Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 04:26AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 10 December 2012 03:01:30PM 4 points [-]

Daniel Dennett's 'Quining Qualia' (http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm) is taken ('round these parts) to have laid the theory of qualia to rest. Among philosophers, the theory of qualia and the classical empiricism founded on it are also considered to be dead theories, though it's Sellers "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (http://www.ditext.com/sellars/epm.html) that is seen to have done the killing.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 11:25:28PM 2 points [-]

I haven't read either of those but will read them. Also I totally think there was a respectable hard problem and can only stare somewhat confused at people who don't realize what the fuss was about. I don't agree with what Chalmers tries to answer to his problem, but his attempt to pinpoint exactly what seems so confusing seems very spot-on. I haven't read anything very impressive yet from Dennett on the subject; could be that I'm reading the wrong things. Gary Drescher on the other hand is excellent.

It could be that I'm atypical for LW.

EDIT: Skimmed the Dennett one, didn't see much of anything relatively new there; the Sellers link fails.

Comment author: Karl 11 December 2012 03:52:51AM 3 points [-]

Also I totally think there was a respectable hard problem

So you do have a solution to the problem?

Comment author: [deleted] 11 December 2012 01:26:57AM *  0 points [-]

I'll take a look at Drescher, I haven't seen that one.

Try this link? http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/SellarsEmpPhilMind.pdf

Sellars is important to contemporary philosophy, to the extent that a standard course in epistemology will often end with EPM. I'm not sure it's entirely worth your time though, because an argument against classical (not Bayesian) empiricism.

Comment author: RobbBB 11 December 2012 02:46:03AM *  -1 points [-]

Pryor and BonJour explain Sellars better than Sellars does. See: http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/courses/epist/notes/given.html

The basic question is over whether our beliefs are purely justified by other beliefs, or whether our (visual, auditory, etc.) perceptions themselves 'represent the world as being a certain way' (i.e., have 'propositional content') and, without being beliefs themselves, can lend some measure of support to our beliefs. Note that this is a question about representational content (intentionality) and epistemic justification, not about phenomenal content (qualia) and physicalism.