Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem - Less Wrong
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That's an over-generalisation from colour. Pain is a textbook example of a quale, and "pain" describes an effect, a reaction, not a cause, which would be something like "sharp" or "hot". Likewise, words for tastes barely map onto anything object. "Sweet" kind of means "high in calories", but kind of doens't, since saccharine is thousands of times sweeter than sugar, but not thousands of times more calorific. And so on.
The simplest explanation for the universe is that it doesn't exist. It's not popular, because the universe seems to exist. Explanations need to be adeqaute to the facts, not just simple.
There is a perspective from which it is surpising we can describe anything that it going on in our heads. Billions of neurons must churn data in considerable excess of gigabits per second, but speech has a bandwidth of only a few bits per second. So the surprise is that some things, chiefly discursive thought, are expressible at all. Although that is not really a surpise, since we can easily account for it on the assumption that discursive thought is internalised speech.
Since the inexpressibility of qualia can be accounted for given facts about the limited bandwidth of speech, it does not need to be accounted for all over again on the hypothesis that qualia don't exist.
Beliefs about what? It might be just about credible that other people are p-zombies, with no qualia, but with a mistaken belief that they have qualia. However, it is much harder for me to persuade myself that I am a zombie. When I look at a Muler-Lyer illusion, I have a (cognitive, non perceptual) belief that the lines are the same length, but I will also report that they look different. That second belief is not a belief about belief, it is a belief about how things look.
I don't see where you are going with that. Unless your "less" amounts to a zero, that doesn't amount to nihiism. Having some qualia, but less than we previosously thought, raises the same problems.
So does eliminating matter in favour of free-floating mental content, as do idealists (or perhaps we should call them matter nihilists). Parsimony can be a two-edged sword.
The epiphenomenality of qualia is not something that "seems" intuitively or introspectively, it is a delicately argued position
One can challenge such arguments on the grounds that the "about" doens't follow.
I have a more modest proposal: let's eliminate the idea that some things X cannot represent, stand for, or inform us about, some thing Y without being similar or analogous to it.
Whereas the argument for matter is...?
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."
See also Occam's sandblaster
If qualia are explained by our innate intuitions (or beliefs)—propositional attitudes—then two questions follow about "how it works":
What is the propositional content of the beliefs?
What evolutionary pressures caused their development?
I make some conjectures in another essay.
Qualia might be beliefs instead of qualia. Matter might be qualia instead of matter.
:. Beliefs might be Matter instead of Beliefs, or put more simply, beliefs may matter.
Or in other words "I think, therefore I want to explore."