I have no idea why you would say that.

I would agree that the kind of physicalism that seems to go so well with modern science (specifically QM) is evidence that the older materialist views that seemed to go so well with Newtonian mechanics, have waned along with the older mechanistic science. In other words it is evidence that human worldviews are profoundly influenced by science. This is certainly an empirically attested sociological fact.

There would not seem to be any empirical evidence which will answer the philosophical question as to whether human worldviews should be profoundly influenced by science, though

but if there is no implicit (I hesitate to say "pre-conceptual" but would certainly say "pre-linguistic") understanding of what you are seeing then it makes no real sense to say that you are seeing anything. — John

So, pre-linguistic babies don't see color due to not having language? I see. I think, even if that was correct as to the proper cognitive origin of sense experience, the qualia is not explained away, it is there, but via that mechanism. The qualia itself remains, just given a different take on its origins. Some people focus on the rods and cones and optic nerves.. If I replace that with your explanation or anything "x" with your explanation, it will only be an explanation. The explanation is not the experience. You cannot talk yourself out of the fact that a blue sky is presenting itself to your mind's integration of things and that this feeling of quality exists.

It happens your explanation seems to be a bit odd, since I can imagine a baby that was not taught language does, in fact, experience qualia and is not a p-zombie. Do animals not have any internal "what it's like to feel" aspect because they do not have language? The senses, one can say, works independently from the mechanism which encapsulate them into integrated concepts.

It means a philosophical theory and its competitors are empirically equivalent.

No, I haven't said that a pre-linguistic baby (or a suitably equipped animal) does not see colour, but I would say it does not experience seeing colour.

Also, a p-zombie is defined as not experiencing anything. So, on that account people are not p-zombies, obviously. I say that people do not experience qualia or 'qualities of experience', that is just an aberrant notion, in my view. People experience things, other people, cities, landscapes, animals and so on.

Also with the notion of 'qualia' itself there is some equivocation about whether it refers to something like 'raw sense data' or 'the subjective quality of experience', both of which I would say are different chimeras.

I was not familiar with the term, and I was hoping you would explain it.

Wiki definition:

Epistemicism is a position about vagueness in the philosophy of language or metaphysics, according to which there are facts about the boundaries of a vague predicate which we cannot possibly discover. Given a vague predicate, such as 'is thin' or 'is bald', epistemicists hold that there is actually some sharp cut off, dividing cases where a person is actually thin from those in which they are not. Epistemicism gets its name because it holds that there is no semantic indeterminacy present in vague terms, only epistemic uncertainty.

I don't believe that there are "sharp cut offs" which determine so-called vague terms. Nor do I think there is no "semantic indeterminacy" in vague terms. So, it would appear that I do not qualify as an epistemicist, unless you can show that some of my claims necessarily entail these beliefs I am disavowing.

Nah what Wikipedia said isn't what I was talking about. I meant Karen Bennett's epistemicism - realism about metaphysical questions but skeptical of any answers to them, because they are empirically equivalent and theoretical virtues are meaningless. Thus there is no good reason to choose one position over the other.

I don't know what it could mean to be a "realist about metaphysical questions". For me metaphysical questions deal with what different possibilities we can (logically speaking) think; and what the presuppositions involved in those different possibilities would be. We may very well have good reasons to think one possibility is more likely than another, but I appreciate the fact that people differ when it comes to what they think constitutes "good reasons".

I certainly don't think, as some on these forums do, that science is necessarily our best guide to metaphysics; although I do think it should be taken into account.

Realism about metaphysical questions just means that they are legitimate questions, not semantic ones. I believe that questions about time, composition, universals, persistence, etc are legitimate questions and cannot be reduced to language as deflationary theorists claim.

I agree about those being legitimate questions, but I think for me their legitimacy has nothing to do with realism; it is, rather, experiential as well as logical.

Those questions are legitimate because, for example, we actually experience time, composition and persistence and, although we do not experience them, universals present legitimate puzzles about difference, sameness and identity that are inherent to thinking itself and not confined merely to conventions of language usage.

I tend towards logical or conceptual realism, which I would also call 'metaphysical realism' except the latter is always strawmanned by anti-realists as some claim about what purportedly lies beyond experience. I don't think the claim that objects are mind-independent, for example, means anything more than that they experienced as being objects available for anyone to see, or feel or hear or whatever, as distinct from mind dependent phenomena like memories or hallucinations that are not available for more than one percipient.

What mind independent objects 'are' in some imagined 'ultimate sense' is unknowable and may not even be a coherent question. But that is what antirealists falsely proclaim that all realists are necessarily making some claim about.

'Course I dunno what that has to do with p-zombies, but you started on this particular tangent...

I don't think he does per se. He's too close to the rhetoric of reductive materialism. For him it's a matter of clearly asserting the non-existence of qualia due to its claimed ineffable nature. I'd go has far as to say he lacks the concept of qualia to state the argument I did. His rhetoric comes out saying "qualia" does not exist, so it rubs people interested in moments of life the wrong way. He's saying moments of experience don't exist.

My point was, however, is Dennett is doing something other than merely asserting qualia doesn't exist. He's deconstructing it say that, as proposed by the immaterialists, it doesn't make sense because they are suggesting the ineffable has description. He's attempting to break down a mistake in our understanding of consciousness.

The reason his position appears confused is becasue he's rejected qualia while still holding there is consciousness to describe. In his deconstruction of qualia, he's realised it's not needed to describe consciousness, so he's happy to say he is conscious without qualia.

Taken literally he's saying he's conscious (has experiences which are described) without his experiences ever existing (no qualia, no moment of experience). He leaves out the indexical pointer ( "qualia") to moments of experience. It like if I was to say: "I don't exist" but than say: "Willow is making a post of thephilosophyforum." It looks like he's saying things exist in description but never in the moment.

In the end he doesn't quite grasp consciousness, he says "qualia doesn't exist" when he should say "qualia cannot be described, so it has no relevance to describing our experiences."