So when I hear a claim that "subjective experience" and "qualia" are divorced from any and all behavior or functionality in the mind

I don't think that Chalmers would claim that they are. He's only saying that there doesn't seem to be any obvious logical reason for why someone would need to have subjective experience, and that it needs to be explained why we seem to have subjective experience anyway.

When you say:

The more I think about qualia, the more I feel like the only meaning I can find in any of my subjective experiences is in how they relate to everything else in my head.

Then one could answer "but why couldn't a computer system just have this enum-like system that had all the properties which match your subjective experience, without having that subjective experience?"

Note that this is not claiming that your subjective experiences wouldn't be related to the behavior and functionality of your mind. They obviously are! But that doesn't explain why they are.

So when I hear a claim that “subjective experience” and “qualia” are divorced from any and all behavior or functionality in the mind, I’m left with a sense that Chalmers is talking about something very different from my subjective experience, and what it seems like to be me. My subjective experience seems deeply integrated with my behavior and functioning.

That's playing on different meanings of "isolated" and "integrated". The claim that explanations of behaviour are not explanations of subjective experience does not by itself amount to the claim that subjective experience is epiphenomenal -- causally idle, not causing or influencing behaviour.

There is fertile ground for confusion here, because there are plausible grounds for considering Chalmers to be an epiphenomenalist -- but, importantly, his epiphenomenalism isn't an assumption of the hard problem, as he states it, nor an immediate consequence.

He argues at length that property dualism is the correct answer to the HP, and that would seem to imply epiphenomenalism: if physical properties are sufficient to explain behaviour, then mental properties have nothing to do. But that means epiphenomenalism is an indirect consequence of the HP.

Yes! Subjective experience has a topology. The neighborhoods are just all the collections of qualia that feel some amount of similar, for any sort of amount that feels different. And the "shape" of the #2 color is different because it is not homeomorphic to the #1 color.

There's also (something like) a metric space structure on this topology, since different things feel different amounts of different. People seem to have variation in this while still having the same topological structure as others.

My hypothesis about the "mysterious redness of red" is that it feels striking in part because it has a more mathematically interesting/complex homotopy type, and that you could in principle give people entirely new qualia by arranging their neurons to experience a novel homotopy type.

Given that, I think I want to rename Chalmers' categories as the "Boring" and "Interesting" problem of consciousness.

Just to be sure, hard=boring and easy=interesting, right?

The "sexiness'" of the hard problem of Consciousness to me is mainly in it's relationship with morality and meaning.

For any hypothetical I can think of, whether or not the entities involved have a subjective experience (along with the concept of a valence/preferences) dominates any other consideration. In a way it seems like "Hard Problem" aspect of Consciousness is the only thing that would give anything meaning, thus pointing to the hard problem as one of the most pressing questions for anyone trying to understand what's going on.

The idea goes that even if you explained how the brain does everything it does, you haven't explained why this doing is accompanied by subjective experience. It's rooted in this idea that subjective experience is somehow completely isolated from, and separate to behavior.

This supposed isolation is already a little suspicious to me.

I'm not sure that this "isolation" exists, either.

I think this idea is useful because it asks...how might you explain to a computer what makes ants different from people, or computers different from ants and people, or how anesthetic works? What is joy?

Or how could we tell if robots/aliens have subjective experience?

What if when we looked at the sky, and the ocean, we both used the English word "Blue", but you experienced what I experience when I look at what we both agree is called "Green"?

Related question: Do variations between individuals in terms of eyes have effects, beyond colorblind versus not?

I don't get why it's still not mainstream that panpsychism with weak illusionism about "self" solves the Hard Problem. It's not even that unintuitive to think "I am made from the same stuff as rocks, therefore rocks are conscious". Any difference with rocks, bats, counties, you and you, when you was a meter to the left, are of easy, non-mysterious, ethical kind.

Some components of experience, like colors, feel simple introspectively. The story of their functions is not remotely simple, so the story of their functions feels like it must be talking about a totally different thing from the obviously simple experience of the color. Though some people try to pretend this is more reasonable than it is by playing games and trying to define an experience as consisting entirely of how things seem to us and so as being incapable of being otherwise than it seems, this is just game playing; we are not that infallible on any subject, introspective or otherwise. The obvious solution, that what seems simple just turns out to be complicated and is in fact what the complicated functional story talks about, is surely the correct one. Don't let Chalmers' accent lull you into thinking he has some superior down under wisdom; listen to the equally accented Australian materialists!

From a very short interaction with my desk I've concluded it doesn't have subjective experience. After a few years of interacting with my dog, I'm still on the fence on if it has subjective experience.

I read you as suggesting something like "subjective experience seems to have behavioral consequences because interaction with something leads me to have beliefs about whether it has subjective experience". But I think when I reach such conclusions, I'm mostly going off priors that I got socially. Is it different for you?

Does everyone have the same "favorite color"?

No. As far as I'm concerned, that proves we do not all see the same colors.

My own favorite color has varied over my lifetime. I myself do not see "blue" and "green" in the same way I did forty years ago. Further, I generally find deep blues to be cool and soothing; but while the blue light from the sky does not bother me, the "blue" from "daylight" LED room lamps is piercing. The light from the blue LED pilot lamps on my computer and similar equipment is almost painful to me, despite being relatively deep--so much so that I had to cover them with white cloth tape blacked out with a felt tip marker to tone it down.

There's a store i pass on my to work that I dislike because the red and blue LED display in its window fools me into thinking there's a pack of police cars there.

Color is not just a spectroscopic reading to a conscious being. Color also carries emotional weight. Colors mean things to people.

The "problem of qualia" comes about for today's materialists, because they apriori assume a highly geometrized ontology in which all that really exists are point particles located in space, vector-valued fields permeating space, and so on. When people were dualists of some kind, they recognized that there was a problem in how consciousness related to matter, but they could at least acknowledge the redness of red; the question was how the world of sensation and choice related to the world of atoms and physical causality.

Once you assume these highly de-sensualized physical ontologies are the *totality* of what exists, then most of the sensory properties that are evident in consciousness, are simply gone. You still have number in your ontology, you still have quantifiable properties, and thus we can have this discussion about code and numbers and names, but redness as such is now missing.

But if you allow "qualia", "phenomenal color", i.e. the color that we experience, to still exist in your ontology, then it can be the thing that has all those relations. Quantifiable properties of color like hue, saturation, lightness, can be regarded as fully real - the way a physicist may regard the quantifiable properties of a fundamental field as real - and not just as numbers encoded in some neural computing register.

I mention this because I believe it is the answer, when the poster says 'I still feel like there is this "extra" thing I'm experiencing ... I personally can't find any way to relate this isolated "qualia of redness" to anything else I care about'. Redness is cut off from the rest of your ontology, because your ontology is apriori without color. Historically that's how physics developed - some perceivable properties were regarded as 'secondary properties' like color, taste, smell, that are in the mind of the perceiver rather than in the external world; physical theories whose ontology only contains 'primary properties' like size, shape, and quantity were developed to explain the external world; and now they are supposed to explain the perceiver too, so there's nowhere left for the secondary properties to exist at all. Thus we went from the subjective world, to a dualistic world, to eliminative materialism.

But fundamental physics only tells you so much about the nature of things. It tells you that there are quantifiable properties which exist in certain relations to each other. It doesn't tell you that there is no such thing as actual redness. This is the real challenge in the ontology of consciousness, at least if you care about consistency with natural science: finding a way to interpret the physical ontology of the brain, so that actual color (and all the other phenomenological realities that are at odds with the de-sensualized ontology) is somewhere in there. I think it has to involve quantum mechanics, at least if you want monism rather than dualism; the classical billiard-ball ontology is too unlike the ontology of experience to be identified with it, whereas quantum formalism contains entities as abstract as Hilbert spaces (and everything built around them); there's a flexibility there which is hopefully enough to also correspond to phenomenal ontology directly. It may seem weird to suppose that there's some quantum subsystem of the brain which is the thing that is 'actually red'; but something has to be.

It’s just that I personally can’t find any way to relate this isolated “qualia of redness” to anything else I care about.

Maybe not, but its still of academic interest.

The physicalist paradigm has been successful in many areas, but has yet to win out entirely because of some recalcitrant problems. The alternatives to physicalism -- idealism, dualism, panpsychism, and so on -- get their traction, retain what popularity they have, because of the mind body problem. There are a few other issues, such whether mathematical entities have an immaterial existence, and the status of physical law, but the mind-body problem is the big one. And the hard problem is the hardest part of the mind body problem.

A lot of people care enough about preserving physicalism to come up with a stance on the HP, including extreme ones like illusionism.

Just as the parts of the brain more directly involved with vision take as input the electrical impulses that travel down the neural pathways that originate in rods and cones, some other parts of the brain take as input the signals coming from other parts of the brain. Do we just call the more direct ones experience of the outside world, the higher level ones, experiences of the brain?

If we measured the signal level coming out of different people's neurons connected to the photoreceptors when exposed to Colors.ORANGE, surely we all have slightly different numbers of rods and cones, they are all wired up slightly differently, their transmission rate depends on neurotransmitter levels, etc. All of these parts are connected in various ways to the brain, and the excitation interacts in complex ways, so that the Colors.ORANGE today is never going to be exactly the same as the Colors.ORANGE of yesterday, but many of the same pathways are triggered.

I find the "hard problem" incredibly annoying to discuss with people, because it is just a shape-shifting question with most people, for which there isn't even a possible answer. It seems like it is not hard, but rather just an insistence on drawing a distinction between neurons feeding in more directly from sensory inputs connected to the outside world, and those parts of the brain which are fed more by the activity generated in other parts of the brain. Claiming that the difference between those is a problem is not clear to me at all.

I think about breathing. Usually you don't notice that you are breathing. But sometimes, when you are running you might notice that your breathing has changed. The parts of the brain that observe breathing are just getting a constant signal most of the time, and it disappears. The network adapts to the input to a point where it becomes like nothing, much like the input of the eye adapts to not see the nose, but if we cover one eye, it appears. If we meditate, we focus on our normal breathing.

What does paying attention mean? Is that the hard problem? Is the hard problem just the nature of the hippocampus? If so, you could probably solve it some kind of brain scan. Until then, who cares? Maybe the only people that care are those that experience the hard problem as a problem. To me, it's just what the brain is doing all of the time. There's no other layer of explanation needed.