I'll steal it. We can apprehend the world through quality and quantity, hence both of these must exist, at least in our mind. Very neat.

Given that we both acknowledge the occurrence of the word "quality" in the English language (you've made use of it), and if in your view conscious experiences do not consist of quality, where does quality take place?

Or is it your view that quality does not take place anywhere, that it has no occurrence, thereby making the term fully meaningless to you? — javra

That's a very elegant argument... Thanks!

I'm by no means denying my senses. I grant them as necessary elemental constituents of all conscious experience. — creativesoul

Good for you. Can you tell sugar from salt by tasting it? If yes, you have qualia too.

I see the subjective experience as the font of all knowledge.
— Olivier5

:up: It was put very well by somebody on another thread, but I can not remember who. It went something like; every experience creates a note, in sequence the notes create a tune - this is what we dance to! I love it :smile: — Pop

Haha, thanks. It's good to see an optimist philosopher who hasn't sacrificed his senses on the altar of nihilism, and can still enjoy his coffee.. :-)

Some posters here call subjectivity "self-report" and they see it with a great deal of suspicion. They mistrust themselves.

I'm especially surprised that Oliver takes them seriously, given his express discontent with philosophical patter. — Banno

It's your denial that I find sad. You guys are denying your own senses and your own life. It's nothing to me of course, but it makes TPF a bit depressing.

It's on a par with the little man who wasn't there. — Banno

Can you taste your coffee and find it too strong, with not enough sugar or milk?

I guess part of my resistance is that I assume the whole point of any encyclopedia compiling we do is to develop of repertoire of responses and options to consider as a response. That's pretty crudely put, but the point is I'm not sure you need the encyclopedia as a separate thing at all, when you could just have the responses. — Srap Tasmaner

If that works for you, why not? It doesn't work for me. I see the subjective experience as the font of all knowledge.

The argument given, that there has to be a smell that we smell, is not convincing. — Srap Tasmaner

Consider that you can reliably identify the actual chemistry of your food by tasting it, at least for those chemicals that have a taste. You can decide: "there is too little salt in this soups to my taste", knowing reliably that with a pinch of salt or two your soup will taste just fine. A cook can adjust the level of his ingredients throughout the process, add more ginger or paprica if need be.

If I prepare three coffees, one with no sugar, one with much sugar, and one average, anyone who tastes them can tell which is which.

So there is such a phenomenon as "too much sugar in my coffee" or "too little salt in your soup". You can measure the actual chemistry of soups and coffees, and compare this objective scientific data with your own sense of how much or little salt or sugar you taste, and the two will map to each other pretty well.

Tastes work. Quantitatively, objectively, they measure important stuff, like the content of sugar and salts in our food. Such a system cannot logically work without some ID system for tastes, some qualitative perceptual signal, a signature, recognisable somehow from the perceptual signals of other chemicals. Memorizable somehow. And then this individual perceptual signature for say, sugar, can also code for solution dosage by way of modulating the intensity of the signal.

Now we can ask ourselves how our senses work, a scientific question, or wonder what is the ontology of tastes, a philosophical question. But let's be clear that everyone can taste the difference between sugar and hot pepper. Especially at high dosage.

Therefore qualitative differences in perception exist.

Enter the little qualia, dancing in circles... I mean the modest, phenomenological qualia: mere qualitative coding for generally quantitative signals that make up our robust, biological, life-afirming senses.

Our senses honed by evolution, the source of all our experiences, they need some way of tagging, identifying qualitatively the signal of certain significant chemicals, or wavelengths, or sound signatures. It's literally "color coding".

we can’t communicate what it’s like — Marchesk

I guess that was not part of the initial Darwinian advantage. The system evolved over eons to provide each individual its own capacity to make important, effective dietary and other choices. Affability was never part of the deal.

Language was invented by human beings, it's not a biological thing. It's symbolic in nature. This means it uses symbols of real life stuff, like a stone, a horse or in this case an olfactive sensation, it gives them names. It does so by building sets and tagging them with a word or other symbol. A horse is an animal of the species equus equus. If two people know what the sets and the tags are, they can communicate somehow about those stuff, relating one symbol with another. They can say: "I rode a horse today" or, more likely in my country, "I ate horse meat today", and this helps them coordinate and learn and all that jazz. But the symbol is generally arbitrary and does not express fully all the existential content of horse riding (or eating). It just tags it.

Words are just tokens for the real deal. The map cannot be the territory. Symbols by themselves are always ontologically hollow.

But to get there, you claim we store particular qualia as memories. Really? Like, the whole thing, the exact smell of the rancid bacon? I'm skeptical. — Srap Tasmaner

I make no guesses about how memory works either. I've read a few books. It's complicated alright, so let's perhaps not go into how it works. What I can say in confidence is that I (and any animal with a sense of smell) can connect a present sensation, a current smell, to another one perceived in the past. I did once ate rancid walnuts (I meant walnuts not chestnuts). This smell... I can recognise it when it happens, describe it somehow (bitter in a dirty way), but I cannot summon it on my tongue, so to speak, I cannot recreate it at will. So our memory (or perhaps our imagination, as well as our language) has certain limits.

The important functional point is to be able to recognise a smell, to be able to connect it to another perceptive event(s) that happened in the past, because the whole point is to learn from past experience when interpreting new ones... Without this ability, a sense of smell would be useless to the animal, and to me as well. Every smell would be an entirely new smell.

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

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

I'll leave figuring out how memory works to neuroscientists. — Srap Tasmaner

So why did you want to go into that, then?

Let me explain with another gustatory example. I made dinner tonight, a carbonara. I picked a big piece of guanciale (a sort of extremely fat bacon made from the cheeks of a pig) in the fridge and sliced the whole of it. It was about a month old and I wanted it out.

I fried them slices in the pan, and a horrible smell soon filled up the kitchen. I stopped the fire and started to pay attention to the smell. Fried guanciale always smells a bit acrid, but this was different... What was it? It was like old walnuts when they become rancid, I reconned... I smelled it again, and then it downed on me that my old guanciale was simply rancid, i.e. a banal form of fat oxidation. But you see, I had never smelled rancid guanciale before.

Now I have. And I have memorized it. I won't even start to slice a piece of guanciale without smelling it first... This will spare me trouble. I lost 30 mn with this whole mess. I had to cut another piece of beacon made for amatriciana... It had hot pepper all over it, which tastes great in the amatriciana (these are pasta sauces, in case someone wonders) but wouldn't go in the carbonara, so I had to peel the thing before slicing it. Then I had to clean the pan because I didn't want the rancid fat to taint the taste of my sauce...

In the end, the pasta was good. Nobody complained.

The moral of this story is that a sense of smell would be nothing without the capacity to remember smells.

The senses of smell and taste provide an obvious Darwinian advantage in that they help the animal avoid certain foods that can be bad for its health (by tagging those with an unpleasant taste or smell) and gives it an incentive to consume other kind of foods (by giving them a pleasant taste or smell). Maybe rancid fat is bad for your health, or maybe it just correlates with other things bad for your health such as bacteria.

The animal is even capable of remembering tastes of food that it consumed in the past, and attach to them a positive or negative tag through taste modulation depending on whether past consumption led it to sickness, or on the contrary healed it. During pregnancy, the tastes and smells are somehow affected and certain smells become hard to bear, supposedly to get additional protection against toxins.

We don't know our food through chemical analysis of all components, we taste it. It's as good as a biological lab can get. To support this complex food analysis and signaling system, tastes must have some form of identity, some consistence, some presence. You must be able to remember them, identify them, etc.

Qualia vita sunt.

How much do you need to complexify it?

If you can recognize your favorite coffee only by its taste, it means you have memorized this taste somehow.

How would you go about proving that if I like how this coffee tastes, there is an entity, how this coffee tastes to me, that I like? — Srap Tasmaner

Would you be able to recognise the coffee you like in a blind test?

you can't have flavour preferences if flavours don't exist.
— Olivier5

What kind of claim is that? Is there anything that could convince you that it's false? — Srap Tasmaner

It is a logical claim. As such, it could be disproved by using propositional logic. I am saying something like:

If A and B do not exist, then the proposition (A > B) is meaningless.

Category error - confusing someone's flavour preferences with flavours. — fdrake

Not confusing them, just saying you can't have flavour preferences if flavours don't exist.

I think the point is that none of these require talking in terms of qualia in order to be effectively and exhaustively explained. — creativesoul

Give it a try.

I think most would agree p-zombies are logically possible. — frank

Joke aside, I disagree with that. I view consciousness as a necessary feature, not some decorative item easily disposed of.

why should someone commit themselves to an independent "phenomenal" type associated with the experiences, when the elements of the phenomenal type ("what is it likes") vary with changes in the type they are supposed to be independent of? — fdrake

Because people who don't like cauliflower try to avoid eating cauliflower independently of the circumstances.

Because an optical illusion cannot be reasoned away, it will crop up again and again, independently of the circumstances.

Because you can recognise the timbre of a musical instrument, the scent of a rose, the color of a dress in spite of them being always a little bit different than the last time.

Because you can recognise the taste of some food that you haven't had for decades, e.g. Proust's madeleines.

Because dogs can follows trails, and find corpses even under water.

Because the same applies to words: their meaning varies from one sentence to the next, and yet we still use them and we still recognise their meaning somewhat.

I suspect the pumps (no less than 15 of them, mind you) and their increasing esoteric scenarios are there to confuse the reader, to make him lose the plot, not to inform him. It seems to be working on some.

It's like matter and forces are given extra layers of epistemic value that are not there. — schopenhauer1

What is an "extra" layer of epistemic value, may I ask???? Something you haven't yet read about in a book? Something non-canonical? And how can you possibly check if some "layers of epistemic value" are "there" or "not there"??? What are the criteria for the existence of layers of epistemic value?

In other words, could you clarify your perspective? Seem you are making many assumptions here that you are not aware of, assumptions that you are not prepared to challenge or even explore, and as a result you can't arrive at a clear question.

So just at the first step: can you accept that I might be a p-zombie? — frank

No way. You're far too smart to be one.

I already know that I'm going to cry
I'm going to complain
And that I'm going to laugh
I know that in the dark
You can't see 'nada'

The sunset lasted two seconds
I'm burning inside
The soul and the body
Blood is boiling
The sunset lasted two seconds

And I can't be like this anymore
Without soul or body
I'm burning inside
I burn, I burn, I burn, I burn

I know you won't come
No one is going to teach you
What it's like to be like this
That in this loneliness
Facing the truth
It's almost like running away

The sunset lasted two seconds
I'm burning inside
The soul and the body
Blood is boiling
I burn, I burn, I burn, I burn
I'm burning inside
I burn, I burn, I burn, I burn
I'm burning inside

And I can't be like this anymore
Without soul or body
I'm burning inside
Blood is boiling
I'm burning inside
The soul cannot disappear it stays in the body
I'm feeling it
I'm burning inside
The soul and the body
Blood is boiling
I'm burning inside

Voilà Voilà

There you go, it starts again
Everywhere and in the sweet France
Here they go again
Everywhere, everywhere, they advance
The lesson wasn't enough
Must say that we chose to forget
Everywhere, the speeches are the same
Stranger, you are the cause of our problems!
I thought it was all over
But no, no, it was just a pause

Here they go again...

The lesson wasn't enough
Memories we chose to forget
Away, away, strangers!
That is the remedy of civilized men
Beware, they thrive
While we avert our eyes
Beware, they thrive
While we avert our eyes

Here they go again..

The lesson hasn't been learned
Memories we chose to forget
Everywhere I hear what they say
Foreigners you are the cause of our problems!
Me, I thought it was all over
But in fact, it was only a pause

There you go, it starts again
Everywhere and in the sweet France
There you go, it starts again
They are coming
There you go...

Now the king told the boogie men
"You have to let that raga drop"
The oil down the desert way
Has been shakin' to the top
The Sheik he drove his Cadillac
He went a-cruisin' down the ville
The Muezzin was a-standin'
On the radiator grille

The Shareef don't like it [Shareef = the bosses]
Rock the Casbah, rock the Casbah
The Shareef don't like it
Rock the Casbah, rock the Casbah

By order of the prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy Casbah sound
But the Bedouin they brought out the electric camel drum
The local guitar picker got his guitar-pickin' thumb
As soon as the Shareef had cleared the square
They began to wail

The Shareef don't like it
Rock the Casbah

Now, over at the temple
Oh, they really pack 'em in
The in-crowd say it's cool
To dig this chanting thing
But as the wind changed direction
And the temple band took five
The crowd caught a whiff
Of that crazy Casbah jive

The Shareef don't like it....

The king called up his jet fighters
"He said you better earn your pay
Drop your bombs between the minarets
Down the Casbah way"
As soon as the Shareef was chauffeured outta there
The jet pilots tuned to the cockpit radio blare
As soon as the Shareef was outta their hair
The jet pilots wailed

Shareef don't like it
Rock the Casbah, rock the Casbah
Shareef don't like it, he thinks it's not kosher
Rock the Casbah, rock the Casbah
Shareef don't like it, fundamentally can't take it
Rock the Casbah, Rock the Casbah
Shareef don't like it, you know he really hates it
Rock the Casbah, rock the Casbah
Shareef don't like it, really, really hates it


Arabic cover of the Clash: Rock El Casbah

Why treat emergence as something special, different from a tree falling in the forest? Are you making some assumption about emergence here, that would require this question to be asked in the case of emergence but not for a tree falling in the forest?

In the face of that doubt, how would you defend your belief that there was qualia associared with my tasting? — frank

Let's see... In the unlikely hypothesis that I cared to know for sure how my tea tasted to you, I would try to figure out if you have any reason to lie, and what it could be. Politeness could be a reason for instance. I offered you some fancy, expensive tea, so you may want to reassure me that the tea was good even if it actually tasted like Jell-O to you... To rule out this rival hypothesis I would ask again, adding: "I am trying to study the taste of tea from a scientific viewpoint, hence the scanner, so please don't try and be polite or anything. Do tell me exactly how the tea tasted like, please, even if it tasted nothing." Then I will watch your body language while you respond, check the electroencephalogram and conclude one way or the other based on this additional data, if I can. I will decide whether or not to trust you.

Right, so one cannot logically say: "subjective experience means nothing, only science does", because science is an effort to firm up and generalize subjective experience.

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines
Picket signs
Don't punish me
With brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
What's going on

Mother, mother
Everybody thinks we're wrong
But who are they to judge us
Simply 'cause our hair is long
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today

That is indeed a key point to differentiate science from other forms of knowledge. However, note that the replications and verifications are still done by human beings. Therefore science is entirely based on subjective experience.

Even scientific observations are made by someone, and thus the whole of science is based on subjective experience.

There is something it's like which is being changed. — Marchesk

Exactly. So the more thought experiments Dennett piles up to try and disqualify qualia, the more he affirms that qualia can be affected by genetics or by neurosurgery, the more he is proving that there are such things as qualitative differences in perception, and that they can be scientifically studied... :cool:

Intution pumps 8-12 look like we don't have direct access to previous qualia — Marchesk

Note that the scientists who objectively and verifiably invert poor Chase’s taste buds in IP #8, the pill that changes Dennett’s experience of cauliflower in IP #11, and the inverted spectacles of IP #12 affirm the objective existence of qualia, since they imply that taste and visual qualia can be objectively manipulated by science. Likewise, IP #10 proves that tastes are genetically mediated and a product of our biology, which also lends them objectivity.

So some facts are agreed by many. But if there was no private experience of facts, no public fact would exist.

Emergence has a view from one thing to another. I'll call it a an epistemic leap. In fact, I don't even know if there was a view to start from that leaps, so perhaps nothing is leaping anywhere. — schopenhauer1

Is this another version of "if a tree falls and no one sees it fall, did it really fall?"

I've no idea how you arrived at that summary. I'm not equipped to disentangle it. — creativesoul

I just summarized each and every of his 15 "pumps", and then examined it... I am aware it is hard to do, it took me the evening. But now I can prove than none of these pumps amount to a serious conceptual critique, that the idea that scientists could invert one's qualia attracts attention to the fact that qualia are objective, scientifically studied phenomena, for instance.

I predicted that you won't be able to summarize the argument followed. And indeed you couldn't, and now that I have summarized it for you, you cannot even deal with it... :-)

So the board appears to bulge, but does not really; and this is a private thing, despite our shared talk about it.

And this is the sort of thing you would call qualia.

Not disagreeing here - just checking if this is what you want to assert. — Banno

Correct. It is private in the sense that you cannot be sure that others see exactly what you see. But it is universal in the sense that we all report seeing something different from the objective image.

There are two choices here 1) I know that x, 2) We know that x. — magritte

2 is just 1 multiplied by 2.