But this is difficult to swallow. For both of you, apparently, silent genocide victims ought to be ignored even by countries in a position to help. Aside from the sometime legality of humanitarian intervention under the aegis of the United Nations and international law, moral intuition tells us that innocent victims ought to be helped even if they don't ask for help. A strong man ought to help a frail old lady who is being beaten by someone younger and stronger than she is, even if she is not asking for help. The situation with humanitarian intervention is significantly different from that analogy, but exactly how is it different, and what are the consequences of that difference for the moral rightness or wrongness of intervening? — jamalrob

Shouldn't the cost of intervening be factored in? A country like the US is often in a position to interfere, but then what are the consequences? You get embroiled in someone else's civil war? Then it turns into another nation building exercise with troops still stationed there a decade later? And what if this involves complications with other nations? This also raises issues of why countries like the US or the EU get to intervene. Does that mean China and Russia do as well?

It's easy to say someone should stop and stop a Rwandan genocide. It's harder to think thought all the implications. What if the answer is yes for Rwanda because nobody else will oppose it, and no for Syria, because Russia, and no for North Korea because they could level cities?

Yep. That's right, I'm not sure what bearing you think that has on the issue. It's a fairly simple matter of demonstrating pretty conclusively that the use of the word 'red' does not reference a conscious experience. It can't do because the decision to use the word has already been made prior to any occipital originating signals in areas of the brain associated with conscious awareness. — Isaac

Assuming what you're saying is actually true. I've heard of this sort of study in reference to decision making (when its immediate, not following deliberation), but not reports of conscious experience. I've also seen criticism of conclusions reached regarding this sort of study, as many neurological studies engendering bold claims are often criticized for unwarranted conclusions.

But regardless, I can sit here and stare at a red object for five seconds before commenting on it, which means I've had time to be consciously aware before deciding to speak. And during that time, I may notice detail that wasn't immediately obvious and report that

We can go into that too if you like (spoiler - it's not by association with conscious awareness of 'redness' either), b — Isaac

I disagree. How could we talk of being in pain or having dreams without there being such experiences?

What we have no use for at all is armchair speculation about what the constituents of our perception-response system might be without any cause or evidence for such an arrangement. — Isaac

It's armchair speculation to suppose it's some form of self-reporting illusion. You have also equivocated between sensations being identical to certain neuronal activity and them being illusions. Which is also armchair speculation.

'm calling them stories in a technical sense. We treat these stories as reality whether we like it or not, even whilst we're trying to investigate them scientifically ( — Isaac

Conscious experience isn't a story we tell ourselves. It just is how we experience the world and our own bodies.

This just shows scientists are human too, and use ordinary language like the rest of us. The debate is going around in pointless circles at this juncture.

Especially when one goes about picking which parts of ordinary language to rely on in ad hoc manners. In ordinary language, intentions are not illusory, for one example. We all speak as though sentient beings are endowed with agency (granted, and sometime speak of insentient things, like computers, as though they are endowed with agency; such as in, “it's thinking,” when a computer program doesn’t process information fast enough). — javra

Yep. I edited my post to remove that part as unnecessarily argumentative, but yeah, I have issues with ordinary language philosophy. Another part of or ordinary language is universals. But ordinary language philosophy is not very keen on Platonism. So colors are real, but not categories.

But on ordinary usage, as in scientific practice, there are red apples. In my view, ordinary language is straightforward, coherent and useful. And isn't susceptible to the kinds of philosophical problems that arise for subject/object dualism. — Andrew M

Ordinary language has naive realist assumptions. I really don't understand the obsession with ordinary language philosophy. Ordinary language has all sorts of assumptions baked into it. Why take those at face value?

Also, science doesn't say the apple is red, it says the apple reflects light of certain wavelength that we see as red. Important distinction.

We’re just going back over the same ground at this point.

"Red" doesn't refer to an experience, it refers to the color of the apple. — Andrew M

Apples aren't red. They reflect light in a wavelength range we see as red. Red is part of the visual experience.

If the apple looks different to you than to me, then our experiences are different. That's a difference that is, in principle, discoverable. — Andrew M

But not for creatures with sensory modalities different enough from us.

Not on the ordinary definition of experience (one's practical contact with the world). On that definition we can, and do, describe our experiences. — Andrew M

Experiences aren't limited to perception, and there is a limit to my ability to communicate what it's like to be me to you. We never fully know what other people experience. Their full feelings, dreams, thoughts, and being in their own skin is only something they experience.

Even with perception, if the difference is great enough, we can't always know. Some have suggested there are tetrachromatic females who have more vivid color perceptual abilities. Their ability to communicate what that's like to us would be limited by our 3 primary color combinations, if this is indeed so. I believe the evidence is still inconclusive, though.

No. I could imagine something which is red, I don't think I can imagine 'red' I don't believe there is such a thing. — Isaac

What about "seeing red" when someone is angry? The image being your entire visual field turns red in a fit of rage. That doesn't happen to me, but I can imagine it, and maybe it happens for some people.

No we haven't. Activation of Brodmann's area precedes signals being sent to the working memory. You literally start forming the word 'red' in response to firing from the V2 area prior to being aware of the fact that what you're seeing is red. — Isaac

That can only work on immediate responses prior to being conscious and not when taking your time to reflect on the red cup before you. Also, this is a learned response, not something infants do. They don't utter "red" the first time they see a red object. You're talking about a learned reflex.

Sounds delightful!

Or we could just ask a mathematician whether a color is a number, but they'd probably think we were trolling.

Numbers are abstract quantities that you can perform mathematical operations on. Sure, you could assign 0 to purple and 1 to green, or use the standard digital hex value or HSLA. But numbers can be assigned to represent anything, from unicorns to philosophers.

Colors are not abstract quantities. You don't say there's "green squares" to represent a number of squares.

Problem is that when it comes to myself, I'm not positing anything theoretical when I taste spicy food. It just tastes spicy, red cups look red, and nutty coffee does taste a bit bitter to me. And that's prior to any philosophizing about internal states and "what it's like". Our sensations are not linguistic constructs or self-reports to make sense of behavior. They're just part of experience.

But anyway, good of you to bring up Dennett's intentional stance. And I prefer to add "2+2" in a Python environment.

So you deny basic logic? Numbers and neurons aren’t colors. This is a matter of identity. You expect me to reconsider?

Intuition pump #16

Chase and Sanborn are sophisticated programs inside an elaborate computer simulation. They perform all the same functions when tasting coffee as humans do, and make the same reports in the simulation. Some say that means they must be conscious agents.

So computer scientists examine the running code and hardware. But nowhere do they find a sensation of coffee, nor any colors or feels. Only self-reports. Some others say they are not conscious, but rather digital p-zombies.

The problem remains hard.

I have never like the term 'what is it like', though. 'What is it like to be a bat'? Apart from the fact that it depends on the particular bat and the time, I would say that there is nothing it is like to be a bat. in the sense that being a bat is not like anything being anything else. Perhaps 'what it is to be a bat' or 'what it is to drink tea' and so on would be less misleading. — Janus

Good point. "What it is like" implies a comparison. Which can work for bitter and nutty coffee, because we know what bitter and nutty tastes like. But we don't know what a sonar modality would be like. We have nothing to compare it to, unless it's like vision or hearing, although bats also have ears and eyes, as do dolphins. So sonar sensations might be something entirely different that we can't compare to.

...which is begging the question already. As I said earlier, the debate is about these assumptions, discussion is pointless if you're going to start from the premise that they're obviously the case. — Isaac

It is a category error. 1s and 0s aren't colors. They're numbers. And neurons aren't colors either. And guess what, neither are photons!

All the Christians I've known thought there was good evidence (and arguments) for the beliefs. Faith was more of putting your trust in God kind of thing rather than some Kierkegaard leap of reason.

The only exceptions I can think of were very "liberal" believers who didn't like to define God and made sure their beliefs were consistent with science, but still thought there was some sort of spirit to the universe along with maybe an afterlife. Jesus was a good moral teacher who had some non-literal spiritual insights and all that jazz. The resurrection was some kind of metaphor for personal enlightenment.

I'm an atheist, so I think they're both wrong, but the first category has their own evidence based on a worldview that is somewhat at odds with our full modern understanding.

@Banno@creativesoulThis turns on the crux of the debate. Is Dennett and his defenders in this thread denying the experiences of color, coffee taste, etc? Or are they just saying there's nothing to those sensations that leads to a hard problem?

Banno has clarified that he doesn't deny sensation. There is a taste of coffee, and it can vary from bitter for you and nutty to him, but it's not inexpressible or (fundamentally) private.

However, we do have this from Dennett, which I quoted earlier:

The properties of the "thing experienced" are not to be confused with the properties of the event that realizes the experiencing. To put the matter vividly, the physical difference between someone's imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow might be nothing more than the presence or absence of a particular zero or one in one of the brain's "registers". Such a brute physical presence is all that it would take to anchor the sorts of dispositional differences between imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow that could then flow, causally, from that "intrinsic" fact. (I doubt that this is what the friends of qualia have had in mind when they have insisted that qualia are intrinsic properties.) — Quining Qualia

So what is Dennett saying here? It's a category error to say that the difference between purple and green is the neural equivalent of 0 and 1, because numbers aren't colors, and neither are spiking neurons. So the issue arises when attempting to explain our conscious sensations by reducing them to dispositional, relational or functional talk. Reason being that it seems to dismiss the experience of sensation, by replacing it with talk of something else (the purported underlying mechanism or behavior).

The biological explanation for coffee taste isn't the nutty or bitter taste itself. That's why we say there is a "what it's like", a "seeming", an "appearance of something". To be conscious is not to be conscious of some perceptual process or 1s and 0s in the brains "registers", it's to be aware of how things seem, whether nutty or purple.

We could have visible light detector hooked up to a voice dictation that reads out a color that matches our visual system, but there's no reason to think this system would have a color sensation just because it can discriminate and report accurately. We could easily modify the dictation to invert the colors or map taste words or Trumpisms instead (sorry, election is still "on" my mind).

And we could modify the detector for some EM range we can't see and feed that the color dictation. Would that mean it's now having the same color sensations for light we can't see? The p-zombie argument came about because we can't "see" how any physical system results in conscious sensations, even though we know there are physical correlations in the human case.

The condescending thing is claiming that people who disagree with you over a practically irrelevant philosophical dispute — fdrake

One which has inspired multiple books and numerous papers? That dispute which we're having the thousandth thread about in the history of this forum? The one that Dennett has probably had more to say about than any other dispute?

ncidentally, the quotes given above and the text around them in the article should be sufficient to put an end to the risible objection that Dennett denies the reality of conscious experience. Those who have made that assertion in this thread are guilty of not having understood what is being said; they ought go back and read at least the introduction of the article. — Banno

We're aware of what Dennett claims. It's also been pointed out that he likes to equivocate on terms like consciousness and free will. So he'll say that of course we're conscious and taste coffee and see colors, but then he goes on to argue in a way that denies the first person experience. So the conclusion to draw is that he doesn't really mean it the same way. By consciousness, Dennett means a third-person description amenable to science.

By tasting coffee and seeing colors, Dennett means something other than the sensations of taste and color. He means the behavioral aspect of discrimination, and its biological functions, which includes giving mistaken reports about coffee tastes and red cups, when it entails there being some first person experience to it.

Thus the claim that a wine tasting machine would have the same conscious gustary experience.

What else could what it's like to drink tea consist of if not each and every instance? — creativesoul

The continuous experience, unless you want to break perceived time down into atoms.

Sure; again, what has this to do with ineffable as-it-seems-to me's? That the coffee is not sugared is not ineffable, not Albert. — Banno

The coffee not being sugared is a chemical fact. The coffee not tasting sweet is the experience. You're equivocating here.

We're talking about a plurality. — creativesoul

Why suppose it needs to be broken down into instances? Our experiences change all the time. But it does depend on the experience. Focus on one of the images in this thread, and it will stay relatively constant.

Well, indeed. But I think we could say the same for red apples, or illusions, or whatever. They're just normal aspects of our experience which nonetheless seem to generate particular kinds of philosophical confusion. — Andrew M

Because some of them are properties of perception. Three people are in a room. It feels cold to the first, warm to the second and just right for the third. Yet the thermometer records the same temperature, which is a really a measure of the amount of kinetic energy the molecules in the atmosphere have. Our feeling cold or warm isn't the molecular energy. We didn't know anything about molecular energy until relatively recently. But humans were feeling cold and warm long before then.

So using objective property of the world such as spatial location to mock qualia is missing the point. Now if you want to talk about the feeling of being located somewhere, then we can talk about what it's like when you misjudge how close a wall is in the dark and what not. You have an experience of it being farther away than it is, and then you run into it.

All of these sort of example demonstrate that our experiences are not simply reflections of the world. They're generated by our act of perceiving and other mental activities. So appealing to some direct realism or externalism still needs to account for perceptual relativity and all the other stuff occurring for the organism.

iIts inherent in the subjective differences between individuals. Thus why we recognize that people have different tastes. “Oh, so coffee tastes good for you? I can’t stand that bitter taste!”

Also, I’m sure you recall the various debates with The Great Whatever, and how he liked to bring up the ancient Cyreneac school of philosophy, and their focus on individual sensation given the widely recognized problems of perception. So not entirely an invention of modern philosophers abusing language.

think qualia are functional. If they exists, they exist for a reason. — Olivier5

Even if so, we can’t communicate what it’s like, so we can’t know that from the functioning of a bat or robot. Unless it’s the same as ours. Bat sonar might be like vision as Dawkins has suggested, or it might be like a blind persons use of a walking stick, which the functioning of their nervous system could tell us. But if not, then we’re in the dark.

So you would agree that explaining function doesnt explain qualia. That's a pretty common view. — frank

Yes, but one could suppose, like Chalmers has, that qualia is tied to function, or rich information streams, via some non physical scientific law.

I’m building on the foundation that there is a way things seem to us. How we express this in language, and which terms work is a secondary matter. The coffee tastes like something to me.

Grammar, in the schoolbook sense, is not a sure guide to ontology. Think of Quine's puzzle about "seeking" and friends: if I'm looking for a spy, that doesn't mean there's a spy I'm looking for. — Srap Tasmaner

So just because I’m tasting the coffee doesn’t mean there is a taste of coffee? Just because I see a color illusion, doesn’t mean there is a color illusion?

But that's wrong. I've stipulated that I'm experiencing something; I'm denying the platonist inference that there's something I'm experiencing, period. — Srap Tasmaner

I’m not sure how to parse this.

At the end of all this discussion, however successful Dennett is in his intuition pumping, I wish to preserve the what it’s like. That is the one aspect of conscious experience for which a denial is prima facie absurd. It is what survives the quining, whatever we wish to do with the term qualia. Although as noted, Dennett did not attempt to quine privacy, and immediate apprehension was not directly challenged, just the epistemically access to comparing previous qualia.

We're just denying that preferring how one coffee tastes to how another coffee tastes necessitates there being such an entity as how each coffee tastes to me. — Srap Tasmaner

How would you have a preference if the coffee didn’t taste like something to you? I wonder if @Banno really is wanting to go this far. Seems like it’s doing violence to ordinary language to deny there’s something it’s like to taste coffee.

An existence claim. You can’t have movie preferences without movies.

Thus telling a blind person that the colour red is experienced as unary, warm, positive, advancing etc, would still not do the trick. — Qualities of Qualia

You can't tell a blind person what it's like to see color, no matter the words you use. There is something inexpressible for sensory modalities.

Qualia are supposedly ineffable because no description by itself can yield knowledge of what it is like to have an experience. A description might tell you certain things about qualia, but it won’t give you them. The question is how this is supposed to be radically different from any other sort of description? All descriptions are in some sense incomplete, in some way less than the things being described. This is not at all surprising. After all, descriptions are something different from the thing being described. — Qualities of Qualia

Which is just saying that language has its limitations. The world is more than language, or whatever is dreamt up in Dennett's denial.

This is what David de Leon has to say in response to not being able to tell whether the quale of the coffee taste has changed (or surgically altered), or judgement about it has changed (or surgically altered):

The most obvious response to the thought experiment is, that although introspection can’t decide between the alternatives, there is still a fact of the matter: either a change in qualia has occurred, or the change is in some other aspect of the individual. There is still the experience of a particular quale, but since we might be misremembering the past (or our tastes might have changed), we just can’t be sure whether that quale is the same as, or different from, some other particular quale.

Dennett dismisses this kind of response as vacuous, on the grounds that he thinks nothing follows from it and that it is as “mysterious as papal infallibility.” But these accusations don’t warrant Dennett in misinterpreting the property under suspicion. Both of his thought experiments are geared towards showing that we can’t be infallible in our comparisons of non-simultaneous qualia, but is this what immediate apprehension in consciousness is supposed to mean? I think not. What the notion implies, is that we are aware of our qualia directly and non-inferentially; there is no room for an is/seems distinction. That is, one cannot “... be unaware of one’s ‘real’ qualitative state of consciousness during the time one is aware of some qualitative state.” This is simply not the sort of mistake we can make; which still leaves a whole range of other sorts of mistakes we can, and routinely do make. It is trivially true, for example, that we often misremember our experiences of qualia (even without nocturnal neurosurgery). — The Qualities of Qualia

This accords with my response. We know first hand of the qualia we're having now, even though we can be wrong about the qualia we did have. Dennett thinks thinks you have to be in the same epistemic position toward both for direct apprehension to work, but that's not necessary.

Good point. I forget about that. There is something it's like which is being changed. Similar to your statement that illusions make a noticeable difference to us that we can empirically verify.

No, the intuition pumps 8-12 show that we cannot access these 'qualia'. If we could, then we'd be able to tell which pathway had bee tampered with. As we can't, we don't have access to them as a separate step. If they're not a separate step the wine-tasting machines have qualia. — Isaac

Intution pumps 8-12 look like we don't have direct access to previous qualia such that we can answer the question, Just the memory of them. And memories are fallible reconstructions. My memory qualia of tasting the coffee years ago might not be the same as it was when tasting it then. But that doesn't mean there is no qualia when tasting it now.

Dennett denies there is because it doesn't do any third-party verification for him. That's his loss.

We have this from late in the article:

To put the matter vividly, the physical difference between someone's imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow might be nothing more than the presence or absence of a particular zero or one in one of the brain's "registers". Such a brute physical presence is all that it would take to anchor the sorts of dispositional differences between imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow that could then flow, causally, from that "intrinsic" fact. — Quining Qualia

This illustrates Dennett's denial most vividly. A difference in conscious experience could be nothing more than the equivalent of flipping a bit. And it is that which I just cannot agree with, whatever the status of the qualia properties.

What could it possibly mean to say that the difference between imagining a purple and green cow is a 1 or 0 (or the neural equivalent)? A 1 or 0 isn't purple or green. Neither for that matter or rgb values in a computer. They are just encoded for an output device that does produce the wavelengths of light we see as combinations of red, green and blue.

Maybe so, and it's even worse as we get farther away from our biology, such as when Data tastes wine.

This begs the question. Science only "can't" tell us that if you assume your conclusion that such sensations are private and intrinsic. If you don't, then science has merely failed to tell us that so far. — Isaac

So why were you tempted to agree that science needed to modify our nervous system in order for us to know?