The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem

I think that's because qualia, if they exists, have no correlation with physical world, hence we cannot convey information about them with physical means. P-zombies would talk about qualia in the same terms we do, which is actually their point. The only way to 'solve' by physical means the qualia problem is therefore accept it's inexistance and trying to understand why we think there's a problem in the first place: because every other coherent solution must produce the physical effect of this solution.

But I am a falliblist about my qualia.....

Theres a difference between causation and reduction. The idea that qualia have physical causes is compatible with dualism, the idea that they are not ieducible to physics.

Knowing what causes non standard qualia, or where they diverge, still doesn't tell you how non standard qualia feel to the person having them.

For that reason, we are not going to have private language dictionaries any time soon. Looking at brain scans of someone with non standard qualia us not going to tell me what their qualia are as qualia.

I would agree that once you reduce it to a physical explanation there's nothing left over to explain, if that's ultimately the point he was trying to make

I am fairly confident that that is, in fact, the point he was trying to make. Your reaction is familiar to me. I could be wrong, but the reason that this argument sounds absurd to you may be that you already agree with it, but haven't noticed that you agree with it because you don't seriously entertain any of the alternatives. I'm not criticizing you with this suggestion, let me explain.

The dualist position holds that experience is a non-physical thing that cannot be explained physically: the sensation of burning your hand on a stove-top is not identical to the behaviour of a heat-damaged nervous system, rather, there is a thing that is "the quale of pain", which you happen to be exposed to whenever your physical body is hurt. This is where the "inverted spectrum" argument comes in - how do you know that the colour-quale that I sample when I look at the sky is the same as your "blue"? Sure, I call it blue, but of course I would call it that because I learned what blue meant from being told "blue is the colour of a cloudless daytime sky".

Metaphysicist is making the case that qualia don't exist, and that instead every experience/sensation is reducible to physics. "Experiencing blue" is just what your brain does when it is exposed to a certain wavelength of light. But if you're already operating under that assumption and haven't considered and discarded the possibility of qualia, it can look as though the anti-qualia argument is an anti-experience argument, because it is clearly an argument that some putative element of experience does not exist. If your metaphysics only contains one putative element of experience, that's confusing.

My reaction to the anti-qualia argument was initially the same as yours. Then someone explained what I'd missed, and my second reaction was "seriously, we need an argument for that?" Then I read Wittgenstein, and for a long time it seemed like he was just flailing ineffectually at the problem. The tipping point was when I came to realise that the monist/dualist dichotomy isn't just an opinion that people hold, it's one of the hinges of their opinion-having machinery. Convincing them isn't simply a matter of giving the machine the right arguments as inputs - that would be like trying to use a pipe organ as a calculator. Instead, you have to hack their brain - present a series of inputs that changes how they have opinions, rather than just changing what opinions they have. That's what I think Wittgenstein was trying to do, and I think it has worked on me. Unfortunately, for me and most others, Wittgenstein isn't a fast-acting treatment.

Anyway, I've gone a bit off topic here. It's possible that I'm completely wrong about how you've interpreted Metaphysicist's post, if so, sorry for wasting your time. Only trying to help!

Yeah, exactly. It sounds like he's denying experience exists or saying that it's illusory, which would be stupid. Experience is an epistemological first principle; it's axiomatic.

Why would I make 'experience' a first principle or an axiom? That sounds utterly impractical and inefficient.

That amounts to saying that if you solve the hard problem, then there is no longer a hard problem.

It doesn't actually deliver a solution.

See also Occam's sandblaster

"If nothing exists, I want to know how the nothing works and why it seems to be so highly ordered."

If qualia are explained by our innate intuitions (or beliefs)—propositional attitudes—then two questions follow about "how it works":

1. What is the propositional content of the beliefs?

2. What evolutionary pressures caused their development?

I make some conjectures in another essay.

Upvoted for this line alone. See also, "If nothing exists, I want to know how the nothing works and why it seems to be so highly ordered."

Or in other words "I think, therefore I want to explore."

I'm not sure how this is relevant. I was responding to the objection that qualia have no vocabulary of their own, but ony parasitize vocabulary relating to external properties.

But of course, it makes good evolutionary sense for us to be aware of some internal states

Sure, but that's introspection, not subjectivity.

So you are quite wrong to assert, elsewhere in the thread, that subjective qualities would not be expected on the hypothesis of physicalism.

I don't think so. bearing in mind that what I mean by "subjectivity" is "objective inaccessibility", not "introspectability". Permalink

But can the inexpressibility of qualia be accounted for by such facts as mentioned?

It would be more intesting to put forward a specific objection.

the claim here is that the only supposed fact you have to support your belief that you experience qualia is your inability to doubt that you do. It's hard to see how that's a good reason.

I don't think that anything anywhere is better supported. Can you prove the existence of matter, or the falsity of contradictions without assuming them?

No facts can tell you whether articulating qualia would exceed our expressive limitations because we have no measure of the expressive demands of a quale.

What an odd thing to say. The argument for the inexpressability of qualia is just the persistent inability of anyone to do so -- like the argument against the existence of time machines. An explanation for that inablity is what I gave, just as their are speculative theories against time travel.

Science. Human practice. Surely not "I just can't help believing that matter exists."

I think that if you unpack "science" and "human practice" you will find elements of "we assume without proving"..and "we can't help but believe".

Even if examining the brain will make you less confused someday, correctly believing that proposition does not make you any less confused right now.

Or, at least, it doesn't make you not-confused right now. Correctly propagating that belief eliminates the common class of confusion along the lines of "My brain is inherently incomprehensible, why can we comprehend other things but not the brain? Reductionism fails, we must invent new physics to account for mental experiences."

If there is a qualia thing that is in fact a thing in the world, then materialism (the study of things in the world) can explain it.

Maybe there is some barrier to actually figuring something out, like it's really hard and we die before we figure it out. Maybe that's what you meant? Or did you literally mean that it's possible in principle that materialism can't explain some phenomenon?

I believe that The_Duck is taking an eliminativist position, and is not trying to say that materialism explains qualia.

What do you mean by "empirical"?
Given a putative explanation, how do you assess it?
It appears to me that you are merely saying that you do not accept the putative explanation that the Duck (among many others) accepts. Putting it in the impersonal language seems extremely misleading to me. Moreover, the existence of the disagreement appears strong evidence against the claim this is an empirical question, at least if "empirical" is interpreted in an impersonal way.

Maybe your point is your second sentence and your disagreement is a minor detail, but I find your phrasing emphasizes disagreement and distracts from the second sentence. Indeed, the second sentence seems to take a personal view of acceptance of arguments.

One can accept materialism while remaining agnostic about whether it can explain qualia, just like one can accept economics without necessarily requiring it to explain physics.

Materialism is a philosophy which claims the primacy of physics. A materialist can be either a reductionist or an eliminitivist about qualia.

The analogy to economics is bad because economics doesn't contend that economics is primary over physics, but materialism does contend that the physical is primary over the mental.

If materialism is a scientific hypothesis, it is disproveable, ie it could run into a phenomenon it cannot explain.

I could imagine such a thing happening. The fact that it hasn't happened is why we should be firm materialists. As it stands, we have every reason to expect that when we delve into the neurobiology of the brain, we will find a complete, material, physical explanation for the phenomenon of "people talking about qualia." Yes, there's "still a chance" that consciousness may turn out to somehow lie outside the realm of physics as we know it, but that doesn't license you to believe or expect it.

Materialism is neither a scientific hypothesis, nor a case of dogmatically rejecting anything that doesn't fit a materialistic worldview.

Every time I see a red thing, I see a thing. So, are "I see a red thing" and "I see a thing" two separate facts? If so, then I cannot imagine what value there is in counting facts. On that account simply listing all the facts that derive from a given observation ("I see a thing that isn't blue" "I see a thing that isn't yellow" "I see a thing that isn't orange" etc. etc. etc.) would take a lifetime. It might be useful to Taboo "fact".

I can't make sense of that. For one thing, materialism doens't imply nominalism. For a materialist, there could be a Form of the Electron. For another, there is still some phenomenon of sameness in a material world: all electrons are identical

Ding-ding!

A p-zombie doesn't feel pain; it just says it does, and it goes through the motions of being in pain. Does that sound like you? If we chop off your hand, will you not actually be feeling anything?

.def wanderer (locations, utility, X):
..while True:
.
...for some random l1, l2 in locations:
....if utility[l1] < utility[l2]:
.....my_location = l2
....else:
.....my_location = l1
.
...if X(my_location, current_time):
....utility[my_location] = utility[my_location] - 1
.
...current_time = current_time + 1

"You think you replaced it with bold, but that's just a belief. Boldness qualia don't actually exist."

I'm a brain in a body. My attention is a cognitive process for allocating scarce processing resources.

I would love to be able to comment on the degree of meaningfullness, truth, well-informedness, originality and clarity of you comment, but I find myself suddenly confused by what sort of things meaningfullness, truth, well-informdness, originality and clarity actually are. Do you have one or zero of them...?

A theory about qualia is that they're epiphenomena, which I interpret to mean that causation goes only one way (from physical events to qualia), not both ways. I used to immediately reject that theory because we're physically discussing qualia. But then I speculatively proposed the neural argument above, and realized I was wrong. We only ever discuss the fact that we have qualia. We don't discuss the content of the qualia themselves. In fact it seems we can't discuss the raw experienced content of the qualia. So maybe they are very nearly epiphenomenal, with one niggling exception that the facts of their existence are apparently causally linked both directions (perhaps as explained by that putative neural mechanism).

Um, that might still be badly expressed, but it's my best effort. If it still doesn't work, then the whole idea is probably badly formed.

Perhaps a differently evolved or designed neural architecture could discuss the content of qualia. We might simply lack the wiring for it.

I think you are confusing the word "color" that identifies a certain type of visual experience, with the word "color" that identifies a certain set of light-frequencies. This is much like confusing the word "sound" which means "auditory experience", with the word "sound" which means "acoustic vibrations".

You see certain frequencies in a different way than people with red-green colour blindness; in short these frequencies lead to different qualia, different visual experiences. That's rather obvious and rather useless in discussing the deeper philosophical point.

But to say that you experience certain visual experiences differently than others experience them, may even be a contradiction in terms -- unless it's meant that the atomic qualia trigger in turn different qualia (e.g. different memories or feelings) in each person. Which is probably also trivially true...

You'll notice that the next few sentences of my post address this same idea for fully functional members of different species. But it doesn't technically refute the claim for qualia, only that we're not all equally responsive to the same stimuli.

It is, for example, technically possible (in the broadest sense) that color-blind people experience the same qualia we do, but they are unable to act on them, much in the same way that a friend with ADD might experience the same auditory stimuli I do, but then is too distracted to actually notice or make sense of it.

I note, however, that the physical differences in color-blindness (or different species' eyes) are enough reason to lend little credibility to this idea.

You can also know all relevant facts about physics but still not "know" how to ride a bicycle. "Knowing" what red looks like (or being able to imagine redness) requires your brain to have the ability to produce a certain neural pattern, i.e. execute a certain neural "program". You can't learn how to imagine red the same way you learn facts like 2+2=4 for the same reason you can't learn how to ride a bike by learning physics. It's a different type of "knowledge", not sure if we should even call it that.

Edit (further explanation): To learn how to ride a bike you need to practice doing it, which implements a "neural program" that allows you to do it (via e.g. "muscle memory" and whatnot). Same for producing a redness sensation (imagining red), a.k.a "knowing what red looks like".

Mary's room is an interesting one. I think there's a valid rebuttal to it, though, but it takes quite a bit of explanation so hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen, and if you're not interested then feel free to ignore. I should stress that this is an argument of my own formulation, although it is informed by my readings of a bunch of other philosophers, and that therefore it is entirely possible that people who share my conclusions might disagree with my premises or form of argument. I'm not trying very hard to convince anyone with this post, just putting the argument out there for your inspection. <-- (EDIT: left the word "not" out of this sentence the first time. Whoops!)

The hard-materialist, anti-qualian, functionalist argument is that sensation ≡ brain state. That is, "for one's brain to be in the brain-state which is produced when red light hits one's retina is to experience redness". Once you've experienced redness a few times, it is to possible to intentionally assume that "red" brain-state, so it is possible to remember what it is like to see red without actually having to be exposed to red light. We call this "knowing what red is like".

Mary, unfortunately, has grown up in a colour-free environment, so she has never experienced the brain-state that is "seeing red", and even if her brain had drifted through that state accidentally, she wouldn't have known that what she was experiencing was redness. She can't find her way to the state of redness because she has never been there before. When she starts researching in an attempt to figure out what it is like to see red, her descriptive knowledge of the state will increase - she'll know which sets of neurons are involved, the order and frequency of their firings, etc - but of course this won't be much help in actually attaining a red brain-state. Hearing that Paris is at 48.8742° N, 2.3470° E doesn't help you get there unless you know where you are right now.

Mary's next step might be to investigate the patterns that instantiate sensations with which she is familiar. She might learn about how the smell of cinnamon is instantiated in the brain, or the feeling of heat, etc, etc, and then attempt to "locate" the sensation of red by analogy to these sensations. If you know where you are relative to Brisbane, and you know where Brisbane is relative to Paris, then you can figure out where you are relative to Paris.

This workaround would be effective if she were trying to find her way to a physical place, because on Earth you only need 3 dimensions to specify any given location, and it's the same 3 dimensions every time. Unfortunately, the brain is more complicated. There are some patterns of neural behaviour which are only active in the perception of colour, so while analogy to the other senses might allow Mary zero in a little closer to knowing what red is like, it wouldn't be nearly enough to solve her problem.

Luckily, Mary is a scientist, and where scientists can't walk they generally invent a way to fly. Mary knows which neurons would are activated when people see red, and she knows the manner of their activation. She can scan her head and point to the region of her brain that red light would stimulate. So why does she need red light? Synesthetes regularly report colour experiences being induced by apparently non-coloured stimuli, and epileptics often experience phantom colours before fits. Ramachandran and Hubbard even offer a report of a colour-blind synesthete who experiences what he calls "Martian colours" - colours which he has never experienced in the real world and which therefore appear alien to him (PRSL, 2001). So, Mary CAN know red, she just has to induce the brain state associated with redness in herself. Maybe she uses transcranial electrostimulation. Maybe she has to resort to wireheading (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading). Maybe all she needs to do is watch a real-time brain scan while she meditates, so she can learn to guide herself into the right state the same way that people who already "know" red get to it. Point is, if Mary is at all dedicated, she's going to end up understanding red.

Of course, some qualians might argue that this misses the point - if Mary induces an experience of redness then she's still exposing herself to the quale of red, whether or not there was any red light involved, so Mary hasn't come to her knowledge solely by physical means. I think that skirts dangerously close to begging the question, though. As I've mentioned above, the functionalist view of colour holds that to know what it is like to see red is just "to know how to bring about the brain-state associated with redness in oneself". It seems unfair to say that Mary has to be able possess that knowledge but never use it in order for functionalists to be proved right - you might as well request that she know what an elephant looks like without ever picturing one in her mind. Regardless, the Mary's Room thought experiment presupposes that Mary can't experience the quale of red in her colourless environment. If qualians want to argue that inducing the brain state of red exposes Mary to the quale of red, then the thought experiment doesn't do what it was supposed to, and therefore can't prove what it was designed to prove.

Anyway, I'd say that was my two cents but looking at how much I've typed it's probably more like fifteen dollars...

It's just another cool problem about colors.

As far as Mary's Room goes, you might similarly argue that you could have all of the data belonging to Pixar's next movie, which you haven't seen yet, without having any knowledge of what it looks like or what it's about. Or that you can't understand a program without compiling it & running it.

I'm not entirely sure how much credibility I lend to that. There are some very abstract things (fairly simple, yes) which I can intuit without prior experience, and there are many complicated things which I can predict due to a great deal of prior experience (eg landscapes described in novels).

But I mostly raised it as another interesting problem with a proposed [partial] solution.

Yes, but that's a separate argument.

In addition, this hypothesis is definitely testable. I made a claim above. Create a new sensory input / type of stimuli, and we will perceive a "new" qualia that was never perceived before, just like colorblind people that have never seen color and don't have any idea what you're talking about who would suddenly be able to see colors.

There have been cases of people blind from birth who, by some medical treatment were enabled to see. No references to hand, but Oliver Sacks probably writes about this somewhere. They clearly get new qualia, which are moreover clearly different from those who were sighted from birth.

ETA: Wikipedia article on recovery from blindness.

In this philosophy, we only perceive "color" as a "special experience" because we do not realize that the same is true for all of our senses

Indeed, all of our senses, by definition, have qualia, and colour is just a particularly striking example. It is interesting, though, to note that not all brain tissue produces qualia: the cerebellum operates without them. Our motor control (what the cerebellum primarily does) proceeds without qualia -- we have almost no awareness of what we are doing with individual muscles. This is why all forms of teaching people how to move, whether physiotherapy, dance training, martial arts, sports, and so on, make a lot of use of indirect visualisation to produce the desired results. (These can easily be mistaken, sometimes by the teachers themselves, for literal descriptions, e.g. of "chi" or "energy".) Golfers are taught to "follow through", even though nothing that happens after the moment of impact can have any effect on the ball. It is the intention to follow through that changes how the club is swung, and how it impacts the ball, in a way that could not be achieved by any more direct instruction.

In this philosophy, we only perceive "color" as a "special experience" because we do not realize that the same is true for all of our senses

Ye-e-e-s, but the standard qualiaphilic take is that all the other sense are problematic as well. You think you are levelling down, but you are levelling up.

In addition, this hypothesis is definitely testable. I made a claim above. Create a new sensory input / type of stimuli, and we will perceive a "new" qualia that was never perceived before,

That isn't a test of reductionism, etc, since many of the alternatives make the same prediction. For instance, David Chalmer's theory that qualia are non-physical properties that supervene on the physical properties of the brain.

I don't know about excruciating detail, but I think the general idea is this:

One would not predict the existence of evil in a universe created by a benevolent God.

One would not predict the existence of intrinisically subjective qualities in an entirely physcial, and therefor entirely objective, universe.

qualia = {"red", "blue", "cold", "pleasure"}

memory_associations = {red = {"anger", "hot"}, blue = {"cold", "calm"},
                                        pleasure = {"hot", "good"}}

function experience_qualia(input)
    for _, q in ipairs(qualia) do
        if input == q then
            print("my experience of", input, "is the same as", q)
        else
            print(q, "and", input, "feel different")
        end
    end
    print("furthermore, the feeling of", input, "seems connected to")
    print(table.concat(memory_associations[input], " and "))

    print("I have no way of reducing these experiences, therefore I exist outside physics")
end

experience_qualia"red"
experience_qualia"blue"

{'x': y}
['x', 'y']

{x='y'}
{'x','y'}

{x = true, y = true}

I can write a computer program that experiences qualia to the same extent that I do.

Please do so and publish.

Qualia is not a problem; materialism adequately explains all aspects of it, except the exact neuroscience details.

"Some factors are still missing, like the expression of the people's will..."