some things seem irreducible. for instance, I don't know what it means for transitivity to be true (a>b, b>c, therefore a>c) but I know that it is true.
I don't really even know where I would begin to prove such a concept, it seems foundational to me.
as it is with the laws of logic then, qualia is the same. qualia too seems unexplainable, yet still present.
so I don't think asserting qualia is the same as asserting other unfalsifiable phenomena, like magical pizzas. it is to me fundamentally inconcieveable for anything but the existence of qualia to be the case.
What do you mean by "irreducible"? And things seem irreducible to who? To you specifically? Transitivity doesn't seem "irreducible" to me. It's a rule we invented for certain kinds of logic and we use it or don't use it as we see fit. It makes about as much sense to me to say that transitivity is irreducible as it does to say that "Bishops move diagonally across the board" in chess is "irreducible."
Transitivity does not "seem foundational" to me. I am not sure what that experience would be like or why I would think that, but I don't experience the rules of logic that way, nor do I think it's true that it is irreducible or foundational.
I don't think there even is a concept of qualia that is inexplicable. I think it's inexplicability is a clue that it isn't even a meaningful idea in the first place.
Thanks for replying! Sorry if I'm being unoriginal btw, I've just never been able to wrap my mind around the skeptical position on qualia.
Here's my response:
How do you then make sense of transitivity? I guess I'm asking for your epistemology. Like, if you kept asking why, I imagine you'd have to stop at some point. That stopping point in my view would include the laws of logic and qualia.
Do you imagine it to be an infinite regress of explanations? Or do you think that there is some foundation? If so, that foundation would necessarily be unjustified.
It is my position that these foundational beliefs are merely self-evident.
I guess you could deny that transitivity is true, but personally I am unable to even imagine a situation wherein a>b, b>c, but a is not greater than c. That's what I mean by transitivity being "irreducible".
When you bring up the bishop example, I think it's different in a key way.
1. I do think that this rule is too irreducible. Without such a rule, the piece would not be a bishop as it pertains to the definition of chess. I don't even know what it would mean for bishops to not move diagonally under the strict rules of conventional chess.
2. This is a quality of definitions that cannot be broken. This is an irreducible rule, that definitions must be definitions. a=a is a rule of logic, and I don't know what it would mean for such a rule to be broken.
To sum up, the bishop example is different in that it's a contrived application of a different law of logic (a=a), which makes the concept seem absurd (ironically enuf lol).
I guess I'd put to you whether you believe it could be the case that a>b, b>c, but a is not greater than c.
From where I stand, phenomenal consciousness and qualia are not simply vague, they are hybrid concepts that flit between different incompatible meanings.
I think that it is possible to be much more specific about what is wrong with the concept of phenomenal consciousness. The fact that it is hopelessly vague is a problem, of course, but adding specificity does not so much revive it as put it out of its misery.
I am surprised these terms persists, and you do a good job of pointing out the dynamics that keep them in circulation.
That's a good way to put it, and I agree. We are dealing with a kind of flickering position that moves from one meaning to another, and is very hard to pin down. But it tends to take two forms:
(1) A clear target that we can take down
(2) An unclear target that's impossible to readily take down
It's a case of a motte-and-bailey, only there isn't a clear bailey. It's very, very strange.
What I find strange is the incuriosity among philosophers to recognize and appreciate the root causes of seemingly intractable problems. It's not I'm spotting anything new. The same kinds of issues were raised by philosophers from the inception of analytic philosophy, going back to the first pragmatists.
When I have asked for more rigour in online discussions, usually by just asking for a definition, I have usually been treated with just the attitude shown in your hypothetical flerp discussion.
There is huge resistance to definition, but I think it is also coupled with a genuine cognitive impasse that makes definition particularly challenging for this cluster of concepts. Once you have an entity "beyond the performance of functions", to use Chalmers' phrase, it is necessarily impossible to define it.
I think illusionists get some of the blame here. In many cases, they don't articulate what it is that they are denying, partly because language that is sufficiently precise just doesn't exist or doesn't rise above the babble.
I agree regarding illusionists. You and I might disagree on this (I don't know your stance on the matter) but I think illusionism arose within the analytic tradition and borrows much of its methods, ways of thinking and speaking, and its presuppositions. I think a view more circumspect towards the analytic project would have done better, though the kind of classical pragmatism I've come to favor of late seems to have few proponents.
I think Frankish illusionism, to some extent, consists of accepting the framing provided by qualia realists, vagueness and incoherence and all, and saying: I don't believe in that. Illusionism hasn't yet been able to articulate a different vision, and unfortunately the debate is still stuck with the faulty framing as the primary reference point.
In the beginning of the article you complain that critics of illusionism act incredulous whenever people claim that they don't believe in qualia, phenomenal consciousness, etc. rather than giving an argument to demonstrate their existence. But that ignores what the purported justification for the existence of those things is. No one claims that they know about consciousness or qualia because they found some argument for their existence - they claim to know about it by direct observation through introspection. As an analogy, imagine you're in a bus, and your friend sitting next to you points out all building that is on fire outside the window. You look directly at it but claim that you see nothing. What else is your friend supposed to do other than act incredulous? Do you expect him to give you some argument to prove that there is in fact an burning building in front of you? This is exactly what it's like to deny the existence of qualia or consciousness from a non-illusionist's perspective (with the additional caveats that the person might just be misunderstanding the words used, rather than genuinely denying the concept).
Also, I'm not sure why you get all indignant about people psychologizing illusionists and qualia quietists and then immediately go on to create a psychological theory about pseudoconcepts to explain away the belief in qualia in a way that accuses those who believe in them of not even knowing what their own words mean.
I wrote this a while ago so I don't really remember everything I said. You say:
"In the beginning of the article you complain that critics of illusionism act incredulous whenever people claim that they don't believe in qualia, phenomenal consciousness, etc. rather than giving an argument to demonstrate their existence."
...Can you remind me of where specifically I said that?
The specific mention of incredulity was from 5 in the numbered list from Section 1. But I was mainly responding to what you said in the first few paragraphs of Section 1, particularly this part:
"I suspect such people often resort to ridicule when they don’t have good objections, and I suspect this is true of critics of illusionism. As such, I take such ridicule not to be evidence that the position in question is stupid, but that the person criticizing it probably doesn’t have very good objections. If they did, why not simply present them?"
Given that the way we know about qualia is (or by your lights, supposedly is) simply by direct experience, how are we supposed to argue for their existence other than just appealing to the direct experience of having them? Likewise, how are we supposed to define what they are other than just pointing to examples with a demonstrative (i.e., "You know what it's like to see the color red? That's a qualia.").
Likewise, how are we supposed to prove to you that a term is meaningful other than by noting that we personally understand what it means, and that there is a community of experts who communicate using the term and are able to formulate arguments with it that other experts understand? Even when we define it in terms of colloquialisms, you still insist that that doesn't prove it means anything. So what exactly do you want? How would you prove to someone that a word is meaningful if they rejected any appeal to usage or your own understanding of the word, wouldn't accept you pointing to examples to illustrate the concept, and every time you tried to define it in terms of other words, they either asked for the meaning of those words until you went in a circle or denied that the definition you gave is correct based on the common meaning of the words?
The incredulity has to do with them, not me. As in, they are incredulous that we don't share their intuitions or beliefs. I'm not sure how that relates to your earlier remarks so perhaps you could clarify.
Regarding the remark: I'm specifically talking about the lack of good objections to illusionism. That's not identical to positive arguments for phenomenal states or qualia, since illusionism isn't the only position that rejects qualia (indeed, I don't think there are qualia, I am not even an illusionist!).
//Given that the way we know about qualia is (or by your lights, supposedly is) simply by direct experience, how are we supposed to argue for their existence other than just appealing to the direct experience of having them?//
I'm specifically talking about the lack of good arguments against illusionism, not so much arguments for qualia. But I can still address this: If the purported means by which you acquire knowledge that you have qualia isn't something, on your own view, that you could argue for, that's hardly a reason for me to shrug and let them off the hook for the lack of good arguments. Suppose someone:
(1) Holds the view that X is true.
(2) Holds the view that they have a special power to immediately know X is true, and therefore don't need any arguments for X. They just immediately know it's true!
If I object that I have no good reason to think X is true because they haven't given any good arguments for it, appealing to (2) is a bit of a weird move. The view is *internally* self-reinforcing. Sure, okay, so on their view X is true *and* they don't have to present any arguments for why X is true because they immediately know it.
Fine: then why should I believe (1) and (2) are both true? Why think you have a special power to immediately know X is true? What's the argument for that?
They can, at this point, say:
(3) It's self-evident I have this power because I'm aware of the fact that I am using it, so I don't need to argue for (2).
This can be repeated ad infinitum. Anyone, at any time, can give themselves an epistemic get-out-of-jail-free card, but that doesn't mean I or anyone else has to take them seriously.
If you disagree, consider this:
I have a special faculty that gives me direct acquaintance with the truth. I am directly acquainted with the fact that I am right about everything I said in this post and all of the comments in this post, and I am directly acquainted with the fact that you are wrong. I am further acquainted with the fact that I don't have to argue for any of this. You're just wrong if you disagree.
Would you take this to be a reasonable or philosophically engaging or satisfying thing for me to say? I sure hope not.
//Given that the way we know about qualia is (or by your lights, supposedly is) simply by direct experience, how are we supposed to argue for their existence other than just appealing to the direct experience of having them? Likewise, how are we supposed to define what they are other than just pointing to examples with a demonstrative (i.e., "You know what it's like to see the color red? That's a qualia.").//
I don't think you can argue for the view or explain what it means. I don't think you can define what they are by pointing to examples of them. These are some of my main problems with the view that we have qualia! Nobody can clearly say what they are, point to them, or provide arguments for them.
//Likewise, how are we supposed to prove to you that a term is meaningful other than by noting that we personally understand what it means, and that there is a community of experts who communicate using the term and are able to formulate arguments with it that other experts understand? //
I don't grant that you're "noting" that you understand. That implies you do understand. But I'm not granting that. From my perspective, you are *claiming* to understand, but that has yet to be demonstrated.
Suppose someone told you they understand how cars work. Would you take them at their word, if you had no evidence about this person's education, experience, or abilities? You might. But suppose you asked them to demonstrate that they understood how cars worked, and the only thing they could do was assure you that they understood how they worked, verbally.
I wouldn't believe them. I'd expect them to demonstrate their understanding of cars. Now, either proponents of qualia can demonstrate by some means that they understand what qualia are, or they can't. If they can, let them demonstrate. If they can't, well, why should I even think there is any notion to be understood in the first place?
I don't grant that there are a community of experts who communicate using the term. I grant that there are a bunch of academics who use the term, but what, exactly, are they experts in or about that would make their claims about "qualia" credible?
Again, go back to a person who claims to understand how cars work. Expert car mechanics can demonstrate their expertise. You can give them broken cars and they can fix them. When and how did philosophers demonstrate that they were "experts" when it comes to questions of consciousness or qualia?
//Even when we define it in terms of colloquialisms, you still insist that that doesn't prove it means anything. //
Not quite sure what you mean here.
//So what exactly do you want?//
For proponents of qualia to communicate what "qualia" are. I don't think they've done this. If they think they can, let them do it. If they think they can't, we can move to the next step: why should I believe there are ineffable, incommunicable concepts? I am not obligated to grant this at the outset of inquiry. I am challenging whether there are such concepts. Why do people feel entitled to help themselves to claiming that they "have" concepts the meaning of which they can't communicate? How do you know how you have the concept? And why should I believe you?
Consider this scenario: a group of people claim to have a concept, "glorp." None can explain what it means. But they all claim to be experts in "glorpism." How would you react? What would you do in response? I don't think there are no good answers here. I think there are good answers. I just think that those answers don't result in a flattering depiction of what proponents of qualia are up to.
Compare, instead, to people who claim that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. There are a variety of means they could use to demonstrate this, and people have. No similar tests exist for "qualia." Their putative existence does no empirical work, bakes no bread, and achieves nothing. One can insist that despite their superfluity they are nevertheless real, but why should I think that?
//How would you prove to someone that a word is meaningful if they rejected any appeal to usage or your own understanding of the word//
I don't reject ANY appeal to usage. I reject viciously circular, technical appeals to usage. Lots of ways of using terms readily demonstrate the meaningfulness of the terms being used.
If I'm challenging whether the concept is meaningful, I take meaningfulness to be a precondition for it to be "understood." You can't understand something that isn't meaningful! So people appealing to the "fact" that they "understand" the concepts consists of nothing more than the assertion that I'm wrong. This isn't good evidence that they understand. Evidence is public. If, for instance, I saw Bigfoot, the fact that I saw Bigfoot isn't good evidence for you that I did. You may take my testimony as some evidence, but it wouldn't be good evidence. So I take people claiming to understand the concepts in question to be some evidence that they have the concepts they claim to have, but it isn't good enough evidence, and I don't think you should think this.
If you disagree, you'd be left in a position of granting that all that's required as decisive evidence of meaningfulness is if a person or enough people claim to understand the concept. I think this is inadequate and I'd wonder why anyone would disagree.
wouldn't accept you pointing to examples to illustrate the concept, and every time you tried to define it in terms of other words, they either asked for the meaning of those words until you went in a circle or denied that the definition you gave is correct based on the common meaning of the words?
//wouldn't accept you pointing to examples to illustrate the concept//
I'd certainly accept instances of people pointing to examples that illustrate the concept. I just don't think anyone has done so.
I'm not claiming that you should be convinced of qualia's existence just because one person says they are directly acquainted with it. All I'm claiming with that bus example is that you have no argument against the view, so you shouldn't expect others to be convinced by anything you say. If your friend saw a burning building out the bus window, you wouldn't be able to convince that there wasn't one there by insisting that you didn't see it, asking for an argument to prove the existence of the burning building, and then saying that proponents of burning buildings have no arguments when he gives you none.
In that particular case, if you didn't see the burning building, you would probably not believe your friend. But what if there were more people on the bus, and everyone to you claimed to clearly see the burning building? Would you still insist that there's no building there because no one can give you any argument for its existence? Or would you suspect that maybe you're mistaken, as the only one who can't see something that everyone else thinks is clear and obvious.
As for defining qualia, the things you complain about would implicate almost every word in the English language. Every word either has a circular definition or is defined by pointing out examples to form a family resemblance concept. If this is vicious, then there's not a single meaningful word on your view.
The car mechanic example does nothing to undermine the argument based on common usage that people must understand what these terms means. You can demonstrate that you understand how cars work by using that knowledge to fix a car, and likewise, you can demonstrate that you understand what a word means by competently communicating with others who use the word. What alternative test do you propose? If you think there's some other test needed to prove that people understand qualia that would be more analogous to fixing a car, explain what it is and justify why it would be necessary - don't complain that other people haven't passed a nonexistent test.
I don't think qualia are that much more ineffable or incommunicable than other concepts. The vast majority of concepts are difficult or impossible to explicitly define, and we can certainly communicate with each other about qualia and talk about their characteristics - it's just that we don't have anything way to explain certain basic features to someone who has never experienced them (e.g., explaining what it's like to see red to someone who's never seen it). But this is entirely unsurprising. We're not telepathy who can control others' minds - we can't force someone to have a qualia just by describing it. The mechanism by which we understand what an experience is like is either by currently having the experience or replaying the memory of it - you can't use words to make someone do either of those things.
In the "glorp" example, you're using the fact that glorp is known to be a meaningless (and silly-sounding) word in the real word to pump the intuition that it would be silly to believe it had meaning in the hypothetical. But if there actually were tons of people who claimed to understand what the word "glorp" means, and nearly every philosopher who ever looked into it said they understand what it means (so much so that even among those who deny the existence of glorp, most claimed that glorp was an illusion rather than a meaningless term), lay people learning about philosophy also almost always seemed to immediately grasp the meaning and claimed that its existence was the most obvious thing in the world, and people could communicate to each other about glorp and make extensive arguments about its nature, features, and where it comes from, I think I would be quite justified in thinking that the word "glorp" probably means something! I would be justified in this even if I didn't understand the word myself, but even more so if I understood it too.
There are some cases like this in real life. I don't understand the words that wine-taaters use to describe the taste of wine, and they can't really explain it to me. But they all seem to understand what the words mean, are able to communicate with each other using them, use them consistently, and new people getting into wine-tasting are able to grasp their meaning. Should I insist that everything they say is meaningless because they can't define the words without reference to other wine-tasting terms or by just asking me to taste a few wines to which the word applies?
(By the way, if you want to object to this by claiming that wine-tasting terms can be proven to be meaningful by the fact that certain chemicals correspond to the different tastes they identify, the same can be said of qualia. Do an MRI scan of a bunch of philosophers' brains when they claim to experience the qualia of seeing red, and I guarantee you you'll get similar results.)
Likewise, if I was blind, I wouldn't assume that people who talk about seeing color are just saying meaningless words that they all think they understand, and that unless they can prove color is meaningful to me by defining color terms in a non-circular, non-demonstrative way, they're all talking nonsense. (And don't they dare try to talk about wavelengths of light. Those are uncontroversial things that even color illusionists and color quietest like me agree to, so pointing to those won't work.) In fact, many of your arguments against consciousness-related terms being meaningful would also apply to color terms, even for people who can see color. How can you define what the color red is without just pointing to examples of red things, or by referencing other colors (viciously circular)?
"Evidence is public"
This is clearly false. If I'm alone in a forest, and I'm the only one to see a tree fall, I'm the only one with that evidence. Likewise, people have private evidence of their own qualia. Of course, we also have public evidence from other people's testimony, which you dismiss as not good enough. But
1) This doesn't dismiss anyone's private evidence. Maybe in your epistemic state, it's reasonable not to believe in qualia, but nothing you say does anything to give anyone else a reason not to believe in it.
2) When you get nearly universal testimony for some claim, that's pretty good evidence that the claim is true even if you, personally, can't testify for it.
"I'd certainly accept instances of people pointing to the concept"
But you don't! What are you experiencing right now? What colors do you see in your field of vision? Those experiences are qualia. There, I pointed to an example, but I imagine you're still going to say that you don't know what qualia means and that I've done nothing to define or illuminate it.
//(By the way, if you want to object to this by claiming that wine-tasting terms can be proven to be meaningful by the fact that certain chemicals correspond to the different tastes they identify, the same can be said of qualia. Do an MRI scan of a bunch of philosophers' brains when they claim to experience the qualia of seeing red, and I guarantee you you'll get similar results.)//
That’s not an objection I’d raise or that occurred to me.
//Likewise, if I was blind, I wouldn't assume that people who talk about seeing color are just saying meaningless words that they all think they understand, and that unless they can prove color is meaningful to me by defining color terms in a non-circular, non-demonstrative way, they're all talking nonsense. //
Neither would I. The blindness case actually works in my favor, since it demonstrates precisely why objecting to qualia makes sense, but objecting to color vision doesn’t. Which better be the case for my view, because it’d be a big problem for my view if people who lacked certain sense perceptions were justified in denying anyone else had them. It would not be reasonable for a person who has never experienced color to deny that other people can see color. This is because we have well-established scientific accounts of how human vision systems work. We know about rods and cones in the eye, light refraction, eyes, photoreceptors, the genetics of colorblindness, the optic nerve, the occipital lobe, and a variety of other aspects of how visual processing works. While a full account of color vision is incomplete, we have a well-developed mechanistic account of precisely what allows some people to see color and others not to. We have knowledge of the electromagnetic spectrum, where visible light falls on it, and how the bandwidth of visible light fits in with the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. The electromagnetic spectrum is in turn a highly corroborated finding that is consistent with and makes sense in light of the rest of our understanding of biology, physics, chemistry, and so on. To extract any of these facts would lead to a significant collapse of much our scientific knowledge, because so much of is mutually corroborating. You couldn’t just gut part of it without massive costs to our overarching models of the world. So we have a well-established empirical account of what’s going on with color vision and why some people can’t see colors.
Absolutely *none* of this is available for qualia. They don’t figure into our scientific theories, they don’t account for any public observations or data capable of corroboration, there is no mechanistic account of how some people can detect qualia and others can’t. Absolutely nothing. If anything, blindness and color vision is an excellent test case for how and why my approach makes sense and works well, and why qualia is such a vacuous, useless notion. It does absolutely nothing to explain our observations or publicly available data. Color vision does.
Is there some special organ or sensory system for detecting qualia? If so, nobody’s found one. I’d immediately admit I’m wrong if they do. Have proponents of qualia identified lesions in my brain that illustrate why I can’t detect qualia but they can? No, but I’d immediately admit I was wrong if they do. Is there some mechanistic account of how qualia figure into our best scientific models of the world, such that the failure to posit them would reverberate across the rest of our web of scientific explanations in such a way as to raise serious questions about the reliability of science? No. But that would be the case if it turned out nobody had color vision.
In short: color vision passes all the standard pragmatic tests. Qualia passes none of them.
//And don't they dare try to talk about wavelengths of light. Those are uncontroversial things that even color illusionists and color quietest like me agree to, so pointing to those won't work.//
Yes it will.
//In fact, many of your arguments against consciousness-related terms being meaningful would also apply to color terms, even for people who can see color. How can you define what the color red is without just pointing to examples of red things, or by referencing other colors (viciously circular)?//
You’re still talking about definitions so I’m not sure you understand my objections to qualia talk, which aren’t about definitions. As far as the meaningfulness of color terms: their usage is partially constructive and partially a result of identifiable features of our shared nervous systems. People can and do develop and employ color terminology in a publicly accessible way around which we can coordinate our actions. This is a non-issue, so no, my objections don’t apply to color terminology. The same applies to talk of texture, shape, and so on. All of these features are based on identifiable features of our nervous systems that can be corroborated by direct interaction with our environments. Color talk can be checked via prediction and observation and easily passes basic pragmatic tests. In other words, color talk can be cashed out in publicly accessible, discriminative ways that allow us to make predictions about our future expectations and experiences. Qualia talk isn’t like this. It doesn’t do anything like this and doesn’t fit into our best scientific explanations of how anything works. Color talk, on the other hand, helps explain human and animal behavior and the way such behavior fits in with broader knowledge in physics, chemistry, psychology, sociology, anthropology, religion, and so on.
For instance, we can make predictions about animal color perception based on the behavior of animals, and then discover that those animals can see into the infrared or ultraviolet spectrum. This can then be confirmed and corroborated via studying other aspects of their behavior, conducting experiments, or examining the physiology of the organisms in question. This has already been done for e.g., snakes and bees. It would be extremely difficult to account for their physiology (or human physiology) without appealing to color discrimination abilities. How else would we explain anatomical differences in eyes across different species? That different species have different capacities for color discrimination is the best explanation for many of these observations.
No analogous case exists for “qualia.” Nothing about our anatomy or physiology in any way hints at the existence of qualia, nor is positing qualia helpful in any way in explaining human or animal behavior. It is entirely superfluous. Color perception isn’t.
//This is clearly false. //
I don’t agree.
//If I'm alone in a forest, and I'm the only one to see a tree fall, I'm the only one with that evidence. Likewise, people have private evidence of their own qualia.//
//"Evidence is public"
This is clearly false. //
Apologies; “Evidence is public” isn’t a good way to convey what I mean and that was a stupid way for me to put it. What I mean is that for something to count as evidence *to me*, it must be available *to me*. And other people’s private experiences are not available to me. As such, they cannot serve as evidence for me.
Another way to put what I mean is this: all dialectically relevant considerations must be available to your interlocutors to serve as evidence *for them.* I don’t have a problem with the notion of private evidence, but to the extent that it’s private, it cannot serve as evidence for anyone else…pretty much by definition. Private evidence can be leveraged as public evidence to some extent. I can (and I think should) take other people’s testimony as evidence, and I do. That people claim to have the concept of qualia and to understand it is evidence that they have (and understand) such concepts. But the mere fact that they make such claims is insufficient (to me) to establish that they, in fact, have such concepts.
//1) This doesn't dismiss anyone's private evidence. Maybe in your epistemic state, it's reasonable not to believe in qualia, but nothing you say does anything to give anyone else a reason not to believe in it.//
Maybe not. But note that private evidence that you cannot publicly corroborate can be arbitrarily strong: anyone can find themselves psychologically disposed to be incorrigible because they feel certain they understand something. But feeling certain you understand something is entirely consistent with not understanding it at all. So is one’s level of confidence good evidence that they are correct?
For whatever reason, I’m expected to take people’s supreme confidence that they have qualia to be evidence that they have qualia. However, I already know that people are confident about lots of things they are completely wrong about. Why should I be impressed by how confident people are about this?
//2) When you get nearly universal testimony for some claim, that's pretty good evidence that the claim is true even if you, personally, can't testify for it.//
I don’t agree. But even if I did, I completely deny there is nearly universal testimony for the existence of qualia. I think less than 1% of the world’s population believes in qualia. There is very little evidence that most people think they have qualia.
//But you don't! //
Sure I do. Go ahead and point out the qualia!
//What are you experiencing right now? //
Typing on my computer!
//What colors do you see in your field of vision?//
Black text, white (faintly red, because I’m using flux) background.
//Those experiences are qualia.//
Where’s the qualia? I don’t see how you’ve pointed to anything in my experience that would indicate that there are “qualia” there.
// There, I pointed to an example, but I imagine you're still going to say that you don't know what qualia means and that I've done nothing to define or illuminate it.//
I’ll go further: I deny you’ve pointed to an example.
Pragmatic tests. Describe what observable differences there would be if the claims in question were true or false. In the case of qualia, I think there would be no observable difference in principle. This is why p-zombies are conceivable for proponents of qualia. I think they regard this as conceivable because qualia make no difference to our observations of events in the world, not even in principle.
//. The vast majority of concepts are difficult or impossible to explicitly define,//
I am not talking about defining concepts. I don’t know why people keep thinking I’m complaining about definitions since I almost never use such terminology when talking about this topic. If I had intended to ask for a definition, I would’ve asked for one. I make two references to definitions in the blog post: I use the made up term “decoy definition” to describe a rhetorical move people make, which isn’t relevant to the present topic. And the second reference is when I talk about “mutually interdefining” sets of terms; note that I take it as a given that such terms are presented as definitions. Clearly there are lots of definitions of the terms in question! I don’t deny that. But definitions come cheap, and I don’t care about whether people can provide them or not.
//and we can certainly communicate with each other about qualia and talk about their characteristics//
This is ambiguous: when you say you can communicate with one about qualia, what do you mean? Do you mean you can use the word, or use the word in a meaningful way? Because I grant that people can use the word “qualia,” but I don’t grant that they can do so in a meaningful way. And I don’t think the fact that a bunch of people are using the term establishes that its use is meaningful.
// it's just that we don't have anything way to explain certain basic features to someone who has never experienced them (e.g., explaining what it's like to see red to someone who's never seen it)//
I don’t grant that anyone has or could experience “them,” since I don’t grant that there is any intelligible phenomena for people to experience.
//The mechanism by which we understand what an experience is like is either by currently having the experience or replaying the memory of it - you can't use words to make someone do either of those things.//
What do you mean when you refer to understanding “what an experience is like”?
//But if there actually were tons of people who claimed to understand what the word "glorp" means, and nearly every philosopher who ever looked into it said they understand what it means (so much so that even among those who deny the existence of glorp, most claimed that glorp was an illusion rather than a meaningless term), lay people learning about philosophy also almost always seemed to immediately grasp the meaning and claimed that its existence was the most obvious thing in the world, and people could communicate to each other about glorp and make extensive arguments about its nature, features, and where it comes from, I think I would be quite justified in thinking that the word "glorp" probably means something!//
Why would you be justified? And why should I agree with that? Also, do you think it is in fact the case that “lay people learning about philosophy also almost always seemed to immediately grasp the meaning and claimed that its existence was the most obvious thing in the world”? I don’t. I don’t think most people have or readily acquire the notion of qualia. I think they have to be, to put it bluntly, duped into thinking such a thing. I think the scenario we’re in is one in which philosophers are, in fact, just spreading their confusions with laypeople like a contagion. I think they do this with other philosophical notions, too, like free will and talk of “reasons.”
//I would be justified in this even if I didn't understand the word myself, but even more so if I understood it too.//
It’s worth reiterating at this point: I do not grant that you or anyone else understands the concept of qualia I am describing. My contention isn’t that I don’t understand it, but others do; it’s that nobody understands it because there isn’t anything to understand. So any argument in which you appeal to the fact that you understand the concept would beg the question against my position.
//There are some cases like this in real life. I don't understand the words that wine-taaters use to describe the taste of wine, and they can't really explain it to me. But they all seem to understand what the words mean, are able to communicate with each other using them, use them consistently, and new people getting into wine-tasting are able to grasp their meaning.//
Yes, and if they couldn’t pass pragmatic tests to establish that what they’re describing can be cashed out via predictions and observations, I’d say that they were talking confused nonsense, too. I don’t apply my standards asymmetrically. I’d say the same thing in this case: either wine tasters could demonstrate that they’re actually able to meaningfully make consistent discriminations, or they couldn’t, and if they’re employing special terms or concepts, what they’d need to show is that those special terms and concepts were somehow relevant to making such discriminations. If they couldn’t do this, I’d conclude they were talking nonsense. And they very well might be doing just that.
//Should I insist that everything they say is meaningless because they can't define the words without reference to other wine-tasting terms or by just asking me to taste a few wines to which the word applies?//
I don’t think these would be good tests. Again, you're not accurately describing what I am asking for. I’m not asking for a definition
I am asking for proponents of the concepts to do literally anything that would communicate the meaning of the concept. If they insist the concepts are “incommunicable” then obviously they can’t pass this test. Under such circumstances, what I’d like to know is why I should think that they have incommunicable concepts.
Take the following case:
Alex has an incommunicable but meaningful concept.
Sam thinks he has an incommunicable but meaningful concept, but is confused and doesn’t really have any meaningful concept at all.
How could we tell the difference between Alex’s concept and Sam’s concept, such that we could establish that one was meaningful and the other wasn’t?
I don’t think something like “lots of people use the same terms as Alex” is good enough. If you do, consider the following scenario: Suppose Alex and Sam both make millions of clones of themselves. All the Alexes use their terminology, and all the Sams use their terminology. The ability for large groups of people to use shared terminology strikes me as possible even if (by stipulation) the terms in question don’t mean anything, unless we think it is somehow impossible for groups of people to be confused about concepts (in which case, I’d like to know why someone thinks that!). So mere numbers are insufficient.
I think this applies to the case of philosophers talking about “qualia.” That lots of people talk about the concepts isn’t good enough. Calling them competent or experts presupposes that they have precisely those qualities that would render their use of such terms credible, but this is what I am challenging, so I don’t grant that philosophers have the relevant competence or expertise to use qualia talk meaningfully. One would have to first establish that they are, in fact, experts with the relevant kind of expertise. If I don’t grant this, we’d need to move the discussion over to whether they are, in fact, experts of the relevant kind.
For comparison, I take it many would not accept if I described someone as an expert in astrology or witchcraft, such that they could, in fact, read the stars and predict the future, or cast spells, or whatever. Were I to make claims of such expertise, it’d be reasonable to ask for arguments or evidence that they were experts of the relevant kind. I simply don’t grant that philosophers are “experts” about qualia.
The externally observable consequences of qualia are that people report having experiences, and they do things because of their qualia. For example, people seek things out that will give them the experience of pleasure and avoid things that give them the experience of pain. I assume you will say that these aren't consequences of qualia, but I could say the same thing about anything else that you claim is the observable consequence of some other concept. You haven't given anyone any reason to reject the view that qualia exist, since your claim that they have no observable consequences rests on the assumption that they don't.
Also, the point about p-zombies only works against epiphenomenalists. I'm a physicalist, so I don't even think p-zombies are possible. If I were an interactionist dualist, I might think that p-zombies are possible, but they would require a bizarrely gerrymandered set of physical laws that's implausible a priori (Under interactionist dualism, certain physical states are caused by mental states, so a world with no mental states would require ad hoc physical laws that perfectly mimic the physical effects of mental causation in order to have zombies physically identical to conscious humans. This might be metaphysically possible, but it’s obviously a ridiculous ad hoc theory. If qualia can be claimed not to exist or be a meaningful concept just because one can come up with an ad hoc theory where their observable consequences occur without they themselves occurring, this would imply that literally everything is meaningless and/or doesn't exist). Epiphenominalists are the only ones who actually hold to a theory where consciousness has no externally observable effects, but this is precisely why it's such an implausible theory, since such effects obviously do exist (this entire conversation is one such effect).
By "communicate," I don't just mean that people use the word, but that they use it effectively. When people talk about qualia, others appear to understand, even if by your view they don't actually understand. There's no difference between the way people talk or think about qualia and the way they do about uncontroversially meaningful concepts, say, electrons. What could an observer point to as the difference between philosophers discussing qualia and theoretical physicists discussing electrons, other than that the conversations are about different topics?
Of course, I would say that there is no difference, and both conversations are obviously meaningful. If I saw people having such conversations, I would be very confident that the thing they're talking about must be meaningful, even if i didn't know what "qualia" or "electron" meant. It's super implausible to me that a huge number of extremely smart people would have long conversations that everyone thought were meaningful, write long papers and have arguments that everyone thought were meaningful, and yet the entire time everything everyone was saying was completely meaningless. If the entire conversation was meaningless, what were people thinking about when they had the conversation? What concept were they actually thinking about when they thought they were thinking about qualia, and what makes you so sure that whatever concept that is isn't just what "qualia" means?
"I don't grant that anyone has or does experience them, since I don't grant that there are any intelligible phenomena for people to experience."
This is just completely incoherent to me. It's why you get the incredulous response. It's as if we're both staring at a burning building out the window and you insist that it isn't there, and that you seem no building. I don't know what to tell you if you don't see the building, but it’s obviously there to me and almost everyone else.
The reason I think most people have or readily grasp the concept of qualia is because 1) nearly everyone who talks about the concept, except an extremely small minority, doesn't have any issue discussing it, never gives any sign that they ever had trouble understanding it, even when they first learned about it, and considers it one of the most clear and intuitive concepts there is, 2) everyone talks about their own personal experiences and what it's like to sense or feel things, and that's just what "qualia" is, and 3) I never had any trouble acquiring the concept myself. I understood it the moment I first heard about it - I didn't need coaxing or some form of indoctrination to believe in it.
"I don't think you or anyone else has the concept of qualia"
I don't think you have the concept of "dog." You might think you do, but everything you say about dogs is completely meaningless, and you are somehow radically mistaken about this. How plausible does this sound to you? This is what it feels like to me when you say I don't have some concept that I know that I in fact do have. It's not very convincing to tell me to deny the contents of my own mind. Of course, you can keep denying it yourself if you want, since I don't have the telepathic ability to give you access to my mental state, but you should at least admit that I'm in a better state to know which concepts I do and do not have than someone who doesn't know me is.
You mentioned earlier Christians who say that they just know God exists. I don't think this comparison is fair, given that those Christians aren't claiming to know it in anything like the way we know of qualia, and it would make no sense if we did since you can't know about things external to your own mind by direct experience. But now you are doing something that actually is analogous to what fundamentalist Christians do when they say that that there are no atheists and that everyone really knows God exists. I know that those Christians are wrong because I have access to my own mental state, so I know that I definitely don't know that God exists. Likewise, if someone claims that I don't really have some concept that I in fact have, and that things that I say are as meaningless as "glorp is florp" even though I know that I mean something when I say them, I'm just not going to accept that claim.
And anyway, the point there was about my epistemic state (and the state of others who believe in qualia), not your own.
The Alex and Sam example is also not convincing. Of course you can come up with a contrived scenario where a bunch of people would be using the same meaningless concept as if it were meaningful. I can also come up with a contrived scenario where the Earth would actually be flat despite all the evidence we have to the contrary - that wouldn't be grounds for dismissing the evidence unless we had reason our actual situation was relevantly similar. And clearly the real-life situation is nothing like Alex and Sam's.
I also don't think astrology and witchcraft are good examples. First of all, what's at issue with those fields is whether their claims are true, not whether they're meaningful. Second, astrologers and witches are making claims about the external world, not their own mental states, so they aren't in a position to know them without empirical evidence. Thirdly, their claims have been refuted by evidence from the sciences.
If you think a pragmatic test is needed to vindicate philosophers who talk about qualia, propose one. Can you propose a specific criterion or empirical test that would prove that qualia-talk is meaningful? All I'm seeing is assertions that it's somehow different from all our other talk without any explanation of how it's different or what you would consider a successful attempt to explain the concepts.
Typically, one easy way to test whether a concept is meaningful is to try to explain it to someone else to see if they understand it. But qualia-talk has already passed this test thousands of times, so apparently you want something else. (And yes, I know you're going to respond to this by claiming that qualia talk hasn't really passed the test because people don't really understand it. But that's an unfalsifiable claim that you could use to dismiss any case of purportedly meaningful talk. If you want, you can say that the test is whether you can explain it to someone, and they appear to understand it, in that they report understanding it, competently discus it with others, can say novel things about it that others agree make sense, can figure out things about it that you haven't directly told them, can have coherent disagreements with others about it, etc.)
I write these super long, systematic responses. Sometimes I'm a bit blunt in them. It's a method I've developed over the years, and it isn't an indication that I don't appreciate the engagement. In this case, I absolutely love that you're taking the time to argue things out with me, so your comments are much appreciated. That being said, let me get into it!
Part 1
//All I'm claiming with that bus example is that you have no argument against the view, so you shouldn't expect others to be convinced by anything you say. If your friend saw a burning building out the bus window, you wouldn't be able to convince that there wasn't one there by insisting that you didn't see it, asking for an argument to prove the existence of the burning building, and then saying that proponents of burning buildings have no arguments when he gives you none.//
That's all true, but on the flip side, if someone saw something I didn't, what business do they have ridiculing me, mocking me, and treating me like an idiot if I don't see what they say?
And there may be antecedent/extraneous reasons for doubting that people saw what they claim to have seen.
Take a claim from someone who says they were abducted by aliens. I think there is good, publicly available evidence to be very skeptical of such claims. A person who claims to have been abducted by aliens should appreciate this and recognize that whatever the quality of their evidence, much, most, or even all of it is going to be private, and that they should have little or no expectation that others fall in line and accept their claims at face value. Why, then, do proponents of qualia act like anyone who claims not to share their views so often treat us like garbage?
If anything, they may be in a worse position than people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. After all, abductees can at least in principle point to corroborating evidence, such as physical signs of abduction. What do proponents of by-definition-private-properties have that they can point to as public evidence? Absolutely nothing - pretty much by definition.
//In that particular case, if you didn't see the burning building, you would probably not believe your friend.//
Burning buildings out windows don't strike me as especially implausible, so I'm not sure why I wouldn't believe them.
//But what if there were more people on the bus, and everyone to you claimed to clearly see the burning building? //
I'd probably believe them unless I had good reason not to.
//Or would you suspect that maybe you're mistaken, as the only one who can't see something that everyone else thinks is clear and obvious.//
That depends. If I have a good view of the area, I might think they were delusional or hallucinating or something. The thing is, this isn't adequately analogous to qualia cases. In the case of qualia, I've spent years studying, discussing, and working in relevant fields. So it'd be much closer to if I were to get off the bus and go personally investigate the area the burning building allegedly was at for *several years*. And if I saw no signs of burning builds at that point: not only would I conclude that everyone else on the bus was wrong, I'd be very confident they were wrong, and I'd probably be right. *This* is the situation I am in when it comes to qualia. Proponents of the view have had ample opportunity to make a good case for their views. I don't think that they have.
//As for defining qualia, the things you complain about would implicate almost every word in the English language. Every word either has a circular definition or is defined by pointing out examples to form a family resemblance concept. If this is vicious, then there's not a single meaningful word on your view.//
People say this sort of thing all the time. I don't agree at all. I think this is true of almost *no* words in the English language, at least not in ordinary language. I am not asking for "definitions" so whether definitions are all circular is irrelevant. I am asking for people to communicate the concept. All meaningful concepts are communicable and all meaningful words in the English language can be communicated. When people start thinking I am asking for definitions, I am confused in two ways: first, why do they think this? I don't ask for "definitions." Second, why are they so confident that the rest of the English language works the same way as qualia talk? So much so that they just assert this as if I'd agree? I don't agree. I think qualia talk *in particular* has the suspicious features I am describing; I don't think this is true at all of ordinary English words and I've literally never seen any good example of a candidate term that is similarly mysterious as "qualia." Qualia is a philosophical term of art, something totally made up and disconnected from everyday English. Everyday English words are not like that all. They function and do work. "Qualia" talk doesn't do any work at all outside a closed loop of theoretical talk.
//If this is vicious, then there's not a single meaningful word on your view.//
This is not an accurate representation of my view. I'm a pragmatist about truth and meaning. Ordinary English easily passes pragmatic tests. "Qualia" doesn't.
//I don't think qualia are that much more ineffable or incommunicable than other concepts.//
I take it to be part of the definition of qualia that they are ineffable. If you're referring to something as qualia and regard as not ineffable, then it simply isn't what I am talking about.
//The car mechanic example does nothing to undermine the argument based on common usage that people must understand what these terms means. You can demonstrate that you understand how cars work by using that knowledge to fix a car, and likewise, you can demonstrate that you understand what a word means by competently communicating with others who use the word. //
I don't agree. Look, I can invent a set of empty terms, and teach people the relations between those terms.
All florps are zorps.
All zorps are blorps.
All blorps are florps.
I can then teach a group of people to talk about florps, zorps, and blorps and say things like:
"If it's a florp, then it's a blorp. After all, all florps are zorps, and all zorps are blorps, so by appealing to the principle of transitivity, we can know that if something is a florp, then it's a blorp."
These people can go on to say all manner of things about the relation between these terms even if we explicitly stipulate that they don't mean anything. Logical relations can exist between empty concepts that have literally no content at all other than their relation to one another. But that closed loop never cashes out in anything real; it doesn't refer to anything or describe anything.
That people can competently use words does not show that those words mean anything. In contrast, competence at mechanics isn't just cashed out in terms of words. You can actually do something with that knowledge that yields predictions about actual experiences we'd have in the world, experiences beyond a closed loop of stipulative terminological relations.
What I am proposing is that qualia talk is like florp talk. It never bottoms out in percepts or experience in any way. It's just words, and nothing more. In contrast, car mechanics isn't merely words. Cars and their parts and facts about their operation are real and one can understand them.
The difference between qualia and abduction by aliens is that the vast majority of people do not claim to be abducted by aliens, and we have very good reasons to doubt the claims of the few who do. You can't use, "This would be just like believing someone who was abducted by aliens," as a general counterargument for any testimony you disagree with, particularly when that testimony is given by an overwhelming majority of people who speak on the topic you're talking about.
I don't think your analogy for the bus scenario is accurate. You don't have overwhelming evidence against the existence of qualia or the meaningfulness of the term (or at least, no such evidence was presented here or in the original article), so it's nothing like going to the location of a supposed building and finding that it isn't there. This is like the scenario where everyone else on the bus sees the burning building and you don't. It doesn't make much sense to say that they're all hallucinating in that case - which makes more sense: that everyone else on the bus is having the same hallucination, but you are somehow immune to it, or that you're missing something or perhaps hallucinating yourself? Maybe in the bus scenario you would conclude that everyone else was conspiring to gaslight you or play some elaborate prank, but that's obviously implausible in the case of qualia.
If it's not circular definitions or definition by example that's the problem, then you have no argument against the meaningfulness of the term whatsoever. That's why everyone assumes this is what you're taking issue with. That, and the fact that you specifically pointed out those two things as problems with the way people talk about qualia - you're the one who said that they were viciously circular, so I don't know how that's supposed to be a strawman of your view.
Without these specific arguments, all you have is a bare assertion that the terms are not meaningful. You tell me that people have "failed to communicate" the concepts without giving any argument for this. Well, I think they were communicated just fine, and so do the vast majority of philosophers. If nearly everyone who has heard of a concept except you thinks it was adequately communicated, how can you continue to claim that this wasn't done by just asserting it?
I don't think ineffability is part of the definition of qualia - AFAIK that was only added to the definition by illusionists in order to argue against the concept. I think ineffability is too vague of a concept to say for sure whether qualia are ineffable. In some senses, they can be communicated - you can describe certain features of them to others, who may understand those features from their own experiences. But they can't be communicated in the sense that you can't just make someone experience a qualia through words alone.
The example with glorps still doesn't work. You might be able to train people to discuss words that have no meaning just by following logical connections between them, but no one who starts talking about glorps in that way will think that they understand what the words mean - they just know the logical relations. This is not analogous to qualia.
Furthermore, the glorps example is another fully general counterargument to the meaningfulness of any term. You could always claim that people don't really know what the words they're saying means and are just following logical relations, but this in general a very unlikely claim - you would need some strong evidence to show that it's true.
Anyway, I agree with one thing you're saying here, which is that illusionists and quietest shouldn't be ridiculed for their beliefs. Just because I think it's rationally appropriate for others to assert the existence of qualia and consciousness without proving it by argument, that doesn't mean people should be unnecessarily rude.
Ambiguity is typically resolved in its contexts of usage; whether or not and to what extent any of those remarks would be ambiguous would depend on the contexts in which they're used.
phenomenal state and qualia are meaningful. phenomenal state is a state that is constituted by qualia. and qualia are such properties that constitute what it is like to have an experience. what-it-is-like is also meaningful. and to try to convey the concept or idea, i might ask...
when someone in pain or who is suffering would perhaps feel that their suffering is being undermined, they might say “you don’t know what’s like”. do you understand what that means?
I anticipate that you will respond, as you have done before, that
“I don’t think we can move from colloquial, ordinary uses of terms to the presumption that if the phrases in question are meaningful in those everyday contexts that therefore they’re meaningful in philosophical contexts”
and my answer here would just be: why the heck not? presumably there are many words, or set of words, you're using in colloquial contexts the same way in philosophical contexts, so then why can’t you do the same with ‘what-it-is-like’? how is it disanalogous?
"What-it-is-like" isn't an ordinary term. "What it's like" or "what it is like" in ordinary contexts are ordinary uses of the terms, but "what-it-is-like" in a philosophical context isn't. If philosophers think these phrases mean the same thing they're welcome do the work to figure out what is meant in the ordinary contexts and then see if that matches what is meant in the philosophical contexts.
I'm not going to just grant that if a philosopher uses a term it means the same thing as some other term. And if they're going to claim X means the same thing as Y, we're still going to have to figure out what Y means.
I'm not sure I grant the distinction between the ordinary and philosophical uses of the term "what-it's-like". The term is fairly ordinary to me outside of philosophical contexts. For instance, i remember one of my friends, who isn't interested in philosophy and isn't familiar with any of the litterature at all, once asked me "i wonder what it's like to be rasmus (me)". Thomas Nagel wondered what it's like to be a bat. It seems to me they were both wondering or asking what it's like from someone or something else's point of view. And it seems to me they were both talking about what it's like in the same sense. I think the same might be true when someone going through a tough time might say "you don't know what it's like".
Speaking of which, i noticed you didn't answer the question, but i am curious how you would answer: if someone going through a tough time would say "you don't know what it's like", do you have an understanding of what that means?
"Terms like phenomenal state and qualia, when used to reference the sorts of things illusionists deny, aren’t even meaningful."
i would want to know how a claim like that could be demonstrated or justified. there are terms or utterances that dont make any sense to me. but i dont claim they aren't meaningful. i would just say i doubt they are meaningful, and if they are meaningful, i have no idea what they're supposed to mean. but this is not what you do. or is that what you mean to do? or do you mean to make the stronger claim that phenomenal state and qualia don't mean anything?
some things seem irreducible. for instance, I don't know what it means for transitivity to be true (a>b, b>c, therefore a>c) but I know that it is true.
I don't really even know where I would begin to prove such a concept, it seems foundational to me.
as it is with the laws of logic then, qualia is the same. qualia too seems unexplainable, yet still present.
so I don't think asserting qualia is the same as asserting other unfalsifiable phenomena, like magical pizzas. it is to me fundamentally inconcieveable for anything but the existence of qualia to be the case.
What do you mean by "irreducible"? And things seem irreducible to who? To you specifically? Transitivity doesn't seem "irreducible" to me. It's a rule we invented for certain kinds of logic and we use it or don't use it as we see fit. It makes about as much sense to me to say that transitivity is irreducible as it does to say that "Bishops move diagonally across the board" in chess is "irreducible."
Transitivity does not "seem foundational" to me. I am not sure what that experience would be like or why I would think that, but I don't experience the rules of logic that way, nor do I think it's true that it is irreducible or foundational.
I don't think there even is a concept of qualia that is inexplicable. I think it's inexplicability is a clue that it isn't even a meaningful idea in the first place.
Thanks for replying! Sorry if I'm being unoriginal btw, I've just never been able to wrap my mind around the skeptical position on qualia.
Here's my response:
How do you then make sense of transitivity? I guess I'm asking for your epistemology. Like, if you kept asking why, I imagine you'd have to stop at some point. That stopping point in my view would include the laws of logic and qualia.
Do you imagine it to be an infinite regress of explanations? Or do you think that there is some foundation? If so, that foundation would necessarily be unjustified.
It is my position that these foundational beliefs are merely self-evident.
I guess you could deny that transitivity is true, but personally I am unable to even imagine a situation wherein a>b, b>c, but a is not greater than c. That's what I mean by transitivity being "irreducible".
When you bring up the bishop example, I think it's different in a key way.
1. I do think that this rule is too irreducible. Without such a rule, the piece would not be a bishop as it pertains to the definition of chess. I don't even know what it would mean for bishops to not move diagonally under the strict rules of conventional chess.
2. This is a quality of definitions that cannot be broken. This is an irreducible rule, that definitions must be definitions. a=a is a rule of logic, and I don't know what it would mean for such a rule to be broken.
To sum up, the bishop example is different in that it's a contrived application of a different law of logic (a=a), which makes the concept seem absurd (ironically enuf lol).
I guess I'd put to you whether you believe it could be the case that a>b, b>c, but a is not greater than c.
Great piece.
From where I stand, phenomenal consciousness and qualia are not simply vague, they are hybrid concepts that flit between different incompatible meanings.
I think that it is possible to be much more specific about what is wrong with the concept of phenomenal consciousness. The fact that it is hopelessly vague is a problem, of course, but adding specificity does not so much revive it as put it out of its misery.
I am surprised these terms persists, and you do a good job of pointing out the dynamics that keep them in circulation.
That's a good way to put it, and I agree. We are dealing with a kind of flickering position that moves from one meaning to another, and is very hard to pin down. But it tends to take two forms:
(1) A clear target that we can take down
(2) An unclear target that's impossible to readily take down
It's a case of a motte-and-bailey, only there isn't a clear bailey. It's very, very strange.
What I find strange is the incuriosity among philosophers to recognize and appreciate the root causes of seemingly intractable problems. It's not I'm spotting anything new. The same kinds of issues were raised by philosophers from the inception of analytic philosophy, going back to the first pragmatists.
When I have asked for more rigour in online discussions, usually by just asking for a definition, I have usually been treated with just the attitude shown in your hypothetical flerp discussion.
There is huge resistance to definition, but I think it is also coupled with a genuine cognitive impasse that makes definition particularly challenging for this cluster of concepts. Once you have an entity "beyond the performance of functions", to use Chalmers' phrase, it is necessarily impossible to define it.
I think illusionists get some of the blame here. In many cases, they don't articulate what it is that they are denying, partly because language that is sufficiently precise just doesn't exist or doesn't rise above the babble.
I agree regarding illusionists. You and I might disagree on this (I don't know your stance on the matter) but I think illusionism arose within the analytic tradition and borrows much of its methods, ways of thinking and speaking, and its presuppositions. I think a view more circumspect towards the analytic project would have done better, though the kind of classical pragmatism I've come to favor of late seems to have few proponents.
I think Frankish illusionism, to some extent, consists of accepting the framing provided by qualia realists, vagueness and incoherence and all, and saying: I don't believe in that. Illusionism hasn't yet been able to articulate a different vision, and unfortunately the debate is still stuck with the faulty framing as the primary reference point.
In the beginning of the article you complain that critics of illusionism act incredulous whenever people claim that they don't believe in qualia, phenomenal consciousness, etc. rather than giving an argument to demonstrate their existence. But that ignores what the purported justification for the existence of those things is. No one claims that they know about consciousness or qualia because they found some argument for their existence - they claim to know about it by direct observation through introspection. As an analogy, imagine you're in a bus, and your friend sitting next to you points out all building that is on fire outside the window. You look directly at it but claim that you see nothing. What else is your friend supposed to do other than act incredulous? Do you expect him to give you some argument to prove that there is in fact an burning building in front of you? This is exactly what it's like to deny the existence of qualia or consciousness from a non-illusionist's perspective (with the additional caveats that the person might just be misunderstanding the words used, rather than genuinely denying the concept).
Also, I'm not sure why you get all indignant about people psychologizing illusionists and qualia quietists and then immediately go on to create a psychological theory about pseudoconcepts to explain away the belief in qualia in a way that accuses those who believe in them of not even knowing what their own words mean.
I wrote this a while ago so I don't really remember everything I said. You say:
"In the beginning of the article you complain that critics of illusionism act incredulous whenever people claim that they don't believe in qualia, phenomenal consciousness, etc. rather than giving an argument to demonstrate their existence."
...Can you remind me of where specifically I said that?
The specific mention of incredulity was from 5 in the numbered list from Section 1. But I was mainly responding to what you said in the first few paragraphs of Section 1, particularly this part:
"I suspect such people often resort to ridicule when they don’t have good objections, and I suspect this is true of critics of illusionism. As such, I take such ridicule not to be evidence that the position in question is stupid, but that the person criticizing it probably doesn’t have very good objections. If they did, why not simply present them?"
Given that the way we know about qualia is (or by your lights, supposedly is) simply by direct experience, how are we supposed to argue for their existence other than just appealing to the direct experience of having them? Likewise, how are we supposed to define what they are other than just pointing to examples with a demonstrative (i.e., "You know what it's like to see the color red? That's a qualia.").
Likewise, how are we supposed to prove to you that a term is meaningful other than by noting that we personally understand what it means, and that there is a community of experts who communicate using the term and are able to formulate arguments with it that other experts understand? Even when we define it in terms of colloquialisms, you still insist that that doesn't prove it means anything. So what exactly do you want? How would you prove to someone that a word is meaningful if they rejected any appeal to usage or your own understanding of the word, wouldn't accept you pointing to examples to illustrate the concept, and every time you tried to define it in terms of other words, they either asked for the meaning of those words until you went in a circle or denied that the definition you gave is correct based on the common meaning of the words?
The incredulity has to do with them, not me. As in, they are incredulous that we don't share their intuitions or beliefs. I'm not sure how that relates to your earlier remarks so perhaps you could clarify.
Regarding the remark: I'm specifically talking about the lack of good objections to illusionism. That's not identical to positive arguments for phenomenal states or qualia, since illusionism isn't the only position that rejects qualia (indeed, I don't think there are qualia, I am not even an illusionist!).
//Given that the way we know about qualia is (or by your lights, supposedly is) simply by direct experience, how are we supposed to argue for their existence other than just appealing to the direct experience of having them?//
I'm specifically talking about the lack of good arguments against illusionism, not so much arguments for qualia. But I can still address this: If the purported means by which you acquire knowledge that you have qualia isn't something, on your own view, that you could argue for, that's hardly a reason for me to shrug and let them off the hook for the lack of good arguments. Suppose someone:
(1) Holds the view that X is true.
(2) Holds the view that they have a special power to immediately know X is true, and therefore don't need any arguments for X. They just immediately know it's true!
If I object that I have no good reason to think X is true because they haven't given any good arguments for it, appealing to (2) is a bit of a weird move. The view is *internally* self-reinforcing. Sure, okay, so on their view X is true *and* they don't have to present any arguments for why X is true because they immediately know it.
Fine: then why should I believe (1) and (2) are both true? Why think you have a special power to immediately know X is true? What's the argument for that?
They can, at this point, say:
(3) It's self-evident I have this power because I'm aware of the fact that I am using it, so I don't need to argue for (2).
This can be repeated ad infinitum. Anyone, at any time, can give themselves an epistemic get-out-of-jail-free card, but that doesn't mean I or anyone else has to take them seriously.
If you disagree, consider this:
I have a special faculty that gives me direct acquaintance with the truth. I am directly acquainted with the fact that I am right about everything I said in this post and all of the comments in this post, and I am directly acquainted with the fact that you are wrong. I am further acquainted with the fact that I don't have to argue for any of this. You're just wrong if you disagree.
Would you take this to be a reasonable or philosophically engaging or satisfying thing for me to say? I sure hope not.
//Given that the way we know about qualia is (or by your lights, supposedly is) simply by direct experience, how are we supposed to argue for their existence other than just appealing to the direct experience of having them? Likewise, how are we supposed to define what they are other than just pointing to examples with a demonstrative (i.e., "You know what it's like to see the color red? That's a qualia.").//
I don't think you can argue for the view or explain what it means. I don't think you can define what they are by pointing to examples of them. These are some of my main problems with the view that we have qualia! Nobody can clearly say what they are, point to them, or provide arguments for them.
//Likewise, how are we supposed to prove to you that a term is meaningful other than by noting that we personally understand what it means, and that there is a community of experts who communicate using the term and are able to formulate arguments with it that other experts understand? //
I don't grant that you're "noting" that you understand. That implies you do understand. But I'm not granting that. From my perspective, you are *claiming* to understand, but that has yet to be demonstrated.
Suppose someone told you they understand how cars work. Would you take them at their word, if you had no evidence about this person's education, experience, or abilities? You might. But suppose you asked them to demonstrate that they understood how cars worked, and the only thing they could do was assure you that they understood how they worked, verbally.
I wouldn't believe them. I'd expect them to demonstrate their understanding of cars. Now, either proponents of qualia can demonstrate by some means that they understand what qualia are, or they can't. If they can, let them demonstrate. If they can't, well, why should I even think there is any notion to be understood in the first place?
I don't grant that there are a community of experts who communicate using the term. I grant that there are a bunch of academics who use the term, but what, exactly, are they experts in or about that would make their claims about "qualia" credible?
Again, go back to a person who claims to understand how cars work. Expert car mechanics can demonstrate their expertise. You can give them broken cars and they can fix them. When and how did philosophers demonstrate that they were "experts" when it comes to questions of consciousness or qualia?
//Even when we define it in terms of colloquialisms, you still insist that that doesn't prove it means anything. //
Not quite sure what you mean here.
//So what exactly do you want?//
For proponents of qualia to communicate what "qualia" are. I don't think they've done this. If they think they can, let them do it. If they think they can't, we can move to the next step: why should I believe there are ineffable, incommunicable concepts? I am not obligated to grant this at the outset of inquiry. I am challenging whether there are such concepts. Why do people feel entitled to help themselves to claiming that they "have" concepts the meaning of which they can't communicate? How do you know how you have the concept? And why should I believe you?
Consider this scenario: a group of people claim to have a concept, "glorp." None can explain what it means. But they all claim to be experts in "glorpism." How would you react? What would you do in response? I don't think there are no good answers here. I think there are good answers. I just think that those answers don't result in a flattering depiction of what proponents of qualia are up to.
Compare, instead, to people who claim that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. There are a variety of means they could use to demonstrate this, and people have. No similar tests exist for "qualia." Their putative existence does no empirical work, bakes no bread, and achieves nothing. One can insist that despite their superfluity they are nevertheless real, but why should I think that?
//How would you prove to someone that a word is meaningful if they rejected any appeal to usage or your own understanding of the word//
I don't reject ANY appeal to usage. I reject viciously circular, technical appeals to usage. Lots of ways of using terms readily demonstrate the meaningfulness of the terms being used.
If I'm challenging whether the concept is meaningful, I take meaningfulness to be a precondition for it to be "understood." You can't understand something that isn't meaningful! So people appealing to the "fact" that they "understand" the concepts consists of nothing more than the assertion that I'm wrong. This isn't good evidence that they understand. Evidence is public. If, for instance, I saw Bigfoot, the fact that I saw Bigfoot isn't good evidence for you that I did. You may take my testimony as some evidence, but it wouldn't be good evidence. So I take people claiming to understand the concepts in question to be some evidence that they have the concepts they claim to have, but it isn't good enough evidence, and I don't think you should think this.
If you disagree, you'd be left in a position of granting that all that's required as decisive evidence of meaningfulness is if a person or enough people claim to understand the concept. I think this is inadequate and I'd wonder why anyone would disagree.
wouldn't accept you pointing to examples to illustrate the concept, and every time you tried to define it in terms of other words, they either asked for the meaning of those words until you went in a circle or denied that the definition you gave is correct based on the common meaning of the words?
//wouldn't accept you pointing to examples to illustrate the concept//
I'd certainly accept instances of people pointing to examples that illustrate the concept. I just don't think anyone has done so.
I'm not claiming that you should be convinced of qualia's existence just because one person says they are directly acquainted with it. All I'm claiming with that bus example is that you have no argument against the view, so you shouldn't expect others to be convinced by anything you say. If your friend saw a burning building out the bus window, you wouldn't be able to convince that there wasn't one there by insisting that you didn't see it, asking for an argument to prove the existence of the burning building, and then saying that proponents of burning buildings have no arguments when he gives you none.
In that particular case, if you didn't see the burning building, you would probably not believe your friend. But what if there were more people on the bus, and everyone to you claimed to clearly see the burning building? Would you still insist that there's no building there because no one can give you any argument for its existence? Or would you suspect that maybe you're mistaken, as the only one who can't see something that everyone else thinks is clear and obvious.
As for defining qualia, the things you complain about would implicate almost every word in the English language. Every word either has a circular definition or is defined by pointing out examples to form a family resemblance concept. If this is vicious, then there's not a single meaningful word on your view.
The car mechanic example does nothing to undermine the argument based on common usage that people must understand what these terms means. You can demonstrate that you understand how cars work by using that knowledge to fix a car, and likewise, you can demonstrate that you understand what a word means by competently communicating with others who use the word. What alternative test do you propose? If you think there's some other test needed to prove that people understand qualia that would be more analogous to fixing a car, explain what it is and justify why it would be necessary - don't complain that other people haven't passed a nonexistent test.
I don't think qualia are that much more ineffable or incommunicable than other concepts. The vast majority of concepts are difficult or impossible to explicitly define, and we can certainly communicate with each other about qualia and talk about their characteristics - it's just that we don't have anything way to explain certain basic features to someone who has never experienced them (e.g., explaining what it's like to see red to someone who's never seen it). But this is entirely unsurprising. We're not telepathy who can control others' minds - we can't force someone to have a qualia just by describing it. The mechanism by which we understand what an experience is like is either by currently having the experience or replaying the memory of it - you can't use words to make someone do either of those things.
In the "glorp" example, you're using the fact that glorp is known to be a meaningless (and silly-sounding) word in the real word to pump the intuition that it would be silly to believe it had meaning in the hypothetical. But if there actually were tons of people who claimed to understand what the word "glorp" means, and nearly every philosopher who ever looked into it said they understand what it means (so much so that even among those who deny the existence of glorp, most claimed that glorp was an illusion rather than a meaningless term), lay people learning about philosophy also almost always seemed to immediately grasp the meaning and claimed that its existence was the most obvious thing in the world, and people could communicate to each other about glorp and make extensive arguments about its nature, features, and where it comes from, I think I would be quite justified in thinking that the word "glorp" probably means something! I would be justified in this even if I didn't understand the word myself, but even more so if I understood it too.
There are some cases like this in real life. I don't understand the words that wine-taaters use to describe the taste of wine, and they can't really explain it to me. But they all seem to understand what the words mean, are able to communicate with each other using them, use them consistently, and new people getting into wine-tasting are able to grasp their meaning. Should I insist that everything they say is meaningless because they can't define the words without reference to other wine-tasting terms or by just asking me to taste a few wines to which the word applies?
(By the way, if you want to object to this by claiming that wine-tasting terms can be proven to be meaningful by the fact that certain chemicals correspond to the different tastes they identify, the same can be said of qualia. Do an MRI scan of a bunch of philosophers' brains when they claim to experience the qualia of seeing red, and I guarantee you you'll get similar results.)
Likewise, if I was blind, I wouldn't assume that people who talk about seeing color are just saying meaningless words that they all think they understand, and that unless they can prove color is meaningful to me by defining color terms in a non-circular, non-demonstrative way, they're all talking nonsense. (And don't they dare try to talk about wavelengths of light. Those are uncontroversial things that even color illusionists and color quietest like me agree to, so pointing to those won't work.) In fact, many of your arguments against consciousness-related terms being meaningful would also apply to color terms, even for people who can see color. How can you define what the color red is without just pointing to examples of red things, or by referencing other colors (viciously circular)?
"Evidence is public"
This is clearly false. If I'm alone in a forest, and I'm the only one to see a tree fall, I'm the only one with that evidence. Likewise, people have private evidence of their own qualia. Of course, we also have public evidence from other people's testimony, which you dismiss as not good enough. But
1) This doesn't dismiss anyone's private evidence. Maybe in your epistemic state, it's reasonable not to believe in qualia, but nothing you say does anything to give anyone else a reason not to believe in it.
2) When you get nearly universal testimony for some claim, that's pretty good evidence that the claim is true even if you, personally, can't testify for it.
"I'd certainly accept instances of people pointing to the concept"
But you don't! What are you experiencing right now? What colors do you see in your field of vision? Those experiences are qualia. There, I pointed to an example, but I imagine you're still going to say that you don't know what qualia means and that I've done nothing to define or illuminate it.
Part 3 of 3:
//(By the way, if you want to object to this by claiming that wine-tasting terms can be proven to be meaningful by the fact that certain chemicals correspond to the different tastes they identify, the same can be said of qualia. Do an MRI scan of a bunch of philosophers' brains when they claim to experience the qualia of seeing red, and I guarantee you you'll get similar results.)//
That’s not an objection I’d raise or that occurred to me.
//Likewise, if I was blind, I wouldn't assume that people who talk about seeing color are just saying meaningless words that they all think they understand, and that unless they can prove color is meaningful to me by defining color terms in a non-circular, non-demonstrative way, they're all talking nonsense. //
Neither would I. The blindness case actually works in my favor, since it demonstrates precisely why objecting to qualia makes sense, but objecting to color vision doesn’t. Which better be the case for my view, because it’d be a big problem for my view if people who lacked certain sense perceptions were justified in denying anyone else had them. It would not be reasonable for a person who has never experienced color to deny that other people can see color. This is because we have well-established scientific accounts of how human vision systems work. We know about rods and cones in the eye, light refraction, eyes, photoreceptors, the genetics of colorblindness, the optic nerve, the occipital lobe, and a variety of other aspects of how visual processing works. While a full account of color vision is incomplete, we have a well-developed mechanistic account of precisely what allows some people to see color and others not to. We have knowledge of the electromagnetic spectrum, where visible light falls on it, and how the bandwidth of visible light fits in with the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. The electromagnetic spectrum is in turn a highly corroborated finding that is consistent with and makes sense in light of the rest of our understanding of biology, physics, chemistry, and so on. To extract any of these facts would lead to a significant collapse of much our scientific knowledge, because so much of is mutually corroborating. You couldn’t just gut part of it without massive costs to our overarching models of the world. So we have a well-established empirical account of what’s going on with color vision and why some people can’t see colors.
Absolutely *none* of this is available for qualia. They don’t figure into our scientific theories, they don’t account for any public observations or data capable of corroboration, there is no mechanistic account of how some people can detect qualia and others can’t. Absolutely nothing. If anything, blindness and color vision is an excellent test case for how and why my approach makes sense and works well, and why qualia is such a vacuous, useless notion. It does absolutely nothing to explain our observations or publicly available data. Color vision does.
Is there some special organ or sensory system for detecting qualia? If so, nobody’s found one. I’d immediately admit I’m wrong if they do. Have proponents of qualia identified lesions in my brain that illustrate why I can’t detect qualia but they can? No, but I’d immediately admit I was wrong if they do. Is there some mechanistic account of how qualia figure into our best scientific models of the world, such that the failure to posit them would reverberate across the rest of our web of scientific explanations in such a way as to raise serious questions about the reliability of science? No. But that would be the case if it turned out nobody had color vision.
In short: color vision passes all the standard pragmatic tests. Qualia passes none of them.
//And don't they dare try to talk about wavelengths of light. Those are uncontroversial things that even color illusionists and color quietest like me agree to, so pointing to those won't work.//
Yes it will.
//In fact, many of your arguments against consciousness-related terms being meaningful would also apply to color terms, even for people who can see color. How can you define what the color red is without just pointing to examples of red things, or by referencing other colors (viciously circular)?//
You’re still talking about definitions so I’m not sure you understand my objections to qualia talk, which aren’t about definitions. As far as the meaningfulness of color terms: their usage is partially constructive and partially a result of identifiable features of our shared nervous systems. People can and do develop and employ color terminology in a publicly accessible way around which we can coordinate our actions. This is a non-issue, so no, my objections don’t apply to color terminology. The same applies to talk of texture, shape, and so on. All of these features are based on identifiable features of our nervous systems that can be corroborated by direct interaction with our environments. Color talk can be checked via prediction and observation and easily passes basic pragmatic tests. In other words, color talk can be cashed out in publicly accessible, discriminative ways that allow us to make predictions about our future expectations and experiences. Qualia talk isn’t like this. It doesn’t do anything like this and doesn’t fit into our best scientific explanations of how anything works. Color talk, on the other hand, helps explain human and animal behavior and the way such behavior fits in with broader knowledge in physics, chemistry, psychology, sociology, anthropology, religion, and so on.
For instance, we can make predictions about animal color perception based on the behavior of animals, and then discover that those animals can see into the infrared or ultraviolet spectrum. This can then be confirmed and corroborated via studying other aspects of their behavior, conducting experiments, or examining the physiology of the organisms in question. This has already been done for e.g., snakes and bees. It would be extremely difficult to account for their physiology (or human physiology) without appealing to color discrimination abilities. How else would we explain anatomical differences in eyes across different species? That different species have different capacities for color discrimination is the best explanation for many of these observations.
No analogous case exists for “qualia.” Nothing about our anatomy or physiology in any way hints at the existence of qualia, nor is positing qualia helpful in any way in explaining human or animal behavior. It is entirely superfluous. Color perception isn’t.
//This is clearly false. //
I don’t agree.
//If I'm alone in a forest, and I'm the only one to see a tree fall, I'm the only one with that evidence. Likewise, people have private evidence of their own qualia.//
//"Evidence is public"
This is clearly false. //
Apologies; “Evidence is public” isn’t a good way to convey what I mean and that was a stupid way for me to put it. What I mean is that for something to count as evidence *to me*, it must be available *to me*. And other people’s private experiences are not available to me. As such, they cannot serve as evidence for me.
Another way to put what I mean is this: all dialectically relevant considerations must be available to your interlocutors to serve as evidence *for them.* I don’t have a problem with the notion of private evidence, but to the extent that it’s private, it cannot serve as evidence for anyone else…pretty much by definition. Private evidence can be leveraged as public evidence to some extent. I can (and I think should) take other people’s testimony as evidence, and I do. That people claim to have the concept of qualia and to understand it is evidence that they have (and understand) such concepts. But the mere fact that they make such claims is insufficient (to me) to establish that they, in fact, have such concepts.
//1) This doesn't dismiss anyone's private evidence. Maybe in your epistemic state, it's reasonable not to believe in qualia, but nothing you say does anything to give anyone else a reason not to believe in it.//
Maybe not. But note that private evidence that you cannot publicly corroborate can be arbitrarily strong: anyone can find themselves psychologically disposed to be incorrigible because they feel certain they understand something. But feeling certain you understand something is entirely consistent with not understanding it at all. So is one’s level of confidence good evidence that they are correct?
For whatever reason, I’m expected to take people’s supreme confidence that they have qualia to be evidence that they have qualia. However, I already know that people are confident about lots of things they are completely wrong about. Why should I be impressed by how confident people are about this?
//2) When you get nearly universal testimony for some claim, that's pretty good evidence that the claim is true even if you, personally, can't testify for it.//
I don’t agree. But even if I did, I completely deny there is nearly universal testimony for the existence of qualia. I think less than 1% of the world’s population believes in qualia. There is very little evidence that most people think they have qualia.
//But you don't! //
Sure I do. Go ahead and point out the qualia!
//What are you experiencing right now? //
Typing on my computer!
//What colors do you see in your field of vision?//
Black text, white (faintly red, because I’m using flux) background.
//Those experiences are qualia.//
Where’s the qualia? I don’t see how you’ve pointed to anything in my experience that would indicate that there are “qualia” there.
// There, I pointed to an example, but I imagine you're still going to say that you don't know what qualia means and that I've done nothing to define or illuminate it.//
I’ll go further: I deny you’ve pointed to an example.
Part 2:
//What alternative test do you propose? //
Pragmatic tests. Describe what observable differences there would be if the claims in question were true or false. In the case of qualia, I think there would be no observable difference in principle. This is why p-zombies are conceivable for proponents of qualia. I think they regard this as conceivable because qualia make no difference to our observations of events in the world, not even in principle.
//. The vast majority of concepts are difficult or impossible to explicitly define,//
I am not talking about defining concepts. I don’t know why people keep thinking I’m complaining about definitions since I almost never use such terminology when talking about this topic. If I had intended to ask for a definition, I would’ve asked for one. I make two references to definitions in the blog post: I use the made up term “decoy definition” to describe a rhetorical move people make, which isn’t relevant to the present topic. And the second reference is when I talk about “mutually interdefining” sets of terms; note that I take it as a given that such terms are presented as definitions. Clearly there are lots of definitions of the terms in question! I don’t deny that. But definitions come cheap, and I don’t care about whether people can provide them or not.
//and we can certainly communicate with each other about qualia and talk about their characteristics//
This is ambiguous: when you say you can communicate with one about qualia, what do you mean? Do you mean you can use the word, or use the word in a meaningful way? Because I grant that people can use the word “qualia,” but I don’t grant that they can do so in a meaningful way. And I don’t think the fact that a bunch of people are using the term establishes that its use is meaningful.
// it's just that we don't have anything way to explain certain basic features to someone who has never experienced them (e.g., explaining what it's like to see red to someone who's never seen it)//
I don’t grant that anyone has or could experience “them,” since I don’t grant that there is any intelligible phenomena for people to experience.
//The mechanism by which we understand what an experience is like is either by currently having the experience or replaying the memory of it - you can't use words to make someone do either of those things.//
What do you mean when you refer to understanding “what an experience is like”?
//But if there actually were tons of people who claimed to understand what the word "glorp" means, and nearly every philosopher who ever looked into it said they understand what it means (so much so that even among those who deny the existence of glorp, most claimed that glorp was an illusion rather than a meaningless term), lay people learning about philosophy also almost always seemed to immediately grasp the meaning and claimed that its existence was the most obvious thing in the world, and people could communicate to each other about glorp and make extensive arguments about its nature, features, and where it comes from, I think I would be quite justified in thinking that the word "glorp" probably means something!//
Why would you be justified? And why should I agree with that? Also, do you think it is in fact the case that “lay people learning about philosophy also almost always seemed to immediately grasp the meaning and claimed that its existence was the most obvious thing in the world”? I don’t. I don’t think most people have or readily acquire the notion of qualia. I think they have to be, to put it bluntly, duped into thinking such a thing. I think the scenario we’re in is one in which philosophers are, in fact, just spreading their confusions with laypeople like a contagion. I think they do this with other philosophical notions, too, like free will and talk of “reasons.”
//I would be justified in this even if I didn't understand the word myself, but even more so if I understood it too.//
It’s worth reiterating at this point: I do not grant that you or anyone else understands the concept of qualia I am describing. My contention isn’t that I don’t understand it, but others do; it’s that nobody understands it because there isn’t anything to understand. So any argument in which you appeal to the fact that you understand the concept would beg the question against my position.
//There are some cases like this in real life. I don't understand the words that wine-taaters use to describe the taste of wine, and they can't really explain it to me. But they all seem to understand what the words mean, are able to communicate with each other using them, use them consistently, and new people getting into wine-tasting are able to grasp their meaning.//
Yes, and if they couldn’t pass pragmatic tests to establish that what they’re describing can be cashed out via predictions and observations, I’d say that they were talking confused nonsense, too. I don’t apply my standards asymmetrically. I’d say the same thing in this case: either wine tasters could demonstrate that they’re actually able to meaningfully make consistent discriminations, or they couldn’t, and if they’re employing special terms or concepts, what they’d need to show is that those special terms and concepts were somehow relevant to making such discriminations. If they couldn’t do this, I’d conclude they were talking nonsense. And they very well might be doing just that.
//Should I insist that everything they say is meaningless because they can't define the words without reference to other wine-tasting terms or by just asking me to taste a few wines to which the word applies?//
I don’t think these would be good tests. Again, you're not accurately describing what I am asking for. I’m not asking for a definition
I am asking for proponents of the concepts to do literally anything that would communicate the meaning of the concept. If they insist the concepts are “incommunicable” then obviously they can’t pass this test. Under such circumstances, what I’d like to know is why I should think that they have incommunicable concepts.
Take the following case:
Alex has an incommunicable but meaningful concept.
Sam thinks he has an incommunicable but meaningful concept, but is confused and doesn’t really have any meaningful concept at all.
How could we tell the difference between Alex’s concept and Sam’s concept, such that we could establish that one was meaningful and the other wasn’t?
I don’t think something like “lots of people use the same terms as Alex” is good enough. If you do, consider the following scenario: Suppose Alex and Sam both make millions of clones of themselves. All the Alexes use their terminology, and all the Sams use their terminology. The ability for large groups of people to use shared terminology strikes me as possible even if (by stipulation) the terms in question don’t mean anything, unless we think it is somehow impossible for groups of people to be confused about concepts (in which case, I’d like to know why someone thinks that!). So mere numbers are insufficient.
I think this applies to the case of philosophers talking about “qualia.” That lots of people talk about the concepts isn’t good enough. Calling them competent or experts presupposes that they have precisely those qualities that would render their use of such terms credible, but this is what I am challenging, so I don’t grant that philosophers have the relevant competence or expertise to use qualia talk meaningfully. One would have to first establish that they are, in fact, experts with the relevant kind of expertise. If I don’t grant this, we’d need to move the discussion over to whether they are, in fact, experts of the relevant kind.
For comparison, I take it many would not accept if I described someone as an expert in astrology or witchcraft, such that they could, in fact, read the stars and predict the future, or cast spells, or whatever. Were I to make claims of such expertise, it’d be reasonable to ask for arguments or evidence that they were experts of the relevant kind. I simply don’t grant that philosophers are “experts” about qualia.
The externally observable consequences of qualia are that people report having experiences, and they do things because of their qualia. For example, people seek things out that will give them the experience of pleasure and avoid things that give them the experience of pain. I assume you will say that these aren't consequences of qualia, but I could say the same thing about anything else that you claim is the observable consequence of some other concept. You haven't given anyone any reason to reject the view that qualia exist, since your claim that they have no observable consequences rests on the assumption that they don't.
Also, the point about p-zombies only works against epiphenomenalists. I'm a physicalist, so I don't even think p-zombies are possible. If I were an interactionist dualist, I might think that p-zombies are possible, but they would require a bizarrely gerrymandered set of physical laws that's implausible a priori (Under interactionist dualism, certain physical states are caused by mental states, so a world with no mental states would require ad hoc physical laws that perfectly mimic the physical effects of mental causation in order to have zombies physically identical to conscious humans. This might be metaphysically possible, but it’s obviously a ridiculous ad hoc theory. If qualia can be claimed not to exist or be a meaningful concept just because one can come up with an ad hoc theory where their observable consequences occur without they themselves occurring, this would imply that literally everything is meaningless and/or doesn't exist). Epiphenominalists are the only ones who actually hold to a theory where consciousness has no externally observable effects, but this is precisely why it's such an implausible theory, since such effects obviously do exist (this entire conversation is one such effect).
By "communicate," I don't just mean that people use the word, but that they use it effectively. When people talk about qualia, others appear to understand, even if by your view they don't actually understand. There's no difference between the way people talk or think about qualia and the way they do about uncontroversially meaningful concepts, say, electrons. What could an observer point to as the difference between philosophers discussing qualia and theoretical physicists discussing electrons, other than that the conversations are about different topics?
Of course, I would say that there is no difference, and both conversations are obviously meaningful. If I saw people having such conversations, I would be very confident that the thing they're talking about must be meaningful, even if i didn't know what "qualia" or "electron" meant. It's super implausible to me that a huge number of extremely smart people would have long conversations that everyone thought were meaningful, write long papers and have arguments that everyone thought were meaningful, and yet the entire time everything everyone was saying was completely meaningless. If the entire conversation was meaningless, what were people thinking about when they had the conversation? What concept were they actually thinking about when they thought they were thinking about qualia, and what makes you so sure that whatever concept that is isn't just what "qualia" means?
"I don't grant that anyone has or does experience them, since I don't grant that there are any intelligible phenomena for people to experience."
This is just completely incoherent to me. It's why you get the incredulous response. It's as if we're both staring at a burning building out the window and you insist that it isn't there, and that you seem no building. I don't know what to tell you if you don't see the building, but it’s obviously there to me and almost everyone else.
The reason I think most people have or readily grasp the concept of qualia is because 1) nearly everyone who talks about the concept, except an extremely small minority, doesn't have any issue discussing it, never gives any sign that they ever had trouble understanding it, even when they first learned about it, and considers it one of the most clear and intuitive concepts there is, 2) everyone talks about their own personal experiences and what it's like to sense or feel things, and that's just what "qualia" is, and 3) I never had any trouble acquiring the concept myself. I understood it the moment I first heard about it - I didn't need coaxing or some form of indoctrination to believe in it.
"I don't think you or anyone else has the concept of qualia"
I don't think you have the concept of "dog." You might think you do, but everything you say about dogs is completely meaningless, and you are somehow radically mistaken about this. How plausible does this sound to you? This is what it feels like to me when you say I don't have some concept that I know that I in fact do have. It's not very convincing to tell me to deny the contents of my own mind. Of course, you can keep denying it yourself if you want, since I don't have the telepathic ability to give you access to my mental state, but you should at least admit that I'm in a better state to know which concepts I do and do not have than someone who doesn't know me is.
You mentioned earlier Christians who say that they just know God exists. I don't think this comparison is fair, given that those Christians aren't claiming to know it in anything like the way we know of qualia, and it would make no sense if we did since you can't know about things external to your own mind by direct experience. But now you are doing something that actually is analogous to what fundamentalist Christians do when they say that that there are no atheists and that everyone really knows God exists. I know that those Christians are wrong because I have access to my own mental state, so I know that I definitely don't know that God exists. Likewise, if someone claims that I don't really have some concept that I in fact have, and that things that I say are as meaningless as "glorp is florp" even though I know that I mean something when I say them, I'm just not going to accept that claim.
And anyway, the point there was about my epistemic state (and the state of others who believe in qualia), not your own.
The Alex and Sam example is also not convincing. Of course you can come up with a contrived scenario where a bunch of people would be using the same meaningless concept as if it were meaningful. I can also come up with a contrived scenario where the Earth would actually be flat despite all the evidence we have to the contrary - that wouldn't be grounds for dismissing the evidence unless we had reason our actual situation was relevantly similar. And clearly the real-life situation is nothing like Alex and Sam's.
I also don't think astrology and witchcraft are good examples. First of all, what's at issue with those fields is whether their claims are true, not whether they're meaningful. Second, astrologers and witches are making claims about the external world, not their own mental states, so they aren't in a position to know them without empirical evidence. Thirdly, their claims have been refuted by evidence from the sciences.
If you think a pragmatic test is needed to vindicate philosophers who talk about qualia, propose one. Can you propose a specific criterion or empirical test that would prove that qualia-talk is meaningful? All I'm seeing is assertions that it's somehow different from all our other talk without any explanation of how it's different or what you would consider a successful attempt to explain the concepts.
Typically, one easy way to test whether a concept is meaningful is to try to explain it to someone else to see if they understand it. But qualia-talk has already passed this test thousands of times, so apparently you want something else. (And yes, I know you're going to respond to this by claiming that qualia talk hasn't really passed the test because people don't really understand it. But that's an unfalsifiable claim that you could use to dismiss any case of purportedly meaningful talk. If you want, you can say that the test is whether you can explain it to someone, and they appear to understand it, in that they report understanding it, competently discus it with others, can say novel things about it that others agree make sense, can figure out things about it that you haven't directly told them, can have coherent disagreements with others about it, etc.)
I write these super long, systematic responses. Sometimes I'm a bit blunt in them. It's a method I've developed over the years, and it isn't an indication that I don't appreciate the engagement. In this case, I absolutely love that you're taking the time to argue things out with me, so your comments are much appreciated. That being said, let me get into it!
Part 1
//All I'm claiming with that bus example is that you have no argument against the view, so you shouldn't expect others to be convinced by anything you say. If your friend saw a burning building out the bus window, you wouldn't be able to convince that there wasn't one there by insisting that you didn't see it, asking for an argument to prove the existence of the burning building, and then saying that proponents of burning buildings have no arguments when he gives you none.//
That's all true, but on the flip side, if someone saw something I didn't, what business do they have ridiculing me, mocking me, and treating me like an idiot if I don't see what they say?
And there may be antecedent/extraneous reasons for doubting that people saw what they claim to have seen.
Take a claim from someone who says they were abducted by aliens. I think there is good, publicly available evidence to be very skeptical of such claims. A person who claims to have been abducted by aliens should appreciate this and recognize that whatever the quality of their evidence, much, most, or even all of it is going to be private, and that they should have little or no expectation that others fall in line and accept their claims at face value. Why, then, do proponents of qualia act like anyone who claims not to share their views so often treat us like garbage?
If anything, they may be in a worse position than people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. After all, abductees can at least in principle point to corroborating evidence, such as physical signs of abduction. What do proponents of by-definition-private-properties have that they can point to as public evidence? Absolutely nothing - pretty much by definition.
//In that particular case, if you didn't see the burning building, you would probably not believe your friend.//
Burning buildings out windows don't strike me as especially implausible, so I'm not sure why I wouldn't believe them.
//But what if there were more people on the bus, and everyone to you claimed to clearly see the burning building? //
I'd probably believe them unless I had good reason not to.
//Or would you suspect that maybe you're mistaken, as the only one who can't see something that everyone else thinks is clear and obvious.//
That depends. If I have a good view of the area, I might think they were delusional or hallucinating or something. The thing is, this isn't adequately analogous to qualia cases. In the case of qualia, I've spent years studying, discussing, and working in relevant fields. So it'd be much closer to if I were to get off the bus and go personally investigate the area the burning building allegedly was at for *several years*. And if I saw no signs of burning builds at that point: not only would I conclude that everyone else on the bus was wrong, I'd be very confident they were wrong, and I'd probably be right. *This* is the situation I am in when it comes to qualia. Proponents of the view have had ample opportunity to make a good case for their views. I don't think that they have.
//As for defining qualia, the things you complain about would implicate almost every word in the English language. Every word either has a circular definition or is defined by pointing out examples to form a family resemblance concept. If this is vicious, then there's not a single meaningful word on your view.//
People say this sort of thing all the time. I don't agree at all. I think this is true of almost *no* words in the English language, at least not in ordinary language. I am not asking for "definitions" so whether definitions are all circular is irrelevant. I am asking for people to communicate the concept. All meaningful concepts are communicable and all meaningful words in the English language can be communicated. When people start thinking I am asking for definitions, I am confused in two ways: first, why do they think this? I don't ask for "definitions." Second, why are they so confident that the rest of the English language works the same way as qualia talk? So much so that they just assert this as if I'd agree? I don't agree. I think qualia talk *in particular* has the suspicious features I am describing; I don't think this is true at all of ordinary English words and I've literally never seen any good example of a candidate term that is similarly mysterious as "qualia." Qualia is a philosophical term of art, something totally made up and disconnected from everyday English. Everyday English words are not like that all. They function and do work. "Qualia" talk doesn't do any work at all outside a closed loop of theoretical talk.
//If this is vicious, then there's not a single meaningful word on your view.//
This is not an accurate representation of my view. I'm a pragmatist about truth and meaning. Ordinary English easily passes pragmatic tests. "Qualia" doesn't.
//I don't think qualia are that much more ineffable or incommunicable than other concepts.//
I take it to be part of the definition of qualia that they are ineffable. If you're referring to something as qualia and regard as not ineffable, then it simply isn't what I am talking about.
//The car mechanic example does nothing to undermine the argument based on common usage that people must understand what these terms means. You can demonstrate that you understand how cars work by using that knowledge to fix a car, and likewise, you can demonstrate that you understand what a word means by competently communicating with others who use the word. //
I don't agree. Look, I can invent a set of empty terms, and teach people the relations between those terms.
All florps are zorps.
All zorps are blorps.
All blorps are florps.
I can then teach a group of people to talk about florps, zorps, and blorps and say things like:
"If it's a florp, then it's a blorp. After all, all florps are zorps, and all zorps are blorps, so by appealing to the principle of transitivity, we can know that if something is a florp, then it's a blorp."
These people can go on to say all manner of things about the relation between these terms even if we explicitly stipulate that they don't mean anything. Logical relations can exist between empty concepts that have literally no content at all other than their relation to one another. But that closed loop never cashes out in anything real; it doesn't refer to anything or describe anything.
That people can competently use words does not show that those words mean anything. In contrast, competence at mechanics isn't just cashed out in terms of words. You can actually do something with that knowledge that yields predictions about actual experiences we'd have in the world, experiences beyond a closed loop of stipulative terminological relations.
What I am proposing is that qualia talk is like florp talk. It never bottoms out in percepts or experience in any way. It's just words, and nothing more. In contrast, car mechanics isn't merely words. Cars and their parts and facts about their operation are real and one can understand them.
The difference between qualia and abduction by aliens is that the vast majority of people do not claim to be abducted by aliens, and we have very good reasons to doubt the claims of the few who do. You can't use, "This would be just like believing someone who was abducted by aliens," as a general counterargument for any testimony you disagree with, particularly when that testimony is given by an overwhelming majority of people who speak on the topic you're talking about.
I don't think your analogy for the bus scenario is accurate. You don't have overwhelming evidence against the existence of qualia or the meaningfulness of the term (or at least, no such evidence was presented here or in the original article), so it's nothing like going to the location of a supposed building and finding that it isn't there. This is like the scenario where everyone else on the bus sees the burning building and you don't. It doesn't make much sense to say that they're all hallucinating in that case - which makes more sense: that everyone else on the bus is having the same hallucination, but you are somehow immune to it, or that you're missing something or perhaps hallucinating yourself? Maybe in the bus scenario you would conclude that everyone else was conspiring to gaslight you or play some elaborate prank, but that's obviously implausible in the case of qualia.
If it's not circular definitions or definition by example that's the problem, then you have no argument against the meaningfulness of the term whatsoever. That's why everyone assumes this is what you're taking issue with. That, and the fact that you specifically pointed out those two things as problems with the way people talk about qualia - you're the one who said that they were viciously circular, so I don't know how that's supposed to be a strawman of your view.
Without these specific arguments, all you have is a bare assertion that the terms are not meaningful. You tell me that people have "failed to communicate" the concepts without giving any argument for this. Well, I think they were communicated just fine, and so do the vast majority of philosophers. If nearly everyone who has heard of a concept except you thinks it was adequately communicated, how can you continue to claim that this wasn't done by just asserting it?
I don't think ineffability is part of the definition of qualia - AFAIK that was only added to the definition by illusionists in order to argue against the concept. I think ineffability is too vague of a concept to say for sure whether qualia are ineffable. In some senses, they can be communicated - you can describe certain features of them to others, who may understand those features from their own experiences. But they can't be communicated in the sense that you can't just make someone experience a qualia through words alone.
The example with glorps still doesn't work. You might be able to train people to discuss words that have no meaning just by following logical connections between them, but no one who starts talking about glorps in that way will think that they understand what the words mean - they just know the logical relations. This is not analogous to qualia.
Furthermore, the glorps example is another fully general counterargument to the meaningfulness of any term. You could always claim that people don't really know what the words they're saying means and are just following logical relations, but this in general a very unlikely claim - you would need some strong evidence to show that it's true.
Anyway, I agree with one thing you're saying here, which is that illusionists and quietest shouldn't be ridiculed for their beliefs. Just because I think it's rationally appropriate for others to assert the existence of qualia and consciousness without proving it by argument, that doesn't mean people should be unnecessarily rude.
I have a bias against physicalism. And this writing prompted me to wonder whether I could ever be convinced that physicalism was true. So I pondered this issue and wrote about my ponderings. Here is that writing: https://sufferingthinkers.blogspot.com/2024/01/physicalisms-ambiguity-problem.html
Cool I'll check it out. I'm not a physicalist FWIW.
"I find considerable irony in the fact that critics of views like illusionism can’t even explain what it is that it’s so stupid for us to deny. "
"Pains hurt". That's a stupid thing to deny.
Failing to disambiguate claims to make clear and accurate criticisms is stupid.
You usually take the view that ordinary language is unambiguous.
How about "weighty thingss are heavy" , or "extended things are big" or "luminous things are shiny".
Ambiguity is typically resolved in its contexts of usage; whether or not and to what extent any of those remarks would be ambiguous would depend on the contexts in which they're used.
phenomenal state and qualia are meaningful. phenomenal state is a state that is constituted by qualia. and qualia are such properties that constitute what it is like to have an experience. what-it-is-like is also meaningful. and to try to convey the concept or idea, i might ask...
when someone in pain or who is suffering would perhaps feel that their suffering is being undermined, they might say “you don’t know what’s like”. do you understand what that means?
I anticipate that you will respond, as you have done before, that
“I don’t think we can move from colloquial, ordinary uses of terms to the presumption that if the phrases in question are meaningful in those everyday contexts that therefore they’re meaningful in philosophical contexts”
and my answer here would just be: why the heck not? presumably there are many words, or set of words, you're using in colloquial contexts the same way in philosophical contexts, so then why can’t you do the same with ‘what-it-is-like’? how is it disanalogous?
"What-it-is-like" isn't an ordinary term. "What it's like" or "what it is like" in ordinary contexts are ordinary uses of the terms, but "what-it-is-like" in a philosophical context isn't. If philosophers think these phrases mean the same thing they're welcome do the work to figure out what is meant in the ordinary contexts and then see if that matches what is meant in the philosophical contexts.
I'm not going to just grant that if a philosopher uses a term it means the same thing as some other term. And if they're going to claim X means the same thing as Y, we're still going to have to figure out what Y means.
I appreciate the reply.
I'm not sure I grant the distinction between the ordinary and philosophical uses of the term "what-it's-like". The term is fairly ordinary to me outside of philosophical contexts. For instance, i remember one of my friends, who isn't interested in philosophy and isn't familiar with any of the litterature at all, once asked me "i wonder what it's like to be rasmus (me)". Thomas Nagel wondered what it's like to be a bat. It seems to me they were both wondering or asking what it's like from someone or something else's point of view. And it seems to me they were both talking about what it's like in the same sense. I think the same might be true when someone going through a tough time might say "you don't know what it's like".
Speaking of which, i noticed you didn't answer the question, but i am curious how you would answer: if someone going through a tough time would say "you don't know what it's like", do you have an understanding of what that means?
"Terms like phenomenal state and qualia, when used to reference the sorts of things illusionists deny, aren’t even meaningful."
i would want to know how a claim like that could be demonstrated or justified. there are terms or utterances that dont make any sense to me. but i dont claim they aren't meaningful. i would just say i doubt they are meaningful, and if they are meaningful, i have no idea what they're supposed to mean. but this is not what you do. or is that what you mean to do? or do you mean to make the stronger claim that phenomenal state and qualia don't mean anything?
I'm making the stronger claim that they don't mean anything.
Well, i'd be interested to know how you justify that claim.