One issue with this is that “explanation” (like “consciousness”) is a bit of a grab-bag word. We can have a feeling that something has been explained, but this feeling can take several different forms and each can be triggered in several different ways. In addition to compression, we might call things explanations if they’re non-compressive generative models (“This sequence starts 01 because it’s counting all the integers in order”), if they assert but don’t contain the information needed to predict more data (“This sequence starts 01 because it’s copying the sequence from page 239 of Magical Munging”), if they put our data in a social context (“This sequence starts 01 because the Prime Minister ordered it to be so”) and many other things both sensical (like Aristotle’s four causes) and nonsensical (“A witch did it”).
Still, I agree that if we just take compressive explanation and look at the second half of your post, this makes a lot of sense.
But allowing for more diverse explanations re-raises the question of why people have a hard time explaining qualia. First I should not that actually, they don’t: “I see red because I’m looking at something red” is a great explanation. It’s not the qualia themselves that aren’t explained, it’s some mysterious overarching pattern (some sort of “why qualia at all?” in some specific hoped-for sense) that’s the issue.
This is a lot like the issue with free will. Lots of people think they have/want/need “libertarian free will,” but since that’s false they feel like they’re running into a hard problem. Sure, they can give attempted explanations for why we have libertarian free will, but somehow those explanations always seem to have holes in them. Clearly (they think) we have this thing, it’s just mysteriously hard to explain.
By analogy, you can now figure out where I’m going with qualia. Some people think they have/want/need “Cartesian qualia” that are the unique things our singular “I” sees when it gets information about the world through our brain. But...
Some people think they have/want/need “Cartesian qualia” that are the unique things our singular “I” sees when it gets information about the world
So I think I agree that there are no ontologically fundamental qualia in the world. But I have a certain amount of sympathy with people who want to consider qualia to be nonetheless real...like yeah, on one level there seem to be no fundamental qualia in physics, on another level the whole point of physics is to provide an explanation of our experiences, so it seems weird to demote those experiences to a lesser degree of reality.
Say you’re a string-compressing robot. Which is more ‘real’, the raw string you’re fed, or the program you devise to compress it? Overall I don’t think you can say either—both are needed for the function of string compression to be carried out. Similarly, I think both our experiences and world-model seem necessary for our existence as world-modeling beings. Maybe the problem is that the word ‘real’ is too coarse, we need some kind of finer-grained vocabulary for different levels of our ontology.
In addition to compression, we might call things explanations if they’re non-compressive generative models (“This sequence starts 01 because it’s counting all the integers in order”), if they assert but don’t contain the information needed to predict more data (“This sequence starts 01 because it’s copying the sequence from page 239 of Magical Munging”), if they put our data in a social context (“This sequence starts 01 because the Prime Minister ordered it to be so”) and many other things both sensical (like Aristotle’s four causes) and nonsensical (“A witch did it”).
Yes. In particular , explanations decrease arbitrariness and increase predictability. That allows us to put a more concrete interpretation on “we can’t explain qualia”: we can’t predict qualia from their neural correlates.
But allowing for more diverse explanations re-raises the question of why people have a hard time explaining qualia. First I should not that actually, they don’t: “I see red because I’m looking at something red” is a great explanation. It’s not the qualia themselves that aren’t explained, it’s some mysterious overarching pattern (some sort of “why qualia at all?” in some specific hoped-for sense) that’s the issue
It’s not quite the latter either: it’s why qualia given physicalism.
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so successful in other areas.
By analogy [with libertarian free will], you can now figure out where I’m going with qualia. Some people think they have/want/need “Cartesian qualia
It’s not really analogous with LFW, because denial of libertarian free will isn’t directly self contradictory...but illusionism, the claim “nothing seems to you in any particular way, it only seems to be so” is.
One issue with this is that “explanation” (like “consciousness”) is a bit of a grab-bag word. We can have a feeling that something has been explained, but this feeling can take several different forms and each can be triggered in several different ways. In addition to compression, we might call things explanations if they’re non-compressive generative models (“This sequence starts 01 because it’s counting all the integers in order”), if they assert but don’t contain the information needed to predict more data (“This sequence starts 01 because it’s copying the sequence from page 239 of Magical Munging”), if they put our data in a social context (“This sequence starts 01 because the Prime Minister ordered it to be so”) and many other things both sensical (like Aristotle’s four causes) and nonsensical (“A witch did it”).
Still, I agree that if we just take compressive explanation and look at the second half of your post, this makes a lot of sense.
But allowing for more diverse explanations re-raises the question of why people have a hard time explaining qualia. First I should not that actually, they don’t: “I see red because I’m looking at something red” is a great explanation. It’s not the qualia themselves that aren’t explained, it’s some mysterious overarching pattern (some sort of “why qualia at all?” in some specific hoped-for sense) that’s the issue.
This is a lot like the issue with free will. Lots of people think they have/want/need “libertarian free will,” but since that’s false they feel like they’re running into a hard problem. Sure, they can give attempted explanations for why we have libertarian free will, but somehow those explanations always seem to have holes in them. Clearly (they think) we have this thing, it’s just mysteriously hard to explain.
By analogy, you can now figure out where I’m going with qualia. Some people think they have/want/need “Cartesian qualia” that are the unique things our singular “I” sees when it gets information about the world through our brain. But...
So I think I agree that there are no ontologically fundamental qualia in the world. But I have a certain amount of sympathy with people who want to consider qualia to be nonetheless real...like yeah, on one level there seem to be no fundamental qualia in physics, on another level the whole point of physics is to provide an explanation of our experiences, so it seems weird to demote those experiences to a lesser degree of reality.
Say you’re a string-compressing robot. Which is more ‘real’, the raw string you’re fed, or the program you devise to compress it? Overall I don’t think you can say either—both are needed for the function of string compression to be carried out. Similarly, I think both our experiences and world-model seem necessary for our existence as world-modeling beings. Maybe the problem is that the word ‘real’ is too coarse, we need some kind of finer-grained vocabulary for different levels of our ontology.
Yes. In particular , explanations decrease arbitrariness and increase predictability. That allows us to put a more concrete interpretation on “we can’t explain qualia”: we can’t predict qualia from their neural correlates.
It’s not quite the latter either: it’s why qualia given physicalism.
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so successful in other areas.
It’s not really analogous with LFW, because denial of libertarian free will isn’t directly self contradictory...but illusionism, the claim “nothing seems to you in any particular way, it only seems to be so” is.