Seems you have entirely missed what was said.There are no language games about “Prefflings” — Luke
Seems you have entirely missed what was said. — Banno
Why? Are all language games sensical? — Isaac
why aren’t all language games sensical? — Luke
But if we all think we enjoy an inner life, then even though we cannot directly share our inner lives in the way we can directly share the sensory world, could it not be sensical to talk about our inner lives — Janus
What does "qualia" pick out to the exclusion of all else? — creativesoul
I meant that we cannot pick out precisely determinate features of our inner lives to share, as we can with perceptible objects. — Janus
I guess we don't even need to speak about quality of experience, but just about the experience itself. — Janus
Are you an eliminative materialist?
— Luke
Here's the thing: I do not have to have an alternative explanation in order to show that qualia are not helpful.
But since you asked, it seems to me that the hard problem is a result of looking at the issue the wrong way. Here's a post of mine from a while back:
Painted using a matte house paint with the least possible gloss, on stretched canvas, 3.5 meters tall and 7.8 meters wide, in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
An anti-war statement displaying the terror and suffering of people and animals.
Two ways of talking about the very same thing.
Do we need to reduce one to the other?
There is indeed a discussion to be had about how the selection of paint leads to the impact that Guernica has on the viewer. In the end you might be able to show the effect, but not to say it; there is nothing to say, when what is left is to look a the painting. A complete description of the tones and materials will not have the same impact.
Here's another:
Philosophy is a jigsaw puzzle.
Descartes thought the best way to finish the puzzle was to start by finding the corners. The corners are fixed, he thought, so if we get them in place, we can work our way around the edge by finding the straight edges, and work our way into the middle. He argued that "I think therefore I am" was a corner.
Other folk thought he was mistaken. They looked for other corners. A priori concepts, perhaps; or dialectic, or the Will, or falsification, or logic, language, choice... And on and on
Wittgenstein's contribution consists in his pointing out that this particular jigsaw does not have corners, nor edges. There are always bits that are outside any frame we might set up. And further, we don't really need corners and edges anyway. We can start anywhere and work in any direction. We can work on disjointed parts, perhaps bringing them together, perhaps not. We can even make new pieces as we go.
— Philosophy is a jigsaw puzzle. Descartes thought the best way to finish the puzzle was to start by finding the corners. The corners are fixed, he thought, so if we get them in place, we can work our way around the edge by finding the straight edges, and work our way into the middle. He argued that
See what I did there?
Or the cliché, should we argue that this is reducible to an image of a rabbit?
Is it really just a rabbit? Is the mind really just matter?
This is the content of Wittgenstein's PI, and it seems to me to have an impact on many philosophical questions; to carry a great deal of weight.
But don't ask me to tell you what that impact weighs in kilograms. That's not a sensible question. — Banno
Banno’s minimalist responses to the first lines of my posts have brought us here. — Luke
I guess we don't even need to speak about quality of experience, but just about the experience itself. — Janus
There seems no purpose for this wierd intermediary 'qualia', neither in perception, nor in experience. — Isaac
Qualia is what eliminative materialists want to eliminate. — Luke
Why does it need to be considered as an “intermediary” instead of just the (quality of the) experience that a person has? — Luke
The way things taste, look, sound, feel to a particular person. — Luke
Why does it need to be considered as an “intermediary” instead of just the (quality of the) experience that a person has? The way things taste, look, sound, feel to a particular person. We know that these things are not the same for everyone, otherwise there would be no colour-blindness or synaesthesia or deafness, etc. And it’s likely that there could be even more slight, less noticeable differences for more normal people. — Luke
You think that the word “qualia” has an intentionally nonsensical meaning? — Luke
What is the difference between the quality of the experience and the experience? — Isaac
What is 'the way' doing here?. The taste of an apple is the taste of an apple — Isaac
there's no other thing it becomes inside my mind. — Isaac
If an apple has a taste, then there is a way it tastes. Am I Englishing wrong? — Luke
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