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.
I want to shift the burden of proof, so that anyone who wants to appeal to private, subjective properties has to prove first that in so doing they are not making a mistake.
Personally, I find the dual process account pretty convincing, so I think there's lots of stuff going on with us we aren't aware of. If you want to include all of that under "mind", and I would, then I agree wholeheartedly. The disembodied mind is an abstraction. — Srap Tasmaner
Some posters here call subjectivity "self-report" and they see it with a great deal of suspicion. They mistrust themselves. — Olivier5
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.
And further:
I want to shift the burden of proof, so that anyone who wants to appeal to private, subjective properties has to prove first that in so doing they are not making a mistake. — Banno
I assume the response will be that it might mislead us to think that such properties are subjective rather than objective, and that if the flower is perceived as red or if the coffee is perceived as bitter, then each of them really are red and bitter. Except that's not how everyone perceives them?
— Luke
What do you mean by subjective and objective here? How are the two distinguished? I'm asking because Dennett's position is taken as undermining the distinction between those two, so it should be hard to understand in those terms. (Edit: though I do recall him using the phrase "objective properties" in a paper!)
If you're using "objective" as a placeholder for "all property types", I'd agree with you. If "objective" imputes constraints on the types of property considered and our access to them, I guess I wouldn't. — fdrake
ncidentally, the quotes given above and the text around them in the article should be sufficient to put an end to the risible objection that Dennett denies the reality of conscious experience. Those who have made that assertion in this thread are guilty of not having understood what is being said; they ought go back and read at least the introduction of the article. — Banno
That's just another way to say the same thing though. — Olivier5
So he'll say that of course we're conscious and taste coffee and see colors, but then he goes on to argue in a way that denies the first person experience. — Marchesk
The qualia of life is consciousness
The qualia of consciousness are experiences.
The qualia of experiences are emotions.
The qualia of emotions are feelings.
The qualia of feelings are points on the Pain Pleasure Spectrum
The qualia of points on the PPS are death - pain / pleasure - life.
The qualia of life is consciousness – this completes the consciousness loop. — Pop
Qualia articulates life, consciousness, experience, emotion, feeling, and a pain / pleasure spectrum. — Pop
That looks exactly wrong. It serves to hide distinctions and similarities by grossly simplifying our tried, attested and substantial language around sensations. — Banno
Wouldn't you agree that simply asserting that our sensations are ineffable serves to remove them from the conversation? — Banno
You can not have consciousness without experience. You can not have experience without emotion. You can not have emotion without feeling. You can not have feeling without a pain / pleasure spectrum. — Pop
The qualia of life is consciousness
The qualia of consciousness are experiences.
The qualia of experiences are emotions.
The qualia of emotions are feelings.
The qualia of feelings are points on the Pain Pleasure Spectrum
The qualia of points on the PPS are death - pain / pleasure - life.
The qualia of life is consciousness – this completes the consciousness loop. — Pop
We seem to have very different understandings of what the issues are here. Not sure there's much else to say. — Srap Tasmaner
Hope it works for you. I will stick to science and to the tools nature gave me.it remains much more parsimonious, methinks, to allow perceiving its dependability, dismiss qualia as something conditioned by perceiving, and fault understanding a posteriori or judgement a priori, for whatever cognitive errors I make. — Mww
Because some of them are properties of perception.
...
All of these sort of example demonstrate that our experiences are not simply reflections of the world. They're generated by our act of perceiving and other mental activities. So appealing to some direct realism or externalism still needs to account for perceptual relativity and all the other stuff occurring for the organism. — Marchesk
I think there's a parallel between qualia and 'secondary qualities' — Wayfarer
The primary qualities are those which are subject to precise quantification, while tastes, smells and so on are secondary and associated with the obsering subject. I think in physicalism, only bearers of primary attributes - that would be 'matter' - is real. It's those annoying 'inneffable feels' that have to be disolved in the acid of Darwin's dangerous idea into the doings of the only real sources of agency, which are molecules: — Wayfarer
If the word "qualia" has no use, then what are we talking about? What is Dennett talking about? — Luke
Perhaps our conscious minds "don't work in real time", but why do our brains not work in real time? — Luke
Note that "feels cold" doesn't predicate Alice's sentience, or perceptions, it predicates Alice herself. The statement does, however, presuppose that Alice is sentient, otherwise it would be a category mistake.
On this ordinary language scheme, subject/object duality is unnecessary, and an internal/external distinction is just an artefact of that duality. So a question of qualia doesn't arise. — Andrew M
Qualia seem to meet the three criteria set out for a technical term. — Banno
So an alternative to that is that Alice's feeling of the cold, or that the apple is red, etc., are first-class attributions which more specialized scientific statements derive from and explain — Andrew M
English grammar makes no distinction between subject and object. — Olivier5
In any case the underlying philosophical issue is that of agency, of whether subjects are meaningfully designated moral agents or whether that sense of personal agency is an illusion engendered by cellular automata (as Dennett holds). — Wayfarer
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