Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
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He seems to answer the question of why humans feel and report that they are conscious; why, in fact, they are conscious. But I don't know how to translate that into an explanation of why I am conscious.
The problem that many people (including myself) feel to be mysterious is qualia. I know indisputably that I have qualia, or subjective experience. But I have no idea why that is, or what that means, or even what it would really mean for things to be otherwise (other than a total lack of experience, as in death).
A perfect and complete explanation of of the behavior of humans, still doesn't seem to bridge the gap from "objective" to "subjective" experience.
I don't claim to understand the question. Understanding it would mean having some idea over what possible answers or explanations might be like, and how to judge if they are right or wrong. And I have no idea. But what Dennett writes doesn't seem to answer the question or dissolve it.
Here's how I got rid of my gut feeling that qualia are both real and ineffable.
First, phrasing the problem:
Even David Chalmers thinks there are some things about qualia that are effable. Some of the structural properties of experience - for example, why colour qualia can be represented in a 3-dimensional space (colour, hue, and saturation) - might be explained by structural properties of light and the brain, and might be susceptible to third-party investigation.
What he would call ineffable is the intrinsic properties of experience. With regards to colour-... (read more)