Many people who are leaders in relevant fields - people like Anil Seth, Antonio Damasio, Peter Tse, Brian Greene, Donald Hoffman, and David Eagleman - most of whom think physicalism must be the answer, say we don't have a theory, and don't even have any idea what such a theory would look like. — Patterner

The problem is that consciousness is informational, not physical. Explaining consciousness in physical terms runs into the same problem that explaining any informational process in physical terms does. Imagine starting with the notion of computation, or the notion of War and Peace,
and trying to leap directly to a physical explanation of these. You need to first construct an informational narrative, and only then explain how this narrative is instantiated physically.

Strict omnipotence is not a logically coherent notion. Multiple contradictions follow. One standard one, "can God create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it?" Either he can, and his power is limited in lifting it, or he cannot, and his power is limited in creating it.

You explicitly include a contradictory ability: the ability to create omnipotent beings. You can't have two omnipotent beings. One can always try to strip omnipotence from the other. Either that attempt fails, limiting the power of the first, or it succeeds, limiting the power of the second.

Further, you cannot have two omnipotent and omniscient beings. One can always predict the actions of the other. Either the prediction fails, limiting the omniscience of the first, or it succeeds, limiting the power of the second to act outside of the first's predictions.

So, the rest of your proof is redundant. Your premises are already contradictory.

Moreover, you are arguing with Christian secondary literature, not primary. The idea of God being philosophically perfect, possessing all the "omnis", only arose with the fusion of Christianity and Greek philosophy, really beginning with Augustine.

What criteria do you use to decide if they are normal or not? We're made up of a lot of different parts and behaviors. — Questioner

It depends on what we are talking about. Behavior? Physiology? Ability? Appearance?

What is the purpose of being able to call someone "abnormal?" What is the application of that? — Questioner

To describe. To give context to a description of someone's behavior, physiology, ability, or appearance. Where do these fall within the human spectrum?

To diagnose. Sometimes abnormality indicates a problem that requires correction.

To reward or praise. Where spectrums are value-laden, norms can be exceeded as well as fail to be met.

To exclude. Humans are often excluded based on abnormality, for reasons that are legitimate as well as reasons we would probably object to.

It may lead to suppression or oppression. — Questioner

Indeed, it may. But this belongs in a discussion of the ethics of normality, not the meaning.

This definition requires a judge of what is to be "expected." Who will judge what is to be expected? Who will decide if that fits the definition of "normal?" — Questioner

Of course. That is how the word works. The speaker may have an idea of what "normal" is, the listener may share it, or may not. They talk past each other to the degree that their concepts of "normal" differ. The listener may realize this, or may not have a concept of normal at all, and ask, "What is 'normal' here?"

When we try to apply the concept of "normality" to all human beings - who demonstrate a great deal of variation - the concept kind of breaks down. — Questioner

Why does it break down? Sure they display variation, but this variation is still within pretty tight bands. Human variation is far from pure chaos. There are innumerable patterns that may be used to define normality.

(normalcy) cannot work without marginalizing people who don't fit the parameters of what others "expect." — Questioner

When applied to humans (which is only a fraction of the usage of 'normal'), yes this kind of marginalization happens. What of it? You may think this shouldn't happen; but it does. Maybe we shouldn't use the word with humans at all; but we do.

It is best to describe prescriptive baggage when defining a word, describing how it actually functions.

natural means stemming from nature or following nature's laws. — Copernicus

This definition covers a large chunk of usage, but not all of it.

"Let events follow their natural course". What is "natural" here is not nature's laws, the sentence more likely refers to human events. For events to "follow their natural course" means that they proceed without intervention, where what intervention cons is determined by context. "To rely on your natural ability" mainly means to forego training, not necessarily to forego technological augmentation such as fancy gear or doping.

The most general meaning of "natural" is freedom from intervention, not following natural laws. It is just that human intervention is the sort of intervention often implied when "natural" is used.

what you're describing is natural. — Copernicus

No, @Outlander is describing "normal". Normal is all about expectation. To meet expectation is to be normal .

"Natural" is an entirely different concept. To be "natural" is to be free from influence. "Whose influence?" is context dependent. Usually, but not always, to be natural is to be free from human influence.

This suggests thought is language, words traveling throughout our brain, which is a metaphysical claim, arguing about what the internal thing going on in our head is. That would not be consistent with Wittgenstein, but a better phrasing would be that thinking is shown through use, namely language. — Hanover

Yet, I only paraphrased what you quoted:

"When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought." — PI §329 — Hanover

This points out the problem with ascribing a metaphysical claim to Wittgenstein because here we're now being baited into a conversation about how different people might think. — Hanover

If anyone is "baiting", it is you. Your OP is about the nature of our internal language. Yet now you are demanding all discussion must adhere to some kind of Wittgensteinian ametaphysical purity.

Mentalese is supposed to be pre-linguistic and universal. When you think in your head, that is supposedly a translation from mentalese. And so mentalese, if it is going on, is not necessarily consciously accessible, unlike our verbal thoughts.

I rather agree with Wittgenstein, that language is a vehicle of thought, not a reflection of thoughts happening elsewhere. That said, when I think verbally, I don't think in the compressed manner that you suggest. I think in full sentences. Maybe this just reflects differing cognitive styles. Maybe my dumb brain has to spell everything out. Also remember that verbal thinking is not the only kind of thinking. There is also visual thinking, and other people have claimed more exotic modes (tactile? emotional? logical?).

And so I don't necessarily agree that what is going on in our heads is compression, analogous to how languages compress over time. I wouldn't even call it a language, language is only one component. There is no rigid grammatical requirement for our thoughts to be comprehensible to ourselves.

You do realise, though, that the use of this term 'quale' or 'qualia' is almost entirely unique to a very narrow band of discourse, — Wayfarer

Only if modern analytic discourse on consciousness is a narrow band in its entirety.

allow for the designation of the qualities of conscious experience as a spurious object — Wayfarer

Only grammatically. I don't see the nounification of "objects of consciousness" as carrying any particular ontological commitments.

Like @Banno I don't see how this is deployed against Chalmers, as I recall he makes use of the idea, which predates him by quite a bit.

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity? — Banno

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. We pick and choose our concepts, and I think mine cleanly maps to that which we are talking about when we talk of consciousness. It is an entirely different matter to reliably apply this concept to other beings. Qualia, and therefore consciousness, is private, as third person observers we only have indirect access, through behavior and self report.

Agree that it's very hard to determine what is or isn't sentient at borderline cases such as viruses (presumably not) or jellyfish and so on. — Wayfarer

Viruses are a hard no. They don't even have volition, they make no decisions, they are essentially giant, extraordinarily complex, free floating molecules. Jellyfish seem to be the upper limit of what can be achieved with no central nervous system. Probably not, but as you say it is extremely hard to rule out entirely.

My hunch is that consciousness is the ultimate fulfillment of the engineering principles of modularization and abstraction. It is an extremely efficient strategy for abstracting and organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system. We have to integrate all the physical senses, bodily senses, emotions, memories, thoughts. Based on this enormous mass of information, we are supposed to act, moment by moment. If there were no abstraction, if these were all just raw electrical inputs, the brain would be totally overwhelmed. So the brain's strategy is to transform these raw inputs into abstractions, and act based on them. Our lived experience is that of the brain's decision maker. Our world consists in these abstractions, qualia, and from them, we attend to the relevant subset, we predict, and we act.

This strategy has probably coevolved multiple times in different evolutionary branches. To detect consciousness, we would have to understand the principle whereby the brain achieves this kind abstraction, and examine the extraordinarily complex nervous systems of the animals that might be using it.

:lol: I didn't necessarily think I was blowing anyone's doors down! But I don't think I said nothing either.

Just look at all the ways consciousness has been defined in the past. You just said the term was up to us to define. Wayfarer just quoted:

Somewere I once read the aphorism that 'a soul is any being capable of saying "I am"' — Wayfarer

Consciousness has never been a clear, fixed concept. Whereas qualia, your feelings about the term aside, is much more precisely defined. If the unclear term can be defined in terms of the clear term, even seeming tautologously, then that is progress. At least we would know what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness. Does that explain consciousness? Of course not.

Furthermore, I've also noticed that disabled people are portrayed as objects of hate or jokes (in films like "Avatar"). I don't know whether this is truly the norm in society or whether it's a distortion. If this is true, I'd like to point out that the very permissibility of making jokes about people with disabilities was probably perceived differently in earlier times. Furthermore, I think this has become possible due to the secular nature of modern times. — Astorre

There is something going on here, and I'm not at all sure it is cultural. It is not just in films, I noticed growing up that this attitude was very widespread in children. Rather than something that is socialized in us, it is as if this is something that needs to be socialized out of us. This experience made me wonder if there is a dark side to human nature expressing itself here. A drive to exclude based on perceived lack of fitness and lack of ability of the individual to contribute to the group.

One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. Like, nothing matters to a crystal or a rock formation, but things definitely matter to a bacterium, because it has skin (or a membrane) in the game, so to speak. — Wayfarer

All life has "drives". Viruses have "drives", to infect and reproduce. Roombas have "drives", to clean. This is not enough. What is relevant is whether these drives are experienced as such. We don't just have drives, our drives are sometimes (but crucially, not always) experienced as drives. We have this capacity, this does not remotely mean that to have a drive is intrinsically to experience that drive.

I would like to think that the sentience of beings other than human is not something for us to decide. Whether viruses or archai or plants are sentient may forever remain moot, but that anything we designate with term 'being' is sentient as part of the definition (hence the frequent Buddhist reference to 'all sentient beings'.) — Wayfarer

I thought that 'all sentient beings' was making a distinction between these and insentient beings?

I don't see why it is problematic for us to conceptually mark out what counts as sentience. For me, to be sentient is to have qualitative states. It is quite another thing (maybe impossible) to empirically know whether other species have qualitative states.

.

As if there were one thing that "it is like" to be aware that your toe hurts, to be aware that the sun is out, and to be aware that Paris is in France. — Banno

The second two examples use "aware" in its other sense, which is simply to know a certain fact.

To be aware of a mosquito bite, aware of a sunset, aware of a feeling of jealousy, are all qualitative states. There is something it is like to experience each of these. What each is like is quite different. What unifies them is that they are all varieties of qualitative conscious states, they each have a felt quality. "Qualia" bundles this property of having a felt quality into a conceptual bucket.

And what, exactly, is the claim here? — Banno

The claim is that in order for you to be conscious of anything at all, that consciousness must have a felt quality. Absent that, you aren't actually aware. If something has no felt quality, no associated qualia, then it is not conscious.

"Doesn't the answer simply depend on what we count as being sentient? That is, it's something to be decided , not discovered?"

I would argue that qualia is the bedrock of sentience. To be sentient is to have qualitative states. But given that, it is still something to be discovered, if this is even possible. Unless consciousness is a physical property (which I doubt), we can never build a consciousness detector. The best we can likely do is identify the features of neuroanatomy, across very different species and neural architectures, which bring about consciousness.

There's no third person without the first person. — Wayfarer

I would add, to @Banno's question, that there is no first person without qualia. To be aware of anything at all, there must be something it is like to have that awareness. In other words, consciousness without qualia is contradictory. To do without qualia is to do without consciousness.

Probably not all that different. I think there really is a hard problem, and it is hard because of the relation between us and our own consciousness, vs. us and anything else we experience. All of our collective evolutionary and cultural problem solving machinery was developed to manage the latter. Whereas with the former we really only have our own example, and none of that machinery applies. Worse, All of that machinery is reflexively part of what needs to be explained, insofar as it structures our conscious experience. That is what makes it so hard.

. That said, there is no 'hard problem of consciousness' at all. The whole reason for Chalmer's polemic is to show up an inevitable shortcoming of third-person science. Once that is grasped, the 'problem' dissappears. But it seems extraordinarily difficult to do! — Wayfarer

I have a somewhat different take. Consciousness is real, and in principle it admits to explanation. The problem is our unique epistemic relationship with our own consciousness. Our whole access to the world, and to ourselves, is via consciousness. And so we have the problem of explaining consciousness from the inside.

It is like someone who lives alone wearing rose colored glasses, who can never remove them or even look at them, tasked with explaining the glasses that filter their vision.

Consciousness, which can experience so much, and explain these experiences so well, has a unique difficulty explaining itself.

SO you are at odds with those who have said elsewhere that qualia are just colours and so on. Because colours are not restricted to the first person... — Banno

Yes, that is exactly why we need the term, to specify we are talking about the first person aspect specifically.

And it seems to me that one simple explanation of this is that the notion is incoherent. — Banno

A very easy, simple recourse to incomprehension.

You have omitted qualia already. The word does no work in your explanation. The explanation works without mention of qualia. — Banno

A smell is a quale. You are free to be allergic to the word and never use it. And you are free to invent a world where qualia are just decor that don't do anything, or are incoherent, or don't exist. You are free to be wrong.

You seem very confident about that. Fine. To me they are instances of the same sort of thing, — Banno

I'm confident. There is more than a trivial distinction between meeting an old friend whose name you cannot place, and meeting a stranger.

There are three very distinct things: smell, recognition, naming.

But you want to add, in addition to the smell of coffee, something more: the quale of coffee, here, now, perhaps. Something of that sort. And the simple request is, why?. To what end? — Banno

No, I never said anything like this, and I keep feeling you are somehow missing the concept. The quale is not something in addition to the smell. The smell is an instance of a broader category, qualia, that includes everything with a subjective feel.

. The raw sensation by itself doesn’t explain why you identify it as "coffee." Therefore, "qualia" does no explanatory work in the theory of perception or cognition. It’s a label, not a mechanism. — Banno

In your mind, linguistic context somehow explains it? I don't think so.

It is really a very simple story. In your life you encounter aromatic things. In their presence, you experience a kind of qualia: a smell. In your mind, you form an association: smell <--> aromatic thing. In this case, coffee smell <--> coffee. Then later on, when you encounter coffee smell, your training tells you it's significance: coffee.

You cannot omit qualia from this story. Qualia, that which is a subjective feel, is how information such as aromas enter into our conscious awareness. Without qualia, it isn't clear how the information would enter into awareness at all. Maybe if we were some kind of hyper linguistic species, a voice would whisper in our ear: "coffee is near". But we are humans, and so our brains use qualia for this job.

How does linguistic context do a better job of explaining this?

What a grand vision! Compounding error with illusion. Rhetoric dressed as precision. — Banno

Lol, and here I thought it was just a definition.

A trivial distinction. To not recognise the smell is to not be able to place it, especially in terms of language. — Banno

Not recognizing something and forgetting the word for something are entirely different. You can know what a smell is, what produces it, while the name of what produces it might be elusive. Or you may know the smell is familiar, but have no clue what it is. Or, you may have never encountered the smell before at all.

Are we really arguing this?

It's unclear to me what this is claiming. Are you now saying that anger and imaginings are also qualia? Odd. Perhaps the next question is, what for you isn't a quale? — Banno

Yes. This is really standard, and it is odd to me that you have read papers on qualia, hosted topics on qualia, opine frequently on qualia, without even knowing that. Qualia applies to anything that has a felt, subjective character. "Qualia" specifically picks out only that felt, subjective character, discarding everything else. There is no suitable word that can be used in it's place.

Look again, with care. That is precisely what it does allow for - the smell is recognised, but the matching word is not: — Banno

No, forgetting the word is a different case. I'm talking about the case where the smell is not recognized.

Then is it anything other than what is commonly called a "sensation"? If not, let us use that term rather than invent a new one. It will suffice. — Banno

"Sensation " is not good enough. It is almost completely specialized to bodily feelings. "Red sensation", "oboe sensation", "angry sensation", "imagining a green sensation". are awkwardly disconnected from established usage.

It is clear in the text that the owner can look inside the box. — Banno

no one can look inside the box. — Banno

If you want phenomenology, there is no gap between my smelling that and my smelling coffee. That's the point. What there might be is a gap between my smelling coffee and my choosing the word "coffee" for what I smell. — Banno

This is demonstrably untrue. It doesn't allow for the common case where you smell something but cannot recall what it is. Despite not recalling, there is still something it is like to smell it. For this to be possible, there must be a difference between smelling something and identifying it, even if the identification is not always conscious.

...and that's the very question I asked, way, way back. If qual are just smells and colours, why bother? Why not just talk about smells and colours? — Banno

So are qualia redundant? Incoherent? Or non-existent? Which is it, you have claimed each of these at various times.

Qualia is a generic term for the individual, subjective experience of smells and colors, and anything else we experience. Invented, I suppose, because "experiences" and "sensations" are already too overloaded. Whereas, "smells" and "colors" can equally refer to the properties engendering these experiences.

no one can look inside the box. — Banno

This does not respect the structure of qualia. The owner of the box may look inside, but no one else. Moreover, the box is not disconnected from the world. There is perhaps a global beetle, and everyone's personal beetle is, though a network of cameras, an image which is a perspective on that global beetle.

it is unlikely that there is a table of any sort in your brain. More likely that there are neural paths that activate when there is coffee in the air. — Banno

Certainly. "Table look up" is at best a logical description of the operation, but not faithful to the actual mechanics.

Yep. But the qual plays no role. You want an explanation that goes odour→qual→table →coffee when one that goes odour→coffee will suffice. — Banno

"Odor" is supposed to be the molecules here? Sorry, but the gap is far too great. How do you get from odor to coffee?

Yep. Same for smell, which unlike a qual has temporal continuity. That is, your qualia become smells in order to be of any use. — Banno

What is a smell if not a quale?

Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. a No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. — §293

I still don't know how the"game" functions without the "beetle". Specifically, how you are able to accurately utter "l smell coffee" without the involvement of qualia.

So you have a qual, and you run down a table of qualia and match it to the qual you previously identified as "coffee". — Banno

Perhaps this suffices to describe what my brain does. I'm not generally aware, unless I'm struggling to identify an odor.

I just smell coffee. — Banno

That is a statement of what you do. It explains nothing.

Suppose that your qual for coffee changes over time, and your table of qualia also changes to match. You still run down the table to identify the smell, but it is a completely different smell.

What role did your qual play here? — Banno

The qualia I experience still matches my "table", even in the implausible scenario both are drifting.

Qualia are supposed to explain how we recognize things, but the recognition depends on stability, which qualia, as momentary sensations, cannot guarantee. — Banno

While qualia themselves are momentary, the cognitive machinery which produces them must be stable enough to allow for recognition through time.


Again, please explain how you identify the aroma of coffee without qualia.

Where do we make use of qualia - outside of philosophy fora? — Banno

For instance, I make use of qualia when I identify the smell of coffee. If I didn't recognize that particular subjective olfactory experience as coffee, I couldn't make the identification. That there is coffee in the air is revealed to me by the quale of coffee aroma.

I believe most humans, including neuroscientists, agree with me here. Does your brain somehow work otherwise?

Your qual change over time but you do not notice, yet the language game continues unchanged. Therefore the qual are irrelevant to the language game. — Banno

The quale can change, but memories must as well. This does not imply that qualia are irrelevant. What is required is the qualia are stable with respect to memories of them.

It is true that given a radically different cognitive architecture that does not make use of qualia, they would be irrelevant. But the fact is, we do make use of them. Given our cognitive makeup, without stable qualia (at minimum, stable relative to memory), we could never coordinate our experiences. It is on you to describe how we can agree that the aroma of coffee is in the air without them.

If the private-symbol model requires “lockstep drifting qualia” just to keep meaning afloat, then abandon the model. Meaning doesn’t live there anyway. — Banno

Wait what? Drifting qualia is your idea, not mine. I'm pointing out how implausible it would be for memories and qualia to drift in lockstep without our notice.

On the presumption that there is such a thing as "the correct subjective smell", which is the very point at issue. — Banno

You identify the smell as just another version of the chemical. This seems to imply that there is a correct subjective smell, which is absurd.

What I mean is, why is the form it's in not the form that it can most easily process and act upon? — Patterner

As the brain receives a sensory signal, it is just a signal, presumably without any qualitative content. The brain has to do the work so that the signal can be interpreted by (the conscious subset of) itself as qualitative.

The key insight is that the sensory manifold we experience is not accidental or epiphenomenal. It is a highly efficient way of organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system.

Notice how the sensation has now become a symbol. — Banno

Not a new position. The smells are symbols. Smells exhibit the characteristic one way relation of symbols. The smell points to the event, brewing coffee, but you can analyze the coffee for a thousand years and you will never derive the smell.

Note that any suitable medium can function as symbols: roads use signage, books use glyphs, brains use qualia.

Suppose that your qual of coffee changes over time, but you do not notice; so that the way coffee smells for you now is utterly different to how it smelt to you as a child.

Now, what is it that is the same now as it was when you were a child? Well, it's not the qual, since that has changed. It's the language and behaviour around the smell of coffee that has stayed the same

The system functions entirely without the consistent private symbol. It is not required. — Banno

This does not follow.

It is theoretically possible that all of our private symbols vary over our lifetimes without our noticing. But for this to work, our memories have to vary in lockstep. If they do not, then not only would we notice, but the symbols would become useless. If what we remember as coffee yesterday smells like bacon today, then the symbol does not communicate anything.

It is as if you are arguing words are not required for language to function, because theoretically words might be varying without our noticing (along with our memories and all printed text).

Or, my preference, the smell of coffee just is those chemicals, under a different description. — Banno

This is very wrong. The smell is certainly not the chemical. This feels like naive realism.

If the smell were the chemical, an alien could analyze the chemical and derive the correct subjective smell. This is clearly impossible. The smell is not a chemical property. Smells are the end product of the conjunction of the chemical and the human sensory system.

Have we? Or have we co-ordinated our behaviour? — Banno

Both. We coordinated on the basis of internal sensations. That is part of the mechanism. Lacking this, you might say "I smell coffee", I might say "I smell bacon", one would be as groundless as the next.

What more, exactly, is there to "identifying my internal, private sensation as coffee" than is found in "I smell coffee" — Banno

Nothing. One just makes explicit what is already contained in the other.

Discourse functions even if our sensations differ... so what is the place of the sensation? — Banno

Since sensations are private, there is no need for them to be consistent between people. They only have to be consistent within an individual. Smell sensations are like a private, internal symbol table. We learn by consistently matching a public event, coffee brewing, with a private symbol, the smell of coffee. Then, when we later encounter the private symbol, the smell of coffee, we can infer the public event, coffee is brewing, is nearby.

How can this system function without the private symbol? And so how would smell discourse function without the system?

But I'm not seeing how a discreet internal event isn't as problematic as a "thing"; it remains that no one else can check that you are correct. — Banno

If you claim you smell coffee, I cannot look inside your head to verify. But I can attend to my sense of smell: do I experience the internal sensation I have leaned to associate with coffee, or don't I? I do. i can confuse that you are experiencing the same smell that I am. Or more sophisticated, that both of us are experiencing the internal event we associate with coffee (even if these are different).

That these sensations off coffee may be entirely different between us is ultimately only of philosophical significance, the discourse functions the same either way. But without these sensations, the discourse wouldn't happen at all.

That everyday discourse functions without the philosophical notion of qualia is not under dispute. But what relevance is that to us purported philosophers?

So if we agree to talk of a qual of coffee - even if here, now - what is it that is being agreed on? The term "the aroma of coffee" perhaps picks out a pattern of behaviour and report, coordinates shared expectations, and is indexical but public. But it does not pick out a thing. We may avoid the hypostatisation. — Banno

There is no hypostasisation. A quale is not a material thing, it is more an event. But it is concrete, not abstract. The "aroma of coffee" picks out the subjective character of the internal event that occurs when coffee is smelled. (While patterns of behavior, expectations, etc are all real, this is just not what "the aroma of coffee" refers to).

The privacy of qualia is philosophical, it doesn't necessarily have significance in linguistic practice. In practice, there is a cousin to naive realism, call it "naive intersubjectivism": the presumption that we all internally experience basically the same things. Even though philosophically, the subjective aroma of coffee is private, by presumption we can talk about it as if everyone is talking about the same thing, everyone experiences what I experience. Moreover, that which prompts the experience is public. And so the discourse can function, even if its philosophical presuppositions are suspect.

Even if naive intersubjectivism is abandoned, we can still discuss qualia. We just abandon the idea that we can understand concretely what others experience. "The aroma of coffee" becomes relative, that which the sniffer experiences when smelling coffee. There is no singular, concrete content, but rather a conceptual structure: that particular experience which each individual undergoes.

I think I agree with everything here.

Depression is a 'mental illness' but it is neurotic, rather than psychotic. I think it better to view neurotic 'mental illnesses' as skewing or limiting perspectives on reality, rather than breaking from reality, as with psychosis. — Jeremy Murray

Maybe not a break with a reality. But certainly a break with objectivity is assessments of one's life circumstance. How can a depressive evaluate this with any objectivity?

Like you, I wouldn't be here suicide were an easy option.

For depression, I've wants to say, "but there is always hope". But can we say this with confidence? Despite having crawled out of our own black holes? How do we know that others aren't much, much deeper, so deep they are doomed never to emerge?

I was haunted reading case reports from NL of assisted suicide granted to the depressed. Here is one example:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/16/dutch-woman-euthanasia-approval-grounds-of-mental-suffering

If there was memory of the qualia, then its abrupt absence would be noticed. — noAxioms

I think what you have in mind is an incomplete absence of qualia. For instance, the idea of someone losing all five senses at once. Yet, they are blindsighted in all five senses, so they can still navigate the world as before, just without conscious awareness.

But keep two things in mind:

1. Memory is also qualitative. When we remember, we remember images, sounds, feelings. These are just as much qualia as external sensations. It is just that the brain is able to bookkeep these, marking them as internal (schizophrenia might be the failure of this bookkeeping mechanism).

Someone who lost all qualitative awareness would lose the qualitative aspect of memory as well. So, there would be no mismatch, memory (no qualia) would match current situation (no qualia).

2. Feelings are also qualitative. It is not just distress that would be lost, all feelingds would be lost.

No sensations, no feelings, no memory of either of these. If the sim lost qualia, it wouldn't notice a thing.

I am currently away visiting family for holidays, which is why replies are not always prompt. — noAxioms

No worries, happy holidays!

But why does the brain present what it already understands to itself in a different form? — Patterner

Think division of responsibility. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions. When receiving information from the world, one part of the brain translates that information into a form that can be easily processed and acted upon. Then the executive, the conscious part, uses that translated information to learn and to act.

we need to know why there's something it is like for anybody to see red — Patterner

FWIW, my take:

We, as conscious beings, live in the perspective of the brain's executive decision maker. All qualia are informational, they tell us about the world and about ourselves. Qualia are the way that the brain presents information to itself, in a form it can efficiently process and act upon. Sensory data, bodily sensations, feelings, all just information that guide us in making decisions and ultimately acting.

Qualia exist only in the context of the brain that produces them. We are, each of us, a machine within a machine. The brain creates for us a virtual world, and then lets us executive decision makers use and act on this information.

Qualia are as real as a computer animation. They exist, but only in terms of the larger framework which supports them. There is no exotic physics, nothing mystical. Just a system organizing information in a way it is able to effectively process and act on.

Form our perspective, qualia are elemental, mysterious, and apart from the material world. But that shouldn't be surprising for virtual machines who experience everything only through qualia.

If qualia are private, then how is it that you and these others agree about them? How do you know that, when you use the term "qualia", you are all talking about the same thing? — Banno

We don't know, and can never know, that the content of our qualia agree. What most of us do agree is that there is something that it is like to see an apple and smell ammonia. This shared fact structures our collective experience, and the concept can be communicated with language. While qualitative content can never be.

The concept is public, in that it refers abstractly to universal human features most of us understand. But a part of the concept is that its concrete instantiations as qualia we individually undergo are private.