nawitus comments on The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 April 2008 11:16PM

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Comment author: thomblake 01 August 2009 11:24:38PM 2 points [-]

you can't simply say that because we cannot use qualia to predict anything at this point, then you can just ignore qualia

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

Comment author: nawitus 02 August 2009 08:31:34AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 02 August 2009 08:52:45PM 3 points [-]

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.