Well, since qualia has no meaning, I'll have to agree that it cannot have a special meaning... — Banno

Ha! A much simpler refutation than mine.

I don't know how one knows one is willing to revise a belief. Or, perhaps better put, I think people's self-evaluations on such an issue are radically biased. — Coben

Yep. That's exactly the point I'm making to @Pfhorrest.

Qualia seem to meet the three criteria set out for a technical term. — Banno

Just noticed this edit. Interesting. Personally, I think it fails on the third criteria - 'meaning'. I think Dennett's account here shows that the term does not provide function in the field (of which it is supposed to be a technical term) on account of its technical meaning. It creates questions on account of presumptions about it, but that's not a 'function' in the sense Farrell means it, I don't think. To be a function in that sense it would have to instrumental in answering some question which arose aside from any presumptions about the putative term.

No, that’s something completely different. Basic beliefs are the kinds of things one would use as premises in an argument. The validity of logical inference itself is not something you ever need to put in a premise of an argument, because if you did you would just get an infinite regress: “if P then Q, and P, therefore Q” would have to become “if P then Q, P, and if ‘if P then Q’ and P then Q, therefore Q”, ad infinitum. — Pfhorrest

Well, you needn't use infinite regress as logic is a formal language and so self-reference can be dealt with using Tarskian meta-languages, but that's not the point. The point here really is that infinite regress doesn't define what beliefs are. Beliefs are just tendencies to act as if.... We tend to act as if logical function preserve truth, so it is a belief. As @Srap Tasmaner is pointing out, you've got it back to front here. We're biological creatures first and foremost. There are things we tend to act as if were the case, these are fundamental beliefs and we don't question them. something like Reformed epistemology is just positing that the belief in God might be one of these, and in a world where a God existed, it's not a bad assumption.

And other people’s explicit advocacy of methods to the contrary, as I already said. — Pfhorrest

Yes, but we're still discussing whether you have actually shown this. This is another issue we're having here, we're in the middle of disagreeing over whether some issue has been shown and yet you still later refer back to it as if it had. We've yet to be shown an example of some philosophy advocating the complete ignorance of all evidence that contradicts their belief - the example you gave is one I disputed and you've not yet settled that dispute.

some kinds of beliefs can only be held on fideistic grounds, like if you believe in the kind of God that cannot possibly be detected observationally. So if someone believes in that kind of thing, you know they’re believing it fideistically. — Pfhorrest

That's not a belief. A belief is a disposition to act as if... Anything less is a meaningless statement and it's pointless to create a model of it, you might as well build castles in the air.

My hypothesis is that they arrive at these kinds of unassailable but useless beliefs after they’re challenged in arguments and modify their old beliefs however necessary to avoid “losing”, even if it requires methodologically “cheating”. — Pfhorrest

Well good. So what tests have you carried out to check that hypothesis? What papers have you read that support it? There's been a great volume of study done on religious belief, even this very topic. An hypothesis is useless unless you're going to test it. You seem to be ignoring your own advice here - there's a whole bookshelf full of papers studying the causes and maintenance factors for religious belief and you've not cited a single on in support of your hypothesis - they should be ready to hand surely?

Besides just not posting, or that one huge 80k-word post, or maybe quarantining all my posts in one General Forrest Thread (should all users be quarantined to one thread like that? Lots of people start lots of threads wherein they repeatedly touch on the same theme; anything by schopenhauer1 is probably anti-natalist for instance), I just don’t know what you want from me. — Pfhorrest

"We shouldn't just believe stuff without being willing revise that belief (except stuff like logic which we have to believe on pain of chaos). We shouldn't believe nothing, that would get us nowhere because we have to at least act on some basis and underdetermination means we can't 'prove' each step. We shouldn't believe all things because a) that's impossible in one person, and b) we're not going to get any better in our beliefs if we don't at least try and get them more right"

There you go, 100 words or so. See if anyone (serious) disagrees, if they don't, let's get on to the interesting stuff.

Go ahead and believe something, for any reason or no reason, it doesn’t matter. (This is the “liberal” plank of my system, contra “cynicism”).

When you experience something contrary to what you believed you would experience, change your beliefs, exactly how and why doesn’t matter. (This is the “critical” plank of my system, contra “fideism”).

Repeat forever and you’ll get less and less wrong over time. — Pfhorrest

How? I don't see how this process will lead to you being less wrong. It could just as easily lead to you constantly shifting beliefs to favour one experience only to find they now contradict an experience previously modelled well by your theory. The net result of such a change will be no movement in the direction of being less wrong. There's nothing in your model to prevent this from being a permanent state of affairs.

On my account, epistemic validity just requires that you believe something or other regardless of how little you have to go on, and that you remain willing to change anything you believe when you encounter evidence to the contrary. — Pfhorrest

A good neat summary. So the entire matter rests on a judgement (both third party and introspective) of 'willingness'. Something which is a) entirely subjective, b) scalar, and c) has no proveable zero point as it anticipates future events. These are the 'interesting' questions, and without answering them you have no theory because, as written above, you have no useable definition of epistemic validity without a method of judging willingness. If you're happy to let 'willingness' remains something naturalistically obvious to any rational person, I'd have no objection to that, but you have to then concede you have a naturalistic argument, not a logical one. Implicit in this concession is the requirement to absorb that which the proper sciences are showing to be the origins of such natural thought.

If the word "qualia" has no use, then what are we talking about? What is Dennett talking about? — Luke

He's talking about the word itself. The word exists. I suppose on way to put it if you want to maintain that all words we use must, by that use, have a meaning (a position I have some sympathy with), then you could say the Dennett was showing that we do not mean any single identifiable thing when using the word. That it has no place in technical discussions such a philosophy or cognitive science. we might sometimes mean 'the sensory perception mechanisms', sometimes the resultant behaviours, sometimes a dualistic or platonic entity...etc. Such ill-defined terms cannot play a part in technical discussion even though they might be used in general conversation (except 'qualia' isn't). Have a read of the Farrell paper I cited, which @Banno has kindly found a free online version of. It gives a very good argument as to why 'what it's like' cannot be counted as a technical term and I think the argument applies equally to 'qualia'.

Perhaps our conscious minds "don't work in real time", but why do our brains not work in real time? — Luke

Because they have backward-acting neurons which suppress signals from more primary cortices before they get processed in the models of cortices higher than them. All the while that's happening, these higher level cortices are not on idle, waiting for the results, they're still processing the previous data and this affects the backward acting signals. So basically, before a signal has even left a primary area it is out of date, it has been interpreted post hoc on the basis of a model from a few seconds ago (or a long as a few minutes ago as you go higher up the cortices).

That is exactly what I mean by fideism. If you think any beliefs are basic and immutable, not subject to question, then that's fideistic. — Pfhorrest

Like the belief in the truth-preserving property of logic?

Primarily the latter — Pfhorrest

Right, so that at least entails a judgement, as I said earlier, that a significant number of people don't think this way (otherwise it would be like writing a lengthy treatise in how we ought really to breathe). And yet you claim to have no power other than your own ad hoc reckoning to justify an assertion that anyone does, in fact, think in a fashion other than this method you're expending so much effort advising us all of.

I think that those basic implicit premises of every argument should be treated as correct, because either “I’m just right and you’re just wrong” (supposing that some answers are unquestionable) or “there’s not really any such thing as right or wrong” (supposing that some questions are unanswerable) are lazy ways to dodge the argument, avoiding the potential of having to change one’s opinions, and so cutting one off from all potential to learn, to improve one’s opinions.

All the rest of my philosophy stems from rejecting those two cop-outs and running with whatever's left. — Pfhorrest

If it did, we'd have little argument. As it is, the rest of your philosophy seems to either be trivially true to the point of uselessness, or to be based on assumptions about the methods by which you distinguish those parameters. What frustrates me about this approach (my 'personal vendetta', as you put it) is that you keep trying to muffle these subjective judgements, to hide them behind some wall of logic when in fact they are the only serious and interesting point of discussion. I'm really not trying to 'win' some argument with you, I'm trying to open up a discussion about the important and difficult matters that are raised by your posts. You seem to just want to drag them back to the trivial ground on which you are right, but uninterestingly and uncontroversially so.

are you claiming there's some objective algorithmic method of determining parsimony — Isaac


Yes, and that is the topic of the next thread I have written up already. — Pfhorrest

Oh good God, no!

a first reading of C — Isaac


This is every bit as subjective judgement as my use of "obvious" for the same purpose earlier. I think you and I, who seem to have similar on-the-ground beliefs despite our philosophical differences, would likely see the same reading as "obvious" / "first", but if "obvious" is too subjective then so is "first reading". — Pfhorrest

I only meant their 'first reading'. The first reading of C they're aware of is not particularly subjective. Arguable, maybe, but not subjective like s third-party judgement of what is 'obvious' and what is not.

We can take an educated guess at whether they're holding B like that or not, though, based on how un-parsimonious a system of beliefs they're willing to construct to excuse the preservation of B. — Pfhorrest

No doubt we're about to be told how the judgement of parsimony is also carried out by some logical algorithm?

If they're doing all kinds of twisty mental gymnastics full of exceptions upon exceptions to preserve B when it would be much easier to just reject B and leave everything else simple and elegant, that suggests -- though doesn't prove conclusively -- that they're likely unwilling to question B. — Pfhorrest

I see. Now we can add 'simple' and 'elegant' to our list of subjective judgements about other people's belief systems - as if we could somehow 'see' the structure! Nonsense on stilts!

Actually, that phrase: "something it is like to..." is what does violence to the language. It's a recent invention found almost only in philosophical discourse, and so is inherently fraught. — Banno

There's an excellent paper on this. Obviously Hacker's https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/is-there-anything-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat/EC6290746D630C343A661C8C0F4D8B8E, but that leaves the possibility of technical language, which is demolished in https://philpapers.org/rec/JONWII-4 .

Worth a read for those that haven't already, the ideas there are germane to this discussion.

Why is it only possible under the second model of experience (sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response)? Are you saying that an intersubjective comparison of qualia would be possible under the first model of experience (sensory input-> response)? — Luke

Yes, to an extent. If we can (in theory) agree intersubjectively on the sources of sensory inputs, and on the responses to those sensory input, then we could compare (or even share) experiences. I say in theory because the process by which those responses are generated is so complex as to be almost chaotic (tiny adjustments having large consequences), and so there might well be a pragmatic limit to such an ability (indeed, I strongly believe there is).

What use are they for what? Qualia are "the way things seem to us". Why do they need to have a use? — Luke

Because they're a word and words without uses are meaningless.

Aren't you just expressing the hard problem with that question: why do we have qualia if they make no functional difference? — Luke

No, that question assumes we have qualia. I'm saying that we don't. That nothing ontologically answers to that description.

Can "the way things seem to us" be theoretical? — Luke

It is only theoretical. We can only tell the story of how things were, not how things are. Our brains simply don't work in real time. and that story of how things were is filtered through several theories.

Anyway, pumps 7-12 is where most of the "demolition" occurs? — Luke

Yep. They're the key ones. 13-15 just put some neurological findings into the mix.

Intution pumps 8-12 look like we don't have direct access to previous qualia such that we can answer the question, Just the memory of them. And memories are fallible reconstructions. My memory qualia of tasting the coffee years ago might not be the same as it was when tasting it then. But that doesn't mean there is no qualia when tasting it now. — Marchesk

No, that's just the first matter to be eliminated in 8. He then goes on to eliminate matters relating to current qualia, the sipping of the coffee right now and the response {not liking the taste, wanting to stop drinking etc.}. All they have is the act of sipping coffee and the response to it. They know the response is unusual for them (this much is not based on fallible memory, they could ask a hundred other people whether they used to like it or not). the point is that they cannot tell whether right now the unusual response is the result of a change in the 'qualia production system' or a change is the 'qualia response system'. All they can tell is that somewhere in that process something has changed. If they had access to their qualia, they could tell which (by checking to see if the qualia have changed). they can't, so they don't.

You could then go back to claiming that qualia are the whole process, but then p-zombies become impossible and wine-tasting machines have qualia, because both go through the process from sensory input to response.

There are plenty of people who tell us that they use (and advocate the use of) fideistic methodologies; basically all of "Reformed epistemology" is about that. — Pfhorrest

Not on my reading of it it isn't. Reformed epistemology is just saying that belief in God might be a basic immutable belief (like we've already agreed logic is) in a world where God exists. So if there's a God, then a belief in God gained from introspection (the 'feeling' that there's a God) would be expected, and therefore it's a reasonable conclusion. They're suggesting that the 'feeling' that there's a God can be given equal footing as the 'feeling' that there's a table in front of me. Neither can be proven, and in that sense their position is, as you've said, akin to yours (and mine, incidentally) against foundationalism.

You always seem to forget that I consider all of the philosophy I'm advocating to be a shoring-up of common sense against badly done philosophy. — Pfhorrest

Hang on - are you describing the way our minds actually do work, or advocating a way they should work? You seem to flick between the two. If the latter then you are definitely criticising the entire group not currently using that technique, which must be at least a majority otherwise your model would be primarily descriptive. If the former, then you're just plain wrong. this is not how people think. I suggest getting out of the armchair and doing some research. The third option - a 'common sense' model of how people think they think - is next to useless. Why would we want that?

Perhaps we could have an example of this "badly done philosophy" that we can work with. Something which seriously advocates the permanent ignorance of all contrary evidence - so we can see what you're up against.

See the several preceding posts where I discuss parsimony as the rationale behind things like "unwieldy". — Pfhorrest

Ah - so we can add 'parsimony' to the list of your personal subjective judgements used to decide who's beliefs are justified and whose aren't - or are you claiming there's some objective algorithmic method of determining parsimony? Do we parcel up our beliefs into atomic packages and enumerate those required to shore up some theory or other and decide based on the final tally which to believe?

The rest of those quote snips are either explicitly describing someone else's subjective judgement, or speaking loosely in conversation (assuming that we have some common ground in our casual, on-the-ground opinions, that I can refer to, despite our disagreement on technical philosophical things) and not as part of explicitly defining my philosophical position. — Pfhorrest

Well, if I've taken them out of context, then let's clarify. The context I'm now specifying is in the matter of judging whether someone's revision of a C-type belief (observation/interoception) is motivated by fideism about the the B-type belief that a first reading of C would contradict, or a genuine rational assessment that their C-type belief is simply the better one to ditch on this occasion. How do we judge? - without using the subjective measurements (that were apparently not applicable to this context) -

unreasonable — Pfhorrest


plausible — Pfhorrest


obvious — Pfhorrest


unwieldy — Pfhorrest — Isaac

and we can add 'parsimonious' to that list too.

So why were you tempted to agree that science needed to modify our nervous system in order for us to know? — Marchesk

I meant that if science could modify it such as to give us the wiring in response to sonar, that the bat would have developed over it's lifetime. I'm just saying that I don't think we could just be given sonar and assume we'd respond to it in the same way as a bat. We'd need the whole shebang to do that 'out of the box'.

Or at least, that's what the abstracted third-party account tells us, according to Dennett's setup. — Marchesk

No, the intuition pumps 8-12 show that we cannot access these 'qualia'. If we could, then we'd be able to tell which pathway had bee tampered with. As we can't, we don't have access to them as a separate step. If they're not a separate step the wine-tasting machines have qualia.

I should have added that science can't tell us that that bat necessarily has a sonar sensation, only whether it has recognizable neural structures (by comparison with ours). — Marchesk

This begs the question. Science only "can't" tell us that if you assume your conclusion that such sensations are private and intrinsic. If you don't, then science has merely failed to tell us that so far.

I thought qualia were a property of perception, rather than a product of perception. If I perceive a blue door, the blue isn't something that follows from the perception, it's a part of it. — Luke

Yes. I should have written sensory input. Sorry - I've edited back, so thanks for that.

What sort of response do you mean? — Luke

Any reaction that indicates we've had some sensory input, could be internal (like drawing a memory back into the working cortices, or external like rejecting bitter coffee.

Qualia are the resulting sensations that consciousness is made up of. — Marchesk

Yes. That's what they're theorised to be in order to distinguish us from wine-tasting machines. But theorised that way, they can't also be private, ineffable, intrinsic and accessible.If

qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). — Marchesk

...then they're not accessible. Only the beginning and the end of those pathways are accessible.

And that is what is radically private about consciousness that science cannot give us, without rewiring our nervous systems, or enhancing them. — Marchesk

Yeah, I'd be tempted to agree with you here on a pragmatic level. But this doesn't show that such experience is 'necessarily' private. As you say, theoretically scientists could one day re-wire our nervous system such that we have the memories and stored neural pathways of a bat and then we would 'know' everything about the experience of sonar before we receive our first ultrasonic sound-wave because all that there is to the knowing is in those neural structures.

maybe the qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). You end up with the same qualia. — Marchesk

That's the point of the though experiments. The only thing we can say we end up with is a relation between the sources of sensation and the response, but the wine-tasting machine has a reliable relation between sensory sources and response, yet we want to leave it without of qualia. If qualia are just the whole process from sources of sensation to response, then wine-tasting machine have it, so do p-zombies.

That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss the merits of using different methods ourselves in the first person. Which is all I do in my arguments for my methodology: illustrate why doing things otherwise is more likely to lead you into or keep your in error than this way, so it’s in your interest, if you care about figuring out the truth, to do it this way. It’s not all about judging other people. — Pfhorrest

In order to advocate it you must at least have judged that there exist people which do not follow this method, otherwise it's like advocating breathing. So it is implicitly, very much about judging other people, especially as you've advocated this method on a board dedicated to the discussion of philosophy, not class of primary school children whom you might prima facie suspect of benefiting from guidance.

No. It's very much about judging other people.

The point here is that you cannot get out of your 'algorithmic' method without resorting to subjective judgements of

unreasonable — Pfhorrest

plausible — Pfhorrest

obvious — Pfhorrest

unwieldy — Pfhorrest

So you cannot dismiss anyone's though process without that dismissal simply being grounded on the fact that you personally find their revision of C (rather than revision of B) to be 'unreasonable' in the circumstances - yet you've given no account at all of how you justify that assessment.

For those of us who have not fully accepted/understood this "banishment", where in the article did it occur with regard to privacy? — Luke

The first section of the article does seem to cause a lot of confusion, maybe Dennett could have been clearer. What he does in intuition pumps one to six si 'steel-man' the arguments for qualia. So your reading of them is basically spot on. He's showing how the concept of a private, ineffable, accessible, irreducible quale comes about - what intuitions lead us to think such things might exist. He litters the discussion of these intuition pumps with forewarnings of the paradoxes to come, but they are not, on their own, meant to show qualia are not any of those four things, they're really meant to show how it is that we come to think they are (put in a way which foreshadows later problems).

So

intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine...some neuroscientific apparatus that fits on your head and feeds your visual experience into my brain. With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at.


Does this imply that if I wear the apparatus then I can experience another person's experience? No. Because I wouldn't be seeing (via my eyes) what another person sees via their eyes. That would be double transduction. — Luke

Yes. That's right - hence the idea that qualia can't be something which can be explained by

sensory input-> response

he's laying out how qualia (as conceived) must be in the form of

a)sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response

in order to salvage our sense that the brainstorm machine would not give us the same experience.

Amazingly (I find), the upshot of this intuition pump for Dennett is "that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology". This only supports privacy! Otherwise, intersubjective comparison would be possible. — Luke

Yep, that's right. This is what Dennett is trying to show here, but - crucially - this is only possible under the second model of experience. If we were to adopt the first model it would not be the case. Again, he's showing us how qualia (as conceived) must follow the second model (which he will later demolish) in order to have the properties we ascribe to them.

While I might claim to be the only one who can know how my qualia seem to me, this does not imply that I am the only one who knows the causes of my qualia. The unconscious processes that cause qualia are irrelevant to the properties of one's conscious experience, especially privacy. — Luke

Not irrelevant, no. But Dennett does not talk about the relevance here, he's saving that for later (pumps 7-12). It just needs to be bourne in mind that there must be an origin of qualia which is not part of qualia. Just re-affirming the first path of that second model - qualia are not perception, they must be the result of perception.

If there are qualia, they are even less accessible to our ken than we had thought. Not only are the classical intersubjective comparisons impossible (as the Brainstorm machine shows), but we cannot tell in our own cases whether our qualia have been inverted--at least not by introspection.


All the more support for privacy, then? None of this helps overcome the intuition of pump #3, that "our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors". — Luke

Yep, again intuition pump 3 is not meant to be solved by pumps 4-6, it's part of a sequence of pumps which show how we got here (with paradoxes).

I find the rest of the intuition pumps, including the coffee tasters, are mostly about infallibility, which is not one of the four properties Dennett claims to be arguing against. — Luke

These pumps are not about infallibility. The point of them is to show how fallibility on both paths of the second model I showed above make the concept of qualia useless as defined. Basically, if we cannot tell whether the causes of qualia, or the responses to qualia have been tampered with, we cannot access qualia independently - so what use are they?

For those of us who have not fully accepted/understood this "banishment", where in the article did it occur with regard to privacy? — Luke

It's not so much the independent property of privacy that's been banished. The argument is more like - in order to have the four properties ascribed to qualia they must be conceived of like this, but when conceived of that way, we can neither access them, nor talk about them, nor do we have any neurological evidence for them, so what the point in theorising their existence?

Algorithms don’t cause outputs. — khaled

I never said they did. You asked about whether they provided knowledge of out puts. They do.

It’s not tasting specifically that’s just an example. Dennett said that qualia cannot be a logical formulation, but must be an empirical fact to satisfy its defenders (your quote). But in the intuition pump designed to prove this (8) he did nothing to actually prove it. — khaled

But it’s worth noting that I don’t agree that it was ever intended to be used that way. So his “opposition” here is meaningless. — khaled

This seems a common theme of misunderstanding, also in @Marchesk's view that just 'seeming' can be called qualia

Fortunately, Dennett's argument in this respect can be really simplified -

1. Proponents of qualia need p-zombies to be distinguishable (or wine-tasting machines as used in the article), they cannot have it that p-zombies and wine tasting machines have qualia. So a model of experience which goes

sensory input-> response

has to be ruled out, otherwise the wine tasting machine and p-zombies have no different an experience to use (both take inputs and produce input-appropriate responses

2. So, in order to salvage us fro p-zombiehood or from being replaced by wine tasting machines, the model of experience has to go

a)sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response

3. But Dennett's third set of intuition pumps show that if we make neurological changes to path (a) - from object to qualia, or path (b) - from qualia to response, we cannot tell which change has been made. We cannot examine our 'qualia' independently to tell if they've been changed by a modification to path (a) or if instead we've simply been subject to a modification of path (b).

4. So if we can't access our qualia introspectively - to do psychological or philosophical work with them, and we can find no evidence of them from external investigation (by neuroscience), then why are we persisting with them?

Or to put it even more simply - qualia are a theorised step in a perception-response process which we cannot access independent of either input (perception) or output (response) and for which there is no other evidence - so what are they are they theorised for?

That's the trivial part, and not even part of his argument, Dennett says — Isaac


Then why did he spend the first 5/6 intuition pumps on it? — khaled

In section 2, I will use the first two intuition pumps to focus attention on the traditional notion. It will be the burden of the rest of the paper in to convince you that these two pumps, for all their effectiveness, mislead us and should be discarded. In section 3, the next four intuition pumps create and refine a "paradox" lurking in the tradition. This is not a formal paradox, but only a very powerful argument pitted against some almost irresistibly attractive ideas.

... I mean... he's literally written what the purpose of each group of intuition pumps are for.

What do you mean? The purpose of the paper is clearly NOT to argue that this strong temptation exists. How is what you quoted a premise in his argument? “People usually respond with x” therefore what? — khaled

..therefore...

if absolutely nothing follows from this presumed knowledge--nothing, for instance, that would shed any light on the different psychological claims that might be true of Chase or Sanborn--what is the point of asserting that one has it?

...in the piece I actually quoted.

You probably mean the bit about how no knowledge follows about the psychological states of the two. And to that I reply: So what? That doesn’t make the concept meaningless or useless. — khaled

No. It makes that particular potential use pointless. The paper is a gradual dismantling of the coherence and utility of the concept. If you agree with Dennett here (that the concept doesn't help in this psychological manner) then good, move on to the next paragraph and see if you also agree with his dismissal of the next use. It's like I'm teaching you how to read a paper here.

No knowledge about what happens in your computer follows from knowledge of the algorithm of the program being run. — khaled

How so? If I know the algorithm causes an output to, say, an Ethernet card, then I can predicted a voltage there. How is that not knowledge about what's happening in my computer?

Just as the INTENT when talking about Qualia is NOT to explain what processes cause it. — khaled

No one is suggesting it is. The Chase/Sandborn section is about private access to qualia, not causes.

Dennett proves that (again), we cannot tell if our experiences are changed due to a change in memory or due to a change in the actual Qualia. — khaled

No. He's talking about our responses, not our 'experiences' and he's comparing them to the change in sensory input, not qualia - are we reading the same section here? The point is to further undermine the idea that we have introspective access to qualia. Chase cannot even tell if his qualia have been inverted.

Again, “No theory will be able to tell how Chase’s experience was changed” does NOT in any way disprove “That chase is tasting X is an empirical fact”. And once again, they’re not even related statements. To disprove the first he must find a situation where Chase literally cannot tell whether or not he is tasting coffee and no one else can tell either. — khaled

Why would anyone be trying to prove anything about tasting? Dennett is not trying to prove that people can't taste things, so I can't think of any reason why you'd see the lack of such data as a problem for his argument.

In any of the A-B-C scenarios we've been discussing, they hopefully will admit to A (not be explicitly logically inconsistent), and probably have some B that they hold immune to question, and so will resort to revising C. — Pfhorrest

So how do you, in practice, distinguish such thinking from the critical rationalist scientist who, we've just established, is more than likely to pick C to revise also? Is there some psychological test of one's intention behind choosing C to revise?

Anyone who clings to some particular belief with unreasonable tenacity and will jump through whatever mental hoops necessary to excuse or dismiss any evidence that would otherwise apparently disprove it. — Pfhorrest

How are you determining "unreasonable tenacity"? We've just established revising C is a perfectly reasonable option, so you can't judge it simply on a preference for revising C.

Again, you've failed to provide the asked for examples. What we need to go through is a concrete example of a fideist refusing to revise B in the light of C where it is 'unreasonable' of them to do so, as compared to a critical rationalist deciding not to revise B, but rather revise C and it being 'reasonable' of them to do so. Otherwise you're at risk of arguing against a straw man version of fideism.

Underlining your model here, just as in your meta-ethic, is an unwritten clause that you personally get to be the final arbiter. Here, we can't distinguish between the fideist rejection of C and the rationalist rejection of C without drawing on your personal subjective judgement of what is 'reasonable tenacity' and what isn't.

Thanks for at least trying.

His description of the “properties of qualia” are not how people use them usually. — khaled

How are you assessing how people use them usually, just anecdotally, or do you have some sources?

When people say qualia are private and accessible they mean that they are immediately apparent to them and only them. What he disproved was “I can tell exactly what goes wrong if I wake up one day and sugar tastes different”. That is not a contrapositive statement nor can I tell how it’s even related to the two properties he’s trying to disprove. — khaled

That's the trivial part, and not even part of his argument, Dennett says

I think that everyone writing about qualia today would agree that there are all these possibilities for Chase and Sanborn.

The argument is

a)

There is a strong temptation, I have found, to respond to my claims in this paper more or less as follows: "But after all is said and done, there is still something I know in a special way: I know how it is with me right now." But if absolutely nothing follows from this presumed knowledge--nothing, for instance, that would shed any light on the different psychological claims that might be true of Chase or Sanborn--what is the point of asserting that one has it? Perhaps people just want to reaffirm their sense of proprietorship over their own conscious states.

Then in b) he dismisses the possibility of seeing them as logical constructs

Logical constructs out of judgments must be viewed as akin to theorists' fictions, and the friends of qualia want the existence of a particular quale in any particular case to be an empirical fact in good standing, not a theorist's useful interpretive fiction, else it will not loom as a challenge to functionalism or materialism or third-person, objective science.

Which leaves c) that qualia have an empirical status, they are firstly created by the senses and secondly judged by our aesthetic and rational feeling.

Intuition pumps 8 through to 12 then show the increasing problem with treating qualia this way - namely that there is no way of distinguishing the production of 'qualia' from the response to 'qualia', thus demonstrating that our 'qualia' themselves are not actually accessible at all. At best we could infer them, but if we did so we would be no better (worse in fact) than a third party.

Adding a belief to your set of beliefs is changing that set of beliefs, and as above, if you're epistemically compelled to make that change, that's the same thing as that set of beliefs being falsified. — Pfhorrest

Yet...

's just the negation of fideism, where that in turn is the claim that some beliefs are beyond question, beyond refutation, unable to possibly be shown false or incorrect or wrong. — Pfhorrest

So, what is it you imagine the fideist thinks in our scenario that is different from the critical rationalism you espouse? They believe A. They believe B, they believe C (which logically contradicts B without some additional beliefs - ie contradicts A). What then? Using a real example, what does this mythical fideist then think?

They're not allowed to explain C away using any revisions or further beliefs, because that's just 'critical rationalism' apparently. So they must literally believe two contradictory things with no reason as to why, despite also believing it is impossible for two contradictory beliefs to coexist.

Who are these people? Examples please.

It seems to me that the advocates of qualia have entirely failed to address the criticism in the article. — Banno

Yep.

they do demonstrably exist as something stable and predictable, if defined as "the way things look to us." — Olivier5

Read the text...please, and then quote from it a section where you think Dennett's contradiction of the above fails and explain why. Anything less is pointless, we're not doing a poll of what people reckon, we're doing exegesis and discussing implications of a text.

This thread is supposed to be about Dennett's paper and the implications thereof. His paper sets out in quite some detail, the problems encountered when treating Qualia the way in which they are treated here. He sets out how the way they at first seem has implications on analysis which are undesirable at least, incoherent at worst. There has then been several hundred word posts from @fdrake, and myself providing more detail and, hopefully, some further exposition of those incoherencies.

This conversation is not going to get anywhere if you don't actually address one of those issues. Just re-asserting that

That it seems there are colored images is the what it’s like for humans to see. — Marchesk

...for example, is just starting back at the beginning again. We know that's the traditional view. Dennett goes on to show some problems with that view, you have to address those problems (preferably by quoting from the text) in order to progress here in any meaningful way.

Changing those theories to reinterpret the observation in a way that doesn’t falsify the theory you’re trying to test is still changing what theories you believe in response to observation. — Pfhorrest

It is. Your claim is the ability to falsify them, not change them around.

Belief C hinges on the theories with which the observation is laden. If you reject C, then you have to change those beliefs that would otherwise lead you to conclude that C. — Pfhorrest

No, as I said below, usually all that's needed is additional beliefs - no changes required.

if we’re getting into the realm of possibly rejecting logical entailments then we’re free to be wildly inconsistent and not reject anything; all this is premised on caring about logical consistency — Pfhorrest

Great, glad we agree there, if we can drop ~A as an option, it makes discussing the example simpler.

In any case, you have to reject some beliefs you already had: either throw out B (the obvious first choice), throw out some part of the background beliefs that lead you to believe C (probably a much taller order) — Pfhorrest

a) Why is throwing out C a much taller order? In the vast majority of complex cases, the idea that our observations are incorrect is the most go-to answer to any inconsistencies. We can't even trust our observations with the simplest of matters (see optical illusions), so when it comes to interpreting complex scientific experiments, rejecting C is the number one choice.

b) More importantly, you're doing your old trick of completely ignoring the bits of the counter argument you don't like. I've just explained how there's no need to reject C, one usually adds beliefs to C, such as the example Srap gave (we are seeing these signals on the device, but additionally we believe there's some dirt on the dish, that would explain them). They weren't entertaining the idea that the readings they saw were illusionary, only that, the world contained a reason for them that they did not currently know - an additional belief.

If you have to add additional beliefs to hang on to your belief system — your belief system cannot retain consistency with your experience without adding those other beliefs —then you have falsified the negations of those beliefs. — Pfhorrest

Which is, I believe, what @Janus is trying to explain. You can't just claim falsification by subsuming falsifying the negation of a belief. That's argument by re-definition of the terms. How is falsifying ~D different from verifying D? D and ~D exhaust the set. By your own examples of the difference it's evidently not true that you have falsified ~D by requiring D to shore up your belief systems. E might have done the same job, or F, or G. The fact that D happens to work as an additional belief to make observation C fit with belief B does not in any logical sense imply we have falsified ~D. Having claimed to understand underdetermination, you then proceed to presume it doesn't exist at every new turn of your argument. The additional beliefs which allows C+B is underdetermined by the range of available additional beliefs which would do that job.

You asked for speculations in this post, remember? If you didn't want then, you shouldn't have asked for them.... — Olivier5

No, I clearly didn't. I asked for examples of an answer to the question which were different from Dennett's in such a way as to offer an explanation of why people think Dennett isn't even addressing the question. all you've done is given me the first half (an example answer), you've left off the second half (why is this an example answer, but Dennett's not).

Say we have an unknown quantity - how many red coins there are in a jar. You say 30, others say 35, Dennett comes along and say 0 and everybody tries to claim he's not even addressing the question. 0 is a perfectly reasonable answer to the question. You may not agree with it, but it's a dishonest move to try and avoid counter arguments by claiming it's not even an answer to the question.

I'm not accusing you of doing the above, by the way, my original question was addressed to @schopenhauer1, I'm explaining what I was looking for in an answer (see how easy it is!).

the fact that we have two interconnected brains (left, right) rather than one can be used to solve the "Cartesian theater" paradox. Instead of an infinite regress of theater viewers, you can conceive of just two viewers sharing notes and impressions. — Olivier5

Yes, you could conceive that...

then you could test it (say with severe epilepsy patients who've had the connection between their right and left hemispheres severed)...

if only there were some discipline where literally hundreds of well-trained researchers were looking into this exact type of conjecture and then reporting the results on some kind of global information sharing system...

then we wouldn't have to just sit around making uninformed speculations...

if only...

But other (background) beliefs would compel us to interpret our observations (i.e. laden them with the theory contained in those beliefs) as demonstrating that self-contradictory belief to be so. Since a self-contradictory belief cannot be so — which we already knew, yes — we cannot within contradiction maintain those beliefs according to which our our observations demonstrate the contradictory belief to be true. — Pfhorrest

But they don't "demonstrate the contradictory belief to be true". Observations don't demonstrate any belief to be either true or false, they underdetermine.

Try it in these terms...

Belief A is a belief about logic {X and ~Y, where X implies Y, is inconsistent}.
Belief B is an inductive belief {that X implies Y}
Belief C is a belief in an observation {that I just observed X and also ~Y}.

Resulting from C one could believe ~C, ~B, or ~A. One cannot believe A, B, and C. But we knew this all along. Prior to C, one could believe A and B. After C, one could believe A and B. C hasn't changed anything

But that still leaves you with an observation that your background beliefs plus the theory under consideration together say should be impossible — logically impossibly, in conjunction with all those beliefs. All those beliefs and the thing they would have you say you observed cannot all be true at once...

...Either way, the observation of something your beliefs say should be logically impossible compels the revision of some beliefs or others to avoiding having to conclude that you observed something logically impossible. — Pfhorrest

Not with sufficient additional beliefs about C, and additional beliefs don't falsify anything.

Going from believing A+B to believing A+B+C+D hasn't falsified A, B, C, or D has it?

Actual falsification that Popper et al supported is not the dogmatic falsificationism that Quine et al opposed. — Pfhorrest

Well, that's a debated issue, but in neither Quine's view nor Lakatos's is it described as merely eliminating the logically inconsistent. It is about the role of observation, in whatever interpretation.

We knew prior to the testing that we could not hold beliefs that would result in a contradiction. We did not know prior to the testing that our beliefs would result in a contradiction.

According to the beliefs we held before, what we seem to have observed should not have been logically possible, and therefore should not have been observed. Yet we seem to have observed it anyway. Therefore we must revise the theories ladening those observations, so that what we observed is not interpreted as being that logical impossibility. — Pfhorrest

You're ignoring the argument. It's pointless just repeating the same assertion without addressing the issue. You said...

some beliefs are about the relations between other beliefs. If C = "A implies B", then you can rule out the possibility of belief D = "A and ~B and C". You still don't know whether C, and if C, whether A or ~B, but you know for sure that ~D. — Pfhorrest

So the only thing you are able to rule out here is belief D that "A and ~B, where A implies B". No observation rules this belief out. It is ruled out by logic, it doesn't require any observation at all. So "we did not know prior to the testing that our beliefs would result in a contradiction" is false in respect of the beliefs you're claiming to be able to rule out "beliefs about beliefs".

you think it is not possible to show any opinions to be incorrect, what exactly are you trying to do by arguing against mine? — Pfhorrest

Show your opinion to be less pragmatic, less honest, less useful... Show other people that there are reasonable alternatives...Undermine the rhetorical power such views have... There's all sorts of reasons to argue against an opinion other than the expectation that it can be proven wring by some mathematical algorithm.

you did the dance, that that should cause it to rain, but that it didn't rain. Yet you can't conclude all of those things at once. So you have to change something about that complete network of beliefs (the theories ladening your observations) to allow you to interpret your experiences in a way that doesn't imply that contradiction. — Pfhorrest

Yep. A fact which...

A) is not what falsification is about
B) we knew was true no less prior to the 'testing' than we did after it. This fact was completely unaffected by the actual testing of the theory
C) helps us not one iota to sort our beliefs because the only one we must reject is that we can believe contradictory things concurrently, a belief which we never had in the first place.

Because there is no consensus in any related field for an explanation of consciousness. — Marchesk

There's no consensus on the vast majority of open questions in psychology. Why is the definition of consciousness special here. Notwithstanding, we're not here talking about a lack of consensus about a solution, we're talking about claims that whole fields of enquiry are not even addressing the question.

No it isn't. That's just an assertion that consciousness is somehow identical to certain functions. If we knew that to be true, then there would be no mystery as to what else is conscious. If it performed those functions, whether it was a bat nervous system, a simulation, a robot or a Chinese Brain, it would all be conscious, end of story. — Marchesk

Yes. You're using the fact that people hold consciousness to be something deeply mysterious as an argument that consciousness is deeply mysterious. It's circular. How can you demonstrate consciousness is not identical to certain functions (and so we can indeed tell what's conscious and what isn't) without calling on the fact that people don't believe it to be so?

Because it doesn't explain how it is that we're conscious. — Marchesk

Again, it does for me and it matches the criteria for a satisfactory explaination of 'how' in all other cases I can think of. You keep just saying it doesn't explain how without addressing my examples of cases where such types of explanation are considered to have exactly answered the question 'how'.

Why do functions result in an experience at all? — Marchesk

Now you're changing the question to 'why'. Again, ask why we have noses and developmental or evolutionary answers are considered completely satisfactory, so the answer to your question is...we benefit from a narrative form of combining sensory information which identifies our body as the subject of such sensation because we can plan and respond better to changing opportunities in our environment which gives us a competetive advantage in our niche.

I'm not asking if you agree with that answer (I'm not even sure I do) I'm asking why it isn't even addressing the question, as @schopenhauer1 claims.

an important thing is that some beliefs are about the relations between other beliefs. If C = "A implies B", then you can rule out the possibility of belief D = "A and ~B and C". You still don't know whether C, and if C, whether A or ~B, but you know for sure that ~D. — Pfhorrest

Firstly, that's not falsification. Falsification is about scientific theories, not logic. All you've done there is assert the laws of logic. If what you want to say is that one can hold any belief as justified so long as it doesn't contradict the laws of logic, then I don't think you'll have a single opposition. as I said above it's trivially true. The point a bout the laws of logic is that we didn't create them out of thin air and then teach them to everyone. they're like the law of gravity, things always used to fall toward the earth, we didn't force them to by the new law. People think in ways broadly construed by the laws of logic, which we then codified to help us avoid a few complex mistakes.

Secondly - mistakes. As I mentioned before (which you ignored) comparing the logical coherence in this way between even as few as ten networked beliefs will require you to carry out 3,6368,800 tests. Given that the types of belief you're talking about are very fine grained here, we'd bee needing to compare several thousand interconnected ones. We all know that we shouldn't hold two contradictory beliefs. The challenge is finding a pragmatic way to avoid it. Testing each one for logical coherence with each other one and discarding only the belief that two logically incoherent beliefs can be held simultaneously, is an impractically obtuse way of doing it. Or as Srap put it

since you are putting an essentially undefined set of beliefs on the table, you have far too many options for disconfirmation. — Srap Tasmaner

In any of those cases, you're also going to have to rearrange the rest of your beliefs somehow or another to accommodate whichever of those you chose to revise. There's going to be many, many ways you could revise the rest of your beliefs to accommodate any of those. But somehow or another, you've got to change something, on pain of inconsistency, since you can't consistently believe that dancing makes it rain, you danced, and it didn't rain. — Pfhorrest

Nobody believes that anyway. There's been no result gained from your experience of dancing. It was already that case that you couldn't believe these three things simultaneously. They merely exhaust the set of all possibilities, we can see that without dancing. You're implying the processes of falsification (testing one's beliefs) but reverting to simple logical laws when that process fails to yield anything useful. The actual testing of the theory "doing a certain dance causes it to rain" has no effect whatsoever on the conclusion you claim that test yields "you can't consistently believe that dancing makes it rain, you danced, and it didn't rain" We knew that by the laws of logic before we did the test.

You can always save some atomic proposition by sacrificing others instead, but every time something seems to happen contrary to what your complete system of belief says should happen, you've got to make some change or another to your complete system of belief, — Pfhorrest

No you absolutely don't I've just demonstrated that with your own example. the required change to you system of beliefs is not impacted one iota by the "something happening contrary to that system". All you're saying in your own example above is that you cannot have a logically inconsistent belief system. We knew that before anything happened.

You mean to tell me you didn't notice that adding sugar changed your internal states in a desirable way until you learned about neural networks and predictive models? Did adding sugar have zero effect on your internal states before that? — Luke

I really don't understand what this question has to do with the answer I gave you. You asked me why people add sugar, I gave you an (admittedly behaviourist) answer I could have answered in neurological terms, evolutionary terms, endocrinological terms... What perspective did you want the answer from?

I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. The way we interface with and interact with our environment is way more complicated than that. — Srap Tasmaner

Exactly. I'm trying to explain the difference between there being 'a taste of tea' and the process of tasting tea. We're not going to make any progress if you don't engage with that distinction - do you understand it, do you find it implausible (if so, why) do you find it plausible but it doesn't answer your concerns (again, if so, why)? Your incredulity that I could think this way is noted. It's not, in itself, an argument. If you think me an idiot, then there's little point in continuing a discussion, If you don't then there's obviously something there to be unravelled isn't there, so that might be an interesting thing to do, no?

As a general principle - if you really think what I'm saying is the equivalent of me saying there's purple jellyfish on the moon, then why engage at all, I'm obviously a lunatic? If not, then it doesn't help to just restate your incredulity.

Can you read this? Can you see this writing? If so, does it appear to have any colour? — Luke

It appears to be black. As I just said to Marchesk, there's little point in arguing against a essay suggesting our intuitions are incoherent by just referring back to our intuitions. We know our intuitions are often that objects have sensory properties (this writing is black). Dennet's just written an essay showing how those intuitions don't hold up to analysis, they're inconsistent in certain cases which shows them to be at the very least in need of modification. What we know about how the brain works supports Dennet's view. It's no good re-telling us that we do indeed have intuitions that objects have sensory properties, that's where the whole inquiry begins, we move on from there to explore some of the problems with that intuition.

So you outright deny that we have conscious experiences. How does that work for you? You tell yourself it's only seems like there is a taste of tea when you sip? — Marchesk

Yes. It's not that hard to catch oneself storytelling, in fact it's quite a common therapeutic technique to do so. That's why I think you really need to engage with the text here, Dennet's arguments are doing exactly that and it's pointless me repeating them here. I assume you've read them, so apart from the overall "Nah!" that is obvious we're not going to make any more progress until you pick up on one of them and say exactly why it doesn't work for you.

There really does only seem to be a taste of tea, Dennet takes us through step by step how what we'd like to think is the taste of tea is not what it seems. I've added a bit of gloss from modern cognitive psychology, but, as I said right at the beginning, Dennet's argument is that our intuitions are mistaken, so it's pointless responding to that with reference to those same intuitions.

Indeed, but yet we have an experience of tasting the tea. That's the hard problem. — Marchesk

We don't. That's the easy solution.

If we had a science of consciousness, we would would be able to know what was conscious. — Marchesk

No, my point was that if I claim we do already have a science of consciousness, and as such we already do know what's conscious, you'll still claim we don't. This just seems circular to me. A thing is conscious if it can report in some way (even if only internally) on its own processing. If a robot can do that, then it's conscious. Hard problem solved? If not, why not?

Dennett isn't a neuroscience, and his multiple drafts doesn't explain sensations. It just suggests how various activity in the brain becomes the center of attention. — Marchesk

Again, how is that not an explanation? It's really unfair to keep dismissing everyone's efforts without specifying what it is you want from them.

It doesn't tell me how there is a color sensation. Instead, it explains how my brain performs certain functions related to discriminating color. — Marchesk

That is 'how'. As I showed with my examples of other 'how' questions, that's exactly the sort of thing which counts as an answer to 'how'. Even so, you're still just repeating the dismissal without specifying a reason. If "explain[ing] how my brain performs certain functions related to discriminating color" isn't an answer for you to "how there is a color sensation", then it seems entirely reasonable to ask you for an account of what's missing.

My entry:

... because of the mise en abyme allowed by our two brains talking to one another. — Olivier5

...and that's an answer. Where '...because of the connectedness of many neurons' isn't, because...

How the brain creates experiences of colors, smells, feels, etc. So far, there are only correlations, but not an actual explanation. Such and such neural activity does some sort of discrimination of incoming electrical impulses from eyes and is integrated with other brain activity to create a conscious awareness of a red cup. But it would have to show how that happens, and not just claim it does (which would be a correlation with observed brain activity). — Marchesk

This just repeats the question. If, say, I explain the neuroscience of colour recognition, I'm trying to get at the sense in which that's not answering 'how?' for you. It's exactly answering 'how' for me.

If I asked 'how does a car work?' an account of its components and their effect on each other is exactly what I'm after. If I ask 'how come that cup is on the table?' an account of the events leading up to its being there suffices. If I ask 'why do humans have noses?' an account of the evolutionary or developmental process is fine. When we ask 'how does the brain create experiences?' an account of neither the mechanisms, nor the components, nor their interactions, nor their development suffices for you. Something is missing which doesn't seem required in any other question about 'how'. I'm trying to understand what that missing thing is.

It's kind of unfair to ask what the explanation would look like since nobody knows yet. — Marchesk

I don't think so. If one is going to dismiss Dennet's hard work as missing the target, I think it's fair to ask for an account of what the target is.

if it did, then the entry in the journal of philosophy could then go on to say how we could use this to understand bat sonar consciousness and create consciousness in robots. — Marchesk

But this is circular. Maybe we have created consciousness in robots "no, they're just p-zombies", how do we know what they've got isn't consciousness?

But that objective understanding has no sensations of color, etc. — Marchesk

How could an understanding of the world have sensations? If this is your target then its not the 'hard' problem its the downright ridiculous problem.

What internal states? How do you sense that it is desirable? How do you know that it will be again? — Luke

Those are both massive questions. Short answer neural networks and predictive models. Perhaps if you could explain the relevance I could be.more specific, as it is you've just asked me for a précis of the whole of cognitive psychology.

I don't want to call your entire mental state the taste of tea. I just want to know whether you can taste tea. It strikes me as abnormal that you can't. — Luke

I can't tell if you don't understand the distinction I made earlier or if you disagree with it because you haven't referenced it at all here despite repeating the notion to which it was an answer. I'll say again - there's a difference between tasting tea [the process] and the taste of tea [the ontological commitment]. I can taste tea. I don't believe there is a thing which answers to 'the taste of tea'. Two different ideas.