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RobbBB comments on Reality is weirdly normal - LessWrong
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Qualia are a candidate for being part (or all) of the phenomenon. Egan's Law doesn't rule out the possibility that eliminativism is true, and qualia are an illusion. But it does insist that if they're an illusion (the sort of illusion zombie Chalmers suffers from in zombie world), the physical basis for the illusion is then the normality that our finished theory has to reproduce and explain.
I'm not setting qualia to one side because I think they're a bad topic for discussion. I'm setting them to one side because they're less metaphysically innocent than the 'normality' of a (true and binding) 'It all adds up to normality', less metaphysically innocent than the 'phenomenon' of a (true and binding) 'Save the phenomenon'.
I wasn't aware of eliminativism. After reading the wikipedia page, eliminativism seems to be nothing more than reductionism applied to the philosophy of mind, but I don't see what problems reductionism poses for qualia. I don't think that I'm missing a logical step, nor do I feel confused on this genre of philosophical issues. So if many people perceive that qualia and reductionism are incompatible, my current hypothesis is that "qualia' has some sort of definitional connotation attached to it that I'm not aware of, which somehow interferes with reductionism. I'd like to be informed about these connotations.
I guess "experience" is the most innocent word? Honestly, "Qualia", "(Subjective) experience", and "(save the) Phenomenon" all seem precisely identical to me, and I only use "qualia" because it's short and doesn't have any other definitions. If it's picked up additional connotations, then I'll have to find a new label for what I will temporarily call "Property Q, which separates counterfactual mathematical structures from reality".
Reductionism says there is some thing existing X which is composed of, undestandable in terms of, and ultimately identical to some other existing thing Y. ELiminativism says X doesn't exist. Heat has been reduced, phlogiston has been eliminated.
Qualia are the specific qualitative properties of our experience, as accessed by first-person introspection. The raw redness of the red you notice in your field of vision, for instance, as contrasted with the functional state of visually detecting light of wavelength 620–740 nm that an alien building a cognitive model of your behavior might initially construct. (Which is not to say that those two properties are non-identical. But if the two are identical, this must be discovered, not just stipulated.)
There are several popular arguments for the irreducibility of qualia (and, more generally, against the reliability of introspection as a method for directly reading off part of our world's ontology), which has made them controversial posits.
In a conversation about mindstuff, what Eliezer calls 'Reductionism' is what I'd call 'physicalism' — the doctrine that the mental (unlike physicsy stuff) is non-fundamental, that it can in principle be fully explained in non-mental terms. The 'reductionism' I think about (which I'll distinguish by making it minuscule) is the more specific doctrine that mental stuff — in this case, phenomenal properties, qualia — exists and is reducible. So a physicalist has to either eliminate or reduce every mental posit.
Eliminativists might insist that we reject qualia because the evidence for them is strictly first-person and introspective (phenomenological) rather than sensory and in-the-world (scientific). Or an eliminativist might think that we have strong prior grounds for accepting physicalism, but that reductionism is a doomed project, say, because of the Mary's Room argument.
...what exactly is the difference between these two things? Observation, evidence, etc... are qualia.
If you are saying that problem of qualia is in the realm of neuroscience, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Neuroscience might make some things more obvious - as it has done with free will - but the answer has been available to us all along. We need not look at an actual brain...we don't even need to look at an actual universe. These sorts of answers hold true no matter what sort of universe you are in, so the word "exists" is inappropriate - you wouldn't say that Bayes theorem "exists", would you?
Qualia (or property Q) is the property that makes things Real in the first place. Qualia is the property that separates the actual universe from the range of all possible universes. All of science and epistemic rationality is an attempt to create models that describe qualia.
Introspection is a perception-like, reflective 'inner sense'. It's modeling your mental states as mental states, by a relatively non-inferential process. Sensory perception is vision, taste, etc.
But there are parts of the universe no one is experiencing. What does it mean to say that there are qualia (properties of experience) there, if there aren't any subjects of experience to be found?
Do you have in mind something like Russell's The relation of sense-data to physics?
Don't all properties distinguish actual universes from non-actual ones? If something isn't actually a bowling ball, then it isn't a bowling ball. I don't see what work qualia is doing here, or what problem it's solving.
Yeah, that's what the words mean, but really, what's the difference between the two? There's no sharp distinction between sensory and introspective perception.
1) Well firstly, qualia are only for you, not for others - I'm pseudo-solopsist that way. But to answer the question: qualia are the Known parts of Reality, and everything else is the Unknown. You can guess at the Unknown using Bayes theorem, and stuff.
2) Maybe? He's being a bit long winded and I'm having trouble ascertaining the main point without spending too much time.
Yes, this is what I mean by qualia being knowns and everything else being unknowns
I'm not sure where he is going with that one as there are many possible interpretations as to what he means. I do think that models are only candidates for being True if they output the correct qualia - and all such models that fit this criteria are then ranked from lowest to highest complexity.
3) No. The counterfactual universe y=3x+7 has properties: the slope is 3, it contains the point (0, 7) and so on. But our reality is not merely "y=3x+7". You know this because you are experiencing things that are decidedly not in the universe "y=3x+7". In the same vein, the counterfactual universe where the sky is green is not real either, and you know this for the same reason.
If your qualia consisted of [(-1, 4), (0, 7), (1, 10)] and so on, with a new point appearing every second, you might consider "y=3x+7 with x=x+1 every second" as a practical model for your universe (although not a complete model - you still need to explain the existence of your thoughts). But that's not our observation...hence, that's not a candidate model of what our universe looks like.
To put it in different terms: the thing that distinguishes reality from theoretical alternatives is observation.
I agree with most of this, although I am not sure that the way strawberries taste to me is a posit.
I've never gotten this either. It has always seemed to me that qualia exist, and that they can fully be explained by reductionism and physicalism (presumably as some sort of function of our nervous system interacting with stimuli). There are apparently some people who have a strong intuition that they can't be explained in such a fashion, but I do not share this intuition.
It seems to me that attempting to eliminate qualia is a repeat of the comedy of behaviorism. "All these mystical people claim that qualia can't be explained by physics, so I'll say qualia don't exist at all! That'll show 'em!"
(At his blog Eric S. Raymond wrote an article arguing that qualia are probably the sensation one feels when one's stimuli processing systems light up, and that attempting to eliminate them is silly).
I think I may write a sequence about this. I've noticed that there are a lot more LW posts trying to solve the Hard Problem (or insisting that it's a pseudo-problem) than trying to explain what 'Hard Problem' means in the first place, or trying to state it precisely.
Thus I see a lot of people insisting that the Hard Problem either isn't a problem, or isn't hard, without investing any time into steel-manning (or even reading) the Other Side. Eliezer, actually, is one of the few LWers I've seen who generally grants that it's both hard and a problem.
A sequence that spent more time trying to figure out what the problem is, and what methodology is appropriate for such a strange topic, might also be more domain-generally useful than one that leaps straight into picking the best solutions (or mocking the worst),
Do you understand exactly why they have the intuition, and what their intuition amounts to?
That may be true for eliminativists who are behaviorists, like perhaps Dennett. But it's not true for eliminativists who acknowledge that introspective evidence is admissible evidence, and just deny that the evidence for qualia outweighs the evidence for the conjunction 'physicalism is true, and phenomenal reductionism is false'.
If you can't regenerate the reasons people disagree with you -- if you're still at the stage where the opposing side purely sounds like a silly caricature, with no coherent supporting arguments -- then you should have low confidence that you know their positions' strong and weak points.
Can you point me to such an explanation??
There's actually one in that essay I linked to at the end of my post. Here is the most relevant paragraph (discussing the Mary's Room problem):
Reading Wikipedia's entry on qualia, it seems to me that most of the arguments that qualia can't be explained by reductionism are powered by the same intuition that makes us think that you can give someone superpowers without changing them in any other way. Anyone with a basic knowledge of physiology knows the idea you can give someone the powers of Spider-Man or Aquaman without changing their physical appearance or internal anatomy is silly. Modern superhero writers have actually been forced to acknowledge this by occasionally referencing ways that such characters are physically different from humans (in ways that don't cosmetically affect them, of course).
But because qualia are a property of our brain's interaction with external stimuli, rather than a property of our bodies, the idea that you could change someone's qualia without changing their brain or the external world fails to pass our nonsense detector. If I wake up and the spectrum is inverted, something is wrong with my brain, or something is wrong with the world.
That isn't a reductive explanaiton, becuase no attempt is made to show how Mary;s red quale breaks down into smaller component parts. In fact, it doens;t do much more than say subjectivity exists, and occurs in sync with brain states. As such, it is compatible with dualism.
You mean p-zombie arguments?
Whatever,tThat doesn;t actuall provide an explanation of qualia.
I presume that would be "Mary's qualia are caused by the feeling the color-processing pathways of her brain light up. The color processing parts are made of neurons, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Those parts of the brain are then connected to another part of the brain by more neurons, which are similarly composed. When those color processing parts fire this causes the connecting neurons to fire in a certain pattern. These patterns of firings are what her feelings are made of. Feelings are made out of firing neurons, which are in turn made out of atoms."
I don't get the appeal of dualism. Qualia can't run on machines made out of atoms and quarks, but there is some other mysterious substance that composes our mind, and qualia can run on machines made out of this substance? Why the extra step? Why not assume that atoms and quarks are the substrate that qualia run on? What hypothetical special properties does this substance have that let qualia run on it, but not on atoms?
I'm sure that if we ever did discover some sort of disembodied soul made out of a weird previously unknown substance that was attached to the brain and appeared to contain our consciousness, Dave Chalmers would argue that qualia couldn't possibly be reduced down to something as basic as [newly discovered substance], and that obviously this disembodied soul couldn't possibly contain consciousness, that has to be contained somewhere else. There is no possible substance, no possible anything, that could ever satisfy the dualist's intuitions.
Yes, plus the inverted spectrum argument, and all the other "conceivability arguments." I can conceive of myself walking on walls, bench-pressing semi-trucks, and flying without making any modifications to my body or changing the external world. But that's because my brain is bad at conceiving stuff and fudges using shortcuts. If I actually start thinking in extremely detailed terms of my muscle tissues and the laws of physics, it becomes obvious that you can't conceive of such a thing.
If anyone argued "I can imagine an anorexic person with almost no muscles lifting a truck, therefore strength cannot be caused by one's muscles," they would be laughed at. P-zombies and inverted spectrums deserve similar ridicule.
A claim that some X is made of some Y is not showing how X's are made of Y's. Can you explain why red is produced and not soemthing other.
I wasn't selling dualism, was noting that ESR's account is not particualrly phsycialist as well as being not particularly explanatory,
I find the Mary argument more convincing.
There are many different neuron firing patterns. Some produce various shades of red, other produce other stuff.
The intuition that Mary's Room activates is that no amount of book-learning can substitute for firsthand experience. This is because we can't always use knowledge we obtain from reading about experiences to activate the same neurons that having those experiences would activate. The only way to activate them and experience those feeling is to have the activating experience.
Now, in Dennett's RoboMary variation of the experience, RoboMary would probably not say "Wow!" That is because she is capable of constructing a brain emulator of herself seeing red inside her own head, and then transferring the knowledge of what those neurons (or circuits in this case) felt when activated. She already knows what seeing red feels like, even though she's never seen it.
The dualist says: 'I imagine Mary the color-blind learning all the scientific facts about color vision, including the fine neurological details, and correctly drawing any relevant inferences from these facts. Yet when I imagine Mary seeing red for herself for the first time, it seems to me that she would think that further epistemically open possibilities have been ruled out, that were previously open. There seemed to be more than one candidate subjective character red-detecting brain states could add up to, and learning "oh, that's what red feels like!" narrowed down the model further.'
Since Mary is color-omniscient, some explanation then is needed for why she would harbor this false belief, or for why she wouldn't really think that the first-hand experience had further narrowed down the experiential possibilities for her.
Saying 'she hadn't instantiated the property X' doesn't explain why anyone has this intuition, because in nearly all cases it's possible to understand and expect properties without instantiating them oneself. If Mary were a volcanologist, there wouldn't be some factual information she's missing by virtue of not having her brain instantiate all the properties of a volcano. What is it about certain mental properties that makes them relevantly different?
Sure, that would be this mini-sequence by orthonormal.