Eliminating Qualia

[WAB]

As a general point, the debate with "quiners" is bound to revolve around what proponents of the existence of qualia say about them in terms of their putative connection to ordinary or scientific notions such as memory, perception, neurons, etc. That can only be irrelevant to the issue of whether qualia exist or not, just as showing that a theory about the world is flawed is no argument that the world doesn't exist. I know my qualia by acquaintance. No amount of deliberation among rational people could possibly convince me I'm wrong about that.

EB

- bolded the best bits.

Very well put.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Time for a very clumsy visual analogy, made in passing.

View attachment 15601

There is literally no white triangle in that image, but there is the perception/sensation that there is.

Maybe qualia are a bit like that.

I did say it was very clumsy, and only an analogy, and only a visual one, and only made in passing.

Only to suggest that things which we are convinced are there might not actually be. Agreeing in principle if you like that qualia might be an illusion, albeit of a different sort.

ps as far as I understand it, Dennett was not making this point when including this image in his 1988 paper and there may be little point in analysing the illusion in the image.

That's a simple example but that's better to talk about qualia.

One thing here for example: there's no white triangle but there's also no other triangle at all. Just as there are not black disks or circles.

Qualia are too many to identify, often too subtle to describe (unlike for triangles, there's just no word for them), and even for the more straightforward ones, like colours and geometrical shapes, the vocabulary is always somewhat misleading.

Qualia are things you experience on the moment. Memories of a quale you experienced yesterday is not the quale itself and no reliable indication of what the quale was, even though there is necessarily a quale of the memory (if you are thinking about it). It's just a different quale. Still, we'll also have a quale as to whether some other quale we're having now is "normal". I would call that the quale of an impression. Assuming you pay attention to it.

I'm going to have carottes tonight.
EB

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

You're being too literal.

Memories are not "fictions we tell ourselves".

We do not create our memories.

There is a whole host of case studies disproving such an assertion.

We merely access them.

So you’re of the opinion that the brain is like a hard drive or something?

And memories do degrade and change.

“Change”? What would change them? And “degrade” once again implies that they are somehow stored in a medium; i.e., that they are somehow discrete, such that you could locate them and remove them or the like.

But that is not a fiction we tell ourselves.

Again, you are being too literal. Consider it more Roman à clef.

They are something, especially if they are old, to be slightly skeptical of.

An understatement from an untermensch.

You claim you experience "red" differently than I.

No I don't.

I would say it could be.

And, by the same token, it could not be. The point is, there is no way to tell. I believe that is at the heart of Dennett’s argument, but I could be wrong.

 

[ruby sparks]

I am not even clear what exactly Dennett is claiming.

Early on he says: "To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant."

('or importance' could be a bit of a let-out, of course).

And as if to clarify, only a paragraph or two later he says:

"Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do.........[snip].....My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special."

It looks to me that he is not doing all that much actual elimination. Except perhaps of a term, a word.

And his last line, ("So contrary to what seems obvious at first blush, there simply are no qualia at all") may need to be seen in that light.

This is where I get confused as to whether what is called 'retentive' elimination isn't just reduction.

 

[untermensche]

There is a whole host of case studies disproving such an assertion.

Nobody is creating "memories". They are creating stories and calling them "memories".

And, by the same token, it could not be.

That would just be a byproduct of a shared heritage.

The point is, there is no way to tell.

Big woop!

Whether you or I experience the same "red" has nothing to do with whether the experience of "red" has qualities associated with it.

Ultimately every human experiences different qualities to all kinds of things. Things like flavor are pretty obvious.

 

[WAB]

Nobody is creating "memories". They are creating stories and calling them "memories".



That would just be a byproduct of a shared heritage.

The point is, there is no way to tell.

Big woop!

Whether you or I experience the same "red" has nothing to do with whether the experience of "red" has qualities associated with it.

Ultimately every human experiences different qualities to all kinds of things. Things like flavor are pretty obvious.

Not to mention the vastly various ways music (periodic vibrations) affects people. Some people can distinguish major and minor by ear, without much instruction, while others are tone-deaf. Some people can sing along to a harmony without causing dissonance, while others simply can't.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I think this section is the key to Dennett’s argument:

The infallibilist line on qualia treats them as properties of one's experience one cannot in principle misdiscover, and this is a mysterious doctrine (at least as mysterious as papal infallibility) unless we shift the emphasis a little and treat qualia as logical constructs out of subjects' qualia-judgments: a subject's experience has the quale F if and only if the subject judges his experience to have quale F. We can then treat such judgings as constitutive acts, in effect, bringing the quale into existence by the same sort of license as novelists have to determine the hair color of their characters by fiat. We do not ask how Dostoevski knows that Raskolnikov's hair is light brown.

There is a limited use for such interpretations of subjects' protocols, I have argued (Dennett 1978a; 1979, esp., pp.109-110; 1982), but they will not help the defenders of qualia here. 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.

It seems easy enough, then, to dream up empirical tests that would tend to confirm Chase and Sanborn's different tales, but if passing such tests could support their authority (that is to say, their reliability), failing the tests would have to undermine it. The price you pay for the possibility of empirically confirming your assertions is the outside chance of being discredited. The friends of qualia are prepared, today, to pay that price, but perhaps only because they haven't reckoned how the bargain they have struck will subvert the concept they want to defend.

I don't see any point in there that would be relevant to the question of the existence of qualia. All I see is Dennett addressing what appears to be something like theories concerning qualia that some people may have put forward and defended.

Iow, qualia are a useful fiction we may tell ourselves, but they are useless in regard to any other application.

That, too, is beside the point. Whether qualia are useful or not may be an interesting topic but it's irrelevant to the question of the existence of qualia.

This is irrelevant but you say "useful fiction". Useful to what?

While I can’t know how you experience red, you can’t know it either,

This is irrelevant. The question of how we experience qualia is irrelevant to the question of their existence.

so no amount of insisting your experience is unique to you can ever be established, only asserted.

That, too, is irrelevant.The question of the uniqueness of qualia is irrelevant to the question of their existence.

Basically, I would expect clever people like Dennett to be able to identify weaknesses in the various theories about qualia put forward by various quidams but that in itself won't be relevant to the question of the existence of qualia.

I guess there are two basic possible situations for critics of the notion of qualia. One is to fail to understand the concept of qualia. In this case it's just their problem.

The second possible situation is that they just flatly deny that they are experiencing them. Assuming they're not lying, I would say it's just too bad for them.

In other words, even if I was the only one to experience qualia, it would still be the case that qualia would exist. Everybody else's ignorance of them would make no difference.

That being said, most people have a reasonably good and intuitive understanding of the notion of qualia. Some may try to do something a bit like "the science of qualia", but however wrong their theories will be won't change the reality of qualia.

And there is an obvious usefulness in the existence of qualia. It's to show us that straightforward materialism is just wrong. I would say myself that it's something that should prove very, very useful if only we could find a better theory than this straightforward materialism.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

For those with the stomach to wade through it, here is another person (Sydney Shoemaker) arguing that qualia do not exist:

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/shoemaker/lectureiii.html

I've read it and I don't understand it.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Now you've read through 'I'm not a behaviourist like Quine, therefore I'm not a behaviourist, but...' Go back and read the Wittgenstein dialogue I posted the other day. It's - quite self consciously - Dennett's reading of the same argument, with more cheery supporting anecdote. He thinks a nothing would serve as well as a something about which nothing can be said. I think he's wrong. The point is that his argument, eventually, by the time we get to consciousness explained and he offers up the heterophenomenological method, is aimed at reduction not elimination. He's not denying consciousness, he's asserting that we are just mistaken about what it is and how we get it.

Shoemaker is just a daft representationalist so wants to eliminate anything that might be in danger of both exhibiting 'aboutness' and being first person. That includes qualia and propositional attitude talk. Sadly, GOFAI eventually got off the pot and it was found, after fifty years of flatulance, to be pristine.

 

[WAB]

For those with the stomach to wade through it, here is another person (Sydney Shoemaker) arguing that qualia do not exist:

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/shoemaker/lectureiii.html

I've read it and I don't understand it.

I can understand someone saying that qualia are not indicative of autonomy and self-control, but how in the world does one go about claiming they do not exist? I'll read through it, but Imma skim it.

By the way, since I'm here, ruby, did you notice my post about the phenom of pareidolia? In case you missed it, and/or have not heard of it, it's about recognizing images, particularly faces, but far more than that, in random blotches of paint, clouds, wood-grain, toast, trees, etc. It's a fascinating thing, and I have it in in spades. I can't see a sky-scape without seeing faces and figures. They jump right out at me (well alright, not literally...).

 

[WAB]

For those with the stomach to wade through it, here is another person (Sydney Shoemaker) arguing that qualia do not exist:

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/shoemaker/lectureiii.html

I've read it and I don't understand it.

*

I am looking at a book with a shiny red cover. The property I experience its surface as having, when I see it to be red, is one that I can only conceive of as belonging to things that are spatially extended. How could that property belong to an experience or sensation? Remember that an experience is an experiencing, an entity that is "adjectival on" a subject of experience. It seems no more intelligible to suppose that a property of such an entity is experienced as a property of extended material objects than it is to suppose that a property of a number, such as being prime or being even, is experienced as a property of material things.

- from the article ruby linked to. Based on this, I'd say this person is trying to be the new Hume. Problem is, he's probably as dumb as Hume. Or dumber.

 

[ruby sparks]

Now you've read through 'I'm not a behaviourist like Quine, therefore I'm not a behaviourist, but...' Go back and read the Wittgenstein dialogue I posted the other day. It's - quite self consciously - Dennett's reading of the same argument, with more cheery supporting anecdote. He thinks a nothing would serve as well as a something about which nothing can be said. I think he's wrong. The point is that his argument, eventually, by the time we get to consciousness explained and he offers up the heterophenomenological method, is aimed at reduction not elimination. He's not denying consciousness, he's asserting that we are just mistaken about what it is and how we get it.

Shoemaker is just a daft representationalist so wants to eliminate anything that might be in danger of both exhibiting 'aboutness' and being first person. That includes qualia and propositional attitude talk. Sadly, GOFAI eventually got off the pot and it was found, after fifty years of flatulance, to be pristine.

To me, Dennett seems like a borderline behaviourist.

As to that dialogue, I can't exactly remember it, but the saying that a nothing would serve as well as a something about which nothing can be said does sound a bit suspect, and in any case, it's not as if nothing can be said about qualia. And what about the things we can't say anything about because we either don't know about them and/or don't understand them? A boson was once something about which nothing could be said but it wasn't a nothing.

A heterophenomenological approach sounds interesting and ambitious. Factoring in the unreliability of personal experience, but without ditching it, is probably a very good idea.

When it comes to qualia, I get being mistaken, and reduction, but not elimination. I don't see how he could have said in 1988 that there are no qualia. Maybe he was just being provocative. Or, if he was being functionalist, then functionalism might be an incomplete approach, imo.

Regarding aboutness, I tend to think that qualia aren't always or necessarily about anything so that makes it hard to swallow Shoemaker's representationalism from the get go.

 

[ruby sparks]

If we say that red qualia are an illusion, what could this mean? It would mean something like saying that the red does not exist, even if the experience of it did. An analogy would be a mirage, perhaps. There is no water in a mirage just as there is no red in the experience of redness.

But most people would say that qualia are 'redness', aka the experience of red, and agree that while red might not exist, redness does ( as 'waterness' does in a mirage). At this point, that's looking incontrovertible and undeniable. What might be left for those saying it's an illusion is to say that it has illusory features. It's there but it's not what we think it is, or isn't doing anything.

But then, I tend to accept that self might be a complete illusion, despite the experience. And free will. To the point that I'm ok with saying that they may not even exist, even though they are experienced. So I'm not going to close the door on saying qualia do not exist, even if at this point it sounds ridiculous.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Regarding aboutness, I tend to think that qualia aren't always or necessarily about anything

Personally, I see aboutness as itself a quale. I subjectively experience it, so it's a quale.

It seems to come as an addition to other qualia, somewhat like a shape quale comes as an addition to colour qualia. I can conceive of them independently but I can't see how I could experience shape without also experiencing colours.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

If we say that red qualia are an illusion, what could this mean? It would mean something like saying that the red does not exist, even if the experience of it did. An analogy would be a mirage, perhaps. There is no water in a mirage just as there is no red in the experience of redness.

But most people would say that qualia are 'redness', aka the experience of red, and agree that while red might not exist, redness does. At this point, that's looking incontrovertible and undeniable. What might be left for those saying it's an illusion is to say that it has illusory features. It's there but it's not what we think it is, or isn't doing anything.

But then, I tend to accept that self might be a complete illusion, despite the experience. And free will. To the point that I'm ok with saying that they may not even exist, even though they are experienced. So I'm not going to close the door on saying qualia do not exist, even if at this point it sounds ridiculous.

I guess it's true that from other people's point of view, they apparently can't possibly ascertain that it's true I experience qualia. So the debate isn't about me proving to other people that qualia exist. I couldn't do that. I have to rely on the assumption that other people also experience qualia.

The debate could therefore be about the possibility that these people don't understand the notion of qualia. I've seen it frequently on this board so I wouldn't be too surprised although it would be really amazing and freakish if that was the case of someone bright and clever and scholarly like Dennett.

In the case of people like Dennett, I can also conceive that they see the notion of qualia as useless and would want to avoid being distracted by qualia being thrown around by idiots.

What I don't see, is how intelligent people like Dennett could really think that qualia don't exist.

But then, there's always the possibility that some people truly would be p-zombies:

A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that from the outside is indistinguishable from a normal human being but lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.

In which case they couldn't possibly know what we're talking about.

Very unlikely, that, so I would rather assume that Dennett's point is entirely pragmatic.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

..... so I would rather assume that Dennett's point is entirely pragmatic.

Or possibly dogmatic.

I mean, it would seem a bit unwarranted to dismiss something just because it's unreliable or vague.

One could dismiss it (in pragmatic terms) if it were a non-causal byproduct or epiphenomenon, but I don't know how you'd go about demonstrating that.

One could start by saying that useless byproducts can exist, but that wouldn't get us very far regarding whether qualia were an example. One could also say that just because it feels like they play a role, they may not, but again that wouldn't get us very far unless we could show that they played no role.

The other possibility is that they do play a role but it's not a helpful one, in the sense that it hinders our survival fitness.

 

[WAB]

But then, I tend to accept that self might be a complete illusion, despite the experience. And free will. To the point that I'm ok with saying that they may not even exist, even though they are experienced. So I'm not going to close the door on saying qualia do not exist, even if at this point it sounds ridiculous.

What could it possibly mean to say that it's possible to experience something that doesn't exist?

Thomas Reid asked similar questions of Hume and Berkeley's work, but nobody listened to Read, because he took all the fun out of everything.

 

[ruby sparks]

What could it possibly mean to say that it's possible to experience something that doesn't exist?

A ghost, I suppose.

Or a fictional character. What does it mean to say that Jessica Rabbit had red hair?

That doesn't eliminate the mental experience of course.

 

[WAB]

What could it possibly mean to say that it's possible to experience something that doesn't exist?

A ghost, I suppose.

Or a fictional character. What does it mean to say that Jessica Rabbit had red hair?

It means that a quantitative material (painted, or digital) was presented by one or more persons that would be almost universally interpreted as being a rabbit with red hair by other persons. The perception is real, and the conception is real, even though they may be varied. So what is it that doesn't exist?

Jessica Rabbit doesn't exist as an actual, living entity, though the material which composes her is real. So we're just agreeing that Jessica Rabbit is a blotch of paint or pixels, not an actual rabbit?

Right?

 

[Subsymbolic]

But then, I tend to accept that self might be a complete illusion, despite the experience. And free will. To the point that I'm ok with saying that they may not even exist, even though they are experienced. So I'm not going to close the door on saying qualia do not exist, even if at this point it sounds ridiculous.

What could it possibly mean to say that it's possible to experience something that doesn't exist?

Thomas Reid asked similar questions of Hume and Berkeley's work, but nobody listened to Read, because he took all the fun out of everything.

Here's the rub.

Dennett, following Wittgenstein, is quite clear that we never communicate anything with a phenomenal character, only our judgements about that phenomenal character. If we could directly communicate the phenomenal character of things, then there would be no problem of other minds.

What Dennett is up to here, and which he finishes off in Consciousness Explained, is demonstrating over and over again that how things seem to us is a dreadful guide to how they are. Ultimately, his final argument will be that all we have is our judgements about phenomenal character and that there simply isn't any available determinate content below those judgements. That's not to say that the judgements are not judgements of something: they are the words produced by a brain that is doing a lot of measuring, judging and so on (The Easy Problem) just without phenomenal character and thus producing statements that are rooted in the underlying workings of the brain, but just the first time these become both public and determinate. Dennett's point is that it would be really easy to mistake these judgements for something more *ahem* mystical like real intrinsic qualia.

By piling up lots of examples of how our seemings are sometimes both merely indefeasible and clearly not intrinsic, not accurate and apparently poorly connected to any underlying neural reality, Dennett hopes to cause an 'aha' moment at which you realise that all this talk of the undeniability of the mental is just one last parlour trick from Descartes that we can let go of. All there is is the judgement and that is more than real enough to fool us into making more extravagant assumptions.

He's acutely aware, pace Wittgenstein, that there's no logical argument that will do the job here. Once again, I have explained why lots of times before. Here's one example from back at SC:

The private language argument is explicitly and specifically concerned with the possibility of a logically private language, that is a language that no other person could possibly learn.

As in:
a language that describes my inner experiences and that only I myself can understand
(PI 256)

The PLI is really an attack on the classical empiricist model of language acquisition, on the claim that one can talk privately about qualia in the same way as you can publicly talk about other things. The whole point of the PLA is to make the point that a truly logically private language is logically impossible and thus that qualia, which are private, are, depending on who you follow, either real yet beyond language or not real at all.

Any conceptualised state that expresses a proposition, you know, the belief that P, for example, is and must be, on Wittgenstein's (and any other analytic account I'm aware of) logically public because another can learn a word's use by spotting correlations between use, behaviour and the world.

Qualia, of course, are not public.

Dennett goes to a great deal of trouble to make it clear that any pre conceptualised content is underdetermined and open to revision on the fly. He illegitimately extends this to the claim that there is no determinate content. And well he might, because he's acutely aware that any determinate content prior to conceptualisation is wide open to being a candidate for being the vehicle for qualia.


Personally I accuse Dennett of making a different Cartesian materialist error: he assumes that the mental and the physical are not the same thing. This is, to my mind the oddest of post dualist errors as the simplest explanation of all is simply that mental states are public, as physical states. The only reason that this isn't immediately obvious to all is that the the mental aspects of these physical states only occur inside a living brain. The issue is further confused by the fact of all the intentional judging going on and if you split the bits that Dennett wants to get rid of - the feel of the biological with the bits Churchland wants to get rid of, the intentional redescription of folk psychology, you are left with two separate aspects of the mind that most theorists spend their time being confused about.

Intentionality (as in the intentional stance, Folk psychology, Propositional attitude talk and so on) is a pre-scientific theory of mental content that would be ripe for elimination if we hadn't come, in the last ten thousand years, to base our entire self conception upon it. Qualia are a hopelessly confused attempt to understand the simple and not terribly surprising fact that internal processing involving a lot of fast binding and a really robust user illusion just happens to feel like something from the inside as well as look like something from the outside. They are wide open to reduction to the biology once we get past the idea that the mental is somehow not identical to the physical.

From the biology, the intentional looks like so much fantasy. From the intentional the products of the biology look like a private fiction. Both are half right and half wrong. Dennett knows this is a possibility, if for no other reason than that we argued each other to a standstill in the bar at the Royal Society in the early nineties. But he reads Wittgenstein as denying qualia where I read him as denying the possibility of talking about them. There's not much movement available there.

You want a fast anecdote to this paper: imagine that the whole paper was diagnosing the easy problem. Suddenly it looks like both a lot of waffle and making assertions that have determinate answers in the biology: we know what happens when we put on inverting glasses and the image eventually reverts. Now we just add the rider that feels like something to be bound within a living brain. The easy problem and the hard problem just are not that dissimilar.