Or is qualia just a throwaway term for the throwaway notions of people who do not know what they're talking about? Clarity? Anyone? — tim wood
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel ( 'What is it like to be a Bat',1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. — David Chalmers
I definitely find that qualia is an aspect which is used to explain aspects of reality which cannot be explained easily by idealism, realism or materialism. — Jack Cummins
That's only if you think the world is as you experience it (naive realism) while at the same time believing the idea that the experience itself is causally segregated from the world itself. It's an inconsistent position.Basically he argues that the first-person nature of experience (awkwardly termed 'what-it-is-like-ness') is something that cannot be described in objective, third-person terms — Wayfarer
I can't make sense of what you mean by this. Apparently, we use "metaphysics" in different ways to mean different things.... the possibility that there may be some metaphysics behind human experiences — Jack Cummins
Thomas Metzinger's magisterial Being No One (I highly recommend the less technical, much condensed summary version The Ego Tunnel). — 180 Proof
Somehow, I have often thought that he was the thinker who suggested that consciousness was an illusion, but having made half way through, 'Consciousness Explained', it seems here that he regarded consciousness as an aspect of the inner life of human beings. — Jack Cummins
His major work Consciousness Explained (1991) was mockingly referred to as “Consciousness Ignored” or “Consciousness Explained Away.” Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Galen Strawson famously said that Dennett should be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act. — Julian Baggini
It just amazes me that people are still asserting that qualia are an illusion when the only way they know of the existence of brains in bodies and their behaviors is via their subjective experience of such things — Harry Hindu
It just amazes me that people are still asserting that qualia are an illusion when the only way they know of the existence of brains in bodies and their behaviors is via their subjective experience of such things. If the way you know the world is an illusion, then your understanding and explanations of the world are an illusion. — Harry Hindu
You've never understood my criticisms of him so there's no point in discussing it with you. — Wayfarer
We may still speak of human "souls," Dennett argues mischievously, as long as we understand them to be made up of tiny robots. And we may still speak of "free will" as long as we mean the way our genetically programmed selves react to the environment rather than the rational choice of ultimate ends.
None of this would be very surprising if Dennett followed his Darwinian materialism to its logical conclusions in ethics and politics. After all, scientific materialists have been around for a long time, attacking religion, miracles, immaterial causes, and essential natures. Think of Lucretius and his poem about the natural world consisting of atoms in the void, or Hobbes's mechanistic universe of "bodies in motion," or B. F. Skinner's "behaviorism," Ayn Rand's "objectivism," E. O. Wilson's "sociobiology," Darwin's Darwinism, and even Nietzsche's "will to power." But all of these materialist debunkers of higher purposes and soul-doctrines drew conclusions about morality that were harsh and pessimistic, if not cynical and amoral. Lucretius saw that a universe made up of atoms in the void was indifferent to man, and he counseled withdrawal from the world for the sake of philosophical "peace of mind"-letting the suffering and injustices of the world go by, like a detached bystander on the seashore watching a sinking ship, and treating the spectacle of people dying with equanimity as impersonal bundles of atoms in the void. Hobbes, Skinner, Rand, and Nietzsche saw humans as essentially selfish creatures of pleasure, power, and domination who in some cases can be induced by fear and greed to lay off killing each other. Darwin never spelled out the moral implications of his doctrine, but presumably he could not have objected to the strong dominating the weak or to nature's plagues and disasters as ways of strengthening the species. Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism - the survival of the fittest in a competitive world - is a logical conclusion of Darwinian natural science.
But such conclusions are alien to Daniel Dennett. He is a Darwinian materialist in his cosmology and metaphysics while also strongly affirming human dignity as well as a progressive brand of liberalism in his ethics and politics. Herein lies the massive contradiction of his system of thought. He boldly proclaims that we live in an accidental universe without divine and natural support for the special dignity of man as a species or as individuals; yet he retains a sentimental attachment to liberal-democratic values that lead him to affirm a humane society that respects the rights of persons and protects the weak from exploitation by the strong and from other injustices. He also objects to B. F. Skinner and the sociobiologists for reducing man to the desires for pleasure, power, and procreation. And he condemns Social Darwinism as "an odious misapplication of Darwin's thinking" and expresses outrage at child abuse, the exploitation of women, and President Bush's attempt to rewrite the Geneva Convention's definition of torture as violations of personal dignity. In short, he is a conventional political liberal of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, type whose moral doctrine is a version of neo-Kantian liberalism that assumes the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. But none of this follows logically from his Darwinian materialism and it even contradicts it, which means Dennett's humane liberalism is a blind leap of faith that is just as dogmatic as the religious faith he deplores. — Robert Kraynak
The components of knowledge. What form does your knowledge take? When you say that you know something what are you pointing to? How do you know you know something?What are qualia, according to you? — Janus
When I look at your brain, is my perspective of your brain first person or third person? Is my perspective of your mind first person or third person? — Harry Hindu
The point being that at the most fundamental level, knowledge is composed of sensory impressions: colors, shapes, sounds, etc., aka qualia. Your experience of the words on this screen are composed of shapes and colors, not neurons firing in a certain sequence. Neurons and brains themselves are composed of particular shapes and colors. It is these varying shapes and colors that are used to compare and differentiate other shapes and colors, not a comparison of neural electrical currents.Knowledge is conceptual, both qualitative and quantitative, so it is does consist in qualia. — Janus
I'm not sure what you mean by "perspective" then if you seem to be attributing it to something independent of a sensory information processing system. There can be no such thing as a perspective independent of some sensory information processing system. In a sense, there are only first-person perspectives with perspectives being a informational structure composed of information about the world relative to the self. Third-person perspectives are simulated first-person perspectives.Your perspective on anything is your perspective of course, not mine. General knowledge of publicly available phenomena is not merely your perspective, even if your perspective accords with it. — Janus
All he does is talk about how the brain models the world without addressing how the model relates to the brain itself - why the model is composed of entirely different stuff from the first person perspective (the mind and its qualia) as opposed to the third person (the brain and its neurons).lmost two decades ago when by chance I came across the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's magisterial Being No One (I highly recommend the less technical, much condensed summary version The Ego Tunnel). — 180 Proof
Why don't you quote Dennett himself? — Janus
Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.”
“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?”
Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ … There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes:
"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe." (from Darwin's Dangerous Idea)
Really, I thought it was an incredibly simple idea.
Qualia is what a philosophical zombie doesn't have, any interior experience (likeness?) of existence. — Nils Loc
Qualia add nothing helpful to the conversation:
What is gained by talk of the-qual-of-the-flower that is not found in talk of the red flower? — Banno
When I refer to the red flower, I am doing so as a shorthand for my experience of the red flower. — Kenosha Kid
How we get from photons destroyed by retina and currents pumped along optic nerves to my experience is nowhere near fully known. Collapsing the distinction between a thing and my experience of it eliminates the language to ask interesting and relevant questions. We can commit to reality and still ask questions about how it works. — Kenosha Kid
What does the shorthand do, that the experience hasn’t already done? — Mww
For good measure, here's a measure:
From the PhilPapers Surveys
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?
Other 393 / 931 (42.2%)
Accept or lean toward: representationalism 293 / 931 (31.5%)
Accept or lean toward: qualia theory 114 / 931 (12.2%)
Accept or lean toward: disjunctivism 102 / 931 (11.0%)
Accept or lean toward: sense-datum theory 29 / 931 (3.1%) — Banno
No, Dennett doesn't deny that we feel, for example, orgasms; he's not as stupid as you imagine. — Janus
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