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Benito comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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To offer my own reasons for disagreement,
I think the first point is unfounded (or misguided). We do things (like moving, and thinking). We notice and can report that we've done things, and occasionally we notice and can report that we've noticed that we've done something. That we can report how things appear to a part of us that can reflect upon stimuli is not important enough to be called 'quaila'. That we notice that we find experience 'ineffable' is not a surprise either - you would not expect the brain to be able to report everything that occurs, down to the neurons firing (or atoms moving). So, all we really have is the ability to notice and report that which has been advantageous for us to report in the evolutionary history of the human (these stimuli that we can notice are called 'experiences'). There is nothing mysterious here, and the word 'qualia' always seems to be used mysteriously - so I don't think the first point carries the weight it might appear to.
Qualia is not clearly a basic fact of physics. I made the point that we would not expect a species designed by natural selection to be able to report or comprehend its most detailed, inner workings, solely on the evidence of what it can report and notice. But this is all skirting around the core idea of LessWrong: The map is not the territory. Just because something seems fundamental does not mean it is. Just because it seems like a Turing machine couldn't be doing consciousness, doesn't mean that is how it is. We need to understand how it came to be that we feel what we feel, before go making big claims about the fundamental nature of reality. This is what is worked on in LessWrong, not in Searle's philosophy.
If the ineffabiity of qualia is down to the complexity of fine-grained neural behaviour, then the question is why is anything effable -- people can communicate about all sorts of things that aren't sensations (and in many cases are abstract and "in the head").
I'm not sure that I follow. Can anything we talk about be reduced to less than the basic stimuli we notice ourselves having?
All words (that mean anything) refer to something. When I talk about 'guitars', I remember experiences I've had which I associate with the word (i.e. guitars). Most humans have similar makeups, in that we learn in similar ways, and experience in similar ways (I'm just talking about the psychological unity of humans, and how far our brain design is from, say, mice). So, we can talk about things, because we've learnt to refer certain experiences (words) to others (guitars).
Neither of the two can refer to anything other to the experiences we have. Anything we talk about is in relation to our experiences (Or possibly even meaningless).
Most of the classic reductions are reductions to things beneath perceivable stimuli,eg heat to molecular motion. Reductionism and physialism would be in very bad trouble if language and concpetualistion grounded out where perception does. The theory also mispredicts that we woul be able communicate our sensations , but struggle to communicate abstract (eg mathemataical) ideas with a distant rleationship, or no relationship to senssation. In fact, the classic reductions are to the basic entities of phyiscs, which are ultimately defined mathematically, and often hard to hard to visualise or otherwise relate to sensation.
You could point out the different constituents of experience that feel fundamental, but they themselves (e.g. Red) don't feel as though they are made up of anything more than themselves.
When we talk about atoms, however, that isn't a basic piece of mind that mind can talk about. My mind feels as though it is constituted of qualia, and it can refer to atoms. I don't experience an atom, I experience large groups of them, in complex arrangements. I can refer to the atom using larger, complex arrangements of neurons (atoms). Even though, when my mind asks what the basic parts of reality are, it has a chain of reference pointing to atoms, each part of that chain is a set of neural connections, that don't feel reducible.
Even on reflection, our experiences reduce to qualia. We deduce that qualia are made of atoms, but that doesn't mean that our experience feels like its been reduced to atoms.
Where is that heading? Is it supposed to tell my why qualia are ineffable....or rather, why qualia are more ineffable than cognition?
I'm saying that we should expect experience to feel as if made of fundamental, ineffable parts, even though we know that it is not. So, qualia aren't the problem for a turing machine they appear to be.
Also, we all share these experience 'parts' with most other humans, due to the psychological unity of humankind. So, if we're all sat down at an early age, and drilled with certain patterns of mind parts (times-tables), then we should expect to be able to draw upon them at ease.
My original point, however, was just that the map isn't the territory. Qualia don't get special attention just because they feel different. They have a perfectly natural explanation, and you don't get to make game-changing claims about the territory until you've made sure your map is pretty spot-on.
I don 't see why. Saying that eperience is really complex neurall activity isn't enough to explain that, because thought is really complex neural activity as well, and we can comminicate and unpack concepts.
Can you write the code for SeeRed() ? Or are you saying that TMs would have ineffable concepts?
You've inverted the problem: you have creatd the expectation that nothing mental is effable.
No, I'm saying that no basic, mental part will feel effable. Using our cognition, we can make complex notions of atoms and guitars, built up in our minds, and these will explain why our mental aspects feel fundamental, but they will still feel fundamental.
I'm not continuing this discussion, it's going nowhere new. I will offer Orthonormal's sequence on qualia as explanatory however: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5n9/seeing_red_dissolving_marys_room_and_qualia/
You seem to be hinting, but are not quite saying, that qualia are basic and therefore ineffable, whilst thoughts are non-basic and therefore effable.
Confirming the above would be somewhere new.