The Mark of Zombie

Now, doesn’t all this talk of qualia and consciousness and zombies and non-zombies and hyper-consciousness and dim consciousness and conscious minds and unconscious minds strike you as insane?

Beer.

A robot, a dead man and a blindsighted nun are lying next to you on a sunny beach. Describe the different effects of the sunlight on each of them. Do not write on both sides of the paper at once. Your time starts...now.

Because you're describing your perceptions and experiences as private and inaccessible to others. — Andrew M

But you appear to speak the same way. At least, you don't speak with certainty that colours do appear the same way to both of us. The way colours appear to each of us is not public, is it? If it were public, then there would be no doubt about the (im)possibility of inverted spectra. If it were public, then we could directly see how colours appear to those who are blind, colour-blind, short-sighted, synaesthetic, etc. This doubt and lack of public access doesn't require a Cartesian theatre. If you allow for the possibility that colours can appear to some/each of us differently, then you must also allow for what you consider to be a Cartesian theatre. However, I don't think it's required. You can't perceive or experience another person's perceptions and experiences. That's just a fact of being you and not them.

Or maybe you have normal color vision and perceive it the same as me. Do you agree that that is a possibility? — Andrew M

Yes, I do consider it as a possibility. Do you consider it a possibility that there could be differences in our colour vision (yours and mine), however slight?

If you do, then we have a case where not only are we both seeing a red apple, but the apple also appears red to both of us.

If that condition is met, we have a common reference point in the world that we can use language to talk about. — Andrew M

We don't need to meet the condition of "the apple appears red to both of us" in order for us to use the word "red". How red appears to you does not need to be the same as how red appears to me in order for us both to use the word "red" the same way. That's the point of the inverted spectra intuition pump. (The colour-blind are more easily discoverable because of their inability to distinguish between colours e.g. red and green.)

So how does this model deal with disagreements about what is perceived? Via norms that function much like the standard meter length bar that used to be held in Paris. If you want to check whether the apple is red, find a normally-sighted person and ask them. — Andrew M

But, again, if how the colour of the apple appears to a normally-sighted person was public (and not private), then we shouldn't need to ask them in order to find out.

Your reference to "how the colour...appears to a...person" is all that I mean by qualia, so why do you get to avoid "the Cartesian theatre model of perception" but I don't?

If the Cartesian perceptual model is rejected, then the simple answer is that we don't have "phenomenal" experiences at all (i.e., there is no experience of an "inner" egg), we just have ordinary, everyday experiences involving ordinary, everyday things like red apples. — Andrew M

What's the difference between phenomenal experiences and "how the colour...appears to a...person"?

but there is no way to distinguish someone who stubbornly refuses to use the right words for the right colours from someone who is actually colorblind. — Banno

And yet there is a difference. That’s the key. We can imagine both possibilities (we can imagine stubbornly refusing to use the right words while seeing the right colors and we can imagine seeing everything in black and white ourselves). Even if we can never test which is the case I think there should still be language that allows us to describe what we’re imagining. Feels like a waste for me to not be able to.

What I’m getting from this is that the worst case scenario: Qualia is untestable or useless outside discussion of sci-fi shows and endless debates on philosophy forums. You think that’s grounds for saying they don’t exist, I don’t think so. If we can conceive of a P-Zombie we should have a word that can express that difference. If we can conceive of the difference between a stubborn confusing person and a colorblind person I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to express the difference even if it is untestable.

Qualia is untestable or useless outside discussion of sci-fi shows and endless debates on philosophy forums. — khaled

Well, no, as your example showed -

the imposter is discovered by examining the structure of their eye. Which has nothing to do with qualia. — Banno

Well, no, as your example showed -
the imposter is discovered by examining the structure of their eye. Which has nothing to do with qualia. — Banno

Please quote the full sentence. I said that’s the worst case scenario. As in even if we couldn't test for coloblindness we would still be able to imagine both alternatives. And being unable to express what we imagine seems like a waste. Inverted colors are one of those things we can imagine but cannot test for. Qualia would also be useful for expressing colorblindness before we came up with ways to test for it. It's a pretty old concept.

Given that we are in the 1200s and we do not know how to test for colorblindness. And given that the person I'm talking to is not lying. If he says "The sky is the same color as the grass", is he making statements about grass and skies or is he making statements about his experience of them. Based on that I can surmise that the person I'm talking to is experiencing different qualia from me (aka is colorblind).

But I think that the word still has a use. Outside of sci-fi shows, endless debate and expressing what we’re imagining (which in my book are good enough reasons to keep it around). I believe that a complete neuroscience will only ever show sufficient conditions for consciousness. It would still make sense then to ask whether other things are conscious. Are spiders conscious? Are computers conscious? Etc. These are questions asking whether or not something has experiences, aka whether or not it experiences Qualia. We cannot answer these by looking at human brains, as all that would provide is sufficient conditions for consciousness. How will we know whether or not an AI is experiences pain by studying human brains?


Also barring any mention of qualia, why do you think colorblind people are surprised when seeing color for the first time?

Ask Mary. She knows all about it.

So how does this model deal with disagreements about what is perceived? Via norms that function much like the standard meter length bar that used to be held in Paris. If you want to check whether the apple is red, find a normally-sighted person and ask them. — Andrew M

Like that blue/gold dress?

There is currently no consensus on why the dress elicits such discordant colour perceptions among viewers[, 31] though these have been confirmed and characterized in controlled experiments (described below). No synthetic stimuli have been constructed that are able to replicate the effect as clearly as the original image.

Neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe that the differences in opinions are a result of how the human brain perceives colour, and chromatic adaptation. Conway believes that it has a connection to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky: "Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis... people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."[32][33] Neitz said:

Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance... but I've studied individual differences in colour vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I've ever seen.[32] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Scientific_explanations

Every now and then, as with the bent-stick-in-water example, things aren't always as they seem. So that becomes a point of difference that can be investigated further. — Andrew M

Or like when someone hears voices and sees things the rest of us don't.

.as Davidson said

In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. — Banno

Like unmediated touch with the molecular motion or infrared light when we feel temperature, eh? The motion of molecules and the photons in the infrared range are given to us directly in experience when we feel warm or cold. That's how that works?

A robot, a dead man and a blindsighted nun are lying next to you on a sunny beach. Describe the different effects of the sunlight on each of them. Do not write on both sides of the paper at once. Your time starts...now. — Daemon

Add a man day dreaming and another one meditating. Since there is apparently no such thing as inner phenomena, no cartesian theater, it should be easy to figure out who is experiencing what. It's all public, right? All out there in the world to empirically verify.

I think I shall start investing in lie detector tests and brain scans.

Because you're describing your perceptions and experiences as private and inaccessible to others. That's the Cartesian theater model of perception. — Andrew M

That our perceptions and experiences are private and inaccessible to others is a fact, which empiricists should respect I think. I cannot read your mind and you cannot read mine. René Descartes did not invent this fact.

A robot, a dead man and a blindsighted nun are lying next to you on a sunny beach. Describe the different effects of the sunlight on each of them. Do not write on both sides of the paper at once. Your time starts...now.
— Daemon

Add a man day dreaming and another one meditating. — Marchesk

Add a brain in a vat, a brain in a bat, a cat in a box, and poor Mary who never had her periods.

I’ll try my chances with the nun.

A bat brain in a vat, I like. Cat in a box is a whole different other can of quantum worms. Why can't nuns be color scientists? (I suppose a female would never have come up with such a biased thought experiment on account of biological reality).

Have your read Dennett's paper about Robo-Mary?

I cannot read your mind and you cannot read mine. — Olivier5

Hasn't stopped some scientists from publishing papers about the political and moral persuasions of people linked to various brain scans. I'm guessing those are not much better than lie detectors.

Have your read Dennett's paper about Robo-Mary? — Marchesk

Err.. no, I’m not a big fan of Dennett. I think he is bulshitter.

(I suppose a female would never have come up with such a biased thought experiment on account of biological reality). — Marchesk

Mary’s room is what happens when a traditional male ‘thinker’ tries to behave all pro-women: 1) choose female guinea pig for your thought experiments; 2) then forget that she is supposed to be a woman, with a womb that will discharge a lot of red colour every month.

[ That's why Dennett is less sexist. He uses a robotic female instead.

reply="Olivier5;475231"] Well, he uses the robot version of Mary to counter the knowledge argument because Robo-Mary can learn how to modify their code or circuits to put themselves into the state of seeing red directly. Which presumably human Mary could do with brain surgery or a transcranial magnet.

However, this won't work with bat sonar. So Mary still doesn't know what it's like to be a bat. But it does get at the issue which is propositional knowledge cannot communicate a kind of experience a person has never had.

Well, he uses the robot version of Mary to counter the knowledge argument because Robo-Mary can learn how to modify their code or circuits to put themselves into the state of seeing red directly. Which presumably human Mary could do with brain surgery or a transcranial magnet. — Marchesk

Ok, I’l bite... And the conclusion is?

Ok, I’l bite... And the conclusion is? — Olivier5

There's no knowledge problem. Thing is, the person (or robot) has to put themselves into the right state in order to gain that knowledge, which means that if they can't, they won't know what it's like. So I don't think Dennett's counter thought experiment does the trick.

I don't think Dennett's counter thought experiment does the trick. — Marchesk

What a surprise!

If you are interested in philosophy, as opposed to the speculative mental expertiments of the anti-mentals, I’ve been reading about modern biosemiotics by Howard Pattee, Thomas Sebeok and others. I know enough biology to understand what they say, and also to see how a philosophy of life as language can work. Currently on:

On the Origin of Language - A Bridge Between Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics, by Marcello Barbieri

Barbieri is an embryologist from Ferrare University. So far (p.3) he gives me a good primer on the ‘school’.

I can also recommend Cell Phenomenology: The First Phenomenon by Howard Pattee. Apokrisis told me about this. It’s all based on Pierce theory of signs, and the importance of interpretation by a subject, which according to Pattee lies at the core of the ‘hard problem’. (Pattee doesn’t solve the problem but exposes it quite well)

which means that if they can't, they won't know what it's like — Marchesk

Smells like a private ineffable experience which cannot be known by knowing the brain processes occuring as one experiences it to me.

Or you can ask Amy who is not a thought experiment.

I can also recommend Cell Phenomenology: The First Phenomenon by Howard Pattee. Apokrisis told me about this. It’s all based on Pierce theory of signs, and the importance of interpretation by a subject, which according to Pattee lies at the core of the ‘hard problem’. (Pattee doesn’t solve the problem but exposes it quite well) — Olivier5

Oh wow, it's great to find somebody who thinks like me ! I've been thinking along these lines for ages. It's why I say a robot/computer isn't an entity in the way a human is. But I've also been thinking that a bacterium is an entity of the appropriate kind. Looking forward to reading Pattee now, thanks Olivier!

Err.. no, I’m not a big fan of Dennett. I think he is bullshitter. — Olivier5

Oh wow, it's great to find somebody who thinks like me! I borrowed his "Consciousness Explained" from the public library when it first came out in 1991, when I knew almost nothing about Philosophy of Mind. I took what he said at face value, I believed he really was explaining consciousness. I will never forgive him for misleading me like that. I think he's a charlatan.

You should thank Apokrisis, who clued me on to this vibe.

This said, it has nothing to do with Dennett so I have posted it on another thread. The mods are welcome to delete it here.

Dennett is attacking the notion/idea of Qualia as (1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness, and he's doing it on several fronts. He's explicitly not denying the reality of consciousness, or that consciousness has properties. He's just denying that consciousness has those aforementioned properties.

from the beginning of the paper...

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...

Moreover, he then goes on to further sharpen his focus...

My claim, then, is not just that the various technical or theoretical concepts of qualia are vague or equivocal, but that the source concept, the "pretheoretical" notion of which the former are presumed to be refinements, is so thoroughly confused that even if we undertook to salvage some "lowest common denominator" from the theoreticians' proposals, any acceptable version would have to be so radically unlike the ill-formed notions that are commonly appealed to that it would be tactically obtuse--not to say Pickwickian--to cling to the term. Far better, tactically, to declare that there simply are no qualia at all.

So, here he talks about the source concept of Qualia, noting the "pretheoretical" condition, which - it seems to me at least - must be met if we are to even attempt to attribute Qualia or conscious experience to language less creatures, or language users who've yet to have the mastery required to talk about conscious experience as a subject matter in it's own right. So, the properties of ineffability, intrinsicality, privacy, and direct or immediate apprehensibility in consciousness are supposed to be further refinements for the criterion of what counts as pre-theoretical.

So, I'm asking any of the proponents of Qualia...

What meets these standards? Better yet what could?

I’m just about to go to bed right now so a few questions about what you’re saying:

or language users who've yet to have the mastery required to talk about conscious experience as a subject matter in it's own right. — creativesoul

What does this mean “talk about experience as a subject matter in its own right”? Does it mean understanding words such as “red” or “bitter” etc? And you are claiming that without this understanding we cannot attribute conscious experience to people?

And I have no idea what you’re asking for. What is a “pretheoretical condition”? Could you give an example of some concept or other and what its “pre-theoretical condition” is? So I have a clue what you’re talking about