= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kaj_Sotala comments on The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem - 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 (340)
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.