Studies of people, born blind, who then suddenly become able to see (such as those who undergo cataract surgery), suggest they have to learn how to interpret what they see,.... — Cavacava

Interpretation is a use of language, recall, and unlike language you don't learn how you ought to see things. You see what there is to see, and retrieving a previously lost or reduced capacity to see is quite different from learning how to interpret what you see. Unlike different interpretations the object that you see is the same regardless of whether your capacity to see it is reduced or not.

A child has to learn that the toy truck is red, just as Mary has to learn that what she is experiencing is red, — Cavacava

What exactly do you expect them to learn? Would they be seeing a grey toy truck until they learn to use the word 'red'? :-} I don't think so.

Mary should already know that what she is experiencing is called 'red', and she would probably use her colour meter out of habit like we use our direct experience.

For example, I've never been on the moon, but I've learned indirectly to know what it's like to be on the moon by reading other people's descriptions, seeing pictures and so on. On the moon I would hardly need to learn how I ought to experience what it's like to be on the moon.

Matter is all there fundamentally is has been replaced by physics, which means that matter-energy, fields, spacetime is all there is. — Marchesk

Being complex and of no interest to fundamental physics isn't a failure to be "real" (Hilary Putnam).

Being complex and of no interest to fundamental physics isn't a failure to be "real" (Hilary Putnam). — jkop

Which doesn't address the question of whether physics is the correct ontology of the world as physicalism claims.

What exactly do you expect them to learn? Would they be seeing a grey toy truck until they learn to use the word 'red'? :-} I don't think so. — jkop

I'm not so sure about this anymore, after having listened to an episode of Radio Lab in which a scholar of Homer noticed that he almost never used the word blue, and in fact used other colors to describe the appearance of the water, sky, etc. And after examining other works of antiquity, came across the same lack of mention for blue.

The hypothesis was that the ancients did not have blue pigment to color things, and blue is only rarely found in nature, with the exception of the sky or water on a clear day. So maybe they lacked the color discrimination for blue.

As a test, he intentionally omitted teaching his young daughter about blue, and then when she was old enough to speak, started asking her what color the sky was.

At first she looked at him weirdly. He kept asking every time they were outside on a sunny day. Her answer went from confusion to black to white, and then finally she identified it as blue. His conclusion was that we don't see the individual color until our brains learn to discriminate it from other colors. At first his daughter was confused because the sky was a big nothing. Then it was some light color, and finally she realized it was blue like other blues in the environment, since we can produce blues and color things with it.

Which doesn't address the question of whether physics is the correct ontology of the world as physicalism claims. — Marchesk

What ontology would do that? I suspect you are talking about some ideology passed for "physicalism".

The hypothesis was that the ancients did not have blue pigment to color things, and blue is only rarely found in nature, with the exception of the sky or water on a clear day. So maybe they lacked the color discrimination for blue. — Marchesk

Lapis Lazuli was the blue of antiquity.The ancient Greek temples and statues were coloured in blue and red like so:

What ontology would do that? I suspect you are talking about some ideology passed for "physicalism". — jkop

Are you not aware of the philosophical literature on physicalism or materialism?

It's weird being in a philosophy forum where poster pretend that terms like realism and physicalism aren't well established terms in philosophy.

I don't make this stuff up. I wish I were that clever!

Here is the part of the colors episode that discusses Homer:

Why isn't the sky blue?

What is an example of realist or physicalist / materialist literature in which the reality of biological facts would be rejected?

What is an example of realist or physicalist / materialist literature in which the reality of biological facts would be rejected? — jkop

There wouldn't be, but those facts would be either reducible to physical facts, or they would be emergent/supervenient on the physical facts. The physical facts are what determine the biological ones.

The question is whether this can work for mental facts.

A reductive physicalist account of biology would mean that biological facts aren't fundamental. — Marchesk

Hahah, David Brin tells a circular version of that, starting and ending with the physicist.

Maybe it is math all the way down. Still leaves the mental a problem. Not sure how Tegmark accounts for consciousness in his mathematical universe.

For example, I've never been on the moon, but I've learned indirectly to know what it's like to be on the moon by reading other people's descriptions, seeing pictures and so on. On the moon I would hardly need to learn how I ought to experience what it's like to be on the moon.

But isn't this the point of the Mary's room thought experiment: the subjective experience of being on the moon cannot be adequately described objectively.

I don't think your experience of being on the moon could ever be reduced to physicalistic interpretations such as neurons firing.

Astronauts go through extensive training to do just what you say " you hardly need to learn"

The problem is accounting for how our visual system has color experience, since all the physical facts about vision would be without color. As such, Mary inside or outside of her room cannot explain how it is that we have color experiences, despite knowing all the physical facts. — Marchesk

I believe that science (or Mary) can tell us something about how we have colour experiences.

It seems that your enquiry has more to do with why we experience colour, rather than how we experience colour. That question could be up there with why anything exists.

But isn't this the point of the Mary's room thought experiment: the subjective experience of being on the moon cannot be adequately described objectively. — Cavacava

Why not? Is it not objectively true that you are on the moon and have a vantage point from on the moon, and experience colors and feelings of weightlessness?

I don't think your experience of being on the moon could ever be reduced to physicalistic interpretations such as neurons firing. — Cavacava

A physicalist interpretation is just that - an interpretation, or a model, just as your visual experience is a model, not how the world really is beyond your experience of it. So to say, that there are neurons firing is a visual model, or explanation, of the world, or some process that is part of it.

Why not? Is it not objectively true that you are on the moon and have a vantage point from on the moon, and experience colors and feelings of weightlessness?

It is objectively true that you are on the moon, but I don't think whatever could possibly comprise that experience, or for that matter any experience, can be fully reduced to objective description. I think there is subjective reality and it is part of what it means to experience anything. To say things are separate/independent of the mind, I think is problematic, since a mind is needed to posit them.

To say things are separate/independent of the mind, I think is problematic, since a mind is needed to posit them. — Cavacava

What our statements refer to don't necessarily need minds. Likewise with experiences. From the fact that we perceive objects with our minds it does not follow that the objects would somehow depend on our minds. An overwhelming amount of the objects that we perceive are real, not hallucinated.

It seems that your enquiry has more to do with why we experience colour, rather than how we experience colour. That question could be up there with why anything exists. — Luke

Right, well if we asked why water has the properties it does, we can see why this is so from the chemistry and physics of water. But if we asked why certain biological processes results in experience, it seems utterly mysterious. You're right that we can get at the how. By why anything material would have an accompanying experience is the hard problem. And why just some brain processes and not digestion or rocks or machines. (Or maybe machines can be conscious?)

Well let me ask you if you think the your experience of a red firetruck is a passive affair, that its givenness is the content of your experience of it, that any statements you make about it just make this explicit,
or
do you think the red firetruck is your representation of what is out there, and any statement such as 'it's a red firetruck' is the only content of that experience, that we are in fact responsible for how we take things?

Well, how do we get to know about anything that isn't already part of ourselves, one way or other?
Perception is interaction.
Dreams are not (at least not with anything extra-self).
Qualia (as particular formats of experiences) are the personal part of interaction, the part on our own end.

Well let me ask you if... ..your experience of a red firetruck is a passive affair, that its givenness is the content of your experience of it... — Cavacava

It is hardly passive, nor is a 'red fire truck' given as its content.

What constitutes the visual experience is, as you probably know, a firing of neurons in your head when your eyes get exposed to the electromagnetic radiation that is reflected by the truck. The content of your experience, i.e. the coloured shape that you see, is set by the truck's design and pigments as they absorb and reflect certain wavelengths of the available electromagnetic radiation. Within an interval of 700–635 nm they are, under ordinary conditions of observation, experienced as red.

How we talk about the experience, however, is learned. For example, that the colour is called 'red', and the shape is recognized as a 'fire truck' and so on.

..the red firetruck is your representation of what is out there, and any statement such as 'it's a red firetruck' is the only content of that experience, that we are in fact responsible for how we take things? — Cavacava

It is typically in our interest to take things for what they are, and for what there is to see, and not explain it away as an illusory representation of something invisible out there.

Not sure how Tegmark accounts for consciousness in his mathematical universe. — Marchesk

Thoroughly materiallist, says that consciousness is an attribute of matter - coins the term 'perceptronium' - then vanishes into a cloud of quantum abstraction so dense that only the mathematically literate can follow.

The problem is that some people deny that experiences are subjective — Marchesk

That cannot be right. I wrote "subjective experiences," but that's a tautology - I should have just written "experiences." Experiences are perforce subjective: they occur in a subject and are confined to a subject.

Dennett has stated that we are p-zombies and qualia do not exist. — Marchesk

I don't think so. I must say though that I have read little of Dennett, and what I have read I found surprisingly difficult to understand and accept, given the praise he is usually given for being accessible and persuasive. (Perhaps it is his smug, smart-alecky style that gets in the way.) What is clear from his writings and reactions to them is that he is not making ontological, metaphysical claims here. Rather, he is arguing that 'qualia' as a philosophical term of art serves no explanatory purpose, "cuts no philosophical ice, bakes no philosophical bread, and washes no philosophical windows" (as Putnam said on another occasion).

If I understood him correctly, he faults qualia precisely for their subjectivity. He refers to Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box" metaphor about private language to argue that because qualia are supposed to be inaccessible to anyone but the subject, the specific referent of the term "qualia" can play no role in the "language game" (in this case, the language game that is philosophy) - it is irrelevant and can be cancelled out. While we are talking about "qualia" - not behavior, not objective physical facts, but strictly private "facts" - we could all be talking about completely different things or no things at all, for all the difference it would make. That's the argument, anyway.

He refers to Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box" metaphor about private language to argue that because qualia are supposed to be inaccessible to anyone but the subject, the specific referent of the term "qualia" can play no role in the "language game" (in this case, the language game that is philosophy) - it is irrelevant and can be cancelled out — SophistiCat

How do you feel about that?

It is objectively true that you are on the moon, but I don't think whatever could possibly comprise that experience, or for that matter any experience, can be fully reduced to objective description. I think there is subjective reality and it is part of what it means to experience anything. To say things are separate/independent of the mind, I think is problematic, since a mind is needed to posit them. — Cavacava

But we can reduce it to an objective description. I simply need to describe what I'm experiencing. If you were there on the moon with me, what would be the point of describing it to you? It would be redundant.

Is it not part of objective reality that you are on the moon, that you have a vantage point, and that you have experiences? To say that there is "subjective reality" without the additional point that this "subjective reality" is part of the objective reality that I am part of too, is to trip yourself into the nonsense of solipsism.

Is positing something the same as giving it existence? I can think about being on the moon, but doing so doesn't put me on the moon. If it does, then why is thinking, or imagining something so different than actually experiencing it directly? Why is my imagining far less detailed and vivid than the real thing?

..the term "qualia" can play no role in the "language game" (in this case, the language game that is philosophy) - it is irrelevant and can be cancelled out. — SophistiCat

Right, one might add that Dennett and his opponents are therefore not even wrong. :D

Experiences are, indeed, qualitative, they are what things are like under such and such conditions of observation. An experience exists 'here and now' for the observer, which amounts to an ontologically subjective domain of the objective reality. But little prevents the observer from making his/her experiences accessible via epistemologically objective descriptions.

I don't know if that was intended to be ironic, but seriously, I am not sure what to make of it. I get a feeling that he may be missing the point, or else that the point doesn't amount to much. Dennett is not very clear as to what he is arguing against. That's part of his point: he makes much of the obscurity of the concept of qualia. But if the concept was too confused to analyze, then how could he build a case against it? He should have just stopped at conceding his confusion.

His intention though is not really to quine qualia ("deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant"); the title of his famous essay is ironic. He does not deny, in the face of the obvious, that there is something it is like to have a feeling, to undergo an experience. His beef is technical, having to do with specific philosophical analyses of experience, and to understand his case one must understand the context in which he makes statements such as "qualia do not exist."

Also, just to be clear, Dennett is not the pope of physicalism. There are many philosophers making arguments on both sides of the issue, or rather, on many sides of the issue, because there isn't even a general agreement as to what qualia are and what kind of account physicalism owes to them.

That cannot be right. I wrote "subjective experiences," but that's a tautology - I should have just written "experiences." Experiences are perforce subjective: they occur in a subject and are confined to a subject. — SophistiCat

But they do deny the inner, private part. Experiences can be individual, but not inner or private.

His beef is technical, having to do with specific philosophical analyses of experience, and to understand his case one must understand the context in which he makes statements such as "qualia do not exist." — SophistiCat

Right, but quining qualia amounts to redefining consciousness as having a functional/behavioral role only. Dennett did say in a recent talk I watched on youtube that we are the equivalent of p-zombies. There is nothing going on in our heads in terms of consciousness.

Also, just to be clear, Dennett is not the pope of physicalism. There are many philosophers making arguments on both sides of the issue, or rather, on many sides of the issue, because there isn't even a general agreement as to what qualia are and what kind of account physicalism owes to them. — SophistiCat

Sure, and Chalmers discusses several versions of physicalism. Physicalism might be the case, but questions of consciousness and intentionality still remain puzzling.

But they do deny the inner, private part. Experiences can be individual, but not inner or private. — Marchesk

Physicalists don't deny the inner, private part either as meant in the ordinary sense of those terms (e.g., that you can be stoic, hide your true feelings, be misunderstood, etc.). And certainly you could feel something that is unique to you, that no-one else has experienced before or can understand. What is instead denied is a radical privacy - the idea that no-one could experience or understand that feeling in principle, regardless of their physical brain state.

The reason that we can meaningfully talk about red apples is because our physical sensory systems are, in the relevant sense, the same. But they need not be, as considering how one would communicate the idea of red apples to a blind person demonstrates.

Right, but quining qualia amounts to redefining consciousness as having a functional/behavioral role only. Dennett did say in a recent talk I watched on youtube that we are the equivalent of p-zombies. There is nothing going on in our heads in terms of consciousness. — Marchesk

You'll find that he is denying epiphenomenalism, not redefining consciousness. See his paper on The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies. In particular, note his analogy with health that concludes:

"Supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination you can remove consciousness while leaving all cognitive systems intact--a quite standard but entirely bogus feat of imagination--is like supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination, you can remove health while leaving all bodily functions and powers intact. If you think you can imagine this, it's only because you are confusedly imagining some health-module that might or might not be present in a body. Health isn't that sort of thing, and neither is consciousness."

Sure, and Chalmers discusses several versions of physicalism. Physicalism might be the case, but questions of consciousness and intentionality still remain puzzling. — Marchesk

:-} Chalmers is a dualist, recall, and the alleged puzzle arises from taking dualism for granted.

You don't get to talk about a hard problem of consciousness with people who don't take dualism for granted.

I don't know if that was intended to be ironic, but seriously, I am not sure what to make of it. I get a feeling that he may be missing the point, or else that the point doesn't amount to much. Dennett is not very clear as to what he is arguing against. That's part of his point: he makes much of the obscurity of the concept of qualia. But if the concept was too confused to analyze, then how could he build a case against it? He should have just stopped at conceding his confusion. — SophistiCat

It was ironic, but it makes a serious point.

Dennett denies that consciousness is real. That has been his fundamental argument all throughout his career. One of his early books was called 'Consciousness Explained', and the Wikipedia entry on it is quite informative. It points out that critics of Dennett's approach, such as David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel and John Searle, argue that Dennett's argument misses the point of the inquiry by merely redefining consciousness as an external property and ignoring the subjective aspect completely. This has led detractors to nickname the book Consciousness Ignored and Consciousness Explained Away.

What is instead denied is a radical privacy - the idea that no-one could experience or understand that feeling in principle, regardless of their physical brain state. — Andrew M

That's not it at all. What is being denied is the primacy of the subjective, the fact that the subjective nature of experience can never be understood in wholly third-person terms, from outside of experience, but is a simply another kind of phenomenon. Part of this is the idea that humans are perfectly reducible to objective analysis (which is a central aspect of Dennett's 'scientism'.)

Furthermore Dennett explicitly argues that the idea of the subject and subject-hood, generally, are at best epiphenomal illusions which in reality are simply the consequences of cellular transactions. Humans are in some real sense automata, they do what they are programmed to do by the 'Darwinian algorithm'. He explicitly, if humorously, says that humans really are 'moist robots', and then says 'so, what's the problem'? It's the fact that he doesn't understand why this is a problem, that's the problem!

Nagel's review of Dennett's latest book is called Is Conscousness an Illusion? Nagel says:

Our manifest image of the world and ourselves includes as a prominent part not only the physical body and central nervous system but our own consciousness with its elaborate features—sensory, emotional, and cognitive—as well as the consciousness of other humans and many nonhuman species. In keeping with his general view of the manifest image, Dennett holds that consciousness is not part of reality in the way the brain is. Rather, it is a particularly salient and convincing user-illusion, an illusion that is indispensable in our dealings with one another and in monitoring and managing ourselves, but an illusion nonetheless.

You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn’t correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about. The way Dennett avoids this apparent contradiction takes us to the heart of his position, which is to deny the authority of the first-person perspective with regard to consciousness and the mind generally.

...Dennett believes that our conception of conscious creatures with subjective inner lives—which are not describable merely in physical terms—is a useful fiction that allows us to predict how those creatures will behave and to interact with them. — Thomas Nagel

Steve Poole's review says:

The way in which this conscious life is allegedly illusory is finally explained in terms of a “user illusion”, such as the desktop on a computer operating system. We move files around on our screen desktop, but the way the computer works under the hood bears no relation to these pictorial metaphors. Similarly, Dennett writes, we think we are consistent “selves”, able to perceive the world as it is directly, and acting for rational reasons. But by far the bulk of what is going on in the brain is unconscious, ­low-level processing by neurons, to which we have no access. Therefore we are stuck at an ­“illusory” level, incapable of experiencing how our brains work.

Dennett's philosophy can be summed up as follows - molecules are the only real agents, real 'doers', in the Universe, and everything else we see is the product of their activities, which are really not so much intelligent as a kind of elaborate chemical reaction:

The true nature of things is evident only at the bottom, and so we must understand life from the bottom up.

• What we find at the bottom are scraps of molecular machinery.

• Through the power of natural selection — which operates like a mindlessly mechanistic algorithm (Dennett) or a blind, unconscious automatism (Dawkins) — these low-level molecular machines slowly evolve into the kind of apparently purposeful, complex entities we recognize as organisms, including ourselves.

• Whatever we are to make of this appearance of meaning and purpose — including my own intentions as I write this and yours as you read it — we are both urged to shed our prejudices and acknowledge that we with our intentions somehow arise from more basic, underlying processes that are essentially dumb, meaningless, and mindless.

Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness, Steve Talbott

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this [i.e. organic molecules] 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.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett, page 202.

Dennett's opponents, in essence, claim there is a subjective aspect to every act of knowing, even the so-called 'hard sciences' such as physics (a fact which has manifested in the 'observer problem'). The reason Dennett can even make his preposterous argument, is that the subject is ubiquitous and is implicitly invoked in every conversation, every 'speech act', even without being made manifest or explicitly referred to. It's unconscious, but not in the way Dennett claims: not because it comprises purely material actions on the cellular level acting out of an algorithm of which we're unaware, but because we so deeply embody it, that it is never an object of perception, it is never a 'that' to us. That is why Dennett can apparently argue for it's unreality; because you can never really pick out what mind is, or where it is, as it precedes any speech act, thought, or gesture. You can act like it's not there, except for if it really weren't there, you'd be dead, and Dennett wouldn't be able to tell you anything.