= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kaj_Sotala comments on Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (152)
A physically plausible scenario would involve growing up under a monochromatic light source.
Growing up without sensory input actually affects the brain; see Wikipedia's article on monocular deprivation. I'm actually an example of this - I was born without the Mystic Eyes Of Depth Perception so I'll never know what stereoscopic vision "feels like".
I propose that "qualia" is a word that, like "microevolution", is mainly used by people who are very confused (and dissolving the question is the appropriate approach).
Could you expand on this? I've seen before here the notion that the term "qualia" should be gotten rid of entirely, but I've never really understood it.
For instance, asking what kinds of processes are capable of producing qualia, in order to figure out which animals are capable of feeling pain, certainly seems relevant for utilitarian ethics. (You could reword the question as "which animals can feel pain", which avoids using the term 'qualia', but you're at heart still referring to the same concept.)
It's also pretty difficult to describe phenomena like synaesthesa without terms like qualia.