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Either "qualia" are ultimately a type of experience that can be communicated to a conscious being who hasn't had the experience, or they cannot. If they can be, they cease to have any distinction from any other communicable fact. If they cannot, you can't actually use them to determine if something is conscious, because nobody can communicate to you their own individual qualia. Either way, qualia by necessity drop out of any theory of consciousness that can classify whether something as inert as a brick is a conscious being or not. And if a theory of consciousness does not predict, either way, whether or not a brick is conscious, then it is a waste of time.
That's the sort of dilemma I don't trust as a reasoning step. What if they can partially or vaguely or approximately (but not precisely and entirely) be communicated to a conscious being who hasn't had the experience?
Then they are partially Enlightened.
Insofar as they are communicable, the communication can be emitted by someone that doesn't experience them, and thus doesn't serve as evidence that the communicating being experiences the quale. (In the classic "Mary the color scientist" formulation, Mary, who has never experienced seeing red, can tell people partially/vaguely what it's like to see red, since knows every communicable fact about seeing red, including how people describe it.)
Let's say you speak to an alien from another universe, and they give you mathematical equations for a phenomenon that only people in that universe experience. For example, a weird slight periodic shift in the gravitational constant.
I can communicate this information further, even though I don't experience such shifts to the gravitational constant myself. And yet you're saying that the alien who first originated those equations, that isn't evidence for their own experiences either?
Perhaps you mean it isn't proof, but to say it's not evidence at all is a rather big claim.
How would his formulating equations give me any evidence that he feels the shift in the gravitational constant? Newton's laws weren't evidence that Newton ever experienced orbiting another body.
Look, back to the basic point of the sterility of qualia, how would you go about distinguishing whether I actually experience qualia, or whether I am just programmed by evolution to mimic the responses of other people when asked about their experiences of qualia?
Newton did orbit the sun, while riding the Earth; and his laws were certainly evidence for that rather than against it.
Saying that event A is zero evidence for event B, really means that the two events are completely uncorrelated with each other -- do you really mean to argue that the existence of Newton's equations is completely uncorrelated with the fact Newton lived in a (to the limits of his understanding) Newtonian universe?
Occam's razor can be useful there, I think, until we have enough understanding of neuroscience to be able to tell between a brain doing mimicry, and a brain doing an honest and lucid self-evaluation.
And he had no particular qualia that would distinguish that from any of a billion other arrangements.
No, I mean to argue that the existence of Newton's equations is completely uncorrelated with whether Newton experienced any qualia. A properly-designed curve-fitting algorithm, given the right data, could produce them as well; there is no evidence of consciousness (at least distinct from computation) as a result.
Aliens arrive to visit Earth. Their knowledge of their own neural architecture is basically useless when evaluating ours. How do they determine that humans "actually experience" qualia, rather than humans simulating the results of experience of qualia as a result of evolution?
The Occam's Razor result that "they act in a manner consistent with having qualia, therefore they probably experience qualia, therefore they are probably conscious" is immediately displaced by the Occam's Razor result that "they act in a manner consistent with being conscious, therefore they probably are conscious". The qualia aren't necessary, and therefore drop out of the axiomization of a theory of consciousness.
You misunderstood my argument. I wasn't talking about qualia when I talked about Newton, I was talking about gravity, another phenomenon. Newton was affected by gravity -- this was highly correlated with the fact he talked about gravity. We talk about qualia -- this is therefore evidence in favour of us being affected by qualia.
What would be the evolutionary benefit of simulating the results of experience of qualia, in a world where nobody experiences qualia for real? That's like an alien parrot simulating the voice of a human in a planet where there exist no humans. Highly unlikely to be stumbled upon coincidentally by evolution.
What do you mean by "conscious"? Self-aware? Not sleeping or knocked out? These seem different and more complex constructs than qualia, who have the benefit of current seeming irreducability at some level (I might be able to reduce individidual color qualia to separate qualia of red/green/blue and brightness, but not further).
I agree; but I don't think it's relevant to the question.