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Comments (165)
That's easy to describe. If I have any experience in the future, I have qualia. If I have no experience in the future, I have no qualia. That's the difference.
Taboo "qualia", "experience", "consciousness", "awareness", and any synonyms. Now try to provide a clear definition.
Please stop commenting. Now try to present your argument.
But more importantly, VAuroch defined clear definition as describing how experience would be different. Experience cannot be tabooed if that is what clear definition means.
As my username might imply, I am not VAuroch.
But more importantly, the point of Taboo is to describe the thing you're talking about in lower level terms, terms that don't generate the same confusion that the original concept does. It is in this manner that confusions are dissolved. If you can't do this with a certain topic, that's evidence you don't fully understand the topic yet--and as far as I'm aware, no one can do this with consciousness/qualia, which is what I was trying to get at.
There is no need to link to Eliezer's posts; I have read all of them, and the ones I disagree with, I will continue to disagree with even after reading them again.
My point about "please stop commenting" is that if something is not a lower level thing, then you cannot describe it lower level terms. That is not because of confusion, but because of what you are talking about.
The links are for the benefit of others who may be reading my comments. That being said, what exactly do you disagree with about dissolving the question?
Assuming this "something" you're talking about is consciousness, I disagree. Strongly.
If you're claiming that you're not confused about consciousness and that you know what you're talking about, then you should be able to transmit that understanding to others through words. If you can't, I submit that you are in fact confused.
I can transmit it through words. We both know what we're talking about here.
I, also, still do not know what you're talking about. I expect to have experiences in the future. I do not really expect them to contain qualia, but I'm not sure what that would mean in your terms. Please describe the difference I should expect in terms of things I can verify or falsify internally.
"I will have experiences but do not expect them to contain qualia," as I understand it, means "I will have experiences but do not expect to experience things in any particular way." This is because qualia are just the ways that things are experienced.
I do not know what it would mean to expect that to happen. Asking how you can verify it is like asking, "How do I verify whether or not 2 + 2 seems to be 4 but is not?"
It seems like you and VAuroch have a disagreement about how to use the word "qualia".
Your usage seems very modest, in the sense of not committing you to anything much. Are you sure that the way you actually use the word is consistently that modest? If having qualia just means experiencing things in some way, then you aren't entitled to assume
without some further argument that explores the nature of qualia in more detail.
(I suspect that VAuroch may have in mind some more-specific meaning of "qualia" that does entail particular positions on some questions like those. Or perhaps he merely doubts that there is any really satisfactory way to define "qualia" and is pushing you for more detail in the expectation that doing so will reveal problems?)
Sorry, but I don't know what we're talking about (i.e. I don't know how to define consciousness). Could you transmit your understanding to me through words? Thanks in advance.
How are qualia different from experiences? If experiences are no different, why use 'qualia' rather than 'experiences'?
Qualia means the specific way that you experience something. And if you don't experience something in any way at all, then you don't experience it. So if there are no qualia, there are no experiences. But they don't mean the same thing, since qualia means "the ways things are experienced", not "experiences."
Suppose I propose that physical objects have not only "mass" but "massiness", which is "the way things have mass". I agree that we can do the usual calculations using mass and that they will tell us how particles move, but I insist that we do not know that massiness is purely physical; that doing those calculations may miss something about massiness.
I guess that you would have little sympathy for this position. Where (if at all) does the analogy "experience : qualia :: mass : massiness" fail?
I have quite a bit of sympathy for that position, actually. I am not sure that analogy fails at all. However, we directly notice that we experience things in particular ways; if there is a particular way that things have mass, it is not part of our direct experience, since mass itself is not.