If you can't tell me in basic terms what externalism is, we're done. — frank
Okay, a brave attempt at a summary, but you stayed at safe distance from Dennett's actual argument, only evoking his "intuition pumps" without trying to summarize any of them, so the argument is not transparently described. Let me try and fill in some blanks.Dennett argues fairly convincingly(by my lights anyway) against the ineffability, intrinsicality, privacy, and direct apprehensibility of the properties of conscious experience, and in doing so effectively grounds his rejection of qualia. It's worth noting that he does all this by offering physicalist explanations of actual counterexamples(intuition pumps) that are germane to historical notions of qualia/quale. In doing so, he shows that the properties of personal experience that make personal experience what it is, are not special in the sort of way that proponents of qualia claim. — creativesoul
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.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
Experience is a synthesis, not an aggregate. Experiences cannot be disassembled, they may only be analyzed. — Mww
You want me to remove all the properties of language and then report my experiences to you? — Marchesk
Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of? — creativesoul
The proponents of qualia and quale are the ones who attempt to decouple, sever, and/or otherwise separate some aspects of consciousness from the ongoing process, which is what experience amounts to. — creativesoul
Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of?
— creativesoul
The various color, sound, taste sensations, but those are words used in language, so naturally you will complain that I'm using language. — Marchesk
It's as if upon characterising perception as a relationship between a subject and an object, the properties of the relationship have been moved inside the subject. Rather than having those properties of perceptual events being of the relationship between the agent ("subject") and their environment ("object") and occurring in same scope as environmental and bodily events. — fdrake
Dennett and the interviewer here talk a bit about the relationship of Dennett's criticism of qualia and undermining the subject-object distinction. Undermining it, not collapsing it to one side. — fdrake
Interviewer: Is that the path out of this problem, is to say that just as the so-called qualia that I'm experiencing...the subject, the 'I' that's in there - or wherever - itself is an illusion that's created by the whole system...
Dennett: Absolutely.
Interviewer: And also with that, even the opposition of the subject and object dissolves if the 'I' is made to be another participant in the whole show. And if you do that, then maybe the difficulty of bridging the gap between the spike trains and the outside world also dissolves.
Dennett: Well... yes. A theory of consciousness has to include and explain at a microphysical level all of the abilities of the subject. And if you stop short of that - which is almost the standard practice for people working on consciousness - no wonder you're baffled, because you're not tackling exactly half the problem. If you still have "somebody home" in your theory, you haven't got a theory of consciousness yet. It's got to be a theory of machinery cranking away where none of it depends on consciousness.
Dennett: So I look at the blue sky, and then what happens? Well, it all depends on who I am and what I know. And maybe what happens is the particular shade of blue together with the breeze wafting over my face as I lie in the grass in the woods or something looking up at the blue sky, it conjures up memories of other occasions when I've looked at the sky. Blue sky means good weather, it means it's not raining, it's not snowing. I have an inexhaustible fountain of associations, recollections, biases, which are all either triggered or triggerable by my looking at the sky. Now, we can start cutting those off piece by piece and suppose that the blue sky can no longer be recognised by me as a sign of good weather; suppose it no longer kindles recollections or memories; suppose it has no effect on my bodily state - on my heart rate, on my respiration, on my galvanic skin response. We're gonna subtract all of these things. At some point, it's not clear that I'm still conscious of the blue sky. My eyes are open...
I bolded the sense data bit, it's construing sense data as the output of senses to discriminatory systems - distinct from construing sense data as perceptual features presented to consciousness, as perceptual features are formed in an interaction between how the environment+body is sensorially sampled and discriminatory systems. — fdrake
His paper sets out in quite some detail, the problems encountered when treating Qualia the way in which they are treated here.
This conversation is not going to get anywhere if you don't actually address one of those issues. — Isaac
intuition pump #3: the inverted spectrum... Since we both learned color words by being shown public colored objects, our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors.
intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine...some neuroscientific apparatus that fits on your head and feeds your visual experience into my brain. With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at.
With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at, except that I marvel at how the sky is yellow, the grass red, and so forth. Would this not confirm, empirically, that our qualia were different? But suppose the technician then pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees and reinserts it in the socket. Now I report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth. Which is the "right" orientation of the plug?
intuition pump #5: the neurosurgical prank...You wake up one morning to find that the grass has turned red, the sky yellow, and so forth. No one else notices any color anomalies in the world, so the problem must be in you. You are entitled, it seems, to conclude that you have undergone visual color qualia inversion...There are (at least) two different ways the evil neurosurgeon might create the inversion effect described in intuition pump #5:
(I) Invert one of the "early" qualia-producing channels, e.g., in the optic nerve, so that all relevant neural events "downstream" are the "opposite" of their original and normal values. Ex hypothesi this inverts your qualia.
(II) Leave all those early pathways intact and simply invert certain memory-access links--whatever it is that accomplishes your tacit (and even unconscious!) comparison of today's hues with those of yore. Ex hypothesi this does not invert your qualia at all, but just your memory-anchored dispositions to react to them.
If there are qualia, they are even less accessible to our ken than we had thought. Not only are the classical intersubjective comparisons impossible (as the Brainstorm machine shows), but we cannot tell in our own cases whether our qualia have been inverted--at least not by introspection.
And that is just what we do when we seem to ostend, with the mental finger of inner intention, a quale or qualia-complex in our experience. We refer to a property--a public property of uncharted boundaries--via reference to our personal and idiosyncratic capacity to respond to it. That idiosyncracy is the extent of our privacy.
If I wonder whether your blue is my blue, your middle-C is my middle-C, I can coherently be wondering whether our discrimination profiles over a wide variation in conditions will be approximately the same. And they may not be; people experience the world quite differently. But that is empiricially discoverable by all the usual objective testing procedures.
We could speak of what Bieri would call "phenomenal information properties" of
psychological events. Consider the information--what Dretske would call the natural meaning--that a type of internal perceptual event might carry. That it carries that information is an objective (and hence, in a loose sense, intrinsic) matter since it is independent of what information (if any) the subject takes the event type to carry. Exactly what information is carried is (practically) ineffable, for the reasons just given. And it is private in the sense just given: proprietary and potentially idiosyncratic.
We may "point inwardly" to one of the deliverances of our idiosyncratic, proprietary property-detectors, but when we do, what are we pointing at? What does that deliverance itself consist of? Or what are its consciously apprehensible proper ties, if not just our banished friends the qualia?
Algorithms don’t cause outputs. — khaled
It’s not tasting specifically that’s just an example. Dennett said that qualia cannot be a logical formulation, but must be an empirical fact to satisfy its defenders (your quote). But in the intuition pump designed to prove this (8) he did nothing to actually prove it. — khaled
But it’s worth noting that I don’t agree that it was ever intended to be used that way. So his “opposition” here is meaningless. — khaled
(1) What do you think Dennett's position is in Quining Qualia? — fdrake
Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia. Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special. — Qunining Qualia
The standard reaction to this claim is the complacent acknowledgment that while some people may indeed have succumbed to one confusion or fanaticism or another, one's own appeal to a modest, innocent notion of properties of subjective experience is surely safe. It is just that presumption of innocence I want to overthrow. — Qunining Qualia
(2) How do you think he argues for that position? — fdrake
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've no idea how you arrived at that summary. I'm not equipped to disentangle it. — creativesoul
(3) How does that relate to the maxim "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality" (Searle) assertion you've been using your photos to intuition pump for (as I've read them anyway). — fdrake
For those of us who have not fully accepted/understood this "banishment", where in the article did it occur with regard to privacy? — Luke
intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine...some neuroscientific apparatus that fits on your head and feeds your visual experience into my brain. With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at.
Does this imply that if I wear the apparatus then I can experience another person's experience? No. Because I wouldn't be seeing (via my eyes) what another person sees via their eyes. That would be double transduction. — Luke
Amazingly (I find), the upshot of this intuition pump for Dennett is "that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology". This only supports privacy! Otherwise, intersubjective comparison would be possible. — Luke
While I might claim to be the only one who can know how my qualia seem to me, this does not imply that I am the only one who knows the causes of my qualia. The unconscious processes that cause qualia are irrelevant to the properties of one's conscious experience, especially privacy. — Luke
If there are qualia, they are even less accessible to our ken than we had thought. Not only are the classical intersubjective comparisons impossible (as the Brainstorm machine shows), but we cannot tell in our own cases whether our qualia have been inverted--at least not by introspection.
All the more support for privacy, then? None of this helps overcome the intuition of pump #3, that "our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors". — Luke
I find the rest of the intuition pumps, including the coffee tasters, are mostly about infallibility, which is not one of the four properties Dennett claims to be arguing against. — Luke
For those of us who have not fully accepted/understood this "banishment", where in the article did it occur with regard to privacy? — Luke
3. But Dennett's third set of intuition pumps show that if we make neurological changes to path (a) - from object to qualia, or path (b) - from qualia to response, we cannot tell which change has been made. We cannot examine our 'qualia' independently to tell if they've been changed by a modification to path (a) or if instead we've simply been subject to a modification of path (b). — Isaac
maybe the qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). You end up with the same qualia. — Marchesk
If qualia are just the whole process from sources of sensation to response, then wine-tasting machine have it, so do p-zombies. — Isaac
he's laying out how qualia (as conceived) must be in the form of
a)perception->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response — Isaac
And that is what is radically private about consciousness that science cannot give us, without rewiring our nervous systems, or enhancing them. — Marchesk
Qualia are the resulting sensations that consciousness is made up of. — Marchesk
qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). — Marchesk
But this doesn't show that such experience is 'necessarily' private. — Isaac
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.