What exactly are qualia, or phenomenal states?
When I ask this question, I often get the same kind of responses I receive when asking what a "normative reason" or an "irreducibly normative fact" would be:
(a) I'm told that I I already know what they are
(b) I'm told that they're "what it's like." This is an odd response because I'm not sure that's meaningful, either, and if it is, it's meaning remains unclear. If I ask what that means, this branches into either a further chain of interdefining concepts that never bottom out in anything that seems meaningful, or I'm treated as impertinent or foolish for asking (see Mandik, 2016 for a similar objection).
(c) I'm told the concept is primitive.
The first of these is a non-starter. I can't know what something means if I'm correct that it isn't meaningful there isn't anything for me to know. Note that I do not grant that other people know what it means. If I’m correct, nobody knows what it means. There would instead be people like me who know that we don’t know what it means, and people who mistakenly think that they know what it means when they don’t. I am not required to grant that if someone claims to “have a concept” that they do. It is possible for people to be mistaken about what concepts they have or don’t have (a point that applies just as much to me as it does to anyone else).
To reiterate: I am not claiming that I think they mean or plausibly could mean something, but I myself personally don't get it. That is not the claim. My claim is that they are meaningless, and that, in virtue of having not made various philosophical errors, I am not subject to the mistaken sense that they are meaningful. I want to be clear about this because often people seem to be taking my arguments that this or that concept is unintelligible to be a personal claim to not understand what the concept means: but that's just it, I don't grant that the concepts in question mean anything, and I don't grant that I have any exclusive burden to show that they're not meaningful; one could just as readily maintain that the onus is on proponents of these concepts to adequately articulate what they mean. As we'll see, they struggle and don't do a very good job of doing so, which is why I think (b) and (c) are so common.
The second seems to generate a kind of terminological möbius strip that always leads me back to where I started and never touches the ground in any kind of ostension, any observations I can point to and go "Aha! So that's what you're talking about." What I find odd about the second of these responses is that my request often bottoms out one step into the questioning. I ask what qualia are, I'm told it's "what-it's-like." I ask what that is, and the conversation is over, as though that answer is supposed to be satisfactory.
There's this notion, the illusion of explanatory depth, which is the tendency for people to think they understand things better than they do. So people may have the impression they understand how a car or a bike works, but when you ask them to explain how they work, most people can't do so (obviously some people do know).
I suspect something similar may be going on with the words we use. There's a kind of "illusion of conceptual depth" where we can have the impression we understand what terms and concepts mean, when in fact we have little or no substantive understanding of those terms and concepts.
Often what I find when I ask what something means is that I'll get a bunch of terms and phrases that more or less amount to restatements of the term or concept in question. And people often seem to be satisfied that in providing these, they've given an adequate answer. Unfortunately, this can give people the impression that if you ask them what something means, and they give one of these unhelpful responses, that you ought to be satisfied, and if you aren't, you are somehow at fault.
The third option is the trickiest. I'm not sure what to make of this. I'm not sure there are "primitive" concepts or what exactly people are intending to communicate when they invoke this term. Standard accounts hold that primitive concepts are concepts that cannot be explained or broken down into other concepts. But if I ask someone what qualia are, I'm not asking them "what concepts compose the concept of qualia?" I'm asking them communicate, in any sense at all, what they're talking about.
I suspect there's something seriously wrong with claims that a concept is primitive and can't be communicated. It's an immediate conversation stopper whenever it's employed. If the content isn't communicable, then how did they come to have the concept? Can we replicate whatever allowed them to obtain the concept? If not, why not? If so, how? At the very least, if some of us don't have concepts others do have, and the concepts are meaningful, I'd like to know why I don't have the concept and they do. And I'd like to know why I should think it's more likely they really do have incommunicable but apparently substantive concepts that are, for whatever reason, incommunicable.
2.0 Can we point at phenomenal states? No.
To illustrate the problem I have with this alleged notion of a phenomenal state, or phenomenal consciousness more generally, take a look at explicit efforts to explain what they are. Here's a remark from Block (2002):
First, consider phenomenal consciousness, or P-consciousness, as I will call it. Phenomenal consciousness is experience; what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something “it is like” (Nagel, 1974) to be in that state. Let me acknowledge at the outset that I cannot define P-consciousness in any remotely non-circular way. I don't consider this an embarrassment. The history of reductive definitions in philosophy should lead one not to expect a reductive definition of anything. But the best one can do for P-consciousness is in some respects worse than for many other things because really all one can do is point to the phenomenon (cf. Goldman, 1993a). Nonetheless, it is important to point properly.
Block explicitly acknowledges that you can't define P-consciousness "in any remotely non-circular way." I take this to be a bad sign, but apparently this isn't an embarrassment because we shouldn't expect reductive definitions.
Unfortunately, I'm not a philosopher of mind, and I'm not quite sure what this means. Does it mean that there are no reductive definitions of anything? And if not "definition," what about an account? I would have thought we'd offered plenty of successful reductions in the sciences, where we explain some phenomenon in non-circular terms. If so, why can't we do that with consciousness?
Block also proposes we can "point to" phenomenal consciousness. How would we do that? Isn't it, by definition, private and inaccessible? How could we point it out to anyone if that's the case?
Next, Block says:
So how should we point to P-consciousness? Well, one way is via rough synonyms. As I said, P-consciousness is experience. P-conscious properties are experiential properties. P-conscious states are experiential states; that is, a state is P-conscious just in case it has experiential properties. The totality of the experiential properties of a state are “what it is like" to have it.
Providing synonyms is not pointing to something. If someone had never seen a dog, and asked you what it was, and you thought the best way to show them was to point to a dog, saying "it's a canine" would not be an instance of pointing to a dog. You'd point to a dog by...well, pointing to a dog. You know, as in you'd *literally point at a dog.* There is no way in principle to literally point to phenomenal consciousness because it is, by stipulation, not something that can be pointed at, at least not literally. If there's some non-literal way of pointing at it, then are we to define it in metaphorically ostensive terms?
Providing a synonym is vacuous. Telling us that phenomenal consciousness is “experience” simply passes the undischarged non-explanation over to a new word. Just because I happen to be familiar with the word “experience,” doesn’t help. If anything, it makes things worse. Since people are familiar with terms like “experience,” and are disposed to say they have experiences, they may feel they have an impression that “experience” is meaningful, and that impression can cause them to think phenomenal consciousness is meaningful if it’s said to be synonymous with “experience.”
This doesn’t work, though. Simply because people are familiar with and make use of the word “experience” as a feature of everyday language does not mean that stipulating that phenomenal consciousness is synonymous with the word “experience” entails that the world experience as it is used in everyday discourse is in fact used to convey the same concept as phenomenal consciousness. That’s an empirical question. Stating that the two are synonyms is just that: a mere assertion. It doesn’t establish anything. It could be that the synonym is merely stipulative: that one is simply saying that, by stipulation, they’ve opted to use the word “experience” to refer to “phenomenal states.” In which case, all they’ve done is propose a new word for the same concept, the contents of which still haven’t been explained. If, instead, they are claiming it’s synonymous with everyday usage of the term experience, well, now we’d need to do empirical work to determine what the content of everyday uses of the term are referring to, which only sets us back further: if we investigate, we may find out what people are referring to, but that’s the task we were already trying to address in the first place. Or we might find that how people are using the term doesn’t match how philosophers are using it, in which case it turns out it wasn’t a synonym after all.
Telling us p-conscious states are “experiential states” only repeats the same problem. What’s an experiential state? How does using the word “experiential” reflect an instance of *pointing* at the states in question? What are we pointing at? I use the term “experiences.” I experience colors and tastes and so on. But at no point in considering these experiences do they appear to have ineffable incommunicable properties that suggest physicalism is false.
Then Block takes us right back to repeating yet another one of these mutually interdefining terms. So before we were told that phenomenal consciousness refers to what it is like to be in that state. Now we’re told that phenomenal consciousness means the same thing as experience, and that phenomenal properties are experiential properties, and it turns out having experiential properties refer to “what it is like” to have it. So instead of a two-step web of interdefining terms, we get a three-step version that bottoms out in the same obscure phrase.
Then Block moves on from pointing to the states by synonyms (which isn’t really an instance of pointing to anything) to providing examples:
Moving from synonyms to examples, we have P-conscious states when we see, hear, smell, taste and have pains. P-conscious properties include the experiential properties of sensations, feelings and perceptions, but I would also include thoughts, wants and emotions.
Unfortunately, this isn’t any more helpful than synonyms. I see, hear, smell, taste, and have pains. Now I’m told that when I do so, I have phenomenally conscious states. Do I? Which part of these experiences is the phenomenally conscious state? How has it been pointed to? Imagine I told you that there is a property, intrinsic florfness. You ask me what this means, and I say I can define it by pointing to examples of florfness. Whenever you eat cake, put on a hat, or add two prime numbers: florfness occurs. This doesn’t do much if anything to illuminate what florfness is. Listing examples of things is not a genuine instance of pointing to the thing one is purporting to point to. This brings to mine Quinean notions about inscrutability of reference. When you’re providing examples, how am I supposed to know which part of these experiences is the phenomenal part, if you don’t tell me what a phenomenal state is? Or if it’s not obvious? Or if you can’t use language to communicate your meaning to me?
It almost seems like analytic philosophers have built up an entire shadow language that exists alongside everyday, ordinary uses of words. Where real words, as they’re used in everyday discourse, derive their meaning in virtue of their relate to the rest of the words used by speakers of that language,
And where philosophers cannot shadow everyday terms convincingly, they patch over the lacunae in their accounts by inventing new terms and phrases. The result is a kind of chimera of seemingly-meaningful verbal doppelgängersä: terms like “experience,” “good,” “knowledge,” “object,” “substance,” and so on all look like they mean something because they mean something when used in everyday contexts. But philosophers uprooted them from these contexts and used them in contexts where they lose their meaning, but continue to insist they have some kind of meaning because the everyday uses have meaning.
It’s a kind of strange equivocation. If you’re using a word in a philosophical context that has an ordinary language analog, it does not follow that if the latter means something in everyday discourse that your use of it in a philosophical discourse is necessarily meaningful as well. To make matters worse, philosophers often don’t know how these words are used in everyday discourse, since this is an empirical question, and they don’t usually do any empirical work to find out how people are actually using the words in question, content instead to suppose that however they find themselves inclined to use the words generalizes to how nonphilosophers use them.
Block suggests that we “point” to examples of phenomenally conscious states, but synonyms and examples are not instances of pointing. Perhaps real concepts are those that can be pointed at, or can be defined by appeal to concepts that can be pointed at. And by "pointed at" I mean literally physically gestured at in the world.
If qualia are, by their very nature, private, and inaccessible in third personal terms, they can’t be pointed at, not even in principle. I think this is probably right, in which case it is altogether unclear to me how Block things we could point at phenomenal states. Perhaps we’re invited to discover them for ourselves on introspection, but nothing about my introspection seems to include any intrinsic nonrelational private qualities that seem to contravene everything I know about physics. Some proponents of the idea of qualia may joke that maybe this is because I’m a p-zombie. In a certain respect, I think they’re right. It’s just that I think we’re all p-zombies, and the only difference between us is that I’m not mistakenly convinced otherwise.
References
Block, N. (2002). Some concepts of consciousness. In D. Chalmers (Ed.), Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings (pp. 206-218). United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Mandik, P. (2016). Meta-illusionism and qualia quietism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 140-148.
Big food for thought for a [Not a Philosopher] because while *almost everything* you say seems convincing, I have a strong feeling (might even call it an obvious intuition ;-p) that qualia are a Thing. Whether they're a Thing "out there" or (merely?) a property of how human (or my own?) mind/brain works I'm not sure. But they definitely feel like a Thing.
So here's my mostly-naive thinking on that:
*They seem to refer to the fact that almost all people I've encountered above certain age and iq (roughly equivalent to "capable of verbal communication") seem to experience (as evidenced by their verbal reports) internal mind states. And those internal mind states seem to be only fully accessible to them. We can communicate about them, and we can APPROXIMATELY agree on their greater or lesser similarity when describing them verbally, by referencing for example physiological states, and we can even empirically (behaviourally) observe that having similarly-labelled states leads to similar behaviours, but we cannot know -- and it feels like we have NO WAY of knowing -- that the internal state "feels" the same, apart from induction from biology (I have roughly the same brain crated by roughly the same DNA evolved in the same phylogenetic process, so it feels reasonable to assume that the "experience" will be also similar).*
-----
As to examples: idk if they're as useless as you imply. People (at least "ordinary people") ordinarily think in natural concepts, which have a prototypical structure, so defining a concept by listing numerous exemplars with ratings of "how much of an X (being a bird, being qualia) a given item is" is likely to provide a pretty decent definition actually.
I'm mostly thinking aloud here though, so don't mind me: the fact that there's no way I can be sure that what's going on in my mind when I look at grass and agreen is the same as in yours (assuming you're not colour blind)