The point about first-person experience is that it is not a thing. — Wayfarer

And yet this is the danger of talk of qualia.

being' is a verb — Wayfarer

Well, yes, a gerund, that's the point... a veritable reification.

Being conscious is something we do, rather than a property; similarly, seeing red is something we do.

If you think of being conscious as an activity, it becomes problematic to ask what it's intrinsic properties are. What are the intrinsic qualitative properties of walking or breathing? Breathing and walking are activities or processes, not entities that have properties in the usual sense. So to ask what their “intrinsic qualitative properties” are risks a category error — as if you were treating walking like a chair, or breathing like a pebble. Properties are generally ascribed to things, and more specifically to substances or states, not to doings.

The responses here are credulous rather than critical.

Nothing here says that we do not have experiences.

From the Latin qualis, roughly "what kind?" It apparently goes back to Aristotle, in a different use:

When Aristotle was translated into Latin by the medievals, the values or nodes in the pyramidical structure that are the ingredients of an essence were called ‘qualia’ — Chris Barnham

The very entomology asks what kind of thing an experience is, and so presumes the finite qualitative nature which we might categorise or identify, and which I am questioning.

As always folk claim Pierce as a precedent, but Lewis appears to be the main precursor, although he used it for properties of sense-data themselves, not properties of experiences. It's just an extension of the very old sense-datum muddle, or an attempt to introduce phenomenological analysis into analytic discourse.

The term imports metaphysical commitments about the structure of experience that should be questioned, not assumed.

Some stuff from the thread Nothing to do with Dennett's , and referring to Quining Qualia

Intuition pump #1: watching you eat cauliflower.
There is a way this cauliflower tastes to you right now. Well, no. the taste changes even as you eat it, even as the texture changes as you chew.

Intuition pump #2: the wine-tasting machine.
As a tool for convincing those who disagree, this strikes me as singularly useless. Dennett will say there is nothing missing from the machine description; advocates of qualia will say that there is...

Except that they cannot say what it is that is missing; qualia are after all ineffable. But this never stops their advocates from talking about them...

Intuition pump #3: the inverted spectrum.
Undergrad speculation.

Intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine. Qualia gain no traction here, either.

Intuition pump #5: the neurosurgical prank. Back to Wittgenstein: how could you tell that your qualia had been inverted, so that what was once blue is now red, as opposed to say, your memory had changed, so what you always saw as red you now recall, erroneously, previously seeing as blue? Intuition pump #6: alternative neurosurgery

Intuition pump #7: Chase and Sanborn. They have the same decreased liking for the coffee they taste; but is it the coffee that is faulty, or is it the capacity to taste that has changes? The difference between this example and 4-6 is the removal of memory as a participant.

Whence the boundary of the white triangle? In the perception or in the judgement?

Hence, intuition pump #8: the gradual post-operative recovery; is the recovery in the quality of the qualia or in the judgement that ensues? And if you cannot tell, then what is the point of introducing qualia?

Intuition pump #9: the experienced beer drinker. This is similar to 7 & 8 in playing on the supposed difference between the qualia and the judgement of that qualia. What is added is a seeming rejection of a spit between the taste of the beer and the appreciation of the beer...

Intuition pump #10: the world-wide eugenics experiment. How to make sense of the qualia of secondary properties... Someone who says phenol-thio-urea is tasteless is not wrong.

Intuition pump #11: the cauliflower cure. The cauliflower tastes exactly the same, but is now delicious...

Intuition pump #12: visual field inversion created by wearing inverting spectacles. The point here seems to be that even if there were qualia, they need not count as intrinsic to consciousness. Needs more consideration.

Intuition pump #13: the osprey cry. There's danger here of following Kripke rather than Wittgenstein. However the point must stand, that recognising the rule one is following consists at least in part in being able to carry on with the rule; but nothing in a single instance allows for this. Hence, if a qual (singular of qualia) cannot by its very nature recur, there can be no grounds for claiming that some rule has been followed; if that be so, there can be no basis for differentiating a qual; hence, no qual and no qualia.

intuition pump #14: the Jello box. This seems to be about the information content of the notion of qualia; if I've understood it aright, one side of the Jello box are the ineffable qualia, the side other, corresponding exactly, the effable, public content of our everyday discourse. But if the content are identical, what is pointed at by the notion of the qualia of say the taste of coffee that is not also pointed at by the usual conversation about the taste of coffee? What additional information is to be found in qualia?

And intuition pump #15: the guitar string. Arguably we have here three qualia; the first open E, the harmonic, and the second open E. Is the point here that as the ineffable becomes the subject of discussion, the qualia is less ineffable...?

Here's my question for those who would have us talk of qualia: what is added to the conversation by their introduction? If a qual is the taste of milk here, now, why not just talk of the taste of milk here, now?

The pretence that Qualia are a given is misguided.

This definition is used in academic philosophy, especially in A-level and university-level discussions of consciousness and the mind — Ulthien

Sure - it's questioned therein. See for example the Stanford article, were four differing uses are listed, each with variations and qualifications. It is not universally accepted that the term makes sense. Yours is an appeal to authority.

The point is they are qualities of experience and therefore precisely what eludes objective description. — Wayfarer

You drop this sentence as if it was clear what a "quality of experience" is - and indeed, if it is to serve as a way of understanding consciousness, as if it were clearer than "consciousness".

Here's a definition stolen from Google: consciousness refers to a person's awareness of themselves and their environment, encompassing wakefulness, alertness, and the ability to respond to stimuli.

How is "qualities of experience" clearer than that?

What, in the best of your ability, are whoever you're referencing "confused" about. — Outlander

Qualia.

Do they like coffee, as their behaviour indicate, or do the really dislike coffee, despite their behaviour?

It's a clear comparative, not dependent ton some absolute notion of real...

Puzzled.

I understand you are asking something, but it is not at all clear to me, what.

But what else should we substitute? — J

The issue is more, what is it that is being named by "qualia"?

The idea was that philosophers define consciousness in terms of qualia. The problem is that qualia are no more clearly defined than is consciousness, and so are not all that helpful.

See the present thread for samples of the confusion they incur.

The experienced sensation of it. — Wayfarer

The red in the red light. Yep. We already have a language for that.

And yep, subjective is not objective. But floops are none of them flops, and that does not tell us what floops and flops are. So saying consciousness consists entirely of floops gets us nowhere.

The supposition is that there is a "quality of experience" that we talk about, and that at the same time there is "no ‘third party’, publicly available instance" of that "quality of experience" about which to talk.

How's that?

It admits to an internal referent (Hanover hates coffee), — Hanover

It admits an internal referent? "Hanover's hate of coffee"? No, it doesn't. Very much no.

My liking coffee is in fact mental furniture because it's either there or its not in whatever way things are stored in my brain. — Hanover

The bit where we should keep the physical substrate seperate from the intention. Here, what is the "it"? Some state of your neurones or your intent drink a coffee? It seems a bit early to say they are the very same. None of which says that you do not like coffee, nor that "Hanover likes coffee" does not have a truth value. Language set ontology up; they are inseparable.

Last night I saw upon the stair,
a little qual that wasn't there...

the third prong of Davidson's triangulation roots meaning in truth — Hanover

We should get this sorted. The three prongs are the speaker, the world and the interpreter. If the interpreter has a sentence S that is true If and only if the speaker believes that P, the S gives the meaning of P. The interpreters place is in systematically working out what S is, using the principle of charity and some rigorous maths. So what you said here is not quite right.

Suitably caricatured, Wittgenstein might say that your liking coffee just is your buying it every day and talking about it in glowing terms. Davidson, that "Hanover likes coffee" is true if and only if Hanover likes coffee, hence "Hanover likes coffee" just means that you like coffee.

Neither much make use of your intent. Neither relies on obtuse metaphysics or ontology.

You say you're he's not sure Davidson commits (as Wittgenstein does) to the belief that the actual emotive state of liking coffee (or feeling pain) is not real and is not a referent. But Wittgenstein does no such thing. He says it's not a mental object, not that it is not real. Indeed, he held such things to be of the utmost import.

There's a big difference in our understandings of both Wittgenstein and Davidson that we should address if we are to proceed.

Interesting.

If "qualia" is a collective noun for "red", "loud" and so on, then I've no great problem with it. That seems ot be how it is used in the research named in the OP.

If it is a name for an otherwise private sensation, then I can't see how to make sense of of it.

That is how it is used by some philosophers.


In so far as the title goes, if the claim is that we have managed to measure red and loud, so what. If the claim is that we have managed to measure the ineffable, there are issues to be considered.

Hu?

Sorry, I can't make out what you and are doing.

I've been setting out out for years. Not doing it all again. Read my posts if you are that interested.

You really should find out about Chalmers.

That's how some (Chalmers?) set out the issue.

Are they correct?

I don't know.

Good post.

I baulk earlier in the paper, at

In my colleague Thomas Nagel’s phrase, a being is conscious (or has subjective experience) if
there’s something it’s like to be that being. Nagel wrote a famous article whose title asked “What
is it like to be a bat?”1 It’s hard to know exactly what a bat’s subjective experience is like when
it’s using sonar to get around, but most of us believe there is something it’s like to be a bat. It is
conscious. It has subjective experience.

I'm not sire this framing works.

It might just be that I am hung up on the thing in something. But is there something it is like to be a bat?

Compare: What is it like to be in love? Well, it's not any one thing. In a very real sense there is not a thing it is like to be in love.

I hope it's clear how this relates directly to my hesitancy concerning qualia.

I can't make much at all of that. Sorry.

I'm not going to countenance such claims. So we won't progress here on that basis.

Cheers.

We already know that brains EM field that we measure as EEG is the NCC — Ulthien

No, we don't.

If qualia are private experiences, we can still talk about them. — AmadeusD

Sure, Then they are 'just what we ordinarily talk about using words like "red" and "loud".'

But there is more going on on here.

I'm seeing something that you don't — Wayfarer

Seems so. But is it an hallucination?

Maybe. And?

Your behaviour is dependent on their behaviour. Presumably. That's why you ask, isn't it?

...whatever the pain is (kind of a weird question) — frank

Isn't it? Point is, you do not need an answer to "what pain is" in order to do whatever it is you do. You just need the comparison to indifference. I hope that you are seeking to return the folk you are talking to, to that state of indifference, but then I don't know what your job is... :worry:

Why, thank you.

Your drunk is not wrong. If the keys are outside the light, he has fuck all chance of finding them, then if he must search, he is in the right place.

I've pointed out a few times that you keep searching when you probably ought stop... :wink:

See the post just above this.

The discussion of relative levels of pain is what decides your next actions. The doing is the thing.

Incidentally, the pain stuff fits well with Ramsey's account, beginning at a point of indifference - neither pain nor pleasure - and looking to how the present state differs from that point, and what is to be done to resort equilibrium.

But that point of indifference is not a mental object, nor is the pain.

The issue left hanging is how to sort out the inconsistency in our coffee drinker. We want ot know, do they really dislike coffee?

But that is to presume to much. Life is complex and dirty, and that while coherence might be a worthy goal, it is not always possible. Messiness is a feature, not a bug - a very Wittgensteinian point. There need be no "fact of the matter", but rather a series of interactions in which our coffee drinker makes decisions amidst conflicting normative demands for social harmony and good taste. They behave as if they like coffee for the sake of social harmony, which is a consistent position.

The question "do they really dislike coffee?" presupposes there's some determinate inner state that could settle the matter, which is precisely the picture Wittgenstein is rejecting.

So on to the other horn. It's seeing the only alternative as to

deny entirely this talk of consciousness and declare it ontologically non-existent and say language is all there is. — Hanover

Rejecting intentional attitudes as private objects does not entail rejecting intentional attitudes altogether. It is instead to reconceptualise them. Not being objects, they are not how things are in a hidden noumenal world, but normative constraints on how we want things to be. They are not objects we detect, but commitments we recognise and undertake.

All that stuff I've written elsewhere about direction of fit, goes here.

So onward. Intentional attitudes.

Two things to think about. The first is Wittgenstein's observation:

Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you. — PI Page 207

Supose we come across someone who behaves as if they like coffee. They drink coffee, make it for themselves and others, and so on. From their behaviour we infer that they do indeed like coffee. But suppose that our inference is mistaken, that they actually are indifferent or even dislike coffee, but go along with a pretence, perhaps for social reasons, in order to "fit in", or whatever.

Is there dislike for coffee a private object in the sense Wittgenstein discusses?

They now say "I've always disliked coffee - my behaviour was all pretence". Wittgenstein might reply "But how could you know that? Perhaps you are misremembering. Perhaps yesterday you liked coffee - you apparently drank it with gusto - but now your recollection is mistaken."

Now I want to be clear as to the point of this argument. It's not that the misremembering has indeed occurred, but that it might occur - the point is the fragility of the belief that they do not like coffee. Since there is no public evidence that supports the contention, it has no grounding, no way to be confident that the person does or does not like coffee. It's ephemeral, changeable... and indeed, it seems wrong to count it as a thing at all.

What is being rejected here is a picture of mind as a set of objects - mental furniture, as "...meanings that are generated from noumenal inner states", that our feelings, beliefs, desires and so on are things in our mind to which our language points.

This is a continuation of the rejection of the meaning of a word as the thing to which it refers, found in the first few pages of PI. Our beliefs are not found in some metal object, but in what we say and do. An intentional state is not a mental thing that grounds our actions, but a bit of language that keeps what we do consistent.

This view aligns with Wittgenstein’s critique of private language, with Davidson’s rejection of inner “causes” for beliefs in favour of interpretation, and with Ryle’s dismissal of the "ghost in the machine" and the myth of inner objects.

And it constitutes a rejection of the first horn of 's dilemma, the

...swirl of language we see take place that is caused by the noumenal, but the best we can say is that the noumenal is there but talking about (it) doesn't help us — Hanover

What is rejected is this two-level picture, in which the visible behaviour and language is caused by a hidden noumenal world. Meaning is not hiding behind our language but consists in what we do with our words.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I think I am rejecting both horns of the dilemma you set.

First, let's settle an ambiguity, one that might explain 's response. The use of "internal" might be understood as referring to the physical state of the brain or of the neural net in an LLM - the physical substrate on which the supposed program of consciousness runs. But I don't think that is what Hanover and I are talking about. We are interested in that we might better call the intentional state, the beliefs and desires and so on that supposedly exist and yet are not directly accessible to others.

There are two issues here, the relation between the physical substrate and the intentional state, which I'd like to set aside for a bit, and the relation between the intentional state and our behaviour, which is the topic Davidson and Wittgenstein give us so much to think about.

This?

https://philpapers.org/archive/CHACAL-3.pdf

It basically says watch.

A fine mind, has ChatGPT; such a good judge of intellectual virtue.

I either did not see this reply, or I left it intending to come back to it. My apologies.

Or perhaps I thought I had addressed it in the "On Certainty" thread, . I don't recall.

But I had reason to revisit Bayesian analysis as a stand-in for belief recently while reading Davidson's last book, such that I am re-thinking my response to the OP. Davidson makes use of Ramsey's account gives us a way of understanding what a belief and preference amount to, using just behaviour.

But that's different to saying that a belief just is a neural structure.

That unit is prior to multitude isn't really about the Holy Trinity, it's just relevant to speaking about the topic. Unlike Bob, Aquinas does not think the Trinity can be known through natural reason, only that God exists. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, Bob deviates from the True Path... and we agree he can't deduce the Trinity within Natural Philosophy. Cool.

I'm not relying on the Trinity being deducible. I'm taking it as it is presented, in the Shield of Trinity, and working out the consequences. And in that Shield transitivity is denied, which has the consequence of modal collapse.

Separately...

But that a fire is hot, heats, and illuminates, does not require three distinct flames or three distinct composite parts of a flame. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Analogical predication. Interesting, since it was the basis of logic in Mohism. The idea is that heat and light are caused by flame, but that the flame remains one. But god's will and his knowledge are not caused by god, not results of, so much as inseparable from, his very nature.

The moment you begin to say something like, “God knows Himself as good, and so wills Himself as good, and hence his will is Love” you relying on a sequence of conceptual moves that require some functional or modal distinction within God. What has the appearance of having a sound logical structure is no more than a series of analogical or poetic moves.

In the end, what appears to be metaphysical precision turns out to be a kind of rhetoric —using philosophical forms to say things that only make sense if you don’t push them too hard, and which are accepted not on their own merit, but for the completely different grounds of revelation and faith. Hence the criticism offered earlier in this thread, that the conclusions of the reasoning are already a given, and the reasoning is just huff and fluff.

It's more honest, to my eye, to say that such things are a mystery than to pretend they are the necessary product of philosophical analysis.


And...

article 9 — Count Timothy von Icarus

...does not address the particular objection I raised.

If he thinks it, he wills it, if he wills it, it is so. — Banno

Either the Trinity is a mystery, and logic doesn't apply, or it's logical, and a contradiction.

Again, understanding this in terms of substitution drops all the huff and fluff.

If we say that the Father and the Son are “the same” in virtue of sharing in transcendental unity, that may avoid numerical identity — but then we are no longer using “same” in any logically tractable way. Substitution still fails. The contradiction arose precisely because we were trying to preserve intelligible substitution, transitivity, and logical identity while claiming that the Father is not the Son, &c.

The cost is, you can no longer track sameness with logic.

God’s knowing and willing are not separate faculties or processes but identical in the unity of divine being. — Wayfarer

Perhaps.

He still can't think about what it would be like if you had not replied to me. If he thinks it, he wills it, if he wills it, it is so.

God results in modal collapse. Either he is a contradiction or a divine mystery.

, , if your aim is to show that the Trinity is a Devine Mystery, your have succeeded.

But why the recourse to logic? Why not just stick with "It's not supposed to make sense"?

Why all the contrivance?

In this case, “is” doesn’t mean numerical identity (as in "Clark Kent is Superman") but rather participation in a common essence. — Wayfarer

Well, that's problematic in itself... (See what I did there?)

To say that they are not "numerically identical" is to say that substitution fails.

If transitivity is denied, then the Son cannot be substituted for the Sprit, and hence they must be different.

But they are the same.

Contradiction.

SO back to the point, that the notion fo the trinity is incoherent.

Here's maybe an odd little nugget that might clarify the problem with such Thomistic reasoning. I've already mentioned this problem, but it might be helpful to expound and expand it.

6. Since He is absolutely simple, His willing and thinking are identical.

So we should be able to substitute his will for his thinking.

So what god wills, god thinks, and what god thinks, god wills. Hence he cannot think what he does not will, nor will what he does not think.

So he cannot think about what might have been the case had I not written this paragraph. To think about it would have been to will it, and hence to make it so.

Perhaps then Thomism commits to Lewis' counterfactuals - that every possibility is an actuality. That would be an odd result.