
(CPR, B154)
——————
On another note, assuming you’re still here.........
The arena where qualia exert their influence, tacitly granting there are such things, is the domain of sensibility. In the ongoing process, sensibility extends only from the appearance of an external object (physiological perceiving apparatus has been affected by something) to the imagination of a particular phenomenon related to it (intuition), all of which operates without the consciousness of our cognitive system, but only the requisites of the physical system, re: particular ways and means of specialized data transmission to the corresponding specific regions of the brain. Hence, there is as yet no empirical knowledge, no conscious experience (as if there was any other kind).......and absolutely no language use. Whether or not any of the speculative stuff is actually the case, the assets of it do necessarily exist in their entirety, and they necessarily consist of integral correlations. Maybe not what you’ve always had in mind, but perhaps congruent to it.
With a chair you can walk up to it to confirm whether or not it’s actually a chair as opposed to a cardboard cutout for example. With Qualia, you have no way of confirming what anyone else is experiencing. You cannot confirm whether or not the sky seems to me as it seems to you. That’s is what it means for Qualia to be private.
So just at the first step: can you accept that I might be a p-zombie?
No way. You're far too smart to be one.
Ha! I'm a moron. That's what most of the pumps are for, though: to make you say yes, I could be qualia-less.
Yeah, I'm working on an ordinary language rendering of the (consciousness)process. Seems to me that the models, such as those being discussed(particularly earlier) by Kenosha, Isaac, and fdrake, are the most promising methods/attempts to situate "qualia" beyond the ability of metacognition in their order of appearance, where metacognition requires common language use.
The judgment/assessment step is most certainly in dire need of unpacking, for there are several levels of complexity to conscious experience, all of which correspond to the cognitive capability of the candidate(which is limited to and facilitated by the physiological/biological 'machinery').
I do not actually entirely agree with Dennett here. I do agree that qualia/quale are misconceptions of the basic fundamental elements of conscious experience. However, I'm trying to keep my engagement about Dennett's paper, or at least on some aspect of his points, as much as possible.
That seems to be Dennett's position regarding mental content to me too. Up to some wrangling on that "responsibility" relationship anyway!
Quoting Marchesk
Also @Luke because I'm trying to channel an "And then what?" argument.
So the question regarding "the sensation itself" I have is: what makes a sensation be more than relational, dispositional and functional properties?
I take it you'll agree that sensations are relational, dispositional and functional to some degree. Or have those as a component. Let's take as an example putting my hand on something too hot and reflexively withdrawing it. The sensation of heat derives from a relationship between my skin and the hot thing (relational), the reflex (a behaviour) of withdrawing my hand is coincident with treating the hot object as a threat to withdraw from (dispositional), and detecting sufficient heat serves as a cause of the reflex of withdrawal to end the threat that I have (functional).
It seems to me if I removed the relational component from the experience, I'd no longer be talking about the same thing at all. If I removed the behavioural component of it, I'd have had a different experience - my hand possibly would not have withdrawn in the reflex. If I removed the dispositional component, I'd no longer have unconsciously appraised the gathering sensation of heat as a threat. Furthermore, I removed that dispositional component, it seems to me I'd be removing the components of my experience that coincide with its character as a threat triggering a reflex - the stress, the panic, the pain, the unpleasantness - and removing those things also removes a substantial component of "what it was like" for me. If I remove the composite of these things and their functional relationships, I'm no longer talking about the experience at all - or I would have both done and felt nothing and burned off my finger.
So it seems if there are phenomenal properties in that experience, they cannot be independent of relational, functional, behavioural, and dispositional properties, as if I changed all of those I'd change "what it was like" for me and even the scenario I was considering in the first place. Given that, why should someone commit themselves to an independent "phenomenal" type associated with the experiences, when the elements of the phenomenal type ("what is it likes") vary with changes in the type they are supposed to be independent of?
Conversely, if "what is it like"s (elements of the phenomenal type) are posited to be dependent upon but separate from relational, behavioural dispositional and functional properties of my experiences, how could a strict distinction between the phenomenal and the composite type of the aforementioned other properties make any sense at all?
Science fiction abounds with characters who either are p-zombies or could be. I think most would agree p-zombies are logically possible.
The next step is to allow it to be possible that you yourself are. So let's play this out and see if I can persuade you, not that you definitely are, but that you could be. Ok?
Because people who don't like cauliflower try to avoid eating cauliflower independently of the circumstances.
Because an optical illusion cannot be reasoned away, it will crop up again and again, independently of the circumstances.
Because you can recognise the timbre of a musical instrument, the scent of a rose, the color of a dress in spite of them being always a little bit different than the last time.
Because you can recognise the taste of some food that you haven't had for decades, e.g. Proust's madeleines.
Because dogs can follows trails, and find corpses even under water.
Because the same applies to words: their meaning varies from one sentence to the next, and yet we still use them and we still recognise their meaning somewhat.
Joke aside, I disagree with that. I view consciousness as a necessary feature, not some decorative item easily disposed of.
Category error - confusing someone's flavour preferences with flavours.
I think the point is that none of these require talking in terms of qualia in order to be effectively and exhaustively explained.
Funny thing: both pro-qualia and anti-qualia arguments depend on your ability to conceive the p-zombie.
Give it a try.
Not confusing them, just saying you can't have flavour preferences if flavours don't exist.
What kind of claim is that? Is there anything that could convince you that it's false?
?
But is it empirical, logical, grammatical, theoretical, what?
It is a logical claim. As such, it could be disproved by using propositional logic. I am saying something like:
If A and B do not exist, then the proposition (A > B) is meaningless.
But nobody is denying that I can't have coffee preferences without there being coffees. We're just denying that preferring how one coffee tastes to how another coffee tastes necessitates there being such an entity as how each coffee tastes to me.
This is just the same old fight against Platonism.
Quoting Olivier5
How would I go about doing that? How would you go about proving that if I like how this coffee tastes, there is an entity, how this coffee tastes to me, that I like?
How would you have a preference if the coffee didn’t taste like something to you? I wonder if @Banno really is wanting to go this far. Seems like it’s doing violence to ordinary language to deny there’s something it’s like to taste coffee.
Would you be able to recognise the coffee you like in a blind test?
This has nothing to do with coffee or with coffee tastes or with mental events, nothing like that; this is all about how to deal with words like "something".
You believe that if i experience something, there's something I'm experiencing, and the only alternative is that I'm experiencing nothing. But that's wrong. I've stipulated that I'm experiencing something; I'm denying the platonist inference that there's something I'm experiencing, period.
Quoting Olivier5
I dunno. What would it prove either way? What if there were a large trial and people couldn't; would that empirical result disprove the existence of qualia?
A worthy endeavor. Opening major will be important.
Carry on!!
I’m not sure how to parse this.
Like the way I memorize a phone number?
Memory is a whole 'nother complicated mess. How much do you need to oversimplify it?
Grammar, in the schoolbook sense, is not a sure guide to ontology. Think of Quine's puzzle about "seeking" and friends: if I'm looking for a spy, that doesn't mean there's a spy I'm looking for.
Quoting Olivier5
I'll leave figuring out how memory works to neuroscientists.
So just because I’m tasting the coffee doesn’t mean there is a taste of coffee? Just because I see a color illusion, doesn’t mean there is a color illusion?
In everyday contexts, sure. The question is whether you should build a philosophical position on how the languages you and I know happen to handle the grammatical transformation here. Obviously I think that's not a formula for success.
I fried them slices in the pan, and a horrible smell soon filled up the kitchen. I stopped the fire and started to pay attention to the smell. Fried guanciale always smells a bit acrid, but this was different... What was it? It was like old walnuts when they become rancid, I reconned... I smelled it again, and then it downed on me that my old guanciale was simply rancid, i.e. a banal form of fat oxidation. But you see, I had never smelled rancid guanciale before.
Now I have. And I have memorized it. I won't even start to slice a piece of guanciale without smelling it first... This will spare me trouble. I lost 30 mn with this whole mess. I had to cut another piece of beacon made for amatriciana... It had hot pepper all over it, which tastes great in the amatriciana (these are pasta sauces, in case someone wonders) but wouldn't go in the carbonara, so I had to peel the thing before slicing it. Then I had to clean the pan because I didn't want the rancid fat to taint the taste of my sauce...
In the end, the pasta was good. Nobody complained.
The moral of this story is that a sense of smell would be nothing without the capacity to remember smells.
The senses of smell and taste provide an obvious Darwinian advantage in that they help the animal avoid certain foods that can be bad for its health (by tagging those with an unpleasant taste or smell) and gives it an incentive to consume other kind of foods (by giving them a pleasant taste or smell). Maybe rancid fat is bad for your health, or maybe it just correlates with other things bad for your health such as bacteria.
The animal is even capable of remembering tastes of food that it consumed in the past, and attach to them a positive or negative tag through taste modulation depending on whether past consumption led it to sickness, or on the contrary healed it. During pregnancy, the tastes and smells are somehow affected and certain smells become hard to bear, supposedly to get additional protection against toxins.
We don't know our food through chemical analysis of all components, we taste it. It's as good as a biological lab can get. To support this complex food analysis and signaling system, tastes must have some form of identity, some consistence, some presence. You must be able to remember them, identify them, etc.
Qualia vita sunt.
But the argument is precisely over how properly to theorize our experience, isn't it? Unfortunately that means there are facts we all agree on, in some vague sense -- we can and do taste coffee -- and there are some we don't -- there being the taste of this coffee to me right now, primarily as a theoretical entity, but related to our common-sense understanding.
The relational, dispositional and functional aspects you describe appear to be reflexive and automatic; in other words: unconscious. You withdrew your hand as a reflex and "unconsciously appraised" the heat as a threat. It seems that the body could have done this without any additional feeling.
Quoting fdrake
I don't think that phenomenal properties are independent of the physical, but I do think they are private and inaccessible from a third-person (purely behavioural/functional) perspective. Phenomenal properties can be assumed or inferred from behaviour, but Dennett seems to want to go further than this.
So why did you want to go into that, then?
So you would agree that explaining function doesnt explain qualia. That's a pretty common view.
I think qualia are functional. If they exists, they exist for a reason.
The important thing would be the habitual response of consuming or not consuming. But to get there, you claim we store particular qualia as memories. Really? Like, the whole thing, the exact smell of the rancid bacon? I'm skeptical. You picked up on a characteristic, an aspect of the smell you were experiencing, one that you were already familiar with and had a prepared response to, but it was hard to pick out at first because of all the other aspects and factors in play.
It's still just not clear to me what this proves. You assume that for the response to kick in, at some point the current "input" must get compared to an exemplar you've stored in memory. That might be how you'd program a robot (although I guess connectionists would say no) but I don't see any reason to believe that our bodies work that way.
Yes, but one could suppose, like Chalmers has, that qualia is tied to function, or rich information streams, via some non physical scientific law.
Even if so, we can’t communicate what it’s like, so we can’t know that from the functioning of a bat or robot. Unless it’s the same as ours. Bat sonar might be like vision as Dawkins has suggested, or it might be like a blind persons use of a walking stick, which the functioning of their nervous system could tell us. But if not, then we’re in the dark.
I make no guesses about how memory works either. I've read a few books. It's complicated alright, so let's perhaps not go into how it works. What I can say in confidence is that I (and any animal with a sense of smell) can connect a present sensation, a current smell, to another one perceived in the past. I did once ate rancid walnuts (I meant walnuts not chestnuts). [I]This smell[/I]... I can recognise it when it happens, describe it somehow (bitter in a dirty way), but I cannot summon it on my tongue, so to speak, I cannot recreate it at will. So our memory (or perhaps our imagination, as well as our language) has certain limits.
The important functional point is to be able to recognise a smell, to be able to connect it to another perceptive event(s) that happened in the past, because the whole point is to learn from past experience when interpreting new ones... Without this ability, a sense of smell would be useless to the animal, and to me as well. Every smell would be an entirely new smell.
Actually, that phrase: "something it is like to..." is what does violence to the language. It's a recent invention found almost only in philosophical discourse, and so is inherently fraught.
Coffee has a taste.
Also, I’m sure you recall the various debates with The Great Whatever, and how he liked to bring up the ancient Cyreneac school of philosophy, and their focus on individual sensation given the widely recognized problems of perception. So not entirely an invention of modern philosophers abusing language.
I guess that was not part of the initial Darwinian advantage. The system evolved over eons to provide each individual its own capacity to make important, effective dietary and other choices. Affability was never part of the deal.
Language was invented by human beings, it's not a biological thing. It's symbolic in nature. This means it uses symbols of real life stuff, like a stone, a horse or in this case an olfactive sensation, it gives them names. It does so by building sets and tagging them with a word or other symbol. A horse is an animal of the species equus equus. If two people know what the sets and the tags are, they can communicate somehow about those stuff, relating one symbol with another. They can say: "I rode a horse today" or, more likely in my country, "I ate horse meat today", and this helps them coordinate and learn and all that jazz. But the symbol is generally arbitrary and does not express fully all the existential content of horse riding (or eating). It just tags it.
Words are just tokens for the real deal. The map cannot be the territory. Symbols by themselves are always ontologically hollow.
Of course.
I'm just not sure the original perceptual event should be characterized as a thing we could file away and then check new things against. Maybe the research shows it's exactly like that, but I don't see grounds for assuming it must be like that. The argument given, that there has to be a smell that we smell, is not convincing.
" ...there’s something it’s like to taste coffee"
OK, let's call it Albert.
Albert isn't the taste of coffee; it's how this coffee tastes to me, here, now... right?
So with my next sip of coffee, I won't become reacquainted with Albert. That will be a new, different something it’s like to taste coffee.
Then Albert is not what the Cyreneac school had in mind.
Or is your next sip Albert? The only thing you have to go on in your memory of Albert. Is this next sip slightly sweeter? Is there a difference that remains unrecognised? Is you second sip Albert or Alberta?
SO Albert has to be the taste here, now.
Nor is Albert your memory of the taste - your memory of Albert is not Albert.
Nor is the name "Albert" a tag for something we share. By definition, Albert is only yours. You can talk about Albert, but like the beetle, what role can Albert possibly play in a language game? You can't order Albert at a coffee shop.
Albert's sole use seems to be in philosophical threads such as this.
So why bother?
The argument is that Albert demonstrates something special about consciousness. The idea that something as obvious as consciousness could be in need of the ephemeral, indistinct assistance of Albert is laughable.
I'm somewhat astonished that otherwise coherent and sound thinkers as your good selves have a place for such a notion.
Is Albert the taste as the coffee hits the tip of your tongue? Is Albert the taste as you swirl it around your mouth? Is Albert the taste as you breath out through your nose, registering the fragrance? Is Albert all of these?
How exactly do you individuate Albert?
Consider that you can reliably identify the actual chemistry of your food by tasting it, at least for those chemicals that have a taste. You can decide: "there is too little salt in this soups to my taste", knowing reliably that with a pinch of salt or two your soup will taste just fine. A cook can adjust the level of his ingredients throughout the process, add more ginger or paprica if need be.
If I prepare three coffees, one with no sugar, one with much sugar, and one average, anyone who tastes them can tell which is which.
So there is such a phenomenon as "too much sugar in my coffee" or "too little salt in your soup". You can measure the actual chemistry of soups and coffees, and compare this objective scientific data with your own sense of how much or little salt or sugar you taste, and the two will map to each other pretty well.
Tastes work. Quantitatively, objectively, they measure important stuff, like the content of sugar and salts in our food. Such a system cannot logically work without some ID system for tastes, some qualitative perceptual signal, a signature, recognisable somehow from the perceptual signals of other chemicals. Memorizable somehow. And then this individual perceptual signature for say, sugar, can also code for solution dosage by way of modulating the intensity of the signal.
Now we can ask ourselves how our senses work, a scientific question, or wonder what is the ontology of tastes, a philosophical question. But let's be clear that everyone can taste the difference between sugar and hot pepper. Especially at high dosage.
Therefore qualitative differences in perception exist.
Enter the little qualia, dancing in circles... I mean the modest, phenomenological qualia: mere qualitative coding for generally quantitative signals that make up our robust, biological, life-afirming senses.
Our senses honed by evolution, the source of all our experiences, they need some way of tagging, identifying qualitatively the signal of certain significant chemicals, or wavelengths, or sound signatures. It's literally "color coding".
Chalmers said we might one day have a theory of consciousness that allows us to predict the phenomenal consciousness of a bee, or
What
It's
Like
To
Be
A
Bee.
Dennett says there's no such thing. Maybe, but its too early to judge that. And Chalmers notion is exciting and fascinating.
You know it is.
Because we are really talking about the qualia of consciousness, which in your case is the experience of Albert. I agree with you that it would be a more meaningful conversation if we were directly discussing the qualia of consciousness - which are experiences.
Re Albert though, to a P.Zombie, every sip would be identical, as would every experience - neither painful, or pleasant.
A cup of coffee usually tastes pretty much the same throughout for me, unless I forget to stir it, then it tastes sweeter at the end of the cup than at the start (I have mine with sugar).
Quoting Banno
What difference does it make? My conscious experience is not a language game. How things seem to me is not a language game. And if Albert is ineffable, then I can't talk about Albert - at least not in great detail.
Quoting Banno
The same way you individuate any of your tastes - unless you think there are none?
"...predict the phenomenal consciousness of a bee..."
I hope you miswrote. What could that possibly mean? I gather it's different to predicting what the bee will do next? Are you suggesting that we might be able to predict hat the bee would enjoy a bit of Borage flower?
Try to make some sense. It will help the thread considerably.
More poor language skills. No, it's Albert. Not the experience of Albert.
And to those reading over Pop's shoulder - this nonsense is why qualia are unhelpful.
Yes. So identifying Albert fails. Quoting Luke
I agree. So, to be consistent you should stop posting to this thread.
I have no expertise in biochemistry, but I would assume what we're talking about is a chemical we ingest or smell binding to a chemical within our bodies, and that binding triggering some other effects that eventuate in various bodily responses. Some of the biochemical interactions could naturally enough be characterized in terms of "information", and if the pathways of response are developed through experience, you could think of that as "encoding" that information. I don't see any reason to be suspicious of such a story, but I have no idea really. What I would find unlikely is that there is anything like a copy of the "input" filed away somewhere. There's our previous response, which is probably strengthened by repetition, but again I don't know. And I'm still not sure how you expect to point at something somewhere in a human interacting with their environment and say, "Right there! That's the quale."
I guess part of my resistance is that I assume the whole point of any encyclopedia compiling we do is to develop of repertoire of responses and options to consider as a response. That's pretty crudely put, but the point is I'm not sure you need the encyclopedia as a separate thing at all, when you could just have the responses.
You know Albert, but not through experience? :chin:
Note the vacillation between qualia being just the commonplace of how something tastes and the ineffable how-it-seems-to-me?
And somehow qualia are not nonsense.
Not I. The defenders of qualia claim to know him.
Have a read of the SEP article.
No, the point is that, even in one cup of coffee, the taste can change from start to finish. But it still tastes like coffee, overall. Just like I can distinguish between two different brands of coffee, but can't explain that difference in flavour.
Quoting Banno
I shouldn't defend the claim that qualia are ineffable, because qualia are ineffable? Interesting argument. :brow:
Indeed - so which is Albert?
SO much bad philosophy comes from folk 'effing the ineffable. Keep going - you are making my point better than I could.
You've already defined it: "how this coffee tastes to me, here, now", at one point in time. I'm saying that the taste of a cup of coffee can change from the first sip to the last. How is this making your point? What is your point?
Not my definition. I borrowed it in order to show that it is a nonsense - literally, it has no sense; except in extending philosophical threads beyond endurance.
It's on a par with the little man who wasn't there.
If that works for you, why not? It doesn't work for me. I see the subjective experience as the font of all knowledge.
Can you taste your coffee and find it too strong, with not enough sugar or milk?
If the nature of conscious experience is not amenable to philosophical discussion, then so be it.
Since you're invoking Wittgenstein, what do you make of his remark that I quoted earlier?:
:up: It was put very well by somebody on another thread, but I can not remember who. It went something like; every experience creates a note, in sequence the notes create a tune - this is what we dance to! I love it :smile:
In the case of the coffee. Every sip is a note, but the whole cup is a tune. Some tunes are better then others. How would it be without them?
So the only way to talk about conscious experience is via qualia? Can't you see how this approach has closed off the conversation?
Quoting Olivier5
Sure; again, what has this to do with ineffable as-it-seems-to me's? That the coffee is not sugared is not ineffable, not Albert.
Note the pernicious diversion of the conversation brought about by the introduction of qualia; how it renders otherwise intelligent and articulate folk incapable of discussing consciousness without them.
I'm especially surprised that Oliver takes them seriously, given his express discontent with philosophical patter.
I think the majority of philosophers representing philosophy of mind know exactly what it means.
But you don't. :chin:
From the PhilPapers Surveys
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?
Other 393 / 931 (42.2%)
Accept or lean toward: representationalism 293 / 931 (31.5%)
Accept or lean toward: qualia theory 114 / 931 (12.2%)
Accept or lean toward: disjunctivism 102 / 931 (11.0%)
Accept or lean toward: sense-datum theory 29 / 931 (3.1%)
So, no, you are quite wrong. Even restricting the data by philosophers who specialise in cognitive science increases the number who accept qualia only by one percent.
Qualia are a pop philosophy phenomena.
(...add that last post to the list that suggests not paying attention to Frank in the future...)
"3. Conceptual and Non-Conceptual Representation
It is a traditional assumption among realists about mental representations that representational states come in two basic varieties (cf. Boghossian 1995). There are those, such as thoughts, that are composed of concepts and have no phenomenal (“what-it’s-like”) features (“qualia”), and those, such as sensations, which have phenomenal features but no conceptual constituents. (Nonconceptual content is usually defined as a kind of content that states of a creature lacking concepts might nonetheless have.[1])"
Quoting Banno
Wow.
My challenge to Dennett and the qualia-deniers on this thread, answer me this:
Location is subjective. I'm standing here and you're standing there. That's a genuinely hard problem for science to explain. Nonetheless location qualia is undeniable and anyone who does deny it must be a zombie. But zombies still shuffle around, and use language claiming to do so. So the onus is on materialists to explain how that is possible without presupposing the very location qualia they deny. (The mind boggles.)
Further, we know that there is a "what it is like" to be standing here that is private and ineffable. It's quite likely that bats don't stand here in the way that humans do. There's apparently even suggestions that they hang upside down (not that that would be verifiable - it's purely a thought experiment which means that it is therefore a logical possibility that can't be ruled out). For a further knock-down argument, no one can deny that it seems that I'm standing here. That's location qualia too.
In conclusion, rejecting location qualia not only defies common sense, it denies what it means to be human.
Q.E.D.
(And I haven't even got to size qualia yet. Alice says that Bob is fat, which Bob denies. Explain that, science.)
Since you're going over what I see as travelled ground in thread, I'll link you posts I've made in the discussion that I see as relevant:
See here,here,here and here.
Summary of relevant travelled ground:
(1) Dennett isn't denying that people feel all sorts of stuff.
(2) Dennett is denying that qualia are useful in describing how people feel stuff.
(3) The paper is an attempt to tease that out. Allegedly conceptions of qualia come with theoretical baggage.
(4) The thread touches on a lot of ground regarding Dennett's views of consciousness, a lot of it comes down to undermining the subject object distinction and the idea of perceptual intermediaries which bear properties of experiences.
(5) Qualia as Dennett's attacking them are (I think) subjective state properties ("my experience of the red quale") that are dependent upon a perceptual intermediary (The "Cartesian Theatre" metaphor).
(6) In the paper, he's especially attacking various second order properties imputed to those subjective states through the subject object relation. I'll write a list, and put a hidden precis of what I read as his supporting claim for the attack. Intrinsicality of mental content [hide=*](environment/history/context/learning differentiates experience, rather than experiences having intrinsic properties)[/hide], infallibility of the experiencer's access to mental content [hide](someone can't tell if their environmental context or memory has changed or the experience has changed)[/hide], strict ineffability of the mental content [hide=*](discernability of mental content is mediated by the context in which it occurs, "this experience"->"this quale type was present" is an inferential relationship mediated by our discriminatory abilities, so the "ineffability" we attribute to qualia comes from needing to be in the same situation with a sufficiently similar discrimatory profile in order to elicit the quale. The "ineffability" derives from something that goes into forming the experiential content, rather than being of the experiential content itself)[/hide] and finally privacy ([hide=*](the coincidence of circumstances of two people required to elicit an experience which is discriminated into the same experiential category, eg. "the sound of an osprey cry" from an osprey cry suffices for the differences in experience over people; idiosyncrasy of circumstance rather than privacy of content.[/hide]. There is also a less sustained attack on the individuation of first order properties of experience being reflected by the retrospective binning people do with qualia.
(7) Broadly, a lot of it comes down to trying to take a look at the individuating principles of experiences, and the role environmental/bodily context plays in that. Dennett finds qualia unsuited for the task of describing how people feel, so he believes they should be discarded. He settles down to characterising experiential properties as "extrinsic relational properties", rather than intrinsic ones. The externality puts subject/object into question, the mode of relation puts perceptual intermediaries into question.
Unless you're playing devil's advocate strongly, I'm quite surprised by your antipathy towards Dennett's qualia denial strategies; you can read them as undermining the subject object distinction!
Can you explain the difference between seeing red and experiencing a red quale? If we eliminate the supposed Cartesian Theatre, does it imply that we don't/can't really see red? In other words, why must qualia advocates be committed to perceptual intermediaries?
I don't think they must in general. I imagine it depends on the account. I've found references for people that don't (there are apparently people that view qualia as similar to extrinsic relational properties) but I haven't pursued them. That's a big rabbit hole.
I think the view of qualia Dennett is responding to is one that he sees as conjuring a perceptual intermediary which has properties that are then projected into consciousness. One of the ways this is done is to treat "I experience a red quale" as "I saw a red object".
So then to the distinction between the two, I'll go for coffee because @Banno has used coffee to make what I think is a similar point. I take a sip of coffee from my cup, and I taste coffee. That's a relationship between me and the coffee. Phrased generally, that's a perceptual relationship between me and a perceptual stimulus.
Another way of parsing that is that I took a sip of coffee from my cup, and I experienced a coffee taste quale. That's a relationship between me and and the coffee taste quale.
Then what's the quale? It's either a property of the coffee, or a property of the experience of the coffee. But on the account that the taste of coffee isn't some "objective property" - it's not in the coffee because it's not a property of the perceptual stimulus (the coffee), then it must be a subjective property - a property of my experiential state. Phrased generally, that's a perceptual relationship between the coffee and the experiential property of its taste, then a presentational relationship between that experiential property and my consciousness.
In the first, there's one step: perceptual stimulus -> me, where the arrow is the perceptual relationship.
In the second, there's two steps: perceptual stimulus -> experiential property -> me, where the first arrow is a perceptual relationship, and the second is a presentational relationship.
Dennett phrases this as a "double transduction" (from "The Myth of Double Transduction"):
That second arrow is the second transduction. The status of the "experiential property" in the second scheme is as an intermediary phase between the perceptual stimulus and me. In the first, there is no intermediary phase; each instance of perception is a relationship between perceiving faculties and perceptual stimuli, and "what we experience" is part of that single transduction.
Putting an even more verbose spin on it: perception as direct representational relationship between how I am and how the perceptual stimulus is vs perception as a mediated relationship between how I am and how the perceptual stimulus is.
Quoting Andrew M
Humorously.
Twaddle.
Ah. I hope so! I was wondering if we'd get into experiential spatiality stuff (proximity, the experiential aspects of place etc) as a result of @Andrew M's post. I hope it went straight over my head!
You did a fine job.
Why wouldn't the response just be that there's nothing particularly special about one location over another. Unless location is specific to a question at hand, i.e. the view of a building from a particular place, I don't see how it presents any kind of problem for D.
Quoting Marchesk
Can a language-less creature offer us a self report? No. Of course not. Can they have some sort of basic, rudimentary, and/or fundamental form of thought and/or belief? If so, then basic, rudimentary, and/or fundamental experience cannot consist of language, or any product and/or bi-product thereof.
Agree?
Right, because sexual partners have prior to recent philosophy readings never asked each other, "what was it like for you?"
It takes a modern philosopher to interpret this and related statements as violence to the language. Which is why I say that those of a philosophical ilk need to get out more. (I speak from experience.)
-----------
On the other hand, there's "qualia": a nifty quantification of quality for those who are endowed with "quanta"-envy.
How many qualia are there to an experience of beauty? Or of the ugly? Or else ... wait for it ... there's no quality to experiences of either. This because materialism can't account for it save via intuition pumps.
----------
In short, bah humbug.
Such intimate conversations will always go awry when "qualia" rears it's ugly head.
We're talking about a plurality.
Well, of course. One will start arguing about both of them being illusory intuition pumpin' machines; the other starts arguing that the quality to it all is going down the drain. And then presto, the magic is lost and there's no more making whoopee between the two.
-------
On a more serious note, quality occurs as an intrinsic aspect of our experiences. Is this debatable? For me the answer is "no". Then: A) Is a quality not possible to experientially differentiate from any other quality, thereby making quality unquantifiable; B) can a quality be experientially contrasted to other qualities and thereby be quantifiable, or c) something other?
I'm not enamored with qualia, as previously mentioned. Still, being charitable here, if we can discern and thereby distinguish between different qualities, then the philosophical notion of qualia might make some sense in certain philosophical contexts.
What say you?.
It's the too easily accomplished reification of the notion that is a primary problem, I think.
Or it's laughed off, and immediately forgotten about.
:up: You only ever read about 'qualia' in conversations by or about this academic clique.
The old gag about behaviourism (of which eliminativism is basically a rebadge):
'That was fantastic for you, dear. How was it for me?' :razz:
About whether or not there is an entirely private, immediate, and directly apprehensible conscious experience in some basic form?
Sure. It does not consist of qualia or quale.
Just because I'd like to get things straight: Does this conscious experience consist of quality?
Very much agreed.
:up:
Quoting fdrake
Sorry fdrake! It was satire. I regard qualia as a philosophical fiction. My post was an attempt to vividly illustrate in a slightly different context some of the standard confusions that arise. A different kind of intuition pump. Which is not to say that there isn't some philosopher somewhere that might endorse that view!
That aside, thanks for your excellent summary which seems right to me. In particular, I think exposing the often implicit subject/object duality and recognizing the relational nature of experience goes a long way towards clarifying the issues.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, indeed. But I think we could say the same for red apples, or illusions, or whatever. They're just normal aspects of our experience which nonetheless seem to generate particular kinds of philosophical confusion.
Not on my view, but perhaps on yours it may. What counts as consisting of quality?
Where do we start?
Dennett accepts we have feelings, dose he explain why we have feelings?
Dose he accept that every thought has its associated feeling?
Because some of them are properties of perception. Three people are in a room. It feels cold to the first, warm to the second and just right for the third. Yet the thermometer records the same temperature, which is a really a measure of the amount of kinetic energy the molecules in the atmosphere have. Our feeling cold or warm isn't the molecular energy. We didn't know anything about molecular energy until relatively recently. But humans were feeling cold and warm long before then.
So using objective property of the world such as spatial location to mock qualia is missing the point. Now if you want to talk about the feeling of being located somewhere, then we can talk about what it's like when you misjudge how close a wall is in the dark and what not. You have an experience of it being farther away than it is, and then you run into it.
All of these sort of example demonstrate that our experiences are not simply reflections of the world. They're generated by our act of perceiving and other mental activities. So appealing to some direct realism or externalism still needs to account for perceptual relativity and all the other stuff occurring for the organism.
Why suppose it needs to be broken down into instances? Our experiences change all the time. But it does depend on the experience. Focus on one of the images in this thread, and it will stay relatively constant.
The coffee not being sugared is a chemical fact. The coffee not tasting sweet is the experience. You're equivocating here.
What else could what it's like to drink tea consist of if not each and every instance?
What's missing?
The continuous experience, unless you want to break perceived time down into atoms.
We do not drink tea each and every day, all day long, for our entire lives. There is no continuous experience of what it's like to drink tea unless we drink tea each and every day, all day long, for our entire lives...
The continuous tea drinker...
:brow:
We know that doesn't make sense.
If your asking me to define quality, dictionaries can do this far better than I.
Two definitions stand out: 1) level of excellence [as in quality of life, or the quality of a song, or the quality of an apple (for the purpose of eating)] and 2) a property or an attribute that differentiates a thing or a person [as in one of the apple's [s]properties[/s] qualities is that it is red rather than green]
To then answer, if an experience is in any way qualitative, it will then consist of (be made up of) qualities - in sense 1, in sense 2, or, arguably, in both senses.
Given that we both acknowledge the occurrence of the word "quality" in the English language (you've made use of it), and if in your view conscious experiences do not consist of quality, where does quality take place?
Or is it your view that quality does not take place anywhere, that it has no occurrence, thereby making the term fully meaningless to you?
I think there's a parallel between qualia and 'secondary qualities' - not that Dennett says that. The primary qualities are those which are subject to precise quantification, while tastes, smells and so on are secondary and associated with the obsering subject. I think in physicalism, only bearers of primary attributes - that would be 'matter' - is real. It's those annoying 'inneffable feels' that have to be disolved in the acid of Darwin's dangerous idea into the doings of the only real sources of agency, which are molecules:
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 202-3, quoted by Steve Talbott
Are those my only choices?
:brow:
It's your denial that I find sad. You guys are denying your own senses and your own life. It's nothing to me of course, but it makes TPF a bit depressing.
Nope. But a non-evasive reply would do.
Haha, thanks. It's good to see an optimist philosopher who hasn't sacrificed his senses on the altar of nihilism, and can still enjoy his coffee.. :-)
Some posters here call subjectivity "self-report" and they see it with a great deal of suspicion. They mistrust themselves.
I'm by no means denying my senses. I grant them as necessary elemental constituents of all conscious experience.
Which satisfies Dennett's criterion?
Good for you. Can you tell sugar from salt by tasting it? If yes, you have qualia too.
Thanks for clarifying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I take the "perceptual relationship" to be the perception itself, and I further assume that the perception has properties, such as seeing a red flower, or tasting bitter coffee. Would it be problematic to refer to these properties of perception as the qualia?
I assume the response will be that it might mislead us to think that such properties are subjective rather than objective, and that if the flower is perceived as red or if the coffee is perceived as bitter, then each of them really are red and bitter. Except that's not how everyone perceives them?
The main sticking point for me is the definition of privacy that I gave earlier. Qualia or not, conscious experience is surely private in the sense that nobody else can experience (or "see") your conscious experience. Nobody can look into your skull and compare whether you see red the same as they do.
That's a very elegant argument... Thanks!
You're making this feel like kindergarten.
I asked you: Quoting javra
to which you replied: Quoting creativesoul
to which I in essence replied: Quoting javra
to which you answer: Quoting creativesoul
... after I asked that you don't evade the question.
I'm calling it a day. Have (non-qualitative) fun!
Guilty as charged on the first count. Innocent on the second. I grant subjectivity in it's entirety.
All things ever thought, believed, spoken, written, uttered, and/or otherwise expressed come through a subject. Thus, we must set the notion aside, for it is incapable of being used to draw any further distinction between our differing claims.
Yeah, no. This is about the language used to talk about sense and life.
Qualia are an attempt to push an unneeded extra beyond the tase of the coffee.
The discussion is about Dennett's paper, in which he is targeting a certain criterion, description, and/or characterization of qualia. Which of the two different definitions of quality are germane to this discussion? I suspect neither.
The credibility of a source is important, though. Who is saying what, and for which reason/motive, is important. Or do you believe anything Trump says?
No, that's just the first matter to be eliminated in 8. He then goes on to eliminate matters relating to current qualia, the sipping of the coffee right now and the response {not liking the taste, wanting to stop drinking etc.}. All they have is the act of sipping coffee and the response to it. They know the response is unusual for them (this much is not based on fallible memory, they could ask a hundred other people whether they used to like it or not). the point is that they cannot tell whether right now the unusual response is the result of a change in the 'qualia production system' or a change is the 'qualia response system'. All they can tell is that somewhere in that process something has changed. If they had access to their qualia, they could tell which (by checking to see if the qualia have changed). they can't, so they don't.
You could then go back to claiming that qualia are the whole process, but then p-zombies become impossible and wine-tasting machines have qualia, because both go through the process from sensory input to response.
I've no issue with that aside from the "in our mind" part. Ad homs aren't very compelling.
Oh for gode sake. Don't use the concept if you don't need it, and let others use it if they seem to need it. It's not like we're forcing you to eat your cauliflower qualia even if you don't like it.
Yes, to an extent. If we can (in theory) agree intersubjectively on the sources of sensory inputs, and on the responses to those sensory input, then we could compare (or even share) experiences. I say in theory because the process by which those responses are generated is so complex as to be almost chaotic (tiny adjustments having large consequences), and so there might well be a pragmatic limit to such an ability (indeed, I strongly believe there is).
Quoting Luke
Because they're a word and words without uses are meaningless.
Quoting Luke
No, that question assumes we have qualia. I'm saying that we don't. That nothing ontologically answers to that description.
Quoting Luke
It is only theoretical. We can only tell the story of how things were, not how things are. Our brains simply don't work in real time. and that story of how things were is filtered through several theories.
Quoting Luke
Yep. They're the key ones. 13-15 just put some neurological findings into the mix.
:kiss:
You are being cancelled because you believed your own senses, rather than what emperor Dennett told you to believe... How dared you? :-)
Qualia are always plural (to me anyway, like data), and private so you cannot actually point at them. But you can perceive them.
There's an excellent paper on this. Obviously Hacker's https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/is-there-anything-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat/EC6290746D630C343A661C8C0F4D8B8E, but that leaves the possibility of technical language, which is demolished in https://philpapers.org/rec/JONWII-4 .
Worth a read for those that haven't already, the ideas there are germane to this discussion.
... would be an interesting topic for a philosophy book. I doubt it would bring more clarity than similar books about bats. There are quite a few Italians left, COVID notwithstanding, some 60 million of them, and supposedly their subjective experience varies at the individual level, and from one day to the next.
But one thing it's like to be an Italian is to positively loathe other nations' coffee making and drinking behaviors, seen as nothing less than reprehensible, if not barbarian. An "americano" is explicitly a strange custom from a stranger's land; to drink a cappuccino after lunch is downright blasphemy; and people drinking machine coffee in a plastic cup deserve help.
Likewise, I can't think of a good reason why bats can't have their moods and tastes and even perhaps their philosophies. Some of them may be nihilists for all we know. "I seriously doubt our representation of the world has any reality, ya kna? It's all an illusion, a trick based on sound reverberation."
So what it's like to be a bat probably depends on the specific bat, and on the moment. Some nights are better than others...
If the word "qualia" has no use, then what are we talking about? What is Dennett talking about?
Quoting Isaac
Perhaps our conscious minds "don't work in real time", but why do our brains not work in real time?
So those who don’t perceive them are the ones who don’t trust their senses?
Yes, that's what I meant. I chose "perceptual relationship" over "perception" because it seems to me I have many perceptual relationships but only one aggregate of them. I wanted to avoid collapsing all of perception into my beholding of the coffee cup.
I don't think so? Care required though, there's all the stuff we've spoken about regarding the individuation of components of perception.
Quoting Luke
What do you mean by subjective and objective here? How are the two distinguished? I'm asking because Dennett's position is taken as undermining the distinction between those two, so it should be hard to understand in those terms. (Edit: though I do recall him using the phrase "objective properties" in a paper!)
If you're using "objective" as a placeholder for "all property types", I'd agree with you. If "objective" imputes constraints on the types of property considered and our access to them, I guess I wouldn't.
Quoting Luke
Yes, I find the privacy bit in the article the hardest to grok properly. I think Dennett's left a lot of conceptual work to the reader to understand the inferences he's making. I'll try and write something detailed about it. What I understand of it gestures in this direction:
Dennett wants to block the inference from "It only happened to me" to "Only I can have information about it", I think the latter is the aspect of privacy that Dennett's arguing against. And it's focussed upon the "can" rather than "Only I have information about it".
Like the mental image I get automatically when I feel a strong sense of disgust. It somehow superimposes itself over my vision and looks like dark cracks cutting across my visual field, but they have no depth or distance from me. It happens to me (private in that sense), but now you have information about it (you have some flavour of access to it, but not /my/ perceptual relationship to it).
Here's another way to put the issue with your bacon and walnuts example: what you're trying to model, or should be, is learning, and I'm deeply skeptical that learning is just recording earlier instances and referring back to them.
I am a learning specialist of sorts... An effective, logical and well grounded philosophical approach to learning must involve Phenomenology, and due attention to and respect for subjective experience as the font of all knowledge, as I said. Behaviors are secondary to subjective experience, which must take center stage.
Yes, in short. They question their own senses a bit too much. Real things are simpler than all this mad neurosurgeon literature, because biology places severe constraints. Senses are there for a reason, which is to help the animal navigate the world. They can be trusted, they keep us alive every day.
I expect you know more about the field than I do, but I would be surprised to learn that biology backs you up on this.
It's not the senses that are the problem here. It's the accounting malpractice thereof.
I would try to take this seriously, but you seem to have settled into thinking of yourself as the spokesman for life and flavor and joy and everyone on the other side is some dreary life-denying ivory-tower dweller.
That's all horseshit, of course. If anything, you're the one neglecting the body and thinking exclusively in terms of the mind, consciousness sovereign of all, center of the universe. If that strikes you as a mischaracterization of your position, maybe you'd be willing to reconsider all this "denying the senses" crap you've posted.
It's not horseshit. To deny one's subjectivity is by definition to deny one's own life.
Denying the usefulness of the subjective/objective dichotomy is to deny one particular accounting practice. One's own life is much more than an accounting practice.
I hope you don't mind me butting in, but mind and body are one. There is no separation - one cannot exist without the other. If you accept that consciousness is self organization, it all subsumes to self organization.
Two behaviorists make love. At the end one of them says: "It was good for you. How was it for me?"
Accounting by whom and to whom?
We always return to the subject.
I'm no idealist. Consciousness rules not the universe. Animals endowned with it use it for their own highly integrative analysis and action orientation. They often make mistakes, too.
So if I reject the notion of qualia, but insist my senses are generally trustworthy, I’m just deluding myself? Or maybe it’s the other way around...... if my senses are generally trustworthy in themselves, then I am only deluding myself in the rejection of qualia?
As much as I’m willing to admit to deluding myself upon proper grounds, it remains much more parsimonious, methinks, to allow perceiving its dependability, dismiss qualia as something conditioned by perceiving, and fault understanding a posteriori or judgement a priori, for whatever cognitive errors I make. Things just run smoother that way.
Quality is not the sort of thing that takes place. It is a standard borne of comparison/contrast.
Quoting Olivier5
And evidently forget where we've already been. You invoked "subjectivity". I argued for it's uselessness as a means to further discriminate between our differing claims about conscious experience.
You returned...
Evolve. Grow lungs. Get out of the subjective waters.
Personally, I find the dual process account pretty convincing, so I think there's lots of stuff going on with us we aren't aware of. If you want to include all of that under "mind", and I would, then I agree wholeheartedly. The disembodied mind is an abstraction.
Quoting Olivier5
Geez Louise. Of course I'm not denying my own subjectivity. On the other hand, sense experience is not a subject-object affair; it's an interaction of organism and environment.
https://www.imprint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Farrell_Open_Access.pdf
Qualia seem to meet the three criteria set out for a technical term.
So your conscious experience is not subjective? Is that what you say?
That's just another way to say the same thing though.
Not so much. More because he used an ad pop that turned out to be wrong.
Does it hurt when you stub your toe?
Qualia is incoher-
No, does it hurt when you stub your toe?
When we talk about reporting-
No, does it hurt when you stub your toe?
The neurological states invol-
No, does it hurt when you stub your toe?
Define-
No, does it hurt when you stub your toe?
....................yes.
How does the brain produce that feeling of pain when you stub your toe?
It doesn't hurt when I stub my toe.
And further:
I make coffee for us; we each take a sip. You say it is too bitter for your taste; I say it's not so much bitter as nutty. Conversations such as this are a commonplace. It's understood that the liquid can taste quite different to different folk.
Talk of qualia serves only to obscure such conversation. "You can never know what the coffee tastes like to me"...well, yes I can; I know it tastes bitter. I can surmise that another coffee, even nuttier to me, might well be more bitter to you.
I know what the coffee tastes like for you.
Qualia fail in so far as they deny that we can have conversations of this sort. Qualia are supposedly ineffable - we cannot explain them to others. The taste of coffee is not ineffable. Quite the opposite - folk build careers and indeed whole industries on the basis of talking about the very sort of thing that is supposedly beyond discussion.
Incidentally, the quotes given above and the text around them in the article should be sufficient to put an end to the risible objection that Dennett denies the reality of conscious experience. Those who have made that assertion in this thread are guilty of not having understood what is being said; they ought go back and read at least the introduction of the article.
Yes, I would agree with you. The entire biological system is undergoing a process of self organization, in my view.
They do not trust in their own feelings, and so they put their trust in the feelings of others.
As far as I can see, there are no thoughts without feelings. I have yet to experience one! :smile:
The below is a qualia articulation that I believe would satisfy the burden of proof sought. None of these elements can exist separate to the others. Whenever you experience one of these elements you also experience the others.
The qualia of life is consciousness
The qualia of consciousness are experiences.
The qualia of experiences are emotions.
The qualia of emotions are feelings.
The qualia of feelings are points on the Pain Pleasure Spectrum
The qualia of points on the PPS are death - pain / pleasure - life.
The qualia of life is consciousness – this completes the consciousness loop.
In other words, when you are alive, you are conscious, and you are having an experience, which is emotional, as it feels either painful or pleasurable or something in between.
When asleep and dreaming this would apply also, but experience of sleep is mostly ineffable.
The idea of "objective properties" may be something I erroneously inferred from your earlier comments (e.g. here) regarding 'extrinsic relational properties'. My assumption was that if perceptual properties are not subjective, then they can only be objective. I took 'objective properties' to mean that one perceives an object to be red because the redness inheres in the object, not in the perception. But if there were such objective properties, then everybody should perceive the object in the same way (namely, as red). However, conditions such as colour blindness and cerebral achromatopsia indicate that people have different perceptions and/or properties in relation to the same objects. This suggests that perception/properties are subjective, not objective. 'Extrinsic relational properties' seems like an attempt to have perceptual properties be neither subjective nor objective. However, while I understand that there is a relation involved in forming a perception, I have trouble understanding how a perception - together with its properties - could be anything but for a subject, i.e. subjective.
We're aware of what Dennett claims. It's also been pointed out that he likes to equivocate on terms like consciousness and free will. So he'll say that of course we're conscious and taste coffee and see colors, but then he goes on to argue in a way that denies the first person experience. So the conclusion to draw is that he doesn't really mean it the same way. By consciousness, Dennett means a third-person description amenable to science.
By tasting coffee and seeing colors, Dennett means something other than the sensations of taste and color. He means the behavioral aspect of discrimination, and its biological functions, which includes giving mistaken reports about coffee tastes and red cups, when it entails there being some first person experience to it.
Thus the claim that a wine tasting machine would have the same conscious gustary experience.
We seem to have very different understandings of what the issues are here. Not sure there's much else to say.
Citation.
Because if you do not present what he actually says, then it's just humbug.
My guess is that Dennett was arguing, again, against talking about stuff about which one cannot talk. That seems to be where the core misunderstanding of what he has said sits.
Are those who support qualia comfortable with this semi-mystical nonsense? Because this is what bad philosophy looks like, this is where inept terminology leads.
Are you saying this dose not apply to you?
Edit. It would not apply to a philosophical zombie. :smile:
If you do not like the word qualia, you could use the word quality instead. It is philosophical jargon, I admit, but it is now well established. Would a word change make a difference? I don't think so. The problem is not the word, the problem is Materialism vs Consciousness - that the nature of consciousness is idealistic, is Dennett's problem, wouldn't you agree?
That looks exactly wrong. It serves to hide distinctions and similarities by grossly simplifying our tried, attested and substantial language around sensations.
Go back and look at the rest of this post. Wouldn't you agree that simply asserting that our sensations are ineffable serves to remove them from the conversation?
I think it is absolutely logical. You can not have consciousness without experience. You can not have experience without emotion. You can not have emotion without feeling. You can not have feeling without a pain / pleasure spectrum. Qualia articulates them, and they are logically inseparable.
Quoting Banno
We can only remove our sensations from the conversation via anesthesia. This is what needs to be addressed, not negated.
Where are the qualia in that description? They are not needed.
What is clearer if they are added? Nothing.
All they seem to have permitted is the construction of this:Quoting Pop
mystical hokum.
You behave dogmatically here, you try to defend a long-dead dogma (behaviorism), and that's why you have nothing interesting to say on the topic. You think defensively, not creatively.
Hope it works for you. I will stick to science and to the tools nature gave me.
Statements such as "Alice feels cold" and "the apple is red" abstract over the underlying physical processes. First, as abstractions, they are direct by design and are (high-level) reflections of the world (being true or false). And second, as abstractions, they presuppose a particular perspective. So that permits perceptual relativity.
Note that "feels cold" doesn't predicate Alice's sentience, or perceptions, it predicates Alice herself. The statement does, however, presuppose that Alice is sentient, otherwise it would be a category mistake.
On this ordinary language scheme, subject/object duality is unnecessary, and an internal/external distinction is just an artefact of that duality. So a question of qualia doesn't arise.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I agree.
Quoting Wayfarer
So an alternative to that is that Alice's feeling of the cold, or that the apple is red, etc., are first-class attributions which more specialized scientific statements derive from and explain. We're interested in scientific explanations of how it is that Alice feels cold, not in creating artificial distinctions that make such explanations impossible in principle or, on the other hand, denying that they are real at all.
He's talking about the word itself. The word exists. I suppose on way to put it if you want to maintain that all words we use must, by that use, have a meaning (a position I have some sympathy with), then you could say the Dennett was showing that we do not mean any single identifiable thing when using the word. That it has no place in technical discussions such a philosophy or cognitive science. we might sometimes mean 'the sensory perception mechanisms', sometimes the resultant behaviours, sometimes a dualistic or platonic entity...etc. Such ill-defined terms cannot play a part in technical discussion even though they might be used in general conversation (except 'qualia' isn't). Have a read of the Farrell paper I cited, which @Banno has kindly found a free online version of. It gives a very good argument as to why 'what it's like' cannot be counted as a technical term and I think the argument applies equally to 'qualia'.
Quoting Luke
Because they have backward-acting neurons which suppress signals from more primary cortices before they get processed in the models of cortices higher than them. All the while that's happening, these higher level cortices are not on idle, waiting for the results, they're still processing the previous data and this affects the backward acting signals. So basically, before a signal has even left a primary area it is out of date, it has been interpreted post hoc on the basis of a model from a few seconds ago (or a long as a few minutes ago as you go higher up the cortices).
"The cold is feeling Alice" makes as much sense as "Alice is feeling cold", right? English grammar makes no distinction between subject and object.
Err... sorry, I mean: distinction between subject and object makes no English grammar
Just noticed this edit. Interesting. Personally, I think it fails on the third criteria - 'meaning'. I think Dennett's account here shows that the term does not provide function in the field (of which it is supposed to be a technical term) on account of its technical meaning. It creates questions on account of presumptions about it, but that's not a 'function' in the sense Farrell means it, I don't think. To be a function in that sense it would have to instrumental in answering some question which arose aside from any presumptions about the putative term.
I'm referring to philosophical subject/object dualism, not grammar. The grammatical distinction is very useful.
Okay so on this ordinary language scheme, subject/object duality is necessary.
Well, since qualia has no meaning, I'll have to agree that it cannot have a special meaning...
I don't understand your point. Can you elaborate?
But the distinction between primary and secondary attributes is hard-baked into our worldview. There’s no easy way to unscramble this particular omelette. Heck, Dennett won’t even admit there’s a need to make the effort, or that there is an issue to solve. Modern scientific method ‘brackets out’ the subjective - that is the meaning of the ‘view from nowhere’. And then, having bracketed it out, it says it can’t find any sign of its reality. There’s a really basic sleight-of-hand behind this entire debate, but for those who can’t see it, it’s devilishly hard to explain.
Quoting Olivier5
Of course it does. All transitive verbs have one or more objects. In a sentence the subject and object are indicated by the case of the verb which the sentence contains e.g. in sentences such as ‘he gave it’, ‘she took it’ the subject is the agent and the object denoted by ‘it’. Persons are differentiated from objects by the use of the personal pronouns.
In any case the underlying philosophical issue is that of agency, of whether subjects are meaningfully designated moral agents or whether that sense of personal agency is an illusion engendered by cellular automata (as Dennett holds).
Ha! A much simpler refutation than mine.
That's one of the related philosophical issue indeed. Another one, much more pressing here in my view, is What founds the knowledge of Dennett, if not his subjective observation of the world?
And then, if Dennett's observations are illusory, why read them?
Or is he saying that everybody else is deluded about their observations and consciousness, but not him?
I've mentioned this already: reason cannot undermine reason, a subject cannot doubt his own subjectivity, observations cannot prove that all observations are illusory.
Our theories about the world emerge from our pretheoretical observations and reason. If some of our theories require that pretheoretical human observation and reason be illusory, then these theories undermine themselves. They must therefore be false.
I think the contention comes from believing that qualia are properties vs phenomena. Qualia deniers talk of them as properties and so they don't make sense. They argue that the seeming produced by an experience is not a property of the input recieved therfore talk of it is fruitless. In other words, "this apple seems red" is not a property of the apple (or else it would seem red to everyone but it doesn't to colorblind people) so proposing a "red quale" is useless. What exactly is the "red quale" a property of?
Qualia advocates I find usually talk of the concept as a phenomena. A sort of "umbrella term" for experiences. So "this apple seems red" and "I experienced a red quale when looking at this apple" are identical statements.
So to an advocate saying "qualia doesn't exist" is the same as saying "nothing happens when you look at a red apple" while for a denier when an advocate says "qualia exist" it is just advocating an incoherent concept.
It's like if a software engineer talked to a hardware designer with neither knowing anything about the other's job.
SE: Which is faster? Quicksort or Merge sort?
HD: What do you mean "Quicksort"?
SE: Oh quicksort is when you *insert algorithm here*
HD: What are you saying? Starting index? Ending index? None of that stuff exists.
SE: Are you saying that computers just do things randomly without instructions?
And around and around they go. The hardware designer opens up the computer to show that "algorithms" don't exist and wonders why the software designer remains unconvinced while the software designer thinks the hardware designer is just some idiot denying the obvious.
Or maybe like this: Dennett's view is a pretty bold attempt to address the Hard Problem. It's not the prevailing view in either neuroscience or philosophy, so we're just looking at how Dennett has approached the topic.
I think doubt is what he's promoting. Just start with doubt that other people have the experiences they describe, as described. Imagine a weird dream that defies articulation. Imagine yourself struggling to find words for it. You settle upon a certain narrative.
Dennett thinks we're doing that all the time, and we've gotton so used to it that we're taking the narrative seriously.
Well as long as he's not doubting that I have experiences he can do whatever he wants.
But I'm more interested in how this:
Quoting frank
Addresses the hard problem in any way. The question is "Why does inanimate matter produce these mental phenomena we are making these (supposedly terribly inaccurate and incoherent) narratives about?" Not "How accurate are our narratives of what we're experiencing?" No answer to the latter will address the former because the latter admits that we are at least experiencing something, which poses the question "Why".
The Hard Problem isn't about explaining how consciousness arises from inanimate matter. The "easy" problem is explaining how the functions of consciousness work, easy in the sense that science already has the tools to do that. The Hard Problem is about explaining experience. It's not clear that science does have the conceptual tools for that.
Dennett's solution is to show how explaining functions does explain experience.
I keep coming back to something Chalmers said once about Dennett: that he might truly be different from the rest of us. If so, maybe Isaac, Banno, and drake are in that same category. Note that there really is this inability to conceive qualia. There tends to be emotion behind it (on both sides). I think there might be an experience gap here that only shows up in our inability to make sense of one another.
(Dennett, 1991a, in a precursor to “Consciousness Explained”)
Not given pre-theoretically carries the implication that, if qualitative properties are possible at all, they must be given pursuant to some cognitive theory. An artifact of misguided theorizing carries the implication that, on the one hand, quality is a property, or, the consciousness of quality in and of itself, is in fact directly accessible to us because it is in fact an intuition. Taken together, it becomes clear that whichever cognitive theory predicates quality with a property, and consciousness of such as belonging to phenomena, is metaphysically empty.
Proper theorizing.....understood herein as opinion, of course, with just a hint of argumentum ab auctoritate.....attributes to quality “the order of degree in time”, as opposed to, e.g., quantity, which is “the order of content in time”. Thus it is, following that opinion, that WIL intuitions grounding WIL language, can never occur as time-determinant conditions alone (which validates “pumping” out those of that kind), for they are themselves necessarily conditioned by it, but may only be indirectly accessible iff it is conjoined to the intuition of a phenomenon which is itself conditioned by successions in time, which gives phenomena their degree. It is therefore only from such degree, that WIL language may ensue. Still, even the possibility of WIL language granted by intuition of degrees in phenomena is not sufficient for its intelligibility, for the degree of a thing..........wait for it...............does not give the order of it.
Not only are “special subjective properties” of quality not special, they are not even properties of a subject; they are merely relative understandings of a subject that thinks order in his conceptions.
Please. Hold the tomatoes. I’m only here cuz it’s too early for football.
Source
I don't know how reliable that is but there. I didn't say the hard problem is explaining consciousness per se, but explaining what is the relationship between experience and physical matter. What processes bring about the experience of "Oh that's hot".
Quoting frank
Maybe. The only person I know is not a robot is me.
We may have to recategorize consciousness as a physical thing in order to build a working theory of consciousness. IOW, talk surrounding the Hard Problem doesnt insist on any ontological commitments. In fact, it implies that we may have to be flexible in order to solve it.
So solving the Hard Problem just means arriving at a decent theory of consciousness. We may find along the way that: "How does consciousness arise from inanimate matter" is the wrong question
Quoting khaled
Yep. And that's really where the topic ends. You can doubt that other people have phenomenal consciousness, but if you're doubting it about yourself, you're in the minority, and there may be something different about you. The rest of us definitely know qualia day in and day out.
Maybe, but I'd much sooner believe that people are only pretending to doubt it about themselves or that what they're doubting isn't "whether or not they have experience" but something more practical like "Is the concept of qualia a fitting description of conscious experience?" than that they are legitimately doubting it. Because I cannot conceive of someone doubting whether or not they are experiencing somthing. The mere fact that they are doubting shows that they are experiencing something (a thought process). Unless they're not in which case they are p-zombies (or just zombies since they aren't a thought experiment anymore)
Quoting frank
In that case the "Physical" in "Physical thing" just becomes redundant. Which I'm fine with. The list of "physical things" has expanded throughout time. From rocks, to less tangible waves, to less tangaible forces, to less tangible "fields" to less tangible "probability clouds" etc. If consciousness joins the mix then I think the "set of things that are not physical" will be an empty set finally. But then again, that just means that "Physical thing" has just become "Thing".
Quoting frank
But how would such a theory ever be confirmed? That theory must be able to tell us the conditions required for consciousness to occur. But how will we test the hypothesis? Until we can somehow make a "consciousness-o-meter" I can't conceive of that happening. The problem is not just hard it's unapproachable. One person can say "consciousness is physical and it arises when x and y occur" and another might say "consciousness is inherent in all matter and combines according to x and y" but without the consciousness-o-meter, they are both just as clueless as a layman as to what is actually happening.
And I can't conceive of how a consciousness-o-meter will be made. How will we make a device that detects something which we're not even sure has any physical impact. If my couch is conscious, that is still consistent with every physical and chemical law there is. We don't even have a clue on how to begin detecting consciousness, only a bunch of hypothesis all of which are untestable.
That's why I can't see what Dennett says as a serious solution. It is a hypothesis (maybe, I still can't make much sense of the rest of what he says outside this paper) but even as a hypothesis it is untestable. It is funny to me how he dismissed qualia on the grounds of not being able to test for it (among other things) but whatever solution he is posing to the hard problem is equally untestable. I'm not very familiar with Dennett so maybe I'm critically misunderstanding somewhere.
What an odd thing to say. How does consciousness arise from inanimate matter? If that's not a hard problem, I guess there should be an answer to that question, right?
ETA: I see Khaled beat me to it.
Right. Obviously you arent alone there. Likewise, Dennett says you're a deluded victim of folk psychology.
Quoting khaled
We'll finally be out from under Descartes at that point.
Quoting khaled
That meter has been a feature of science fiction for decades, so the concept is conceivable (which just means it's not contradictory). But yes, we're only at the beginning stages. It might be that climate change will interrupt progress and our descendants 1000 years from now will take it up and be mildly amused that we thought of it too.
It may be that there is no answer to that question.
This doesn't make sense. How can the mere fact that we're doubting prove we're having an experience with 'being a p-zombie' as the alternative? If there's an alternative, then is is necessarily true that it's possible to doubt without having an experience of the thought process (presumably that's what the p-zombie does) and so you cannot then say anyone who doubts must be having an experience of doubting purely on the grounds of there being no alternative.
I've asked this on another thread, but for you, what would an answer to this question look like?. If I ask "why do we have noses" an evolutionary, or physiological account suffices as an answer, but for some reason such an account is insufficient for the 'hard problem' enthusiasts. I've yet to get clear on why.
If materialism is right, and inanimate matter exists, there's an explanation for how it gives rise to conscious experience. We might never KNOW the explanation, but that's different than there not being an answer.
There may be more to the academic debate, or not, but that's the only discussion I see in this thread.
I'm reading about the changes that took place in science when the concept of zero was introduced. Imagine someone 2400 years ago daydreaming about a theory of lightning. There just wouldnt be any way they'd ve able to do what we can do. They didnt have zero.
That's an example of what concepts can do.
You gotta quit reading so much Kant.
:wink:
He's right. Why is consciousness so hard for science to figure out? Why have we made essentially no progress on an explanation?
Quoting khaled
Quoting frank
The problem is a consequence of not understanding our own thought and belief, what it consists of, how it emerges, evolves, what it gives rise to, and the role that all of this plays in our lives(conscious experience).
That's the only place to start.
We know quite a bit about the functional aspects of consciousness. With regard to the rest: we're just starting.
If the sort of answer which is appropriate for noses is also appropriate for consciousness, then we've made loads of progress. We've got some really good predictive models, we've got a few plausible evolutionary 'stories', we've even isolated the development of certain neural networks involved in the development of consciousness. Given how unbelievably complex the brain is (and how recently we've been able to really examine what's going on), I don't think there's any reason to be maudlin about progress.
Anyway, the reason to be maudlin about progress is because there hasn't been any (on the hard problem). We're really good at finding neural correlates to mental states, but on the questions of how are we conscious and why are we conscious, the theories are all over the place: panpsychism, mysterianism, it's-all-an-illusionism, computationalism, etc. There's no consensus on anything. The only other place this shows up in science is the lack of consensus to explain what's going on with quantum mechanics.
Furthermore, there are a multitude of different kinds of conscious experience, and these are all getting mashed together in the discussion of 'experience'. They are not all the same, aside from having, emerging, and/or otherwise being existentially dependent upon the same pre-theoretical foundation, which definitely does not include "qualia" as it is targeted by Dennett.
However, the ineffable and private aspects must hold good when we're talking about language less creatures' conscious experience. Sorry Banno. It's not that we cannot talk about their conscious experience, it's that they cannot. Our knowing that much allows us to be able to refine our standard/criterion for what pre-theoretical conscious experience can and/or must include as well. But...
The biggest flaw I see in all of this... including Dennett's paper... is the sheer lack of an acceptable theory of meaning. All conscious experience must be meaningful to the creature having the experience. I suspect, when that is gotten right, the rest of the 'problems' will be much less daunting.
Ehhhhh.....you know how it is, right? Somebody’s gotta show the post-moderns how they went off the epistemic rails.
Kidding. Reading a lot does not necessarily indicate learning.
I've told you this before: it's extremely patronising to assume people aren't conscious in the way you are. It's also highly implausible that there are different sorts of humans which are individuated by their stance on an obscure philosophical dispute that takes a lot of its popular form in the 1970s.
If you want an explanation for why I've responded emotionally to you, it's because I've perceived you as dismissive, unengaged and evasive. You've also doubted my basic competence to discuss the issue, and when I gave you a standard definition of externalism with respect to mental content:
you chose to uncharitably read into it that I had no idea that internalists may allow mental states to have externally individuated properties, but not only externally individuated properties ("internalists wouldn't disagree with that"); internalists with regard to mental content align the phenomenal with intrinsic properties of mental content. Recall this is also disputed in the paper, and we've been talking about issues related to it since page 3 of the thread.
We can both play the "different type of human" game, I personally uncharitably suspect that qualia advocates do not have the capability for "second or third thoughts" in Pratchett's sense:
Qualia advocates are unable to see patterns in their own thought, or notice generative patterns for their own agent-environment relationship operative within them. And if you find that over passionate, contemptuous and totally unpersuasive, remember that you have already accused me of having a limited form of consciousness when compared to you.
A fair amount of what you just said about me is how I feel about you. I understand that I've been offensive, but I thought I was just being defensive. I apologize. I do think we're better off avoiding each other.
And it's really not condescending to wonder if people are different. There are ways that I'm different from most people. I mentioned earlier that I have a cousin who has perfect pitch. That's a very distinct difference and there is a genetic basis for it.
:smile:
What would such pre-linguistic reason consist of?
Well, I picked up Kant far too early, in the beginning of my interest in philosophy, along with Spinoza, Witt, and Russell. So, undoubtedly I did not understand it to the degree that I may now, should I ever read him again.
The CI is one of the best philosophical renderings in history, to this day.
Back to the topic though...
:zip:
Tiffany books. Absolute classics.
Well of course I'm in perfect agreement with you, yet threads about Dennett are like zombies that refuse to stop moving even though they're fundamentally devoid of anything meaningful!
If the theory is a good one, it may give us tools to measure consciousness. Let's imagine for instance that a theory crops up, saying consciousness is mediated by brain waves. The supporters of this theory will try and find signals in brain waves, and if they find some patterns, and start to notice clues, they could program their MRI to tract a certain kind of wave modulation.... leading one day to be able to read someone's thoughts... Science fiction?
It's not condescending to wonder and study the differences between people. The condescending thing is claiming that people who disagree with you over a practically irrelevant philosophical dispute literally lack a mental faculty when you've not presented evidence for it. Heck, the p-zombies we're allegedly closer to even existing is a disputed point! Perhaps we are simply poor-in-world ;)
Quoting frank
The troll cycle: I expect you to spend lots of words explaining your position and disagreements, you read my long form argument posts as dismissive and over-critical and respond briefly and amorphously, my expectation is frustrated and I write another detailed exegesis/rebuttal, your expectation is frustrated and you respond briefly and amorphously... Mismatch of respect standards.
Quoting frank
Fair enough!
One which has inspired multiple books and numerous papers? That dispute which we're having the thousandth thread about in the history of this forum? The one that Dennett has probably had more to say about than any other dispute?
Yes. It's a dispute about what human nature is, why should we bifurcate human nature to fit the disputing parties?
"Pre-theoretical" means something different from "pre-linguistic". It means stuff you do in practice without thinking about it in theory. Like when you watch large packs of birds fly. You are not necessarily theorizing about yourself watching birds fly, or even about how the birds fly. You may simply watch them. You may wonder why they fly so high or turn so suddenly, all as one, but it's not a research program yet, more a wonder, a question. You may start to reason that this is peculiar and beautiful, and start filming the phenomenon with your cellphone. You are still not theorizing much. You are just recording whatever you can of the event, thinking your friends will like this.
You may theorize latter, for instance if I ask you why you looked at those damn birds for so long.
I didnt claim anything. I said I keep coming back to that as a possible explanation for the existance of reductionism. No insult intended. If you want me to get exhaustive about my knowledge of how differently people can experience the world, I guess I could.
It gets my goat when someone attributes a stance to me that I clearly didnt take. To avoid having my zen harshed, I usually just ignore it. Are you like that?
Banno has clarified that he doesn't deny sensation. There is a taste of coffee, and it can vary from bitter for you and nutty to him, but it's not inexpressible or (fundamentally) private.
However, we do have this from Dennett, which I quoted earlier:
[quote=Quining Qualia]The properties of the "thing experienced" are not to be confused with the properties of the event that realizes the experiencing. To put the matter vividly, the physical difference between someone's imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow might be nothing more than the presence or absence of a particular zero or one in one of the brain's "registers". Such a brute physical presence is all that it would take to anchor the sorts of dispositional differences between imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow that could then flow, causally, from that "intrinsic" fact. (I doubt that this is what the friends of qualia have had in mind when they have insisted that qualia are intrinsic properties.)[/quote]
So what is Dennett saying here? It's a category error to say that the difference between purple and green is the neural equivalent of 0 and 1, because numbers aren't colors, and neither are spiking neurons. So the issue arises when attempting to explain our conscious sensations by reducing them to dispositional, relational or functional talk. Reason being that it seems to dismiss the experience of sensation, by replacing it with talk of something else (the purported underlying mechanism or behavior).
The biological explanation for coffee taste isn't the nutty or bitter taste itself. That's why we say there is a "what it's like", a "seeming", an "appearance of something". To be conscious is not to be conscious of some perceptual process or 1s and 0s in the brains "registers", it's to be aware of how things seem, whether nutty or purple.
We could have visible light detector hooked up to a voice dictation that reads out a color that matches our visual system, but there's no reason to think this system would have a color sensation just because it can discriminate and report accurately. We could easily modify the dictation to invert the colors or map taste words or Trumpisms instead (sorry, election is still "on" my mind).
And we could modify the detector for some EM range we can't see and feed that the color dictation. Would that mean it's now having the same color sensations for light we can't see? The p-zombie argument came about because we can't "see" how any physical system results in conscious sensations, even though we know there are physical correlations in the human case.
No doubt. And that has only to do with his moral philosophy. His speculative epistemology has been professionally superseded....or neglected outright......which leaves we armchair types to keep it alive.
Probably because we don’t know any better. Or just maybe...there isn’t any better.
Imagine that only Spinozists have the conatus - a will/power to survive, grow, adapt.
Let's say I'm a Spinozist and you're not, and I start telling you that you have no will to survive, grow or adapt because you deny Spinoza's account of the conatus... That is what is happening here. Some advance the thesis that others experience the world totally differently in a manner that is convenient for one side of a philosophical dispute. You have no will to survive, you are not a Spinozist. I have no phenomenal character to my experience, because I am a qualia eliminativist.
People notice disparities in experience by looking at self reports. If we met in real life over alcohol, you'd have no reason to doubt that I feel stuff. Consider:
The last time I ate a burrito the mouth feel of the bread was extremely soft, the chilli inside was quite sour and moderately spicy. There were tingling sensations in my nose from the heat as I swallowed. I felt my cheeks flush too. The texture of the chilli was very smooth, contrasting the hardness of the cool lettuce wrapped in with it. The lettuce was very slightly wilted, having less crunch than I expected. There were sweet fruity notes from the pineapple diced and run through the chilli, that flavour of pineapple didn't permeate the chilli though, it came when my tongue found it.
And if you can't tell I have flavour and texture qualia from charitably reading my self report of taste, you couldn't tell for anyone else either!
...which is begging the question already. As I said earlier, the debate is about these assumptions, discussion is pointless if you're going to start from the premise that they're obviously the case.
It is a category error. 1s and 0s aren't colors. They're numbers. And neurons aren't colors either. And guess what, neither are photons!
All of that is qualia. What Dennett wants you to do is find some space for doubt.
Start by looking at other people. See how there is room to doubt what they say about their experiences of burritos. Once you doubt that I am a reliable witness regarding what sounded like a Peruvian recipe, then you can move on to doubting yourself. See?
In these discussions, I really am at a loss to explain how the Dennet's and Churchlands of the world actually the believe the stuff they're saying. I think it has less to do with how they experience the world and more to do with a certain mindset that views consciousness (and everything associated with it) as "woo".
Not trying to be more-eliminativist-than-thou, but... ok, maybe I am.
But I'm surprised that embracing these other mentalisms is expected to clear the air in a debate with mentalists. As though it'll then be clearer what everyone is talking about.
I have never like the term 'what is it like', though. 'What is it like to be a bat'? Apart from the fact that it depends on the particular bat and the time, I would say that there is nothing it is like to be a bat. in the sense that being a bat is not like being anything else. Perhaps 'what it is to be a bat' or 'what it is to drink tea' and so on would be less misleading.
Good point. "What it is like" implies a comparison. Which can work for bitter and nutty coffee, because we know what bitter and nutty tastes like. But we don't know what a sonar modality would be like. We have nothing to compare it to, unless it's like vision or hearing, although bats also have ears and eyes, as do dolphins. So sonar sensations might be something entirely different that we can't compare to.
Quoting Marchesk
I'm not even clear on what you want an account of. Is it that a given cup of coffee seems a particular way to me? Or that I'm aware that the cup of coffee seems a particular way to me? Or is there an awareness of the taste of the coffee which is only by definition how it tastes to me?
One thing about consciousness is that it seems to be related to volition, might even be why we have it at all instead of just reflexes, however complicated. Or it could be this is the cheapest way to build up a repertoire of complex reflexes. (I spend far more time talking and writing than I do trying to remember words I want to use.) At any rate, we don't have volition here: I don't choose to see the world as colored, or to smell what I smell or feel what I feel, and so on. I have no control over what's dumped into my awareness and what's not. (Similarly, it's almost impossible not to understand speech in a language you understand, so robust is the habit.) That strikes me as interesting, but I've no idea what to do with it.
Chase and Sanborn are sophisticated programs inside an elaborate computer simulation. They perform all the same functions when tasting coffee as humans do, and make the same reports in the simulation. Some say that means they must be conscious agents.
So computer scientists examine the running code and hardware. But nowhere do they find a sensation of coffee, nor any colors or feels. Only self-reports. Some others say they are not conscious, but rather digital p-zombies.
The problem remains hard.
Turing test. That's all he had to say.
Yes, I don't think your position was unclear the first time so a fourth or fifth repetition isn't helping. What I was asking was, if the separateness of these things is an unquestionable belief for you, why you're taking part in a discussion whose premise is to question them. It's like someone declaring they believe in God as a matter of faith and then taking part in a discussion about whether God exists. It's disingenuous. If you've no intention of re-considering your beliefs in these matters just don't partake in discussions about doing so. Why would you?
Whoops. Was thinking about how I can't choose to see an un-colored world and forgot about attention, which I've also thought should be part of this discussion, since introspection is not our default activity and so much talk about consciousness among philosophers is really talk about introspection.
Happens I'm about 3 weeks into an uncontrolled experiment wherein the subject (myself) attempts to acquire absolute pitch. I'm still hopeful of refuting your innatist aspersion, albeit unscientifically.
I aspire also (perhaps) to a Mary's Room type revelation: an additional dimension to my auditory perception. E.g. a 'global' quality attaching to the pitch of a sound, independent of its local relations to other, proximate sound-events (relative pitch). The kind of quality that apparently enables the possessors of absolute pitch to associate different keys with different moods etc.
I would be keen to share the unscientific data with any other interested parties (in a thread), especially if they were minded to share their own? E.g. recollection of their previous attempts, or description of attempts started now, or soon.
Absent that demand, I'll update this (single) post. So WTS if interested...
Cool. Yes, I'm interested. My cousin has a genetic anomaly that's known to be associated with perfect pitch. She's always had it. She started playing piano at 3 years from watching her mother play.
But it's true that jazz musicians demonstrate the ability to perceive key transitions that normal people can't. Supposedly there is a study. I could find if you need it.
It speaks to the part that recollection plays.
Seems like you mean to say that the word "qualia" has no referent, rather than no meaning.
Quoting Isaac
Thanks, I'll take a look.
Quoting Isaac
I take all this to mean that it takes some time for a signal (e.g. sense data) to travel (e.g. from the skin) to the brain. Without wanting to derail the discussion too much, the question becomes: when is "real time", or with what is "real time" synchronous? You seem to suggest it is (e.g.) when light hits the retina. But why then? And whose retina?
I think the first step to unscrambling that omelette is to reject the 'view from nowhere', and thus also the 'bracketing out' of the human perspective.
So-called "primary attributes" ultimately derive their meaning from their role in human experience. Einstein notably developed his special theory of relativity as a construction based on measuring-rods, clocks, and observers.
"Secondary attributes" similarly derive their meaning from their role in human experience. Alice observes that the red measuring-rod has black markings at one centimeter intervals. That's the view from somewhere - the perspective of Alice. So there's no good reason to dichotomize human experience in those primary/secondary terms (which is just the Lockean manifestation of subject/object duality).
Yes, it's a conceptual dispute. Consider whether gravity is a real force (per Newton) or a fictitious force (per GR). On any theory, walking off the edge of a cliff is a bad idea. But from the perspective of GR, gravity understood as action at a distance is "woo" (it's instead local spacetime curvature).
Similarly stubbing your toe is going to hurt, regardless of your theory. But conceptually, qualia for a non-dualist is like a real force of gravity (action at a distance) is for a modern physicist. It's a ghostly entity with no real role to play in one's theory.
But it’s there for very good reason, and it can’t easily be rejected. But it can be revealed through analysis.
It was Galileo Galilei who wrote ‘the book of nature is written in mathematics’ and whose legacy includes the astonishing leaps that science made in subsequent centuries. It is true that understanding the laws that govern just those attributes of bodies that can be made subject to precise quantification, combined with Descartes’ newly-discovered algebraic geometry, laid the ground for the ‘new science’ that is at the basis of modern scientific method, which has universal scope and application, and spectacular results, not least these amazing ‘typing machines’ we all seem to have nowadays. And you can’t let subjective preferences play a role in engineering specifications.
This is all the subject matter of another of Thomas Nagel’s books, namely, Mind and Cosmos. He says
(pp. 35-36)
So what you see with eliminative materialism is this dogmatic insistence that the objective view of modern science is complete in principle, if not in detail. Whatever ‘consciousness’ is, it must be something which can be accommodated inside this schema, otherwise it’s reality is either illusory or deceptive. That’s their view in a nutshell.
So what’s involved in rejecting it is retracing the steps, as it were, to how that situation arose and re-framing the whole issue. And that’s where I think what has become known as ‘embodied cognition’ has a vital piece of the solution. It points out that all knowledge, even the purportedly abstract knowledge obtained by the physical sciences, is situated, both in terms of a body, and also in terms of culture, language etc (hence neuroanthropology and such disciplines.) Hence my frequent reference to the expression ’cartesian anxiety’ which comprises a chapter heading Maturana/Varela/Thomson ‘Embodied Mind’.
I didn't. There IS an alternative. Them being a p-zombie (or, again, just a zombie since they're not a thought experiment any more). But I would sooner believe that they're just confused than believe they're a zombie
One possible answer is that some from of consciousness is inherent in all matter. Another would be some set of conditions that produce consciousness. Another would be whatever Dennett is doing. There are plenty of hypothesis. But without a "consciousness-o-meter" they're all untestable.
Quoting Isaac
It WOULD be sufficient if it was more than a mere hypothesis and there was some sort of evidence to back it up. In the case for noses what you have provided is "testable" in the sense that we can see noses evolve through time by finding different fossils. But we have yet to find a device that can test hypothesis about how consciousness comes about.
Agreed. But that's still a terrible starting place. Considering that I have yet to detect another thought outside of my own head. How might we form a theory about what these thoughts consist of, how they emerge, evolve, etc without being able to detect the thing we are testing the hypothesis for from a third person perspective?
That's why the problem is hard.
Sure but that still doesn't answer why we have thoughts in the first place. Knowing that "brainwave x" corresponds to "I like apples" doesn't tell us HOW brainwave x produces the experience of thinking that one likes apples. Just like my knowing that: when I press a series of keys on my keyboard while highlighting this box a bunch of text pops up, doesn't tell me how a computer works.
Dennett seems to allow for qualia, insofar as they do not have the four special qualities he cites of being:
(1) intrinsic
(2) ineffable
(3) private
(4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness
In other words, he allows for properties of conscious experience (i.e. qualia) as long as they do not possess these four special qualities. I assume you reject qualia because you take "qualia" to refer to properties of conscious experience which do possess these four special qualities. And therefore, like Dennett, you would allow that we do e.g. see the redness of a flower or taste the bitterness of coffee.
[quote=Dennett]Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia. Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special.[/quote]
Quoting Banno
Just like the problem of the inverted spectrum, how do I know that what you call "nutty" is the same as what I call "nutty"? Paraphrasing Dennett: "Since we both learned [flavour] words by being [fed] public [flavour] objects, our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective [flavours].
Even if we experience the same subjective flavours, how do I really know what you mean by "nutty"? Does it taste like a particular type of nut? Do all peanuts taste the same, for example? And what sort of bitterness are we talking about? There are many shades of difference here which language cannot easily capture. We could go on endlessly trying to refine it. I think this is what Dennett criticises (or what qualia advocates are referring to) when he speaks of the ""homogeneity" or "atomicity to analysis" or "grainlessness" that characterizes the qualia of philosophical tradition." A picture is worth a thousand words in other words, and language has difficulty doing justice to the sight before our eyes (or the taste on our tongue, etc.), especially when attempting to convey it to others in high fidelity.
Take the example of the wine tasting machine at intuition pump #2. Dennett describes it as:
[quote=Dennett]A computer based "expert system" for quality control and classification is probably within the bounds of existing technology. We now know enough about the relevant chemistry to make the transducers that would replace taste buds and olfactory organs (delicate color vision would perhaps be more problematic), and we can imagine using the output of such transducers as the raw material--the "sense data" in effect--for elaborate evaluations, descriptions, classifications. Pour the sample in the funnel and, in a few minutes or hours, the system would type out a chemical assay, along with commentary: "a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina"--or words to such effect. Such a machine might well perform better than human wine tasters on all reasonable tests of accuracy and consistency the winemakers could devise, but surely no matter how "sensitive" and "discriminating" such a system becomes, it will never have, and enjoy, what we do when we taste a wine: the qualia of conscious experience![/quote]
What would it take to really invent this machine? How would we go about matching the machine's verbal reports with the chemical compositions of various wines? In particular, how would we obtain the verbal reports to input into the machine? From human wine tasters who actually taste wine, of course! These would be what an expert wine taster would say, because they taste wines and say these sorts of things (give these sorts of descriptions). The wine tasting machine may be indistinguishable from a human (once it is up and running) from a behavioural or functional perspective, but I doubt anyone would say - given the current level of technological sophistication - that the machine does actually taste wine. But another problem is how many different adjectives or scripts could be programmed into the machine without it sounding like a 1980s computer game with a limited range of responses. Furthermore, tastes change and language/descriptions/expressions evolve with them. Can we really imagine such a machine being indistinguishable from humans, and if we could imagine it, could we then doubt whether it did have taste qualia?
Ah. Thanks for clearing that up. Not sure how helpful that distinction is given the task, but at least I better understand what it means.
How does logic tell us what sets the things we label belong to? Are you saying that Hesperus and Phosphorus are two different things, despite both being the same star just because they have different names? Is a chair not a collection of atoms, but some other thing on top of such a collection because atoms are atoms and chairs are chairs? If this is basic logic, then you should be able to write it out in formal notation so we can see how you arrived at your conclusion.
Cool. I have no objection to that. I ask because the majority view from 'hard problemers' seems to be that Dennett is somehow 'not even addressing the question', rather than that he just cannot be shown to be right about the answer. It's a position I've yet to understand so I'm trying to gather some different perspectives on it. If you're not in that camp then you're not really the target of that question. It doesn't really go anywhere from here, but thanks for answering.
Perhaps, but we've no other choice. We make due with what's available.
Quoting khaled
We look to statements of thought and belief for starters. We set out what they consist of at a minimum. We assess whether or not those basic elements could possibly exist in simpler forms. Etc. That's another thread though.
:zip:
Yes, that might be better, but I would say that a word with no proper referent has no consistent meaning (use) and so it's involvement in technical fields like philosophy is highly questionable.
Quoting Luke
Not quite. It's not the route taken that's at issue (otherwise you'd be right, we simply pick a point to class as 'real time'). It's that the point we pick as 'real time' is separate from the activities of the neural circuits which are processing the data we attach to that measure. So with signals we expect to be asynchronous (like light and touch - light is much faster) the faster signal is held back before it is sent to cortices which combine the two senses. Not all cortices (including sub-conscious ones) are getting synchronous signals, which means that whatever we set as 'real time' it's impossible that all parts of the brain are working to it.
While I agree with you on the general thrust (as always), I think you (or Nagel) may be attributing too much antisubjectivity to the scientific method. Galileo imposed the concept of frame of reference, I think. Nothing in physics can be described without a frame of reference - physics are not about the view from nowhere, and do not deny subjectivity or agency. If fact authorship (who discovered what) is a key question in science, absolutely central to the project. Scientists have an ego too.
It is only the most naïve and nihilist forms of materialism that deny consciousness or agency, not science.
The other point is that the "bracketing" was an idea of Husserl if I am not mistaken, and what he recommended philosophers to "bracket" was analysis, so as to return to the acts of perception. That seems far more productive to me that bracketing out the subjectivity of the observer.
No. Whilst I agree with Dennett about rejecting the purported properties of qualia, I also reject that there is such a thing as the 'redness' of a flower. I don't think it makes sense. If there were such a thing, we'd expect some evidence of it, ie it would have some effect on the world. I don't see any evidence of the effect on the world of the 'redness' of a flower, in the sense of a quale. The photons reflected from it have an effect on our retinas, which have effects on our visual cortex, which has effects on our decisions, mental states and behaviours, but I don't see where 'redness' is in any of that.
I don’t believe that Galileo deliberately sought to omit the observer, but the idea of the role of the observer was simply not relevant to his science. It was again much later science that caused the question of the role of the observer to suddenly assume significance. I don’t think the modern philosophical implications would have occurred to him either. They really exploded into consciousness in the subsequent centuries.
The expression of ‘bracketing’ does indeed hail from phenomenology but in such terminology Husserl is merely making explicit what had hitherto been simply assumed. But what I mean by it is that there is a widespread understanding, really the commonsense view, that the universe revealed by modern science is the reference point for what is real. Science has established beyond much doubt the age and extent of the universe, which is of such an enormous scale that the phenomenon of humanity appears as a minute ephemera when compared to it. However again this overlooks the centrality of the human mind in arriving at that understanding. We say it exists independently of us, which in an obvious sense is true, but nevertheless the universe has, as it were, come to this understanding of itself through us. Which is hinted at but not much elaborated by Nagel in Mind and Cosmos.
Quoting Olivier5
Of course. And that is exactly what Dennett, who is not a scientist, represents.
The notion that modern science ‘de-humanises’ the modern worldview is hardly my invention, it is the topic of a vast literature.
Quoting Wayfarer
Through us and other species. And let's remember that our understanding of the universe remains highly imperfect. As for size, why does it matter? The stars are not as wise as you are (Omar Khayyam).
Quoting Wayfarer
That is true but in my experience, real scientists are far more humane and modest than their philosophical worshipers.
Why do you think plants synthetize pigments for their flowers, rather than keep them chlorophyll green? What Darwinian advantage is there to have your flowers colored?
The good and the bad that are in human nature,
The joy and grief that are found in fate and destiny--
Do not attribute them to the movement of heavenly bodies
For according to the path of science
The stars are a thousand times more helpless than you
Do you disagree with Dennett that there are properties of conscious experience?
We are talking about mental stuff, so there's no avoiding mental stuff, as much as some would like to...
:up: That's something I didn't know.
Quoting Olivier5
Don't agree with that. That's kind of fashionable reaction against so called 'human exceptionalism'. We have to own our abilities, not project them on other species. Reason is a soveriegn faculty.
Quoting Olivier5
On the whole I agree with you, but there are some egregious exceptions. Anyway I've made my point about Dennett so will bow out.
It is important to realize that theory emerges from a non-theoretical background, for instance that infants learn how to speak through observation, comparison and imitation, not from grammatical theory. When they grow up they can study grammar theoretically, and even become grammarians. But a grammarian cannot say: "There's no such thing as learning a language."
It follows that those theories -- such as naïve materialist theories -- who deny the efficacy of pre-theoretical observation and reason are shooting themselves in the foot. They can have no credible story of origin, and they cannot make any progress. Theory cannot destroy the basis for theoretical thinking.
In my mind, it's more that we shouldn't go around denying other species possible abilities. W can speak for ourselves of course, but not for others.
If that was true, he would try and propose an alternative conceptual framework, better than the one he criticizes. But this does not appear to be the case.
I presume you're referring to
I don't really agree or disagree here. I think the concept is too poorly defined. If by 'reality of conscious experience' we merely mean that some mental goings on can be referred to as 'conscious experience' then I'd agree that, being real, they'd have properties. I'm tempted, based on Dennett's subsequent views to think he has this in mind, but it's not clear from the text alone. If, rather, it means the same sort of ineffable, intrinsic, private and accessible entity as qualia, but just somehow aggregated to avoid the issues individuating qualia, or some sort of platonic entity, then no.
So at this point we could move on to arguments by Chalmers and others aiming to show that the concept of qualia does make sense and that we cant say that qualia necessarily reduces to function.
A famous one is Chalmers' p-zombie argument. It revolves around the simple question: do you understand what a p-zombie is? Dennett describes it in the article and seems to accept it as a meaningful idea.
1. If you agree that it makes sense, then you should be able to see the logical wedge this drives between qualia and function.
2. If it doesn't make sense to you, all bets are off. ;)
Can you give an example of one (or more) of these properties. I assume redness is out. Bitterness?
This is mostly taken from here, Dennett's summary of his Intentional Stance book.
I think the role mental entities play in Dennett's philosophy of mind is a tightrope walk. On the one hand, he does not want to deny the efficacy of explanation styles which use mental furniture, on the other he does want to deny some ontological commitments which may be taken to explain that efficacy.
So take "I enjoy spicy food", I believe Dennett would see that as quite unproblematic. I can taste things, I can have taste preferences. I have a taste preference for spicy food. But what he would see as problematic is an unrestricted commitment to the existence of tastes, spiciness feelings and so on. As if spiciness, enjoyment as we typically conceive of them are somehow instantiated in my mind and body.
But how can he see "I enjoy spicy food" as unproblematic if he also believes that there's no spiciness experience in some sense of the word? I think it is a difficult question, but he has written on it. It seems to boil down to the attribution of mental states to myself and others is effective at explaining, describing and predicting how we think, feel, sense, behave at a certain level of abstraction. That's the intentional stance idea.
The intentional stance is an explanatory style in which purposive states are attributed to systems in order to predict, explain or describe their behaviour. If I write "2+2" and hit return in the R software environment I have open, it will output "4", one way of explaining that is "my computer added the number 2 to the number 2 and outputted the number 4". That's not what the computer's internal systems did - which involved a lot of electronics and software-hardware interactions I just don't understand - but I can describe and predict its behaviour with that understanding. My computer never had the natural number "2" in it literally, but it did have some systemic pattern that behaves in a way sufficiently similar to having the natural number 2 in it that "my computer added the number 2 to the number 2 and outputted the number 4" works as a predictive explanation. You can tell it was a predictive explanation because I'm familiar with the software, think about it as if it is really adding the natural number 2 to the natural number 2, and it reliably produces the output of "4". The elements in my description correspond to functional patterns in the computer.
Another example is seeing the red light on a printer that signals it is out of paper, I've thought "oh, the printer wants fed" - "wants". Just to be super specific about it, attributing "wants" to the computer there makes a lot of sense as the procedure of printing requires paper, it currently has no paper, and in order for it to be able to print again its paper supply must be refilled. By attributing "wants" to the computer, I have summarized patterns in the printer and analogized it to having an unfulfilled desire (for paper, it is hungry).
Dennett's perspective seems to be that we take exactly the same approach in attributing mental content to people. If you took the intentional stance towards me in trying to understand why I've written this post, you might think some things like "fdrake wants to clear up an ambiguity he sees" or "fdrake wants to steer discussion in the thread" or "fdrake wants to contribute to the discussion" and so on. I'd describe my motivation as involving those and other things.
And in a similar way as I don't have to become committed to the printer having human desires and needs - hunger, wants - by reacting to its paper requirements for printing as "oh, the printer wants fed", why should I have to become committed to the literal existence of any constituent of an explanation I construct when adopting the intentional stance?
I'm not trying to say that "oh, the printer wants fed" and "fdrake wants to clear up the ambiguity he sees" use "wants" with precisely the same denotation and connotations - that is precisely the ambiguity of commitment leveraged in the intentional stance.
Quoting Luke
I realise that what I'm about to say isn't directly about Quining Qualia's argument, but it is related to the above and the intentional stance. Adopting the intentional stance towards a system renders one relatively insensitive to fine grained distinctions between constitutive elements of the considered system for explanatory purposes. Take "fdrake enjoys spicy food", when I write that I've got a few memories associated with it, and I'm attributing an a pattern of behaviour and sensation to myself. I've made a whole type out of "spicy food", but in particular I had some memories of flavours from a vindaloo I'd had a few years ago and the burrito I'd described previously. The particulars of the flavour memories didn't really matter (I can give both more and different "supporting evidence" for the statement), as I'm summarising my engagement with an aggregate of foods, feelings and eating behaviours with discriminable characteristics (sensations, flavour profiles, event memories) etc.
Instead of attributing a quality of ineffability to a particular experience, it can be seen as a result of the indifference of intentional stance explanations to the particular details of their constituents. Ineffability of experience as a feature of the descriptive strategies we adopt regarding experience, rather than of the abstract entities we are committed to when using those strategies. Analogously, the computer's exact reaction to my call command for "2+2" is also practically ineffable; there are thousands of transistors coming on and off, there are allocation patterns for memory etc; and not because it's trying to express the natural number 2 added to the natural number 2 producing the natural number 4 through the flawed media of binary representations and changes in voltage states of transistors.
Santa Claus exists in this sense. Doesnt mean AP philosophers think Santa is a real guy.
But anyway, good of you to bring up Dennett's intentional stance. And I prefer to add "2+2" in a Python environment.
Numbers are abstract quantities that you can perform mathematical operations on. Sure, you could assign 0 to purple and 1 to green, or use the standard digital hex value or HSLA. But numbers can be assigned to represent anything, from unicorns to philosophers.
Colors are not abstract quantities. You don't say there's "green squares" to represent a number of squares.
I don't think that an identity between mental content and signifiers of mental content is required for the intentional stance (as I've understood it). It's more that the intentional stance is a modelling behaviour an agent can adopt towards a system; more goes into adopting the intentional stance than writing a description. If my partner's voice sounds irritated, I'm already attributing mental states to her. If I have an empty feeling in my stomach, I'm attributing desires (hunger) to myself.
Language use will play a role in that, but it's not the whole thing. It's a way for an agent to track and predict another system. That system may be another person or oneself. If I have those interoceptive states in that context, I feel hunger - you see what I mean? Being able to write out a system model in intentional language is piggybacking off some modelling behaviour I'm doing, that "whole thing" is the intentional stance, I think.
And you learned to identify it as hunger from your earliest interactions with your community in the form of your caregiver, as Lacan suggests.
But note that even the above sentence is again struggling to put it in words because you are also formed by vagueness meeting a model.
And "model" is doing it again.
Yes. Here's the thing: seeing this as a cup, feeling that as hunger - the identification/categorisation/discrimination is a process component of it, of seeing and of feeling. The formation of perceptual features (the cup I've seen, the hunger I feel) is a discriminating process.
A process component of what? I dont understand.
Discrimination [hide=*](putting things in explanatorily useful categories based on their characteristics)[/hide] of perceptual stimuli into the types we perceive them as is a process component of the formation of perceptual features. The seeing of the cup. The feeling of hunger.
By abstract, do you mean "quantitative"?
There is the quality-quantity lens mentioned above by @javra.
We can apprehend the world through quality and quantity, hence both of these must exist, at least in our mind. They must be supported by perception systems. I noted that the taste of sugar combines a quality (sugar taste) and a quantity (too little, too much sugar in my coffee). So the idea is like this:
Functionally, a successful animal needs to be able to estimate certain things, including the energy available in its food, and incentivise certain behaviors, while minimising certain risks (including food poisoning). Its olfactive and gustatory senses help distinguish between "good" and "bad" food by:
1. Using chemical reactions in the nose and mouth to estimate a series of indicators - eg concentration in disposable sugars, various salts, some "known" ( by evolution) poisonous stuff, etc.
2. Tag each of these indicators with a qualitatively distinct mark or feel, a qualitative signal if you wish, that allows the animal to recognise the indicator. The taste of sugar is different from the taste of salt.
3. Use the intensity of the signal above to code for the quantitative aspect of perception. (too much or too little sugar)
4. Attach pleasure or displeasure to each of these qualitatively identified signals, as a way to shape behavior.
5. Make the system evolutive and adaptative throughout the animal's life, with some capacity to record or reproduce past food consumption events, to inform future ones.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Neither I nor Dennett are arguing that all things are the same as all other things, so you being able to find two things which aren't the same as each other doesn't prove anything relevant here. The proposition is that colours just are states of neurons in some sense. You seemed to think that a suitable counter-argument is just to say colours are one thing and neural states are another, but that argument only works if no thing we give separate names to turn out to refer to the same entity. As with Hesperus and Phosphorus, we know that's not the case. So what is your actual argument as to why colours cannot be neural states. Why are they like numbers and colours (two different things) and not like Hesperus and Phosphorus (two different names for the same thing)?
Why not?
Just because we can see what someone means by identifying something, doesn't mean it exists. I can understand the idea of an ordinary zombie animated by telekinesis, doesn't make either real.
None of those things would be properties of mental processes, they might at best be categories of mental processes, as in "this particular set neural activities is part of 'bitterness', but it would be a very fuzzy set. I think it makes more sense to think of things like bitterness as convenient fictions. The word does a job and does it quite well, doesn't mean it's referent actually exists.
Properties of consciousness would be more like the pattern of signals it has, the causes and consequences of it,...etc
I don't think that's what he is doing. Because many around here are Dennett readers and they don't propose any alternative conceptual framework or theory to understand how come we can spot sugar from salt, or dislike cauliflower.
If one accepts Dennett's arguments against qualia, is one then bound to accept the remainder of his analysis of consciousness?
That assumption seems to be behind much of the thinking expressed here. But put directly it is inept.
Great. Happy to be introduced to research. I would hope to recognise some of it from previous encounters, but nonetheless. No real excuse for launching into the project, such as it is, without a thorough review. On the other hand I hope we and any other participants aren't inhibited from forming and comparing opinions based on a mixture of science and navel-gazing.
I'll start the thread in the lounge, for that reason. Any views, anecdotes, arguments, research or idle speculation welcome. :smile:
I start from the (questionable) assumption that my brain must have quickly destroyed all growth of the global, absolute sensitivity as soon as musical play led it to start to develop the local, relative sensitivity. [...continued p 94 aka the lounge, here]
Yes, it requires a conceptual shift.
Quoting Wayfarer
What you're describing are the spectacular results that can be realized by effective mathematical abstraction. But, as I note below, it isn't necessary to adopt the Cartesian ontology along with it.
Quoting Wayfarer
The solution, as I see it, is to put qualities like color, etc., back in the world where they belong. It is the apple that is red, there is not red qualia in people's minds, or anywhere else. We see that the apple is red because it is red. Just as we see that there is one apple because there is one apple. That is nature from our perspective (the relational interaction between ourselves and the world that we are a part of).
Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
Yep. Talk of qualia distracts us from the world in which we are embedded. It's vestigial idealism.
Each mouthful had several distinct tastes, sometimes the garlic, sometimes the 'roo, sometimes the cinnamon, each time in a different combination.
To describe a qualia of curry would be a nonsense. An utter failure to recognise the complexity of the experience.
Again, talk of qualia detracts from the conversation.
Oh, and a couple of teaspoons of peanut butter - mussaman style.
But how come some (colorblind) people see the apple as green? And how do you confirm that the apple is in fact red? You can’t see the apple from my perspective to confirm that when you say “red” you are referring to the same experience as when I say “red”.
The problem is this: we can confirm that we all agree on some properties of the apple/experience them the same way. Properties such as shape can be confirmed by asking someone to draw an apple and you’ll find people will agree on an apple’s shape. But someone can be seeing inverted colors from me and there will be absolutely no way to confirm or deny that. In other words, we can confirm the wavelength reflected off the apple, but we cannot confirm whether or not the experience produced when that wave enters our eyes is the same.
Because that is how colour blind people see a red apple.
Quoting khaled
And how do you confirm that it isn't in fact red?
Quoting khaled
But if you agree that it is red, that's an end to the discussion. Well, for everyone else but you, perhaps. Quoting khaled
And hence the argument drops out of the discussion. Either way, it is ineffable. The only issue here is you insisting on attempting to "eff" it, anyway.
And that's the problem with qualia; if they are worthy of inclusion in our musings, then they are just the colours, smells and tastes of which we already speak; and if they are more than the colours, smells and tastes of which we already speak, then they are outside our musings.
So then “red” must not be an inherent property in the apple right? We can agree it reflects a certain wavelength but beyond that we have no data to indicate that that wavelength produces the same experience in everyone. And with colorblind people we have clear data to show it doesn’t.
Quoting Banno
I don’t have to. I’m not the one proposing to attribute experiences to the objects that produce them as properties.
Quoting Banno
I agree that the color I’m experiencing is called red. But I don’t agree that when I say “red” and you say “red” that we’re necessarily referring to the same experience.
Quoting Banno
I’m not trying to eff it. When did I do that? I’m not trying to describe red to someone who has never seen it. That would be effing. I’m saying that there is no reason to believe that my experience of red is the same as your experience of red. In other words, while the experience of red is ineffable, we have no reason to believe that your ineffable experience is identical to my ineffable experience. That’s all I’m saying.
Is it? , "The red inheres in the apple" might be an odd way for you to say that the apple is red; but perhaps you want to bring in the baggage of essential properties and so on? You want to add a distinction between inherent properties and... what? Note that I am not here asking for the detail, but pointing out that it is there; and that makes for further perplexity.
Quoting khaled
That's because of the way you talk about experience. We have ample data that we see apples - some of them - as red. Some are green, some yellow; the conformity is more than sufficient for some of us to plant orchards, breed a huge variety of apples of different colours and sell them to green grocers. What more do you want? Ah, perhaps you want philosophy. Hence:
Quoting khaled
You can choose the red apple from amongst the green ones; buy it; eat it; cook it. The only time you have a problem with it's being red is when you come to the Philosophy Forum.
Quoting khaled
Don't ever apprentice yourself to a green grocer, then.
Quoting khaled
And I'm saying that there is no reason to believe that my experience of red is not the same as your experience of red. Because of the overwhelming agreement as to what is red and what ain't, what you'r saying is irrelevant; more than that, it is senseless; nonsense; meaningless; it has no referent; it makes no difference; it drops out of the discussion, unnoticed by anyone but those few, such as yourself, who misunderstood what was going on.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Not quite. Some we all call green, some we all call yellow. Again, my red could be your purple and no physical or chemical theory would be violated. And we would both refer to a given apple by the same name because we've been taught to associate "Red" with a particular experience. However that particular experience may not be the same for both of us. My "word to associated experience" table may be a homomorphism of yours, not necessarily identical.
That is what I mean when I say that "red" is not the property of the apple. If by "this apple is red" you mean "this apple produces the experience 'red' refers to" then yes that apple is red. If by it you mean "this apple produces the experience 'red' refers to for me, equally for everyone" then no not necessarily. You don't know that. The light wave coming from the apple only specifies which "pointer" to use, it doesn't necessitate the the experience pointed to must be the same.
Quoting Banno
If my expereience of color was the exact inverse of what he experiences, we could still work together just fine. We would both look at an apple and call it "red" or "green" or whatever the case may be but if we somehow peered into the others' first person perspective, maybe their "red" is my "purple". And even if that were the case, we would still be able to perfectly understand each other, as long us neither of us tries to "eff" our experience to the other (because they won't succeed).
Quoting Banno
I didn't say there was. I'm not advocating for a position on this. I'm saying that we have no reason to believe OR deny that our experiences are identical. And neither position leads to any differences in real world interactions or breaks any sort of physical laws.
Quoting Banno
Practically irrelevant. Agreed.
Quoting Banno
But these two things are not the same though you seem to use them interchangeably. "It makes no difference". Fine. "It has no referent". No. It refers to the contents of your experience. Think of "red" as a pointer if you're familiar with programming. "Red" is a word that points to a certain experience (qualia). We do not use the the thing being pointed to when we talk (because that are ineffable) BUT we do use the pointer.
So when I say "the apple is red" I'm saying "I am having the experience 'red' points to, and you'll probably have that one too (unless one of us is colorblind)". I am NOT saying that the experience "red" points to has to be the same for us, and I do not need to make such a claim for us to undertand each other. It could be the case that the experience 'red' points to for me is the experience 'purple' points to for you, and we would still have no issue in understanding.
Quoting Banno
I didn't disagree with this. Doesn't make the concept meaningless, just useless.
So you have a way to distinguish garlic from cinnamon through "distinct tastes". Amazing!
You are not saying that these tastes are qualitatively distinct from one another, right? That is ruled out by Dennett, the naked emperor of your soul.
The concept of qualia is useful to annoy would-be automatons. That must count for something...
No we haven't. Activation of Brodmann's area precedes signals being sent to the working memory. You literally start forming the word 'red' in response to firing from the V2 area prior to being aware of the fact that what you're seeing is red. It's not an 'experience' you're naming, it's just a chain of firing neurons, leading to the production of a name. You have the 'experience' afterwards. Does this matter to anyone except those in cognitive sciences...no, probably not. But for that very reason, I see little point in speculating about it from your armchair.
Quoting khaled
I don't think anyone is saying that.
Quoting khaled
Again, it demonstrably doesn't.
Quoting khaled
No, you're not. You're carrying out the consequences of a link between some stored phonology from visual stimulation, this would happen even if your working memory could be theoretically removed in such a way as you have absolutely no formation of real-time experiences at all.
Yep.
That I start to form the word (or expect to see) red before I see red does not in any way show that the statement "We associate 'red' with a certain experience" is false. I don't see how it is even related. If I asked you to imagine "red" you would be able to correct? Does that not mean that "red" is associated with a certain experience? Even if you formulate the word first before imagining the color, what does that have to do with anything?
You're sounding like Dennett here. Giving a completely unrelated fact to disprove something.
Quoting Isaac
The original thing I replied to seemed like an attempt to attribute qualia to apples. Also curious how you were able to understand my comment even though it had the line "this apple produces the experience 'red' refers to". It's almost as if you can understand what I'm saying despite the irrelevant neurological facts you cite.
Quoting Isaac
But when I say "the apple is red" WHILE my brain is fully intact and functioning I do in fact mean that I am having the experience 'red' points to. That saying "the apple is red" can be done without or before actually experiencing red does not make that statement false. You try to disprove something by citing completely irrelevant neurological facts.
What I'm getting out of this thread is if Dennett is right he's a terrible communicator. Or I'm a terrible reader. Or both.
But then they'd be pretty bad automatons. Because they are not acting as humans well enough. No human doubts that they have experiences, that seems like something only an automaton would do. Maybe Dennett is bugged or something.
By 'an experience' I assumed Yuan meant some conscious awareness of mental states, otherwise I've no idea what you mean by the term.
Quoting khaled
No. I could imagine something which is red, I don't think I can imagine 'red' I don't believe there is such a thing.
Quoting khaled
Yes, which, as you pointed out, is also consistent with your first interpretation. I was just saying that I don't think anyone means to argue for you second interpretation.
Quoting khaled
How can you possibly when the centres of your brain associated with the semantic connection to the word red are not even active at the time the word is beginning to be formed? In fact, colour words are quite unique in the route they take from sensitisation to motor function. They barely touch your working memory from only a few years after the acquisition of the term.
If you still disagree, then perhaps you'd like to offer your alternative explanation for the errors seen during Stoop tests for mismatched colours and written words. If your answer 'red' points to an experience of 'redness', they why are you prone to use it even when seeing the word 'red' printed in blue ink?
Well yes, otherwise you could not annoy them.
:lol:
Correct. The word "red" is associated with awareness of a certain mental state. Now if I told you "but actually, you formulate the word before you become aware of the mental state" what bearing does that have on the statement?
Quoting Isaac
Yea that's what I meant. You can imagine a red screen taking up your vision. Therefore "red" must be associated with some sort of experience no? Or else what does "red" mean exactly? In the absence of an associated experience, when I say "this apple is red" what am I saying?
Quoting Isaac
When I say "attribute qualia to apples" I meant my second interpretation. Anyways.
Quoting Isaac
That I am prone to use it even then does not invalidate the statement "red is associated with a certain experience". And again, I don't see how they're related. If you're going to continue down this path then for the next neurological fact you cite, can you explain how it invalidates the statement "red is associated with a certain experience"
:up:
When Galileo discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter thanks to his newly invented telescopes, it made a big sensation as it contradicted the then canonical cosmology based on Ptolemy. This is when Galileo started his defense of heliocentrism, based on his astronomical observations. One theologian (Ingoli I think) objected that since the whole world was created by God for man, and since the moons of Jupiter did not affect mankind in any way, they are useless, and therefore the moons of Jupiter cannot possibly exist... A dogmatic argument if there ever was one.
To which students from the university of Florence responded through a satirical poem: But the moons of Jupiter annoy Monsignor Ingoli, and therefore they are very useful to mankind!
What is useless to one, can be useful to another... :-)
Because their visual systems differ from the norm.
Quoting khaled
By looking (if you're not colorblind). Or asking someone (if you are).
Quoting khaled
"Red" doesn't refer to an experience, it refers to the color of the apple. Now suppose I were feeling hungry, saw a red apple, and my mouth watered - that's an experience. It's an experience that you might have had as well. But perhaps you don't like red apples, so then your experience would be different.
Quoting khaled
People may or may not agree on the apple's shape if they are wearing different kinds of distorting glasses. That is what colorblindness and color inversion amounts to. We would normally assume that two people who look at a red apple and say that it is red are having the same experience. However if their experiences were different, then there would be physical differences that account for it.
:nerd:
What I meant was how do you confirm that the apple results in the same experience for everyone. You can't. You only know that it results in some experience we all decided to dub "red" (even though it might look different for everyone).
Quoting Andrew M
Well if it makes no physical differences then we have no reason to assume that the two people have the same experience but other than that I agree.
And Qualia, means specifically these experiences. So just because we can't describe the contents of our experiences to others (if my red was your green we would never be able to tell) doesn't mean those contents don't exist.
Just a heads up that we're using the word "experience" very differently.
If the apple looks different to you than to me, then our experiences are different. That's a difference that is, in principle, discoverable.
Quoting khaled
Not on the ordinary definition of experience (one's practical contact with the world). On that definition we can, and do, describe our experiences.
The equating of experience with qualia assumes dualism, which I reject.
How?
What about "seeing red" when someone is angry? The image being your entire visual field turns red in a fit of rage. That doesn't happen to me, but I can imagine it, and maybe it happens for some people.
Quoting Isaac
That can only work on immediate responses prior to being conscious and not when taking your time to reflect on the red cup before you. Also, this is a learned response, not something infants do. They don't utter "red" the first time they see a red object. You're talking about a learned reflex.
But not for creatures with sensory modalities different enough from us.
Quoting Andrew M
Experiences aren't limited to perception, and there is a limit to my ability to communicate what it's like to be me to you. We never fully know what other people experience. Their full feelings, dreams, thoughts, and being in their own skin is only something they experience.
Even with perception, if the difference is great enough, we can't always know. Some have suggested there are tetrachromatic females who have more vivid color perceptual abilities. Their ability to communicate what that's like to us would be limited by our 3 primary color combinations, if this is indeed so. I believe the evidence is still inconclusive, though.
Apples aren't red. They reflect light in a wavelength range we see as red. Red is part of the visual experience.
What is it to see something as red? Could I express such an experience by saying, "To me, the apple looks red" or maybe "To me, the apple looks like it is red"?
There are red apples. You're not bothered to be saying something so obviously false?
You sure?
This nonsense can be dispensed with by dropping some acid.
I recommend cauliflower.
What kind of acid? Hydrochloric, sulphuric? Where do you have to drop it? How does it dispense with nonsense?
Quoting Banno
Would apples be red in the world of the blind?
See Dennett's Cartesian Theater or Ryle's ghost in the machine. Those are metaphors for subject/object dualism, where experiences are private to a subject (hence the need to posit qualia - the content of experience) rather than being a person's interactions in the world (the ordinary, everyday usage).
It's not just a matter of a simple word definition. Subject/object duality is a conceptual scheme that pervades philosophy, in various and often subtle ways.
The mind is not a container or a theater or something mysterious apart from the world, it's a way of talking about an agent's capabilities for engaging in the world. As Bennett and Hacker put it:
Do you mean we can't discover that their experiences are different or in what ways? I'm not color blind, but a quick look at the images on the color blindness Wikipedia page gives me a sense of how a color blind person would see things, and thus how their everyday experience would differ from mine. Similarly for animals, whose visual systems vary further, as you know.
That doesn't tell me much about bats, but I don't see an in-principle line that can't be crossed regarding future knowledge.
Quoting Marchesk
Yet, still, we have empathy and shared experiences. I see the limits as practical, not as in-principle.
Quoting Marchesk
Sure. Though technological or biological modifications could conceivably be developed that alter one's experiences.
Quoting Marchesk
You're speaking a different language to me, which is a philosophical choice. But on ordinary usage, as in scientific practice, there are red apples. In my view, ordinary language is straightforward, coherent and useful. And isn't susceptible to the kinds of philosophical problems that arise for subject/object dualism.
Yes. Color terms are abstractions. Is the apple red even at night and even if no-one is looking at it? The answer again is yes, it is. That is, the apple is red independent of the environment external to it, including sentient human beings. Nonetheless, a human perspective is implicit in the forming of that abstraction.
If everyone were blind, no-one would have formed that abstraction. It would have no use.
Who's interested? An appropriate follow up to this.
:up: Definitely. Ryle's book was a landmark for me.
Ordinary language has naive realist assumptions. I really don't understand the obsession with ordinary language philosophy. Ordinary language has all sorts of assumptions baked into it. Why take those at face value?
Also, science doesn't say the apple is red, it says the apple reflects light of certain wavelength that we see as red. Important distinction.
The Concept of Mind
Especially when one goes about picking which parts of ordinary language to rely on in ad hoc manners. In ordinary language, intentions are not illusory, for one example. We all speak as though sentient beings are endowed with agency (granted, and sometime speak of insentient things, like computers, as though they are endowed with agency; such as in, “it's thinking,” when a computer program doesn’t process information fast enough).
Quoting Banno
To whomever might be interested, my take on red apples:
In short, apples are red, intersubjectively. To make it explicit, this relative to the vast majority of the human species, a populace in which ab-normalities such as color blindness and blindness occur.
Apples are not red in a (intra-)subjective manner, such that their redness is exclusive to the private experiences of one individual and no other. The apple is red to you, is red to me, is red to most humans we interact with, and, therefore, it is (intersubjectively) red - for all of us (save color blind and blind people).
Nor are apples red objectively, such that their redness is universally applicable to all sentient being save for those who are (intentionally so expressed) malformed. As one example, if one accepts biological evolution, lesser animals endowed with sight which don’t see the apple being red are equally evolved in biologically functional manners as are humans; i.e., they don’t have malformed sight. All sentient beings, however, will witness the same spatiotemporal properties of what we humans (intersubjectively) experience as a red apple, this when in proximity to it. Given that objective reality is universally applicable to all sentient beings, this then makes the apple's spatiotemporal properties objective - but not its color, nor its taste, etc., with all the latter being intersubjective realities.
Yep. I edited my post to remove that part as unnecessarily argumentative, but yeah, I have issues with ordinary language philosophy. Another part of or ordinary language is universals. But ordinary language philosophy is not very keen on Platonism. So colors are real, but not categories.
I don't think it has the metaphysical assumptions you think it has, and the assumptions it does have (logical constraints, really) turn out to be very useful.
Instead think of ordinary language as a natural and useful abstraction over the physical processes that operate in our world.
Quoting Marchesk
Scientist: So in this experiment, I'd like you to push the red button when I say.
Philosophy student: There is no red button.
Scientist: That button right there in front of you.
Philosophy student: It's not red.
Scientist: What do you mean? Are you color-blind?
Philosophy student: No.
Scientist: Well what color do you think it is?
Philosophy student: It doesn't have a color. However there is red qualia in my mind that appears right where the button is. Maybe that's what you mean?
Scientist: That will be all, thanks. Could someone get me a physics student?
(A little while later...)
Scientist: So in this experiment, I'd like you to push the red button when I say.
Physics student: Wait a moment! (Get's out light detector. Measures wavelengths of light reflecting off the button. Checks chart to confirm within red wavelength range.) OK, that's red alright!
Scientist: OK... Couldn't you just like, I don't know, look at the button?
Physics student: No, I only trust what my light detector says. It's possible the environment, not to mention my visual system, was influencing what color I thought the button was.
Scientist: (Face palms.) OK, are you ready to push the red button now?
Physics student: Wait a sec. (Get's out light detector again.)
Scientist: What are you doing now?
Physics student: Well, I thought it best to check again. Repeatability and all that. Minimize the possibility of experimental error. Maybe I should get a different detector, just on the off chance this one is faulty.
Scientist: That will be all, thanks. I'll push the damn button myself!
Quoting khaled
I really don't know what to say. Your claim is that X is associated with Y, I show and example of X without Y and you say it's irrelevant. I don't know what more I can do if you can't understand such a basic rational method.
I'm not sure what your ability to imagine that something might be the case has to do with a discussion about whether something is in fact the case.
Quoting Marchesk
How do you know this?
Quoting Marchesk
Yep. That's right, I'm not sure what bearing you think that has on the issue. It's a fairly simple matter of demonstrating pretty conclusively that the use of the word 'red' does not reference a conscious experience. It can't do because the decision to use the word has already been made prior to any occipital originating signals in areas of the brain associated with conscious awareness. How that connection got made originally is a different matter. We can go into that too if you like (spoiler - it's not by association with conscious awareness of 'redness' either), but it's not relevant to the argument here which is much more simple.
The responses we make which indicate to us that something red is in our field of vision (or in our imagination) - which include saying the word 'red', or feeling more 'angry', or picking it when asked to "pick the red one" - are initiated prior to any conscious awareness of the colour aspect of the perception model that is being processed at any given time. They are post hoc. Stories our brain makes up to give the mental events coherence where otherwise they might have been contradictory.
I'm calling them stories in a technical sense. We treat these stories as reality whether we like it or not, even whilst we're trying to investigate them scientifically (a position @Banno and @Andrew M seem to be advocating - I think, and one I have a lot of sympathy with). Yet, if we're doing some form of cognitive science, we might need a technical language to allow us to break the stories apart, just for the purposes of understanding brain function.
What we have no use for at all is armchair speculation about what the constituents of our perception-response system might be without any cause or evidence for such an arrangement.
Assuming what you're saying is actually true. I've heard of this sort of study in reference to decision making (when its immediate, not following deliberation), but not reports of conscious experience. I've also seen criticism of conclusions reached regarding this sort of study, as many neurological studies engendering bold claims are often criticized for unwarranted conclusions.
But regardless, I can sit here and stare at a red object for five seconds before commenting on it, which means I've had time to be consciously aware before deciding to speak. And during that time, I may notice detail that wasn't immediately obvious and report that
Quoting Isaac
I disagree. How could we talk of being in pain or having dreams without there being such experiences?
Quoting Isaac
It's armchair speculation to suppose it's some form of self-reporting illusion. You have also equivocated between sensations being identical to certain neuronal activity and them being illusions. Which is also armchair speculation.
Quoting Isaac
Conscious experience isn't a story we tell ourselves. It just is how we experience the world and our own bodies.
I am not claiming that when someone says "the apple is red" that they are necessarily having a certain experience. I am claiming that in general use (and assuming one isn't lying of course), "the apple is red" is used to indicate a certain experience produced by the apple. You have shown that saying X, and Y occuring are two seperate operations in the brain which occur at around the same time. So what? You have disproven the former claim but did nothing to the latter.
Quoting Isaac
Again, I don't see how the first part ("red" does not reference a conscious experience) follows from the second (because the decision to use the word had already been made)
To borrow Marchesk's example, if I look at a red apple and say nothing, then describe to someone the color of the apple 3 minutes later, what am I referencing? What does "the apple is red" then mean if not "The apple invoked the experience we agreed to dub 'red' "?
You have some data to back this up?
No, it's more straightforward than that (or, at least, doesn't depend on language like "light temperature and intensity", "reflect", "electromagnetic spectrum", "visual system", "appear").
I mean that there are features of the environment that are naturally distinguishable by normally-sighted human beings in decent lighting (whatever the physical details of that happen to be). Further, it has been useful to create language to designate those features.
So the apple grower decides to categorize the apples here as "red" and the apples there as "green". When he explains this to his customers, they can also see the distinguishing features of the apples that he is pointing to. If that seems to them a useful distinction to make, they will go on to use those color terms as well. And so a new language use is born.
Now the scientist comes along and wants to investigate all this in further detail. He discovers that light has wavelengths which are reflected in different ways off different things and that this results in people perceiving things in specific ways. He decides to give color names to various ranges on the spectrum which have an approximate relationship to what people report, but also some differences. These scientific color terms are conceptually different to the color terms the apple grower uses. It's a bit like the relationship of polling to actual election results. Not totally unrelated, but should be understood to be different things.
The point to note here (which I tried to illustrate in the physics student story earlier) is that scientific language doesn't supersede conventional use. Instead, it logically assumes it. That is, the scientist's specialized language is ultimately grounded in ordinary, everyday experience. It's a human view of the world as distinct from a Platonic "view from nowhere".
Phenomenology - you looking out the window.
Quoting Andrew M
Isn't the domain of ordinary, everyday experience precisely what is categorized under 'folk psychology' by eliminative materialists? Isn't it precisely that which is to be superseded by properly-formulated scientific expression?
I'm not sure what you mean by "doesn't depend on language like....". What doesn't depend? Seeing colours? Or talking about seeing colours? If the former then that would seem obvious since (some) animals also see (some) colours as far as we can tell. If the latter then that would also seem obvious, since people talk about seeing colours routinely without referring to any scientific accounts.
"That there are features of the environment that are naturally distinguishable by normally-sighted human beings in decent lighting (whatever the physical details of that happen to be)." is basically the same story I told without specifying as many details as I included.
Since we are human and our perceptual organs are generally much the same, and since the usual reflected light and ambient light conditions determine what colours we will see objects as being, of course it is useful (and inevitable) to create a language to distinguish the different colours we encounter.
However, when you say unreflectively that an apple is red that should not be taken to imply that the apple is red when no one is looking at it, because colours are qualities that exist only by virtue of being seen. It is not wrong to say that apples are red, but it is merely shorthand for saying that we see apples as red.
An animal that has no red photo-receptor cells in its retina cannot see red, and so for that animal apples are not red. If humans had been lacking red photo-receptors then we would never have said that apples are red. So, beyond the context of ordinary communication, it seems to make no sense to speak of apples being red tout court.
Quoting Andrew M
I agree that scientific language does not supercede conventional use in the sense that the former is built upon the latter. Science is founded on everyday experience, to be sure. There is nothing wrong with saying that apples are red or that the sun rises, but scientific investigation and analysis can reveal the limited context in which such statements find their provenance and coherency.
[quote=https://www.edx.org/course/minds-and-machines]
Minds and Machines
An introduction to philosophy of mind, exploring consciousness, reality, AI, and more. The most in-depth philosophy course available online.
Topics include:
The Chinese Room
The Turing Test
Mind-Body Dualism
The Identity Theory
Functionalism
Knowledge
Belief
Color
Perception
Consciousness
'What it's like' to be a bat
The Knowledge Argument
David Chalmers on dualism
[/quote]
How would you do that when the sensory input resulting from that detail fired the relevant neurons many minutes ago? How can you 'notice' the detail after five minutes when the signal causing it has either stopped (if it was detail that you noticed five minutes ago, or has just fired (in which case you're in no better situation that the instantaneous response? Obviously what's really happening is that you're manufacturing an idea of what you're 'noticing', a story of what's happened. You can possibly be actually 'noticing' the things in this deliberation because the sensory memory only hold images , sounds ect for a few seconds.
Quoting Marchesk
I don't understand at all the link you're making here. If I had a wire directly running from my knee to my mouth which formed the word 'fish' every time my leg bent I would say 'fish' a lot while running. There's no intrinsic need for me to be having any kind of conscious experience whatsoever in order to produce language.
Quoting Marchesk
No it isn't. I've provided a substantial amount of empirical research showing that our intuitions on this matter are at odds with what seems possible from the neurology. Of course it's not a 'done deal', but it's just insulting to suggest it's just as much 'armchair speculation'. A massive amount of hard work has gone into it.
Quoting Marchesk
No I haven't. What I'm showing is that certain neural activity precludes some intuitive explanations for our responses.
It's no different to the standard knee-reflex test. It's not possible for you to voluntarily decide whether to raise your knee or not. We know this because we can trace the signal from you knee to your muscles and prove it does not even get to the brain (it's dealt with by the spinal column), so even if you 'feel' like you're moving your knee voluntarily (as some people do) then you must be experiencing an illusion of voluntary action because the signals do net get to a part of your brain where such action can be decided upon.
All I'm doing here is showing that this seem very likely to be the case with responses to stimuli. We can see from fMRI and other interventions that the signals from certain stimuli to certain responses do not pass through areas of the brain which could even feasibly be responsible for conscious decision, so we can show, just like the knee-jerk, that if you think you're making a conscious decision about the response, you must be experiencing an illusion of some sort. It's not equivocation. It might be wrong (but if it were it would be wrong on the basis of better neurological evidence), but it's not equivocation. If you feel like you're conscious of something which the best neuroscientist evidence tells us you can't possibly be conscious of then the best theory is that your feeling is illusory.
Quoting Marchesk
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
That's fine, but then all you've got is the intent behind the expression, but we're talking about ontological commitments here. "Harry Potter" is used to refer to the child wizard in JK Rowling's stories, we wouldn't want such a use to commit us to the real-world existence of Harry Potter would we?
Quoting khaled
It 'means' whatever the term was used to do. It might be to get you to pick one of a similar colour, or to evoke some emotion, or to get a refund on purchase of five green apples... we use words to do things, so long as the ting gets done, the word has been used well. They do not have 'meanings' held in perpetuity in some platonic realm.
No, you're talking about ontological commitments here. I only meant intent behind the expression
Quoting Isaac
So if someone asks me to describe the apple 3 minutes after seeing it, and I go to that person and say "The apple is red" 3 minutes after seeing it. What do I mean? What am I reporting?
Quoting Isaac
I never claimed that the meanings of words never change. But your position would judge all dictionaries as nonsense then no? Are you ok with that? After all words apparently can't mean anything outside of the context of their use.
That would be a case of throwing out the baby (ordinary language) with the bathwater (language implying ghostly entities).
Quoting Janus
OK.
Quoting Janus
The apple's composition is such that a normally-sighted person in decent lighting would use the word "red" to describe it. That is, for the apple to be red is for the apple to have that composition (which it has independent of being seen).
Human color terms won't necessarily be applicable when describing what other creatures perceive, as with your example. The apple is nonetheless red, but the animal is unable to perceive that.
Nonsense. The only reason apples and other fruits exist in the first place as sugary edible stuff, and are colored in a way that makes them stand out from the green background, is precisely to be seen and ingested by animals. This is a well-documented seed dissemination strategy: the animal spots the fruit, eats it, and excretes the seed around, allowing the seeds to fall far away from the tree, so to speak.
Apples are red so that monkeys can see them.
In that case, I think you and I each mean something different by "conscious experience".
If conscious experience is no more than a "pattern of signals" or "neural activity", and if seeing things is just "a convenient fiction", then how are you able to read what I've written? By your logic you are unable to show me any proof or experimental evidence to support your claims because there is no seeing/showing.
Here is the context from the quoted post that I was responding to:
"An animal that has no red photo-receptor cells in its retina cannot see red..."
Fair enough, apologies for not reading the thread.
Still, the point remains that the apple's color is far more than a passive sensation by some animals. It is an active signal from the tree to certain animals able to see it, and as such it is already loaded with meaning and potentiality.
A signal is a sort of sign, a symbol, one that is difficult to miss. It is a sign drawing attention to itself, like a loud siren. Hence the red, which is basically non-green (to simplify, red is what happens when you substract green from natural light). A red patch is hard to miss in foliage. It "pops out".
A signal calls for an action, typically. That's why it's urgent. It comes at a certain moment, when a certain action is required and not before. In this case, the apple turns red when it is ripe, i.e. when the fruit and its seeds are ready for consumption by animals. So basically the tree is calling an animal as a sort of taxi, when it's ready, to transport its kids to a new neighborhood (the seeds, that will be excreted a few miles away). The cab fare is the sugar in the fruit.
It has worked well for apple trees, who have managed to colonise the whole world thanks to a certain primate species appreciative of its fruits: us.
And all new varieties of apples are red because that's what the primate spots best at the supermarket.
Khaled might be right, @Isaac; there is a syndrome found in poor philosophisers that might be termed "failure to commit". Perhaps Khaled never buys red apples, bit only ever has the experience of buying apples that seem to be red; perhaps he has qualia of apples and grocery shops but without committing to their existence...
That's part of the philosophical absurdity that talk of qualia sometimes induces induces. Usually the victim only has these delusions while on philosophy forums.
Spot on.
Quoting khaled
The belief that a dictionary contains the meaning of a word. Naive. Indeed, silly. We don't need more holy books.
This means that there is a broad biological (ecological) meaning to the perception of a red apple by a potential apple consumer, human or animal. The apple physically looks "red" (pigments are produced by the apple skin to absorb green wavelengths) right in time to signal its maturity to the consumer.
One could object that the apple is just an example amongst many things looking red. And that red itself is just an example of color. But then, isn't red the color that's always invoked in qualia talks? And isn't that because it is "eye-catching"? Red is the somehow the queen of all qualia, the king of all colors. For us humans, red is a remarkable color, one once worn by emperors, now painted on firefighter trucks, calling drivers to stop at a traffic light, shining on women lips. Red is often a signal. It calls our attention, us primates.
And isn't the apple a frequent example? Apples are in a way the prototypical red object. It is a natural example to take. Our nature, our biology involve a certain semantic of colors. And none of it can be captured in a reductionist outlook, e.g. through biochemistry. It is about inter-species communication in a given ecosystem.
So the redness of the truck or of an apple is not a passive sensation, a mere impression on some physical sensory systems that would deliver a mere quality (red) to an observing subject. It has meaning before it was even perceived by anyone. It's generally a signal, a beckon. And it is perceived as such.
Of course if our world was predominantly red, green would be the way to signal something important.
And of course, there might be more than one biological meaning to red. And to other colors. Green of course signals plants to animal etc.
This is not to say the whole universe is permeated by meaning or anything as ridiculously panglossian. Just that coexistence between species implies endless possibilities of predation, competition, parasitism and cooperation. In such a context, messaging (including fake messaging) between species is commonplace, in a very practical biosemiotic manner. And therefore our senses are not just passively sensing: they are actively decoding signals sent by our own and other species, noting important patterns, some of which are biologically determined. Our senses do more than inform us, they alert us.
That the apple is not red to some animals implies that it is not red tout court, but that it has the constitutional potential to appear red to some animals. For all we know it may appear as some other colour we have never perceived to some animal. Would you then say that the apple is that nameless colour tout court? Or if the apple is grey to an animal that has no colour receptors does it follow that the apple is also grey tout court? What I think you are missing is that colour is relational, not inherent, whereas the potential to be coloured is inherent.
So how is it so can look up a word I don’t know in the dictionary, read it’s definition, then use it meaningfully in conversation?
Seems like a rather holy experience to me. Especially when it’s Urban Dictionary.
Dont be naive about the dictionary, but do be naive about apples.
It needs to be a little more random.
There is dynamic "measure-counter measure" dimension to inter-species communication and perception. Consider the case of the tiger moth.
Moth Blocks Bat Attack by Jamming Sonar
Navy engineers aren't the only ones who can jam sonar. Scientists have discovered a species of tiger moth that thwarts hungry bats by emitting extra-loud clicks to block the bats' ability to echolocate.
Researchers have long known that some species of moths send out clicks in response to bat sonar, but until now, no one has been able to prove that the clicks actually interfere with echolocation. "The idea of a jamming mechanism has been thrown around for 50 years, but nobody has really put a moth and a bat together in a flight room to see what happens," said ecology graduate student Aaron Corcoran of Wake Forest University, co-author of the study published Thursday in Science.
Corcoran and his colleagues pitted a particularly noisy species of tiger moth, the Bertholdia trigona, against big brown bats trained to hunt in a flight room. As long as the moths were able to click, the bats couldn't catch them, even though the moths were tethered on a string.
But when the scientists pierced a small hole in the moths' sound-producing structures, called tymbals, the silenced moths quickly became lunch.
"It's the first good, solid case of this going on," said insect behavior expert James Fullard of the University of Toronto at Mississauga, who was not involved in the study. "For this bat and this moth, it looks pretty convincing that jamming is what's going on."
Not all clicking moths can jam sonar, Fullard said, and that's part of what makes this discovery so exciting. Previous research revealed that two other varieties of tiger moth make clicks that are too quiet to interfere with bat echolocation. Instead, he said, these moths likely use the clicks as a warning: Because most moths that click back at bats are poisonous, scientists think the noise may communicate, "Don't eat me, I taste bad."
But B. trigona isn't poisonous, and the Wake Forest researchers experimented with young bats that had no prior exposure to clicking moths, so they hadn't already learned to equate clicking with a bad taste. Nor did it seem like the bats were just startled by the clicking moths. Even after multiple attempts on multiple nights, the bats still couldn't catch the intact B. trigona.
"Mammals habituate to startle rather quickly," Corcoran said. "We went through seven days of trials, but the bats never habituated. They were put off by the clicks right away and throughout the whole experiment."
The researchers haven't yet proven how the moth's sonar-jamming mechanism works, but they have two leading hypotheses: The moth's clicks may act as false echoes, essentially making the bat "see" double, or they may interrupt the bat's own echoes, making its prey appear closer than it is.
https://www.wired.com/2009/07/mothjam/
:up:
Quoting Olivier5
That's a great metaphor. Good post!
No, the apple is red tout court.
The word "red" picks out a physical aspect of the apple, not how it appears (which is a qualifier meaning "seem; give the impression of being", not a reference to a mental entity or mental experience).
For example, suppose that some people have a genetic difference that results in brain wiring such that red apples appear green to them and green apples appear red.
They would learn to use the word "red" to describe red apples just the same as everyone else (since that is the convention). Their experiences are different from ours, unbeknown to us. But they correctly identify that the apple is red because the color term is picking out a physical aspect of the apple that is distinguishable by them (i.e., red from green), not how the apple appears to them.
If they put on red-green inverting glasses, they would then say that the red apple appears green to them, just as we would. So even though their experiences are different to ours, they are nonetheless using the color terms in the same way that we are. That's a proof, if you like, that color is a physical aspect of the apple, not a mental phenomenon. Instead it is theirs and our experiences that are different. And that experiential difference has a physical basis in the genetic/brain wiring difference.
Quoting Janus
The apple is red regardless, per the conventional use of the word "red". However there's no problem with having an alternative color language that denotes the color distinctions that a particular animal makes. And an animal that can't distinguish color at all is color-blind.
We're talking ultrasounds here, but similar "clicks" emitted by the infamous death's head hawk moth are audible to humans:
Quoting Isaac
Replying to this by saying "you're talking about ontological commitments here" is intended to say that I meant the alternative (the intent). As in the intent behind saying that "this apple is red" is to indicate a specific experience, that is my claim. If you have an issue with what I'm saying address it directly or not at all please.
What do they contain?
Because dictionaries give synonyms, and hence tell how to use a word. Nothing to do with that elusive, mysterious notion of meaning.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that meaning and use are the same thing.
Better, it has been argued, to look to the use of a sentence than the meaning of a word.
As I've already agreed, the common usage of the term 'red' is fine. But what you say here goes to my argument, that there is no identifiable characteristic of the apple that the word 'red' signifies, other than that its appearance is distinguishable from apples of other colours, even for the colourblind. When the colourblind person uses 'red' she is referring to a different kind of appearance than the 'normal' person is, so they are not referring to a determinable common phenomenon, other than their ability to agree as to which apples the term is correctly applied, (and this is a circular semantic situation, not an identifiable physical characteristic) even though this would not be known absent testing for colourblindness.
Quoting Andrew M
I've already acknowledged that in the conventional sense it is fine to say of a red apple that it is red; but when challenge to say what physical characteristic apart from its distinguishable appearance is being referred to by the term.
'Red' is a colour term. so it cannot be referring to physical characteristics that determine colour. It seems to me to make no analytically examined sense (as opposed to mere conventional sense) to say an apple is red when not seen, or when it is in the dark, because 'red' being a colour term cannot properly apply when there is no colour.
So, it looks to me as if, even though I am not arguing against conventional usage, you for some reason object to the greater accuracy of expression that comes with analysis. Are you afraid that analysis will undermine conventional usage? I see no reason why it should, any more than the discovery and analysis that reveals that the sun doesn't actually rise (since it doesn't move) undermines the perfectly serviceable, and within its context, still common sensible conventional usage that speaks of the sun rising.
:rofl:
I'm not sure it is fine for you, since you think that red, when analyzed, actually refers to how the apple appears, not what color it is. But my argument showed that it can't be referring to how it appears, since how it appears drops out in use. That is, even the person who is wired differently says the apple is red because "appearances" can't be compared between two people. Instead they can each only say that they are able to distinguish two differently colored apples and then use a color naming convention that captures that distinction. (For example, that "red" is the word we use to describe stop signs, and "green" to describe grass. Since this particular apple situation is similar to a stop sign situation and not a grass situation, then "red" is the correct term to describe it.)
That is a version of the private language argument.
Further, we find on analysis that the term "appears" doesn't designate subjective "appearances". It is instead a term that lets us say how two different situations are, in some sense, similar. For example, that wearing red-green inversion glasses makes the situation of seeing a red apple like the situation of seeing a green apple (even though we know that is not actually the situation). Compare with the example of the straight stick that appears bent in water. It's similar to seeing a bent stick, but we know they are different situations. The stick is straight, independently of how it appears to someone. And the apple is red, independently of how it appears to someone.
:100: I think the word "appears" is one of those potential traps. It takes on a life of its own in philosophy!
When did it appear to you that I think apples are not red when I’m on the forum? I’m just clarifying what people mean when they say “the apple is red”. That is that the apple produces a certain experience.
The apple appearing red came long before optics. You have the cart before the horse. It's like arguing that sunrise means the Earth revolves around the sun, or solid means objects are filled with mostly empty space, held together by tight EM bonds. There would be no "sunrise" if if the sun didn't appear to move through the sky, similarly we wouldn't have quite the same word for "solid" if we utilized X-Ray vision instead. Nor would apples look red.
Sellars went through all this in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" too: "looks" talk, as in "the apple looks red to Andrew", is logically posterior to "is" talk. There's no way even to make sense of it otherwise. What does it mean to say that an apple looks red except that it looks like it is red?
I think of that passage more often than almost anything else I've ever read.
Another Austin gem:
What colour it is is how it appears under some specific "normal" conditions; what's the problem with that?
Quoting Andrew M
No, the apple appears red to the colourblind person, just as it does to us "normal" people. That is to say it appears as a colour that he calls red, just as it appears to us as a colour we call red. It just so happens that those two colours, those two appearances are not the same.
Quoting Andrew M
This can't be right because you have said that the apple appears different to a colourblind person than it does to a "normal" person. You can't have it both ways.
Quoting Andrew M
Not a good analogy because the stick appears bent to everyone, and can be felt or withdrawn from the water to confirm its straightness. The straightness of a stick is not something that refers to an appearance as colour words do.
You haven't said what it would mean (beyond the merely conventional usage) to say that an apple is red when no one is looking at it or when it is in the dark.
The question is not how do we know that. Rather, it is what reason do we have to doubt it?
It's not.
It's basic, raw, and/or fundamental to all conscious experience involving whether or not the apple really is red, as opposed and/or compared to 'appearing' or 'seeming' to be. Such conscious experience is language based and metacognitive whereas saying "the apple is red" is language based but not metacognitive.
Quoting khaled
You said apples are not red; they only appear red.
You see, the funny thing is that you presume we all use the same word, "red", for a certain experience; and yet you deny that we all have the same experience. But when we point out that the experience seems therefore to be irrelevant, you disagree.
Makes no sense to me.
Of course, and I asked Andrew if that is what he meant by saying an apple is red and he answered in the negative. In any case if the apple is red only when it is reflecting certain light frequencies, then we cannot say it is red when it is in the dark can we? The other point is that even to accept this definition you gave you must be OK with 'red' being an ambiguous term, since it also refers to the seeing of certain colours.
What?
I don't know about Andrew.
We call those frequencies "red". It's the properties, features, and/or characteristics of red things interacting with light that make them reflect the frequencies we've named "red". Red things reflect those frequencies regardless of whether or not those things are under observation.
Red cups are red(reflect certain frequencies of light consistently). That has nothing at all to do with us.
Quoting creativesoul
Is it the frequencies we are calling red, or the objects that reflect those frequencies. In any case, as I said, I have no argument with ordinary usage in its place, but when examined it yields some other factors that make it not so straightforward as it might first appear.
That all depends upon the refinement of one's language use and/or understanding of how our eyes work. What difference does that make here? In both cases, the apple is red due to how it interacts with light.
Ok. I agree.
So, do you reject redness as a quale(property of conscious experience) as well?
I certainly don't believe in subjective visual perceptions that are somehow "in the brain" and stand as intermediaries between us and the objects we see.
The other meaning of 'qualia' is something like 'raw percept' where what is seen is not seen 'as anything'. I guess this is only possible in rare instances, or with infants, because most everything we see is always already conceptually mediated.
Quoting Banno
I said that when someone says “the apple is red” they really mean “the apple appears red/invokes a certain experience I call ‘red’”. I don’t think that’s even a controversial claim. Whether or not you assign a property “red” to the apple, my claim remains true.
Quoting Banno
Incorrect. I deny that there is a reason to assume we all have the same experience, but we may. Because as I said, whether or not we have the same experience when seeing a red apple is irrelevant, all that we need to understand each other is to have a “homomorphism” of experiences.
Quoting Banno
Incorrect. I agree. I already said that talk of qualia is pointless (with them being ineffable and all that) for describing our experiences but that qualia clearly have a referent. So saying they don’t exist is at best purposely misleading and at worst ridiculous.
But it's only red because that's the color we see. We see that color because of the way or visual system works. If our visual system was different, we might not have an rgb vocabulary. The rest of the EM spectrum does not have color labels, because we don't see the rest of the electromagnetic radiation interacting with the environment.
That's something which is getting lost here. The apple just doesn't reflect light of certain wavelength. It also has other light reflecting off and going through it and what not. Insects and birds can see colors we can't. The full EM spectrum is all around us, but we only see a small fraction of it.