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Bugmaster comments on The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem - Less Wrong
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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 ?
Radically unfamiliar-to-humans qualia. You have picked an easy case, I have picked a difficult one. If we wan't to know what the world sonars like to a bat on LSD, identity theory doens't tell us.
Well, in point of fact, I've personally never done LSD, so I don't know what color perception is like for another human on LSD, either. I could make an educated guess, though.
In case of the bat sonar, the answer is even simpler, IMO: we lack the capacity to experience what the world sonars like to a bat, except in the vaguest terms. Again, I don't see this is a problem. Bats have sonars, we don't.
Note that this is very different from saying something like "we can't know whether bats experience anything at all through their sonar", or "even if we have scanned the bat's brain, we can't predict what changes it would undergo in response to a particular sonar signal", etc. All I'm saying is, "we cannot create a sufficiently accurate mapping between our brain states and the bat's, as far as sonaring is concerned".
Again, I'm not entirely sure I understand what additional things we need to explain w.r.t qualia.
I see that as a problem for the claim that mind-brain identity theory explains qualia. It does not enable us to undestand the bat's qualia, or to predict what they would be like. However, other explanations do lead to understanding and predicting.
Understanding and predicting.
I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "understanding" and "predicting". As I said, if we could scan the bat's brain and figure out how all of its subsystems influence each other, we would know with a very high degree of certainty what happens to it when the bat receives a sonar signal. We could identify the changes in the bat's model of the world that would result from the sonar signal, and we could predict them ahead of time.
Thus, for example, we could say, "if the bat is in mid-flight, and hungry, and detects its sonar reflecting from a small object A of size B and shape C etc., then it would alter its model of the world to include a probable moth at the object's approximate location (*). It would then alter course to intercept the moth, by sending out signals to its wing muscles as follows: blah blah".
Are predictions of this sort insufficient ? If so, what additional predictions could be made by those other explanations you mentioned ?
(*) Disclaimer: I don't really know much about the hunting habits of real-life bats.
More irrelevant. None of them are actualy about qualia, about how things seem to experiencing subjects. You have Substituted an Easier Problem.
Is "how things seem to experiencing subjects" somehow different from "things happening to the brains of experiencing subjects" ? If so, how ?
We can't figure out the former from the latter. If we want to know what such-and-such and experience is like, a description of a brain state won't tell us. They might still be identical in some way we can;t understand... but then we can't undestand it. So it remains the case that m/b identity theory doesn't constitute an explanation.
I read this sentence as,
"If we want to build an approximate mapping between someone else's brain states and ours, a description of a brain state won't help us".
That sounds contradictory to me.
is you parpahrase actually a fair translation of my comment? Are "mappings" things that tell people what such-and-such an experience is like, as if they had had it themselves? What, concretely, is a mapping?
The map is not the territory. Just because descriptions of our brain states won't help us figure out what subjective experiences are like (either currently or in the foreseeable future), doesn't mean that those experiences aren't a part of the physical world somehow. Reductionism has been a very successful paradigm in our description of the physical world, but we can't state with any confidence that it has captured what the ontologically basic, "ground" level of physics is really like.
OK. I am not arguing for duaism. I am arguing against the claim tha adopting reductionism, or materialism, or m/b identity constitutes a resolution of any of any Hard Problem. What you are saying is that m/b identity might be true as unintelligible brute fact. What I am saying is that brute facts aren't explanations.
Normally I'd assume that I know what you meant and move on, but since this involves LSD... You don't know what it's like? Or you do, but it's an educated guess? What?
I've never done LSD myself, but I've talked to people who did, and I've read similar accounts in books, online, etc. Thus, I can make a guess as to what LSD would feel like, assuming my brain is close to the average.