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nawitus comments on The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle - Less Wrong
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No, the problem with the zombie argument, the notion of 'qualia', and anything postulating mysterious entities, is that they don't explain / predict anything. This post mostly just explains that for people who don't feel like reading Dennett.
There are many valid arguments or reason to believe in the existence of qualia, you can't simply say that because we cannot use qualia to predict anything at this point, then you can just ignore qualia. Qualia is "mysterious" in the same way the universe is, we don't know it's properties fully.
In fact, I can and did. Furthermore, if a hypothesis doesn't predict anything, then it is a meaningless hypothesis; it cannot be tested, and it is not useful even in principle. An explanation that does not suggest a prediction is no explanation at all.
Avoid mysterious answers to mysterious questions
Qualia is not a full explanation as of yet, you can think of it as a philosophical problem. There are many arguments to believe in the existence of qualia. It might be possible to show all of them to be false, in fact Dennet has attempted this. After you've shown them all to be false, it's okay to say "qualia doesn't exist". However, it's irrational to claim that since the concept/problem of qualia doesn't predict anything, qualia therefore doesn't exist.
Nope. It's irrational to claim that qualia does exist when the hypothesis that qualia exists does not entail any predictions. I am not aware of any good arguments in favor of the existence of qualia, and already have a good reason to reject the hypothesis that it exists.
"qualia" labels part of the explanandum, not the explanation.