Umm. Am I misunderstanding something, or is this post saying that we should "solve" the problem of qualia by accepting that we're all p-zombies?
From the standpoint of somebody feeling confused about qualia, the trouble with this solution is not that it is necessarily false but that accepting it doesn't make you feel any less confused.
"C. We can’t capture the ineffable core of raw experience with language because there’s really nothing there. One task in philosophy is articulating the intuitions implicit in our thinking, and sometimes rejecting the intuition should result from concluding it employs concepts illogically. What shows the intuition of raw experience is incoherent (self-contradictory or vacuous) is that the terms we use to describe raw experience are limited to the terms for its referents; we have no terms to describe the experience as such, but rather, we describe qualia by applying terms denoting the ordinary cause of the supposed raw experience."
That's an over-generalisation from colour. Pain is a textbook example of a quale, and "pain" describes an effect, a reaction, not a cause, which would be something like "sharp" or "hot". Likewise, words for tastes barely map onto anything object. "Sweet" kind of means "high in calories", but kind of doens't, since saccharine is thousands of times sweeter than sugar, but not thousands of times more calorific. And so on.
..." The simplest explanation for the absence of a vocabulary to describe
The simplest explanation for the universe is that it doesn't exist. It's not popular, because the universe seems to exist. Explanations need to be adeqaute to the facts, not just simple.
Upvoted for this line alone. See also, "If nothing exists, I want to know how the nothing works and why it seems to be so highly ordered."
I think simply fully accepting materialism clears up all hard philosophical problems related to consciousness, including "qualia." We can simply go and look at the how the brain works, physically. Once we understand all the physical facts (including e.g. the physical causes of people talking about qualia) there are no other facts to understand.
As such, I feel like someone treating "qualia" seriously is a big red (ha) flag. Either they have not embraced materialism, or they are worrying about whether a falling tree that no one hears makes a sound.
Even if examining the brain will make you less confused someday, correctly believing that proposition does not make you any less confused right now.
Even if examining the brain will make you less confused someday, correctly believing that proposition does not make you any less confused right now.
Or, at least, it doesn't make you not-confused right now. Correctly propagating that belief eliminates the common class of confusion along the lines of "My brain is inherently incomprehensible, why can we comprehend other things but not the brain? Reductionism fails, we must invent new physics to account for mental experiences."
You didn't actually dissolve the problem of qualia -- you just rationalized it away. The goal we like to aim for here in "dissolving" problems is not just to show that the question was wrongheaded, but thoroughly explain why we were motivated to ask the question in the first place.
If qualia don't exist for anyone, what causes so many people to believe they exist and to describe them in such similar ways? Why does virtually everyone with a philosophical bent rediscover the "hard problem"?
A philosophers’ version is the “inverted spectrum”: how do I know you see “red” rather than “blue” when you see this red print?
That's a typo, right? It's blue print.
Removing a fundamental scientific mystery is a conceptual gain.
Removing it by claiming it doesn't exist seems suspicious to me. Especially given that it seems quite clear that I have qualia.
The whole mess regarding "qualia" I just chalk up to "we don't know how the brain works; once we do, it will have a perfectly reasonable explanation."
A joke: there is in fact an empirical test for p-zombiehood: whether you agree with Dennett or not.
First, let us make it clear that when you see red, your brain does not store pixels with high R-value in little RGB colour points.
I conjecture that the brain has some highly efficient storage formats for visuals, which is evident in the fact that people untrained in visual arts all have very symbol-centric expressive forms. You do not store a high fidelity vector-graphics image of a red sports car when you see one; you probably store the symbol car, the colour red, the feelings associated with the car-brand, some sense of 'sleekness' and many other paintbr...
How do bumping beer cans jointly experience the subjective taste of a strawberry? How can a soul push cations across bilipid membranes? Neither materialist nor non-materialist answers seem to be adequate, which does suggest that there's a problem here that needs dissolving more than it needs solving. In the absence of adequate evidence, my preferred hypothesis is a kind of neutral monism.
I look in front of me and see a purple box. By any of a variety of possible causes, my attention is brought to bear on my current action, and I notice that I am looking...
There are two traditional problems associated with colors. One is the sort that pseudo-philosophical douchebags take to: "Dude, what if no one really sees the same colors?" The other was very popular in the heyday of classical analytic philosophy: how can we say that Red is Not-Blue analytically if they are empirical & presumably a posteriori data?
Let's assume for the sake of getting to the real argument that consciousness arises from physical matter in a manner uncontroversial for the materialist. Granting this, why do we all see the same co...
It seems like 2c is in tension with 3b. The private-language problem ought to tell us that even if raw experiences exist, then we should not expect to have words to describe raw experience. But then, the lack of those words is in no way evidence that raw experiences do not exist, so 2c fails as an explanation.
It's only really your second paragraph that I disagree with. I'm a panpsychist, but I don't often mention it because a lot of people take that to mean "I believe that everything in the universe has a mind, including rocks and stars".
I go even further than you, though. I think that even of the materialists who aren't accidental/secret property dualists, most of them are still dualists without realising it. The idea that there are physical objects which are related to one another causally is inherently dualist because it theorises two types of things in the universe - physical objects and causal relations. More importantly, the idea of physical objects as distinct from causal relationships is dodgy, because it opens us up to Humean skepticism: we never see the objects themselves, just detect them by their causal relationships to us, so how do we know what they're actually like? All of the properties we associate with physical objects are products of their causal relationships with other matter, so separating the universe into physical things and causal relations paints us into the corner of believing in things which have no properties at all - a propertyless substrate a la the Scholastics.
The only hard and fast way to have a dualism-proof materialism that I'm comfortable with is to hold that objects are just clumps of causal relations. An electron isn't a tiny little ball of substrate to which the properties of mass and charge and spin adhere, rather it's just a likelihood that other particles in a given region will be affected by mass and charge and spin in an electron-like way. And that's how I can be a panpsychist: all causal relations are equal. The only thing different about the ones in our heads is that they're intricately interrelated in such a way that they're self-referential, sensitively dependent on outside conditions, and persistent in a way that means that present interactions can recall interactions that happened years in the past (memory). The sensation of being alive is just what it feels like to be a really complex web of causal relations, and when this web reacts slightly to outside stimuli, that sensation changes slightly to, say, "the sensation of being alive and seeing the colour blue". This is why I say that panpsychism isn't the same as believing that rocks are conscious - consciousness is a special, complex type of causal relation, a sub-category into which inanimate objects don't fit unless you spend a lot of time and energy constructing an AI out of them.
[Cross-posted.]
1. Defining the problem: The inverted spectrum
A. Attempted solutions to the inverted spectrum.
B. The “substitution bias” of solving the “easy problem of consciousness” instead of the “hard problem.”
2. The false intuition of direct awareness
A. Our sense that the existence of raw experience is self-evident doesn’t show that it is true.
B. Experience can’t reveal the error in the intuition that raw experience exists.
C. We can’t capture the ineffable core of raw experience with language because there’s really nothing there.
D. We believe raw experience exists without detecting it.
3. The conceptual economy of qualia nihilism pays off in philosophical progress
4. Relying on the brute force of an intuition is rationally specious.
Against these considerations, the only argument for retaining raw experience in our ontology is the sheer strength of everyone’s belief in its existence. How much weight should we attach to a strong belief whose validity we can't check? None. Beliefs ordinarily earn a presumption of truth from the absence of empirical challenge, but when empirical challenge is impossible in principle, the belief deserves no confidence.