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aaronsw comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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Huh? This isn't an argument for the existence of qualia -- it's an attempt to figure out whether you believe in qualia or not. So I take it you disagree with step one, that qualia exists? Do you think you are a philosophical zombie?
I do think essentially the same argument goes through for free will, so I don't find your reductio at all convincing. There's no reason, however, to believe that "love" or "charity" is a basic fact of physics, since it's fairly obvious how to reduce these. Do you think you can reduce qualia?
I don't understand why you think this is a claim about my feelings.
Suppose that neuroscientists some day show that the quale of seeing red matches a certain brain structure or a neuron firing pattern or a neuro-chemical process in all humans. Would you then say that the quale of red has been reduced?
Of course not!
and why not?
Because the neuron firing pattern is presumably the cause of the quale, it's certainly not the quale itself.
I don't understand what else is there.
Imagine a flashlight with a red piece of cellophane over it pointed at a wall. Scientists some day discover that the red dot on the wall is caused by the flashlight -- it appears each and every time the flashlight fires and only when the flashlight is firing. However, the red dot on the wall is certainly not the same as the flashlight: one is a flashlight and one is a red dot.
The red dot, on the other hand, could be reduced to some sort of interaction between certain frequencies of light-waves and wall-atoms and so on. But it will certainly not get reduced to flashlights.
By the same token, you are not going to reduce the-subjective-experience-of-seeing-red to neurons; subjective experiences aren't made out of neurons any more than red dots are made of flashlights.
Ok, that's where we disagree. To me the subjective experience is the process in my brain and nothing else.
There's no arguemnt there. Your point about qualia is illustrated by your point about flashlights, but not entailed by it.
How do you know this?
There's no certainty either way.
Reduction is an explanatory process: a mere observed correlation does not qualify.
I think that anyone talking seriously about "qualia" is confused, in the same way that anyone talking seriously about "free will" is.
That is, they're words people use to describe experiences as if they were objects or capabilities. Free will isn't something you have, it's something you feel. Same for "qualia".
Dissolving free will is considered an entry-level philosophical exercise for Lesswrong. If you haven't covered that much of the sequences homework, it's unlikely that you'll find this discussion especially enlightening.
(More to the point, you're doing the rough equivalent of bugging people on a newsgroup about a question that is answered in the FAQ or an RTFM.)
This is probably a good answer to that question.
Because (as with free will) the only evidence anyone has (or can have) for the concept of qualia is their own intuitive feeling that they have some.
So you say. It is not standardly defined that way.
Qualia are defined as feelings, sensations etc. Since we have feelings, sensations etc we have qualia. I do not see the confusion in using the word ""qualia"
Well, would that mean writing a series like this?
My intuition certainly says that Martha has a feeling of ineffable learning. Do you at least agree that this proves the unreliability of our intuitions here?
Who said anything about our intuitions (except you, of course)?
You keep making statements like,
And you seem to consider this self-evident. Well, it seemed self-evident to me that Martha's physical reaction would 'be' a quale. So where do we go from there?
(Suppose your neurons reacted all the time the way they do now when you see orange light, except that they couldn't connect it to anything else - no similarities, no differences, no links of any kind. Would you see anything?)
I guess you need to do some more thinking to straighten out your views on qualia.
Goodnight, Aaron Swartz.
Or you do. You claim the truth of your claims is self-evident, yet it is not evident to, say, hairyfigment, or Eliezer, or me for that matter.
If I may ask, have you always held this belief, or do you recall being persuaded of it at some point? If so, what convinced you?
Let's back up for a second:
Could you expand on this point, please? It generally agreed* that "free will vs determinism" is a dilemma that we dissolved long ago. I can't see what else you could mean by this, so ...
[*EDIT: here, that is]
I guess it really depends on what you mean by free will. If by free will, pjeby meant some kind of qualitative experience, then it strikes me that what he means by it is just a form of qualia and so of course the qualia argument goes through. If he means by it something more complicated, then I don't see how point one holds (we experience it), and the argument obviously doesn't go through.