Then qualia do not act as advertised; they are not private and ineffable. You have defended qualia to such an extent that they are no longer qualia. They are just colours and smells. — Banno

I have been explicitly saying qualia are colors and smells this whole time.

But your parable is cute. What it shows is that what matters for colour-talk is functional discrimination, not a private qualitative feel. You preserve the entire public language-game of colour, nothing is lost except the internal “what it’s like.” And crucially: nothing about the language-game depends on the missing qualia. You've shown that qualia do not do explanatory work. Cheers. "Colour experience” is a role in a language game, not some private essence. What we call “seeing blue” is just discriminating this from that, and responding appropriately in action and speech. — Banno

My thought experiment is about you/someone who has
known color your whole life. If you lost your ability to see colors, and that little doohickey became your only way of identifying things by color, you would know something was missing. And you would not think it was unimportant, even though you would still be able to have the conversations. Think of the times you would use it if you were alone. If you point it at a sunset, you would learn which areas of the sky are red, orange, yellow, and still blue. Point it at a painting or photograph of a field of flowers, and learn which are which colors. Would you bother?

And would you wish you could see colors again?

If people never had color vision, there woods be no concept of, or word for, color. And if we were all given this device, we would never use it. It would be meaningless. We would have no idea what its taps were for. Even if it was given to us by aliens who tried to explain it, it would be meaningless. We never would have been, and would not now start choosing paint by color. We wouldn't even have vans of specific colors. As we would have been up until then, we would be concerned with how it held up to the weather, to having our children's crayons washed off of it, and whatever other kinds of wear and tear. But there would be no aesthetics involved.

Notice that in loosing all my qualia, I did not loose consciousness. You should find that odd, if being conscious is having qualia. — Banno

People who go blind or deaf are still conscious.

I'll adopt everyone else's views on consciousness for the moment, and say that an entity that had no capacity for qualia would not be conscious. Do you think a machine that can differentiate frequencies in the range of the spectrum that we call visible light knows what red is? Do you think it knows what vision is? Do you think it's conscious? Do you think if we gave ChatGPT a device that can differentiate these frequencies it would experience read the way you do?

Being conscious is not possessing a certain metaphysical item, a quale. — Banno

This is correct.

Being consciousness is being a creature that lives, reacts, expresses, interacts, and speaks in certain ways. — Banno

Much of that can be explained by the physical things and events that make us up. But some aspects of some of those things would be different without consciousness. For example, there would be no conversations about color if we did not subjectively experience the physical events of photons hitting retina, voltage gates opening, ions flooding neurons, electrical signal moving through optic nerve, etc. That is, if we did not see colors.

And that embeddedness is what is in danger of being lost by the simplistic expedient of treating consciousness as a thing. — Banno

Consciousness it's not a thing. It is subjective experience.

I have been explicitly saying qualia are colors and smells this whole time. — Patterner

Then it seems we are in agreement, at least on this. Except that I would drop talk of qualia as unneeded and potentially misleading.

Let's go over the other argument again. It's that qualia - such things as seeing colours - are essential to consciousness. But the very example you give shows that someone who cannot see colours - someone without qualia - would nevertheless be conscious.

What follows is that seeing colours - having qualia - is not constitutive of consciousness.

Consciousness it's not a thing. It is subjective experience. — Patterner

Those two words: Experience and subjective.

What we might say is that "I experience being conscious!". But how is that saying anything more than "I am conscious!" What work is done by "experience"?

And what does that weasel word, "subjective", add here?

So we agree consciousness is not a thing. But I don't see how calling it a "subjective experience" is at all helpful in explaining what it is.

seeing colours - having qualia - is not constitutive of consciousness. — Banno

But are qualia real without consciousness? Qualia are first person as a matter of definition.

So we agree consciousness is not a thing. But I don't see how calling it a "subjective experience" is at all helpful in explaining what it is. — Banno

Perhaps it is not something that can be, or must be, explained. That's what makes it a hard problem!

But are qualia real without consciousness? — Wayfarer

Can you set out how this might work? What are you suggesting?

Perhaps it is not something that can be, or must be, explained. That's what makes it a hard problem! — Wayfarer

If it can't be explained, it's not a problem but a brute fact. I could go along with that.

You seem very confident about that. Fine. To me they are instances of the same sort of thing, — Banno

I'm confident. There is more than a trivial distinction between meeting an old friend whose name you cannot place, and meeting a stranger.

There are three very distinct things: smell, recognition, naming.

But you want to add, in addition to the smell of coffee, something more: the quale of coffee, here, now, perhaps. Something of that sort. And the simple request is, why?. To what end? — Banno

No, I never said anything like this, and I keep feeling you are somehow missing the concept. The quale is not something in addition to the smell. The smell is an instance of a broader category, qualia, that includes everything with a subjective feel.

. The raw sensation by itself doesn’t explain why you identify it as "coffee." Therefore, "qualia" does no explanatory work in the theory of perception or cognition. It’s a label, not a mechanism. — Banno

In your mind, linguistic context somehow explains it? I don't think so.

It is really a very simple story. In your life you encounter aromatic things. In their presence, you experience a kind of qualia: a smell. In your mind, you form an association: smell <--> aromatic thing. In this case, coffee smell <--> coffee. Then later on, when you encounter coffee smell, your training tells you it's significance: coffee.

You cannot omit qualia from this story. Qualia, that which is a subjective feel, is how information such as aromas enter into our conscious awareness. Without qualia, it isn't clear how the information would enter into awareness at all. Maybe if we were some kind of hyper linguistic species, a voice would whisper in our ear: "coffee is near". But we are humans, and so our brains use qualia for this job.

How does linguistic context do a better job of explaining this?

What a grand vision! Compounding error with illusion. Rhetoric dressed as precision. — Banno

Lol, and here I thought it was just a definition.

But are qualia real without consciousness?
— Wayfarer

Can you set out how this might work? What are you suggesting? — Banno

I'm suggesting that in the context of philosophy, 'qualia' are defined as subjective and first-person in nature. Look it up.

I think an issue with Chalmer's 'Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness' is just that problems are there to be solved, whereas the nature of consciousness (or mind) is a mystery. 'A mystery is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question' as Gabriel Marcel put it. It's also not a 'brute fact' - being consciously aware is prior to the knowledge of any facts. Infants are consciously aware, with almost no grasp of facts.

It is really a very simple story. In your life you encounter aromatic things. In their presence, you experience a kind of qualia: a smell. In your mind, you form an association: smell <--> aromatic thing. In this case, coffee smell <--> coffee. Then later on, when you encounter coffee smell, your training tells you it's significance: coffee.

You cannot omit qualia from this story. — hypericin

You have omitted qualia already. The word does no work in your explanation. The explanation is as effective without mention of qualia.

I'm suggesting that in the context of philosophy, 'qualia' are defined as subjective first-person in nature. Look it up. — Wayfarer

Would that the advocates of qualia would reach some sort of agreement.

SO you are at odds with those who have said elsewhere that qualia are just colours and so on. Because colours are not restricted to the first person...


But this is one of the issues; there is no clearly and generally agreed notions of what qualia are. See the SEP article for an exposition of this problem. And it seems to me that one simple explanation of this is that the notion is incoherent.

You have omitted qualia already. The word does no work in your explanation. The explanation works without mention of qualia. — Banno

A smell is a quale. You are free to be allergic to the word and never use it. And you are free to invent a world where qualia are just decor that don't do anything, or are incoherent, or don't exist. You are free to be wrong.

SO you are at odds with those who have said elsewhere that qualia are just colours and so on. Because colours are not restricted to the first person... — Banno

Yes, that is exactly why we need the term, to specify we are talking about the first person aspect specifically.

And it seems to me that one simple explanation of this is that the notion is incoherent. — Banno

A very easy, simple recourse to incomprehension.

A smell is a quale. — hypericin

'qualia' are defined as subjective and first-person in nature. — Wayfarer

You two need to talk.

And it seems to me that one simple explanation of this is that the notion is incoherent. — Banno

It's incoherent for the exact reason that this thread was created months ago! Even designating 'the quality of lived experience' as 'quale' or 'qualia', automatically transposed the entire discussion to the wrong register. It suggest that there is some such thing or state - which there is not. The quality of experience, 'what it is like to be', is always first-person, prior to any discussion. You will invariably try and drag the discussion in the direction of what can be expressed in terms of symbolic logic, but 'what it is like to be' can't be accomodated within that framework, for the simple reason that it is not objectively real. That is what this whole thread is about. That said, there is no 'hard problem of consciousness' at all. The whole reason for Chalmer's polemic is to show up an inevitable shortcoming of third-person science. Once that is grasped, the 'problem' dissappears. But it seems extraordinarily difficult to do!

Chalmers basically said that there is nothing about physical parameters – the mass, charge, momentum, position, frequency or amplitude of the particles and fields in our brain – from which we can deduce the qualities of subjective experience. They will never tell us what it feels like to have a bellyache, or to fall in love, or to taste a strawberry. The domain of subjective experience and the world described to us by science are fundamentally distinct, because the one is quantitative and the other is qualitative. It was when I read this that I realised that materialism is not only limited – it is incoherent. The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is not the problem; it is the premise of materialism that is the problem. — Bernardo Kastrup

Yep.

. That said, there is no 'hard problem of consciousness' at all. The whole reason for Chalmer's polemic is to show up an inevitable shortcoming of third-person science. Once that is grasped, the 'problem' dissappears. But it seems extraordinarily difficult to do! — Wayfarer

I have a somewhat different take. Consciousness is real, and in principle it admits to explanation. The problem is our unique epistemic relationship with our own consciousness. Our whole access to the world, and to ourselves, is via consciousness. And so we have the problem of explaining consciousness from the inside.

It is like someone who lives alone wearing rose colored glasses, who can never remove them or even look at them, tasked with explaining the glasses that filter their vision.

Consciousness, which can experience so much, and explain these experiences so well, has a unique difficulty explaining itself.

I don't see that as different to what I'm saying. So I don't agree that I'm not in agreement. :-)

Probably not all that different. I think there really is a hard problem, and it is hard because of the relation between us and our own consciousness, vs. us and anything else we experience. All of our collective evolutionary and cultural problem solving machinery was developed to manage the latter. Whereas with the former we really only have our own example, and none of that machinery applies. Worse, All of that machinery is reflexively part of what needs to be explained, insofar as it structures our conscious experience. That is what makes it so hard.

:clap: :ok:

Cool.

Now, what does it have to do with first and third person? And can we do it without qualia?

There's no third person without the first person. Modern science began by the bracketing out of the subject. Another of my potted quotes:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

There's no third person without the first person. — Wayfarer

I would add, to @Banno's question, that there is no first person without qualia. To be aware of anything at all, there must be something it is like to have that awareness. In other words, consciousness without qualia is contradictory. To do without qualia is to do without consciousness.

To be aware of anything at all, there must be something it is like to have that awareness. — hypericin

Why? And what, exactly, is the claim here?

As if there were one thing that "it is like" to be aware that your toe hurts, to be aware that the sun is out, and to be aware that Paris is in France.

No, these have nothing in common. There need be no "something it is like" that makes them all cases of "awareness".

Upthread somewhere I linked to an Evan Thompson paper 'Could All Life be Sentient'? He says, briefly, that it's an undecideable question, because it's too hard to specify exactly where in the process of evolution sentience begins to emerge. But he says it's an open question, and an important question, one that hasn't been settled. It's also a question in phenomenology of biology, as 'phenomenology' is specifically concerned with the nature of experience from the first-person perspective.

One of the ground-breaking books (which Thompson cites) is Hans Jonas The phenomenon of life: toward a philosophical biology. Dense book, too hard to summarise, but well worth knowing about. One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. Like, nothing matters to a crystal or a rock formation, but things definitely matter to a bacterium, because it has skin (or a membrane) in the game, so to speak. It has the drive to continue to exist, which is something only living things exhibit. And that it plainly tied to the question of the nature of consciousness (if not rational sentient consciousness of the type humans exhibit.)

Doesn't the answer simply depend on what we count as being sentient? That is, it's something to be decided , not discovered?

I would like to think that the sentience of beings other than human is not something for us to decide. Whether viruses or archai or plants are sentient may forever remain moot, but that anything we designate with term 'being' is sentient is a part of the definition (hence the frequent Buddhist reference to 'all sentient beings'.)

I would like to think that the sentience of beings other than human is not something for us to decide. — Wayfarer

The applicability of the word "sentience" is something for us to decide.

What counts as being sentient?

You think, therefore presumably you are.

Have to log out for a while, duty calls.

duty calls. — Wayfarer

Give her my regards... :wink:

Let's go over the other argument again. It's that qualia - such things as seeing colours - are essential to consciousness. But the very example you give shows that someone who cannot see colours - someone without qualia - would nevertheless be conscious.

What follows is that seeing colours - having qualia - is not constitutive of consciousness. — Banno

I can't imagine anyone's guess as to the nature of consciousness and how it comes into existence is such that the loss of the perception of color, or even vision entirely, would result in the loss of consciousness. I would not be surprised if most people think that you could lose all your senses, as well as your arms and legs, yet retain your consciousness.

But whether or not you, or anyone, think it would result in a total loss of consciousness, it is still in need of explanation. I think everyone in the world should watch all the Ninja Nerd videos that can. Here's one on The Phototransduction Cascade.. Just to give an ideas of the very beginning of the process, I wore a little from Michael Behe's in/famous Darwin's Black Box at the end. Agree or disagree with his conclusions or religious beliefs (I happen to disagree with both), he knows the science.

Nothing anywhere in these things suggests or hints at our experience of redness, or anything regarding consciousness. Colors aren't in these physical events. Yet we see colors. They are what is more important to us, and you would not willingly give them up.

When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a single human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP.)

GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to “cut” a molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative of both GDP and GTP). Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, just as a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub.

Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion channel. It acts as a gateway that regulates the number of sodium ions in the cell. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane that, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.

If the reactions mentioned above were the only ones that operated in the cell, the supply of 11-cis-retinal, cGMP, and sodium ions would quickly be depleted. Something has to turn off the proteins that were turned on and restore the cell to its original state. Several mechanisms do this. First, in the dark the ion channel (in addition to sodium ions) also lets calcium ions into the cell. The calcium is pumped back out by a different protein so that a constant calcium concentration is maintained. When cGMP levels fall, shutting down the ion channel, calcium ion concentration decreases, too. The phosphodiesterase enzyme, which destroys cGMP, slows down at lower calcium concentration. Second, a protein called guanylate cyclase begins to resynthesize cGMP when calcium levels start to fall. Third, while all of this is going on, metarhodopsin II is chemically modified by an enzyme called rhodopsin kinase. The modified rhodopsin then binds to a protein known as arrestin, which prevents the rhodopsin from activating more transducin. So the cell contains mechanisms to limit the amplified signal started by a single photon.

Trans-retinal eventually falls off of rhodopsin and must be reconverted to 11-cis-retinal and again bound by rhodopsin to get back to the starting point for another visual cycle. To accomplish this, trans-retinal is first chemically modified by an enzyme to trans-retinol—a form containing two more hydrogen atoms. A second enzyme then converts the molecule to 11-cis-retinol. Finally, a third enzyme removes the previously added hydrogen atoms to form 11-cis-retinal, a cycle is complete. — Michael Behe

As if there were one thing that "it is like" to be aware that your toe hurts, to be aware that the sun is out, and to be aware that Paris is in France. — Banno

The second two examples use "aware" in its other sense, which is simply to know a certain fact.

To be aware of a mosquito bite, aware of a sunset, aware of a feeling of jealousy, are all qualitative states. There is something it is like to experience each of these. What each is like is quite different. What unifies them is that they are all varieties of qualitative conscious states, they each have a felt quality. "Qualia" bundles this property of having a felt quality into a conceptual bucket.

And what, exactly, is the claim here? — Banno

The claim is that in order for you to be conscious of anything at all, that consciousness must have a felt quality. Absent that, you aren't actually aware. If something has no felt quality, no associated qualia, then it is not conscious.

"Doesn't the answer simply depend on what we count as being sentient? That is, it's something to be decided , not discovered?"

I would argue that qualia is the bedrock of sentience. To be sentient is to have qualitative states. But given that, it is still something to be discovered, if this is even possible. Unless consciousness is a physical property (which I doubt), we can never build a consciousness detector. The best we can likely do is identify the features of neuroanatomy, across very different species and neural architectures, which bring about consciousness.

.