Boldface vs Quotation—i.e., the interrogating qualia skeptic, vs the defender of qualia as a gnostic absolute—is a common pattern. However, your Camp #1 and Camp #2 - Boldfaces who favor something like Global Workspace Theory, and Quotations who favor something like IIT—don’t exist, in my experience.
Antonio Damasio is a Boldface who favors a body-mind explanation for consciousness which is quasi-neurological, but which is much closer to IIT than Global Workspace Theory in its level of description. Descartes was a Quotation who, unlike Chalmers, didn’t feel like his qualia, once experienced, left anything to be explained. Most philosophers of consciousness who have ever written, in fact, have nothing to do with your proposed Camp #1 vs Camp #2 division, even though most can be placed somewhere along the Boldface-Quotation spectrum, because whether your intuition is more Boldface vs more Quotation is orthogonal to how confused you are about consciousness and how you go about investigating what confuses you. Your framing comes across as an attempt to decrement the credibility of people who advocate Quotation-type intuition by associating them with IIT, framing Boldfaces [your “Camp #1”] as the “sensible people” by comparison.
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There’s been discussion in these comments—more and less serious—about whether it’s plausible Boldface and Quotation are talking past each other on account of neurological differences. I think this is quite plausible even before we get into the question of whether Boldfaces could truly lack the qualia Quotations are talking about, or not.
In the chapter of Consciousness Explained titled “Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theater”, Dennett sets out to solve the puzzle of how the brain reconstructs conscious experiences of the same distant object to be simultaneous across sensory modes despite the fact that light travels faster [and is processed slower in the brain] than sound. He considers reconstruction of simultaneity across conscious modes part of what a quale is.
Yet, I have qualia if anyone does, and if someone bounces a basketball 30m away from me, I generally don’t hear it bounce until a fraction of a second after I see it hit the ground. I’ve always been that way. As a grade-school kid, I would ask people about it; they’d say it wasn’t that way for them, and I’d assume it was because they weren’t paying close enough attention. Now I know people differ vastly in how they experience things and it’s almost certainly an unusual neurological quirk.
Second example: it’s commonly attributed to William James that he remarked on the slowness of qualia, relative to more atomic perception: “I see a bear, I run, I am afraid”. This basic motto—the idea that emotion succeeds action—went a long way in James’s philosophy of emotion, if I understand correctly.
I don’t experience emotion [or other things that usually get called “qualia”] delayed relative to reflex action like that at all. Other people also don’t usually report that experience, and I suspect James was pretty strange in that respect.
So even if everyone had qualia, yes, when we try to explain the contents of subjective awareness, we are quite frequently talking past each other because of the Typical Mind Fallacy.
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Taking that as a given, it’s still important whether some people [e.g., Dennett] actually don’t have qualia. Is that possible?
Some people hear voices. Some people are gay. Some people are autistic. Some people are colorblind. There are still some reflexes left over in our culture from the days before reductionism, when philosophers would say of schizophrenics that they were touched by the divine or demonic, of gays that they were inspired by virtue or corruption [depending on the culture], and of autists that they were being deliberately contrarian, or else ill-affected by some bad air, or something. Of the colorblind people we don’t have such leftover cultural narratives, probably because the differences that don’t get noticed, don’t get talked about. But if we did have one for colorblindness, it’d probably be that they were being performatively obtuse; and if the colorblind people had been able to express their private opinion [which would have been met with resistance], it probably would have been that everyone else was faking seeing the emperor’s robe in impossible colors as a status signal or some such.
“Qualia” seem at least as easy to miss as color. So I find it quite plausible that there’s a neurological difference underlying many of the arguments between Boldfaces and Quotations.
People in these replies have said that they are alienated from qualia, but aren’t alienated from consciousness.
Qualia aren’t particularly real; consciousness [in the sense of ‘sentience’, ‘self-awareness’, or ‘subjective experience’, not mere ‘awakeness’, like a fly might have] is real.
Vistas aren’t particularly real; vision is real.
Set Chalmers aside, and define p-zombies as qualia-less people who act like qualia-less people. I think Dennett and other Boldfaces are such people.
Others in the comments have pointed out that it seems implausible that such “p-zombies” [as so defined] could report on the subjects of their own experience, because anything that is the subject of conscious [in the sense of “sentient” or “subjective”] experience, definitionally becomes a quale.
This, I think, is where the cruxy neurological difficulty lies in the mutually target-missing crosstalk between Boldfaces and Quotations. Quotations, when they get to talking about the philosophy of consciousness [/‘awareness’ / ‘sentience’ / ‘subjective experience’] tend to talk about qualia as an inherently mystical or ineffable or non-reductionistic [ in the sense of violating reductionistic principles ] experience. E.g., the nature of Chalmers’s confusion about qualia [unlike Dennett’s, or Damasio’s], isn’t that they seem elusive or unreliable, but that they seem so obvious as to actively obstruct a properly reductionistic understanding of their internal composition—in a way that Chalmers presumably does not also feel about other classes of percept, like vision, sound, or visceral experience.
qualia may be considered comparable and analogous to the concepts of jñāna found in Eastern philosophy and traditions.
“Jñāna” doesn’t mean the same thing as the later Buddhist “jhana”—the later Buddhist “jhana” is a target mental state achieved through meditation, while the earlier “Vedic” “jñāna” simply refers to a thing-experienced the way “quale” does. Like “jhana”, though, “jñāna” is a remote cognate with the English “know” and the Greek “gnosis”. And like “quale”, and “gnosis”, “jñāna”—though not having been originally defined with prescriptive content—acquired mystical and spiritual connotations with use, implying that people tended to organically drift toward using that word in a mysterian way. It seems that across cultures, there is a whole class of people that insists on allowing mysticism to diffuse into our references to atomic conscious experience. This is very strange, if you think about it! Atomic conscious experience isn’t mystical.
I think what happens is that people—especially people like me who can sometimes experience deep, but difficult-to-quickly-unpack, holistic percepts with a high subjective level of certitude—use “quale” [or “jñāna” or “gnosis”] to refer to hard-to-describe things we would not know except by directly experiencing them. Some mystics take advantage, and claim you should give money to their church for reasons they can’t describe but are very certain of. So semantic drift associates the word with mysticism. [ Even while some people, like myself and Chalmers, continue using such words honestly, to refer to certain kinds of large high-certitude experiences whose internals frustrate our access. ]
Dennett and other Boldfaces seem [neurologically? I imagine] inclined to approach all situations, especially those involving reflective experiences, with a heavy emotional tone of doubt, which opens up questions and begs resolution.
[ E.g., Dennett writes:
Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them.
and this general approach holds in the rest of his writing, as far as I’m aware. ]
So given that people use the word “quale” [ which, again, like the word “vista” or “projection”, refers to a category of thing that, if we’re speaking precisely, isn’t real ] so often to refer to their high-certitude opaque experiences, it makes sense that Dennett and Boldfaces would say that they don’t have such experiences. Their experiences don’t come with that gnostic certitude by which holistic thinkers [like me] sometimes fumblingly excuse our quick illegible conclusions.
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You say “Camp #1” vs “Camp #2″ has implications for research decisions, because
[T]he work you do to make progress on understanding a phenomenon is different if you expect the phenomenon to be low level vs. high level.
Demanding that consciousness must be explained as existing only on one level in the ontological hierarchy of description is a greater ask than we make of ordinary software documentation. Is the X window server “low level” or “high level”? It needs the assembly code to run, so it must be “low level”, right? But we can only notice when it breaks by noticing whether our windows look good at a high level—whether they display with the right color and font, whether we can make several, whether their contents don’t interfere with each other, etc. So our criteria are high-level—are we looking at a high-level phenomenon?
Like the X window system, operating systems, etc., consciousness inherently straddles layers of abstraction. It exists to facilitate supervenience. Neither Camp #1 nor Camp #2 is off on a very sensible research foot.
[...] Quotations who favor something like IIT [...]
The quotation author in the example I’ve made up does not favor IIT. In general, I think IIT represents a very small fraction (< 5%, possibly < 1%) of Camp #2. It’s the most popular theory, but Camp #2 is extremely heterogeneous in their ideas, so this is not a high bar.
Certainly if you look at philosophers you won’t find any connection to IIT since the majority of them lived before IIT was developed.
Your framing comes across as an attempt to decrement the credibility of people who advocate Quotation-type intuition by associating them with IIT,
If you can point to which part of the post made it sound like that, I’d be interested in correcting it because that was very much not intended.
Is the X window server “low level” or “high level”?
Clarification: The high-level vs. low-level thing is a frame to apply to natural phenomena to figure out how far removed from the laws of physics they are and, consequently, whether you should look for equations or heuristics to describe them. The most low-level entities are electrons, up quarks, electromagnetism, etc. (I also call those ‘fundamental’). The next most low level things are protons or neutrons (made up of fundamental elements). Molecules are very low level. Processes between or within atoms are very low level. Planetary motions are pretty low level.
Answer: The X window server is an output of human brains, so it’s super super high level. It takes a lot of steps to get from the laws of physics to human organisms writing code. Programming language is irrelevant. Any writing done by humans, natural language or programming language, is super high level.
Boldface vs Quotation—i.e., the interrogating qualia skeptic, vs the defender of qualia as a gnostic absolute—is a common pattern. However, your Camp #1 and Camp #2 - Boldfaces who favor something like Global Workspace Theory, and Quotations who favor something like IIT—don’t exist, in my experience.
Antonio Damasio is a Boldface who favors a body-mind explanation for consciousness which is quasi-neurological, but which is much closer to IIT than Global Workspace Theory in its level of description. Descartes was a Quotation who, unlike Chalmers, didn’t feel like his qualia, once experienced, left anything to be explained. Most philosophers of consciousness who have ever written, in fact, have nothing to do with your proposed Camp #1 vs Camp #2 division, even though most can be placed somewhere along the Boldface-Quotation spectrum, because whether your intuition is more Boldface vs more Quotation is orthogonal to how confused you are about consciousness and how you go about investigating what confuses you. Your framing comes across as an attempt to decrement the credibility of people who advocate Quotation-type intuition by associating them with IIT, framing Boldfaces [your “Camp #1”] as the “sensible people” by comparison.
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There’s been discussion in these comments—more and less serious—about whether it’s plausible Boldface and Quotation are talking past each other on account of neurological differences. I think this is quite plausible even before we get into the question of whether Boldfaces could truly lack the qualia Quotations are talking about, or not.
In the chapter of Consciousness Explained titled “Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theater”, Dennett sets out to solve the puzzle of how the brain reconstructs conscious experiences of the same distant object to be simultaneous across sensory modes despite the fact that light travels faster [and is processed slower in the brain] than sound. He considers reconstruction of simultaneity across conscious modes part of what a quale is.
Yet, I have qualia if anyone does, and if someone bounces a basketball 30m away from me, I generally don’t hear it bounce until a fraction of a second after I see it hit the ground. I’ve always been that way. As a grade-school kid, I would ask people about it; they’d say it wasn’t that way for them, and I’d assume it was because they weren’t paying close enough attention. Now I know people differ vastly in how they experience things and it’s almost certainly an unusual neurological quirk.
Second example: it’s commonly attributed to William James that he remarked on the slowness of qualia, relative to more atomic perception: “I see a bear, I run, I am afraid”. This basic motto—the idea that emotion succeeds action—went a long way in James’s philosophy of emotion, if I understand correctly.
I don’t experience emotion [or other things that usually get called “qualia”] delayed relative to reflex action like that at all. Other people also don’t usually report that experience, and I suspect James was pretty strange in that respect.
So even if everyone had qualia, yes, when we try to explain the contents of subjective awareness, we are quite frequently talking past each other because of the Typical Mind Fallacy.
--
Taking that as a given, it’s still important whether some people [e.g., Dennett] actually don’t have qualia. Is that possible?
Some people hear voices. Some people are gay. Some people are autistic. Some people are colorblind. There are still some reflexes left over in our culture from the days before reductionism, when philosophers would say of schizophrenics that they were touched by the divine or demonic, of gays that they were inspired by virtue or corruption [depending on the culture], and of autists that they were being deliberately contrarian, or else ill-affected by some bad air, or something. Of the colorblind people we don’t have such leftover cultural narratives, probably because the differences that don’t get noticed, don’t get talked about. But if we did have one for colorblindness, it’d probably be that they were being performatively obtuse; and if the colorblind people had been able to express their private opinion [which would have been met with resistance], it probably would have been that everyone else was faking seeing the emperor’s robe in impossible colors as a status signal or some such.
“Qualia” seem at least as easy to miss as color. So I find it quite plausible that there’s a neurological difference underlying many of the arguments between Boldfaces and Quotations.
People in these replies have said that they are alienated from qualia, but aren’t alienated from consciousness.
Qualia aren’t particularly real; consciousness [in the sense of ‘sentience’, ‘self-awareness’, or ‘subjective experience’, not mere ‘awakeness’, like a fly might have] is real.
Vistas aren’t particularly real; vision is real.
Set Chalmers aside, and define p-zombies as qualia-less people who act like qualia-less people. I think Dennett and other Boldfaces are such people.
Others in the comments have pointed out that it seems implausible that such “p-zombies” [as so defined] could report on the subjects of their own experience, because anything that is the subject of conscious [in the sense of “sentient” or “subjective”] experience, definitionally becomes a quale.
This, I think, is where the cruxy neurological difficulty lies in the mutually target-missing crosstalk between Boldfaces and Quotations. Quotations, when they get to talking about the philosophy of consciousness [/‘awareness’ / ‘sentience’ / ‘subjective experience’] tend to talk about qualia as an inherently mystical or ineffable or non-reductionistic [ in the sense of violating reductionistic principles ] experience. E.g., the nature of Chalmers’s confusion about qualia [unlike Dennett’s, or Damasio’s], isn’t that they seem elusive or unreliable, but that they seem so obvious as to actively obstruct a properly reductionistic understanding of their internal composition—in a way that Chalmers presumably does not also feel about other classes of percept, like vision, sound, or visceral experience.
The Wikipedia article on qualia has an interesting note in the introduction:
“Jñāna” doesn’t mean the same thing as the later Buddhist “jhana”—the later Buddhist “jhana” is a target mental state achieved through meditation, while the earlier “Vedic” “jñāna” simply refers to a thing-experienced the way “quale” does. Like “jhana”, though, “jñāna” is a remote cognate with the English “know” and the Greek “gnosis”. And like “quale”, and “gnosis”, “jñāna”—though not having been originally defined with prescriptive content—acquired mystical and spiritual connotations with use, implying that people tended to organically drift toward using that word in a mysterian way. It seems that across cultures, there is a whole class of people that insists on allowing mysticism to diffuse into our references to atomic conscious experience. This is very strange, if you think about it! Atomic conscious experience isn’t mystical.
I think what happens is that people—especially people like me who can sometimes experience deep, but difficult-to-quickly-unpack, holistic percepts with a high subjective level of certitude—use “quale” [or “jñāna” or “gnosis”] to refer to hard-to-describe things we would not know except by directly experiencing them. Some mystics take advantage, and claim you should give money to their church for reasons they can’t describe but are very certain of. So semantic drift associates the word with mysticism. [ Even while some people, like myself and Chalmers, continue using such words honestly, to refer to certain kinds of large high-certitude experiences whose internals frustrate our access. ]
Dennett and other Boldfaces seem [neurologically? I imagine] inclined to approach all situations, especially those involving reflective experiences, with a heavy emotional tone of doubt, which opens up questions and begs resolution.
[ E.g., Dennett writes:
and this general approach holds in the rest of his writing, as far as I’m aware. ]
So given that people use the word “quale” [ which, again, like the word “vista” or “projection”, refers to a category of thing that, if we’re speaking precisely, isn’t real ] so often to refer to their high-certitude opaque experiences, it makes sense that Dennett and Boldfaces would say that they don’t have such experiences. Their experiences don’t come with that gnostic certitude by which holistic thinkers [like me] sometimes fumblingly excuse our quick illegible conclusions.
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You say “Camp #1” vs “Camp #2″ has implications for research decisions, because
Demanding that consciousness must be explained as existing only on one level in the ontological hierarchy of description is a greater ask than we make of ordinary software documentation. Is the X window server “low level” or “high level”? It needs the assembly code to run, so it must be “low level”, right? But we can only notice when it breaks by noticing whether our windows look good at a high level—whether they display with the right color and font, whether we can make several, whether their contents don’t interfere with each other, etc. So our criteria are high-level—are we looking at a high-level phenomenon?
Like the X window system, operating systems, etc., consciousness inherently straddles layers of abstraction. It exists to facilitate supervenience. Neither Camp #1 nor Camp #2 is off on a very sensible research foot.
The quotation author in the example I’ve made up does not favor IIT. In general, I think IIT represents a very small fraction (< 5%, possibly < 1%) of Camp #2. It’s the most popular theory, but Camp #2 is extremely heterogeneous in their ideas, so this is not a high bar.
Certainly if you look at philosophers you won’t find any connection to IIT since the majority of them lived before IIT was developed.
If you can point to which part of the post made it sound like that, I’d be interested in correcting it because that was very much not intended.
Clarification: The high-level vs. low-level thing is a frame to apply to natural phenomena to figure out how far removed from the laws of physics they are and, consequently, whether you should look for equations or heuristics to describe them. The most low-level entities are electrons, up quarks, electromagnetism, etc. (I also call those ‘fundamental’). The next most low level things are protons or neutrons (made up of fundamental elements). Molecules are very low level. Processes between or within atoms are very low level. Planetary motions are pretty low level.
Answer: The X window server is an output of human brains, so it’s super super high level. It takes a lot of steps to get from the laws of physics to human organisms writing code. Programming language is irrelevant. Any writing done by humans, natural language or programming language, is super high level.