There is the phenomenon of qualia and then there is the ontological extension. The word does not refer to the ontological extension.
My basic claim is that the way that people use the word qualia implicitly implies the ontological extensions. By using the term, you are either smuggling these extensions in, or you are using the term in a way that no philosopher uses it. Here are some intuitions:
Qualia are private entities which occur to us and can’t be inspected via third person science.
Qualia are ineffable; you can’t explain them using a sufficiently complex English or mathematical sentence.
Qualia are intrinstic; you can’t construct a quale if you had the right set of particles.
etc.
Now, that’s not to say that you can’t define qualia in such a way that these ontological extensions are avoided. But why do so? If you are simply re-defining the phenomenon, then you have not explained anything. The intuitions above still remain, and there is something still unexplained: namely, why people think that there are entities with the above properties.
That’s why I think that instead, the illusionist approach is the correct one. Let me quote Keith Frankish, who I think does a good job explaining this point of view,
Suppose we encounter something that seems anomalous, in the sense of being radically inexplicable within our established scientific worldview. Psychokinesis is an example. We would have, broadly speaking, three options.
First, we could accept that the phenomenon is real and explore the implications of its existence, proposing major revisions or extensions to our science, perhaps amounting to a paradigm shift. In the case of psychokinesis, we might posit previously unknown psychic forces and embark on a major revision of physics to accommodate them.
Second, we could argue that, although the phenomenon is real, it is not in fact anomalous and can be explained within current science. Thus, we would accept that people really can move things with their unaided minds but argue that this ability depends on known forces, such as electromagnetism.
Third, we could argue that the phenomenon is illusory and set about investigating how the illusion is produced. Thus, we might argue that people who seem to have psychokinetic powers are employing some trick to make it seem as if they are mentally influencing objects.
In the case of lightning, I think that the first approach would be correct, since lightning forms a valid physical category under which we can cast our scientific predictions of the world. In the case of the orbit of Uranus, the second approach is correct, since it was adequately explained by appealing to understood Newtonian physics. However, the third approach is most apt for bizarre phenomena that seem at first glance to be entirely incompatible with our physics. And qualia certainly fit the bill in that respect.
When I say “qualia” I mean individual instances of subjective, conscious experience full stop. These three extensions are not what I mean when I say “qualia”.
Qualia are private entities which occur to us and can’t be inspected via third person science.
Not convinced of this. There are known neural correlates of consciousness. That our current brain scanners lack the required resolution to make them inspectable does not prove that they are not inspectable in principle.
Qualia are ineffable; you can’t explain them using a sufficiently complex English or mathematical sentence.
This seems to be a limitation of human language bandwidth/imagination, but not fundamental to what qualia are. Consider the case of the conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana, who share some brain structure and seem to be able “hear” each other’s thoughts and see through each other’s eyes.
Suppose we set up a thought experiment. Suppose that they grow up in a room without color, like Mary’s room. Now knock out Krista and show Tatiana something red. Remove the red thing before Krista wakes up. Wouldn’t Tatiana be able to communicate the experience of red to her sister? That’s an effable quale!
And if they can do it, then in principle, so could you, with a future brain-computer interface.
Really, communicating at all is a transfer of experience. We’re limited by common ground, sure. We both have to be speaking the same language, and have to have enough experience to be able to imagine the other’s mental state.
Qualia are intrinstic; you can’t construct a quale if you had the right set of particles.
Again, not convinced. Isn’t your brain made of particles? I construct qualia all the time just by thinking about it. (It’s called “imagination”.) I don’t see any reason in principle why this could not be done externally to the brain either.
The Tatiana and krista experiment is quite interesting but stretches the concept of communication to it’s limits. I am inclined to say that having a shared part of your conciousness is not communication in the same way that sharing a house is not traffic. It does strike me that communication involves directed construction of thoughts and it’s easy to imagine that the scope of what this construction is capable would be vastly smaller than what goes on in the brain in other processes. Extending the construction to new types of thoughts might be a soft border rather than a hard one. With enough verbal sentences it should be in principle to be able to reconstruct an actual graphical image, but even with overtly descriptive prose this level is not really reached (I presume) but remains within the realm of sentence-like data structures.
In the example Tatiana directs the visual cortex and Krista can just recall the representation later. But in a single conciouness brain nothing can be made “ready” but it must be assembled by the brain itself from sensory inputs. That is cognitive space probably has small funnels and for signficant objects they can’t travel them as themselfs but must be chopped off into pieces and reassembled after passing the tube.
Let’s extend the thought experiment a bit. Suppose technology is developed to separate the twins. They rely on their shared brain parts for vital functions, so where we cut nerve connections we replace them with a radio transceiver and electrode array in each twin.
Now they are communicating thoughts via a prosthesis. Is that not communication?
Maybe you already know what it is like to be a hive mind with a shared consciousness, because you are one: cutting the corpus callosum creates a split-brained patient that seems to have two different personalities that don’t always agree with each other. Maybe there are some connections left, but the bandwidth has been drastically reduced. And even within hemispheres, the brain seems to be composed of yet smaller modules. Your mind is made of parts that communicate with each other and share experience, and some of it is conscious.
I think the line dividing individual persons is a soft one. A sufficiently high-bandwidth communication interface can blur that boundary, even to the point of fusing consciousness like brain hemispheres. Shared consciousness means shared qualia, even if that connection is later severed, you might still remember what it was like to be the other person. And in that way, qualia could hypothetically be communicated between individuals, or even species.
If you would copy my brain but make it twice as large that copy would be as “lonely” as I would be and this would remain after arbitrary doublings. Single individuals can be extended in space without communicating with other individuals.
The “extended wire” thought experiement doesn’t specify enough how that physical communication line is used. It’s plausible that there is no “verbalization” process like there is an step to write an email if one replaces sonic communication with ip-packet communication. With huge relative distance would come speed of light delays, if one twin was on earth and another on the moon there would be a round trip latency of seconds which probably would distort how the combined brain works. (And I guess with doublign in size would need to come with proportionate slowing to have same function).
I think there is a difference between a information system being spatially extended and having two information systems interface with each other. Say that you have 2 routers or 10 routers on the same length of line. It makes sense to make a distinction that each routers functions “independently” even if they have to be able to suggest each other enough that packets flow throught. To the first router the world “downline” seems very similar whether or not intermediate routers exist. I don’t count information system internal processing as communicating thus I don’t count “thinking” into communicating. Thus the 10 router version does more communicating than the 2 router version.
I think the “verbalization” step does mean that even highbandwidth connection doesn’t automatically mean qualia sharing. I am thinking of plugings that allow programming languages to share code. Even if there is a perfect 1-to-1 compatibility between the abstractions of the languages I think still each language only ever manipulates their version of that representation. Cross-using without translation would make it illdefined what would be correct function but if you do translation then it loses the qualities of the originating programming language. A C sharp integer variable will never contain a haskel integer even if a C sharp integer is constructed to represent the haskel integer. (I guess it would be possible to make a super-language that has integer variables that can contain haskel-integers and C-sharp integers but that language would not be C sharp or haskel). By being a spesific kind of cognitive architechture you are locked into certain representation types which are unescaable outside of turning into another kind ot architechture.
I am assuming that the twins communicating thoughts requires an act of will like speaking does. I do have reasons for this. Watching their faces when they communicate thoughts makes it seem voluntary.
But most of what you are doing when speaking is already subconscious: One can “understand” the rules of grammar well enough to form correct sentences on nearly all attempts, and yet be unable to explain the rules to a computer program (or to a child or ESL student). There is an element of will, but it’s only an element.
It may be the case that even with a high-bandwidth direct-brain interface it would take a lot of time and practice to understand another’s thoughts. Humans have a common cognitive architecture by virtue of shared genes, but most of our individual connectomes are randomized and shaped by individual experience. Our internal representations may thus be highly idiosyncratic, meaning a direct interface would be ad-hoc and only work on one person. How true this is, I can only speculate without more data.
In your programming language analogy, these data types are only abstractions built on top of a more fundamental CPU architecture where the only data types are bytes. Maybe an implementation of C# could be made that uses exactly the same bit pattern for an int as Haskell does. Human neurons work pretty much the same way across individuals, and even cortical columns seem to use the same architecture.
I don’t think the inability to communicate qualia is primarily due to the limitation of language, but due to the limitation of imagination. I can explain what a tesseract is, but that doesn’t mean you can visualize it. I could give you analogies with lower dimensions. Maybe you could understand well enough to make a mental model that gives you good predictions, but you still can’t visualize it. Similarly, I could explain what it’s like to be a tetrachromat, how septarine and octarine are colors distinct from the others, and maybe you can develop a model good enough to make good predictions about how it would work, but again you can’t visualize these colors. This failing is not on English.
Sure the difference between hearing about a tesseract and being able to visualise it is significant but I think the difference might not be an impossibility barrier but just skill level of imagination.
Having learned some echolocation my qualia involved in hearing have changed and it makes it seem possible to be able to make a similar transition from a trichromat visual space into a tetrachromat visual space. The weird thing about it is that my ear receives as much information that it did before but I just pay attention to it differently. Having deficient understanding in the sense of getting things wrong is easy line to draw. But it seems at some point the understanding becomes vivid instead of theorethical.
Qualia are intrinstic; you can’t construct a quale if you had the right set of particles.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what “intrinisc” is supposed to mean. From “The Qualities of Qualia” by David de Leon.
Within philosophy there is a distinction, albeit a
contentious one, between intrinsic and extrinsic
properties. Roughly speaking “extrinsic” seems to
be synonymous with “relational.” The property of
being an uncle, for example, is a property which
depends on (and consists of) a relation to something
else, namely a niece or a nephew. Intrinsic
properties, then, are those which do not depend on
this kind of relation. That qualia are intrinsic means
that their qualitative character can be isolated from
everything else going on in the brain (or elsewhere)
and is not dependent on relations to other mental
states, behaviour or what have you. The idea of the
independence of qualia on any such relation may
well stem from the conceivability of inverted qualia: we can imagine two physically identical brains
having different qualia, or even that qualia are absent from one but not the other.
I find it important in philosophy to be on the clear what you mean. It is one thing to explain and another to define what you mean. You might point to a yellow object and say yellow and somebody that misunderstood might think that you mean “roundness” by yellow. The accuracy is most important when the views are radical and talk in very different worlds. And “disproving” yellow by not being able to pick it out from ostensive differentation is not an argumentative victory but a communicative failure.
Even if we use some other term I think that meaning is important to have. “Plogiston” might sneak in claims but that is just the more reason to have terms that have as little room for smuggling as possible. And we still need good terms to talk about burning. “oxygen” literally means “black maker” but we nowadays understand it as a term to refer to a element which has definitionally very little to do with the color black.
I think the starting point that generated the word refers to a genuine problem. Having qualia in category three would mean that you claim that I do not have experiences. And if qualia is a bad loaded word to refer to the thing to be explained it would be good to make up a new term that refers to that. But to me qualia was just that word. I word like “dark matter” might experience similar “highjack pressure” by having wild claims thrown around about it. And there having things like “warm dark matter”, “wimpy dark matter” makes the classification more fine making the conceptual analysis proceed. But requirements of clear thinking are different from tradition preservance. If you say that “warm dark matter” can’t be the answer the question of dark matter still stands. Even if you succesfully argue that “qualia” can’t be a attractive concept the issue of me not being a p-zombie still remains and it would be expected that some theorethical bending over backwards would happen.
My basic claim is that the way that people use the word qualia implicitly implies the ontological extensions. By using the term, you are either smuggling these extensions in, or you are using the term in a way that no philosopher uses it. Here are some intuitions:
Qualia are private entities which occur to us and can’t be inspected via third person science.
Qualia are ineffable; you can’t explain them using a sufficiently complex English or mathematical sentence.
Qualia are intrinstic; you can’t construct a quale if you had the right set of particles.
etc.
Now, that’s not to say that you can’t define qualia in such a way that these ontological extensions are avoided. But why do so? If you are simply re-defining the phenomenon, then you have not explained anything. The intuitions above still remain, and there is something still unexplained: namely, why people think that there are entities with the above properties.
That’s why I think that instead, the illusionist approach is the correct one. Let me quote Keith Frankish, who I think does a good job explaining this point of view,
In the case of lightning, I think that the first approach would be correct, since lightning forms a valid physical category under which we can cast our scientific predictions of the world. In the case of the orbit of Uranus, the second approach is correct, since it was adequately explained by appealing to understood Newtonian physics. However, the third approach is most apt for bizarre phenomena that seem at first glance to be entirely incompatible with our physics. And qualia certainly fit the bill in that respect.
When I say “qualia” I mean individual instances of subjective, conscious experience full stop. These three extensions are not what I mean when I say “qualia”.
Not convinced of this. There are known neural correlates of consciousness. That our current brain scanners lack the required resolution to make them inspectable does not prove that they are not inspectable in principle.
This seems to be a limitation of human language bandwidth/imagination, but not fundamental to what qualia are. Consider the case of the conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana, who share some brain structure and seem to be able “hear” each other’s thoughts and see through each other’s eyes.
Suppose we set up a thought experiment. Suppose that they grow up in a room without color, like Mary’s room. Now knock out Krista and show Tatiana something red. Remove the red thing before Krista wakes up. Wouldn’t Tatiana be able to communicate the experience of red to her sister? That’s an effable quale!
And if they can do it, then in principle, so could you, with a future brain-computer interface.
Really, communicating at all is a transfer of experience. We’re limited by common ground, sure. We both have to be speaking the same language, and have to have enough experience to be able to imagine the other’s mental state.
Again, not convinced. Isn’t your brain made of particles? I construct qualia all the time just by thinking about it. (It’s called “imagination”.) I don’t see any reason in principle why this could not be done externally to the brain either.
The Tatiana and krista experiment is quite interesting but stretches the concept of communication to it’s limits. I am inclined to say that having a shared part of your conciousness is not communication in the same way that sharing a house is not traffic. It does strike me that communication involves directed construction of thoughts and it’s easy to imagine that the scope of what this construction is capable would be vastly smaller than what goes on in the brain in other processes. Extending the construction to new types of thoughts might be a soft border rather than a hard one. With enough verbal sentences it should be in principle to be able to reconstruct an actual graphical image, but even with overtly descriptive prose this level is not really reached (I presume) but remains within the realm of sentence-like data structures.
In the example Tatiana directs the visual cortex and Krista can just recall the representation later. But in a single conciouness brain nothing can be made “ready” but it must be assembled by the brain itself from sensory inputs. That is cognitive space probably has small funnels and for signficant objects they can’t travel them as themselfs but must be chopped off into pieces and reassembled after passing the tube.
Let’s extend the thought experiment a bit. Suppose technology is developed to separate the twins. They rely on their shared brain parts for vital functions, so where we cut nerve connections we replace them with a radio transceiver and electrode array in each twin.
Now they are communicating thoughts via a prosthesis. Is that not communication?
Maybe you already know what it is like to be a hive mind with a shared consciousness, because you are one: cutting the corpus callosum creates a split-brained patient that seems to have two different personalities that don’t always agree with each other. Maybe there are some connections left, but the bandwidth has been drastically reduced. And even within hemispheres, the brain seems to be composed of yet smaller modules. Your mind is made of parts that communicate with each other and share experience, and some of it is conscious.
I think the line dividing individual persons is a soft one. A sufficiently high-bandwidth communication interface can blur that boundary, even to the point of fusing consciousness like brain hemispheres. Shared consciousness means shared qualia, even if that connection is later severed, you might still remember what it was like to be the other person. And in that way, qualia could hypothetically be communicated between individuals, or even species.
If you would copy my brain but make it twice as large that copy would be as “lonely” as I would be and this would remain after arbitrary doublings. Single individuals can be extended in space without communicating with other individuals.
The “extended wire” thought experiement doesn’t specify enough how that physical communication line is used. It’s plausible that there is no “verbalization” process like there is an step to write an email if one replaces sonic communication with ip-packet communication. With huge relative distance would come speed of light delays, if one twin was on earth and another on the moon there would be a round trip latency of seconds which probably would distort how the combined brain works. (And I guess with doublign in size would need to come with proportionate slowing to have same function).
I think there is a difference between a information system being spatially extended and having two information systems interface with each other. Say that you have 2 routers or 10 routers on the same length of line. It makes sense to make a distinction that each routers functions “independently” even if they have to be able to suggest each other enough that packets flow throught. To the first router the world “downline” seems very similar whether or not intermediate routers exist. I don’t count information system internal processing as communicating thus I don’t count “thinking” into communicating. Thus the 10 router version does more communicating than the 2 router version.
I think the “verbalization” step does mean that even highbandwidth connection doesn’t automatically mean qualia sharing. I am thinking of plugings that allow programming languages to share code. Even if there is a perfect 1-to-1 compatibility between the abstractions of the languages I think still each language only ever manipulates their version of that representation. Cross-using without translation would make it illdefined what would be correct function but if you do translation then it loses the qualities of the originating programming language. A C sharp integer variable will never contain a haskel integer even if a C sharp integer is constructed to represent the haskel integer. (I guess it would be possible to make a super-language that has integer variables that can contain haskel-integers and C-sharp integers but that language would not be C sharp or haskel). By being a spesific kind of cognitive architechture you are locked into certain representation types which are unescaable outside of turning into another kind ot architechture.
I am assuming that the twins communicating thoughts requires an act of will like speaking does. I do have reasons for this. Watching their faces when they communicate thoughts makes it seem voluntary.
But most of what you are doing when speaking is already subconscious: One can “understand” the rules of grammar well enough to form correct sentences on nearly all attempts, and yet be unable to explain the rules to a computer program (or to a child or ESL student). There is an element of will, but it’s only an element.
It may be the case that even with a high-bandwidth direct-brain interface it would take a lot of time and practice to understand another’s thoughts. Humans have a common cognitive architecture by virtue of shared genes, but most of our individual connectomes are randomized and shaped by individual experience. Our internal representations may thus be highly idiosyncratic, meaning a direct interface would be ad-hoc and only work on one person. How true this is, I can only speculate without more data.
In your programming language analogy, these data types are only abstractions built on top of a more fundamental CPU architecture where the only data types are bytes. Maybe an implementation of C# could be made that uses exactly the same bit pattern for an int as Haskell does. Human neurons work pretty much the same way across individuals, and even cortical columns seem to use the same architecture.
I don’t think the inability to communicate qualia is primarily due to the limitation of language, but due to the limitation of imagination. I can explain what a tesseract is, but that doesn’t mean you can visualize it. I could give you analogies with lower dimensions. Maybe you could understand well enough to make a mental model that gives you good predictions, but you still can’t visualize it. Similarly, I could explain what it’s like to be a tetrachromat, how septarine and octarine are colors distinct from the others, and maybe you can develop a model good enough to make good predictions about how it would work, but again you can’t visualize these colors. This failing is not on English.
Sure the difference between hearing about a tesseract and being able to visualise it is significant but I think the difference might not be an impossibility barrier but just skill level of imagination.
Having learned some echolocation my qualia involved in hearing have changed and it makes it seem possible to be able to make a similar transition from a trichromat visual space into a tetrachromat visual space. The weird thing about it is that my ear receives as much information that it did before but I just pay attention to it differently. Having deficient understanding in the sense of getting things wrong is easy line to draw. But it seems at some point the understanding becomes vivid instead of theorethical.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what “intrinisc” is supposed to mean. From “The Qualities of Qualia” by David de Leon.
I find it important in philosophy to be on the clear what you mean. It is one thing to explain and another to define what you mean. You might point to a yellow object and say yellow and somebody that misunderstood might think that you mean “roundness” by yellow. The accuracy is most important when the views are radical and talk in very different worlds. And “disproving” yellow by not being able to pick it out from ostensive differentation is not an argumentative victory but a communicative failure.
Even if we use some other term I think that meaning is important to have. “Plogiston” might sneak in claims but that is just the more reason to have terms that have as little room for smuggling as possible. And we still need good terms to talk about burning. “oxygen” literally means “black maker” but we nowadays understand it as a term to refer to a element which has definitionally very little to do with the color black.
I think the starting point that generated the word refers to a genuine problem. Having qualia in category three would mean that you claim that I do not have experiences. And if qualia is a bad loaded word to refer to the thing to be explained it would be good to make up a new term that refers to that. But to me qualia was just that word. I word like “dark matter” might experience similar “highjack pressure” by having wild claims thrown around about it. And there having things like “warm dark matter”, “wimpy dark matter” makes the classification more fine making the conceptual analysis proceed. But requirements of clear thinking are different from tradition preservance. If you say that “warm dark matter” can’t be the answer the question of dark matter still stands. Even if you succesfully argue that “qualia” can’t be a attractive concept the issue of me not being a p-zombie still remains and it would be expected that some theorethical bending over backwards would happen.