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The_Duck comments on The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem - Less Wrong
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Comments (340)
I think simply fully accepting materialism clears up all hard philosophical problems related to consciousness, including "qualia." We can simply go and look at the how the brain works, physically. Once we understand all the physical facts (including e.g. the physical causes of people talking about qualia) there are no other facts to understand.
As such, I feel like someone treating "qualia" seriously is a big red (ha) flag. Either they have not embraced materialism, or they are worrying about whether a falling tree that no one hears makes a sound.
That materialism will be capable of explaining qualia is an empirical hypothesis, which has not yet been shown true nor false. 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.
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?
This is what I meant.
I believe that materialism will eventually explain why beings would act just as if certain processes in their nervous system (or equivalent) produced qualia. I am agnostic about whether it will ever explain why those beings actually have qualia, and don't merely act like it.
I wouldn't call myself as "agnostic" on that- I would claim that it's an unquestion if it doesn't cash out as differing predictions in a materialistic interpretation. (This is sometimes what people mean by agnostic, but typically agnostic describes the "above my pay grade" response, not the "beneath my notice" response.)
It may be relevant for ethically important questions such as "how realistic a simulation of a suffering being can we make without actually causing any real suffering".
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.
I don't see why that shoudn't be called physcialism.
I suppose I'm using "materialism" in a slightly different way, then - to refer to a philosophy which claims that mental processes (but not necessarily qualia) are a subset of physical processes, and thus explainable by physics.
I don't know what you mean by "mental". By what concept of "mental processes" are qualia not mental?
I'm not even sure that I agree with this myself, and I realize that this is a bit of a circular definition, but let's try: mental processes are those which are actually physically occuring in the brain (while qualia seem to be something that's produced as a side-effect of the physical processes).
That's like redefining "sensation" to mean "afferent neural signal", which is what necessitated inventing the word "qualia" to stand for what "sensation" used to mean. That one's a lost cause, but to use "mental process" to mean "the physical counterpart of what we used to call a mental process but we don't have a word for any more" is just throwing a crowbar into the discourse. Maybe we need a term for "the physical counterpart of a mental process" to distinguish them from other physical processes, but "mental process" can't be it.
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.
The claim that "materialism will be capable of explaining qualia" is proven if materialism does indeed come up with a convincing explanation of qualia. And while one can't disprove it entirely, the claim becomes quite improbable if we ever reach a point in time where it looks like we've solved every other scientific mystery aside for the problem of qualia.
I have no idea of how I'd assess a proposed materialistic explanation of qualia, given that such an explanation seems to me impossible in principle. But then, just because I'm incapable of imagining such an explanation doesn't mean that it would actually be impossible to come up with one, so I remain open to the possibility of someone coming up with it regardless.
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."
Granted.
can you clarify what a crossed-out "Granted" means in this context?
Crossed out = retracted comment.
You do this by clicking a "Retract" icon below your comment. It means: just ignore this comment. It could mean that author does not agree with their previously made comment, or don't feel the comment is useful for discussion, or something else.
It is something like deleting the comment, except that it is not deleted technically. So you can for example look at the replies to this comment, and they still make sense.
Once retracted, the comment cannot be un-retracted.
Made the comment, realized it didn't add anything.
It's the last bit here that's controversial. Why are there no other facts to understand past the physical ones? What's the argument for that?
Here's what I mean: Say that whenever I see that something is red, a certain neural network is activated, call it the R-network. Once we discover that seeing red is, physically, the activation of the R-network, should we then say that there are two facts ('I saw a red thing' and 'My R-network was activated') or only one fact ('My R-network was activated')? We might readily admit that seeing red is reducible to the activation of the R-network, but that alone doesn't mean that the fact 'I saw a red thing' is not a fact.
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 think they'd have to be, since they're not mutually entailing. They certainly can't be identical facts.
Safe to say, there is an uncountable infinity of facts, whether or not we restrict ourselves to physical facts. The question is whether or not there are non-physical facts (where an experience of a red thing is taken to be a non-physical fact). So this isn't a question of quantity or counting.
It might. What do you suggest?
Well, if an experience of a red thing is taken to be a non-physical fact, then there are certainly non-physical facts, inasmuch as there are experiences of red things.
I don't know, since I'm not really sure what you have in mind when you say "nonphysical fact," beyond knowing that experiencing red is an example. That's why I suggested it.
Agreed. I think it's illegitimate to suggest that the problem of qualia can be dismissed by associating experiential facts with physical facts, and then revoking the fact-license of the experiential one. This isn't to say that I think the problem of qualia is an unsolved one. It just can't be solved (or disolved or whatever) like that.
I was using the term 'fact' as I understood Duck to be using it. I guess I'd say a fact is something that's true. (Though we use the term ambiguously, sometimes meaning 'the state of affairs about which a true thing is said' or something like that) A physical fact is something thats true and that's about nature. An astrological fact is something that's true and that's about astrological stuff (and from this we get the conclusion that there are no positive astrological facts).
Well, I certainly agree that all of this semantic pettifoggery gets us no closer to understanding what distinguishes systems capable of having experiences from those that aren't, or how to identify a real experience that we ourselves aren't having, or how to construct systems capable of having experiences, or how to ensure that systems we construct won't have experiences.
Well, there's a infinity of true statements. Some folks like to restict "fact" to what is not Cambridge
That wouldn't matter to the number of facts though. Anything, for example, which weighs 1 lb weighs more than .9 lb. And there are uncountably many weights between .9 and 1 lb that this thing is heavier than. All those are facts by anyone's measure.
Not by anyone's measure. There are those who would say there is one basica fact, wich has to be derived emprically, and a host of logically derivable true statements.
How do you know? If materialism is a scientific hypothesis, it is disproveable, ie it could run into a phenomenon it cannot explain. OTOH, if it is a case of dogmatically rejecting anythign that doens't fit a materialistic worldview, how is that rational?
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 could be a well-confirmed hypothesis that we should accept fairly firmly, but that does't "clear up" any problems whatsoever. Believing, today, that the qualia will one day have a materialistic explanation does not tell us today what that explanation is.
Yes, I agree. I'm only claiming that materialists should classify the remaining hard work as neurobiology, not philosophy. On the philosophical side, we should realize that the answer to questions like "How do material brains give rise to immaterial qualia?" is "There are no immaterial things; investigate the brain more thoroughly and you will understand the basis of internal experience."
It's not clear who is supposed to be posing that question. The is usually posed without prejudice to the materiality of qualia.
That is an expecation about an answer, not an answer.
This is not clear at all - even though I do otherwise agree with your physicalist premises - because the most detailed evidence about subjective experience has been collected by philosophers, namely phenomenologists. The "hard" work probably encompasses any of biology, physics and philosophy.
Could you taboo "material"/"immaterial". In particular are, say, video game characters "material"?
Expecting the brain to be non-reducible makes you open to magic explanations.
Expecting it to be reducible is not in itself an explanation.
Materialism is neither a scientific hypothesis, nor a case of dogmatically rejecting anything that doesn't fit a materialistic worldview.
So how is the lifting being done? By elimination, as per your other comment?
Could you please rephrase this question?
How does one solve problems by "adopting materialism"?
I do not hold that materialism solves any problems.
Materialism is the useful tautology that everything that is woven into the Great Web of Causality falls under the category of "physics". And that by "physics" we mean "everything in the GWC".
Non-materialism is the non useful statement that some things exist and effect the GWC without being part of the GWC.
I don't see the usefullness. There's a usefull distinction between, for instance,
"everything reduces to the behaviour of its smalles constituents"
and
"there are multiple independent layers, each with their own laws and causality".
I can also see the difference between
"Everything that effects is effected"
and
"There are uncasued causes and epiphenomenal danglers".
reductionism is orthogonal to materialism
uncaused causes are empirically verifiable (we have no clear examples)
Once you clear up all the crap around dangling epiphenomena with the GAZP, what's left has no use.
Maybe. But if you distinguish them, it turns out that the work is beign done by R-ism.
We have candidates, such as the big bang, and the possible disappearance of information in black holes.
I'm still rather unpersuaded that you can solve problems by adopting beliefs. Sounds too much like faith to me.
Likewise. I wonder what you are referring to?
The_Duck wote:
I seem to have translated "accepting" into "adopting"
Can you give a materialist account of this "Great Web of Causality"?
All the things that effect the other things.
Ok, now taboo "effect".
see pearl
So how would I use this description of "effect" to taboo the word in the following sentence?
Or would you argue that the above sentence is incoherent.
Agreed; furthermore, from the point of view of materialism, several of the "hard problems" related to qualia simply go away. For example, the question "why do you see the same red as I do when looking at this red text ?" is easily answered with "mu", because there's no Platonic ideal of redness, and thus no "same" red.
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
I'm not sure what this means; can you expand on it a bit ?
What I meant to say was that "I see the color red" is, in materialist-speak (or at least my personal understanding on it), a shorthand for something like this (warning, I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm probably wrong):
"This screeen emits photons within a narrow frequency range. These photons then excite the photoreceptors in my eyes, which cause certain electrochemical changes to occur in my brain. These changes propagate and cause my mental model of the world (which in itself is a shorthand for a wide set of brain states) to update in a specific way.
Since all human brains are very similar to each other, due to evolutionary as well as environmental factors, it is very likely that your own brain states will undergo similar changes when these photons excite your own receptors. That is to say, we could create a probabilistic mapping between my brain states and yours, and predict the future state of your brain (due to those photons hitting your eyes) based on mine, with high degree of certainty.
However, since no two brains (or two sets of eyes, even) are identical, the exact changes in your own brain states will be different from mine, and the aforementioned mapping cannot be exact."
In other words, there's no such thing as a "perfect red", since everyone's brains are different. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest that color perception is strongly shaped by language and culture, etc.
Given the tenor of your further comments, I miunderstood you. You are claiming that given materialism, qualia probably vary with slight variations in brain structure. Although the conclusion really follows from something like a supervenience principle, not just from the materiality of all things. And although qualia only probabl& vary. There could still be a "same" red. An althouh we don't have a theory of *how qualia depen on brain states -- which is, in fact, the Hard Problem. And the Hard Problem remains unaddressed by an assumption of materialism, so materialism does not clear up "all hard problems".
In my response, I was trying to say that "qualia" are brain states. I put the word "qualia" in quotes because, as far as I understand, this word implies something like, "a property or entity that all beings who see this particular shade of red share", but I explicitly deny that such a thing exists.
Everyone's brains are different, and not everyone experiences the same red, or does so in the same way. The fact that our experiences of "red" are similar enough to the point where we can discuss them is an artifact of our shared biology, as well as the fact that we were all brought up in the same environment.
Anyway, if "qualia" are brain states, then the question "how do qualia depend on brain states" is trivially answered.
My use of "depend" was not meant to exlude identity. I had in mind the supervenience principle, which is trivially fulfilled by identity.
I am not sure where you got that from. C I Lewis defined qualia as a "sort of universal", but I don't think there was any implication that everyone sees 600nm radiation identicallty. OTOH, ones personal qualia must recur to a good degree of accuracy or one would be able to make no sense of ones sensory input.
Interestingly, that is completely false. Knowing that a bat-on-LSD's qualia are identical to its brain states tells me nohting about what they are (which is to say what they seem like to the bat in question..which is to say what they are, since qualia are by definition seemings.[If you think there are two or three meanings of "are" going on there, you might be right]).
Agreed. I was just making sure that we aren't talking about some sort of Platonic-realm qualia, or mysterious quantum-entanglement qualia, etc. That's why I personally dislike the word "qualia"; it's too overloaded.
If I am correct, then you personally could never know exactly what another being experiences when it looks at the same red object that you're looking at. You may only emulate this knowledge approximately, by looking at how its brain states correlate with yours. Since another human's brain states are pretty similar to yours, your emulation will be fairly accurate. A bat's brain is quite different from yours, and thus your emulation will not be nearly as accurate.
However, this is not the same thing as saying, "bats don't experience the color red (*)". They just experience it differently from humans. I don't see this as a problem that needs solving, though I could be missing something.
(*) Assuming that bats have color receptors in their eyes; I forgot whether they do or not.
I don't think anyone has raised that except you.
Alhough, under may circumstances, I could know approximately.
Bats have a sense that humans don't have, sonar, and if they have qualia, they presumably have some kind of radically unfamiliar-to-humans qualia to go with it. That is an issue of a different order to not knowing exactly what someone else's Red is like. And, again, it is not a problem solved by positing the identity of the the bat's brain state and its qualia. Identity theory does't explain qualia in the sense of explaining how variations in qualia relate to varations in brain state.
Agreed.
I wasn't talking about sonar, but about good old-fashioned color perception. A bat's brain is very different from a human's. Thus, while you can approximate another human's perception fairly well, your approximation of a bat's perception would be quite inexact.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If we could scan a bat's brain, and understand more or less how it worked (which, today, we can't do), then we could trace the changes in its states that would propagate throughout the bat when red photons hit its eyes. We could say, "aha, at this point, the bat will likely experience something vaguely similar to what we do, when red photons hit our eyes". And we could predict the changes in the bat's model of the world that will occur as the result. For example, if the bat is conditioned to fear the color red for some reason, we could say, "the bat will identify this area of its environment as dangerous, and will seek to avoid it", etc.
If the above is true, then what is there left to explain ?
It still makes sense to ask what these "brain states" actually are, physically. Since we seem to have direct experiential access to them as part of our subjective phenomenology, this suggests on Occamian grounds that they should not be as physically or ontologically complex as neurophysical brain states. The alternative would be for biological brains to be mysteriously endowed with ontologically basic properties (as if they had tiny XML tags attached to them) which makes no sense at all.
I would agree that it makes sense to ask what sorts of brain states are associated with what sorts of subjective experiences, and how changes in brain states cause and are caused by those experiences, and what sorts of physical structures are capable of entering into those states and what the mechanism is whereby they do so. Indeed, a lot of genuinely exciting work is being done in these areas by neurologists, neurobiologists, and similar specialists as we speak.
I agree, and I would add that a lot of interesting work has also been done by transcendental phenomenologists - the folks who study the subjective experience phenomenon from its, well, "subjective" side. The open question is whether these two strands of work will be able to meet in the middle and come up with a mutually consistent account.
"transcendental phenomenology" is not a natural science but philosophy, so there is no middle to meet in.
You say "has been done"... is that to suggest that there is no active work currently being done in transcendental phenomenology?
How so ? I don't follow your reasoning, and I'm not sure what you mean by "neurophysical brain states" -- are there any other kinds ? Ultimately, every human brain is made of neurons...
I didn't understand that either.
Not exclusively. There are glial cells, for example.
Good point. I should've said, "made of neurons or other physical substances" :-)