As someone who could be described as “pro-qualia”: I think there are still a number of fundamental misconceptions and confusions that people bring to this debate. We could have a more productive dialogue if these confusions were cleared up. I don’t think that clearing up these confusions will make everyone agree with me on everything, but I do think that we would end up talking past each other less if the confusions were addressed.
First, a couple of misconceptions:
1.) Some people think that part of the definition of qualia is that they are necessarily supernatural or non-physical. This is false. A qualia is just a sense perception. That’s it. The definition of “qualia” is completely, 100% neutral as to the underlying ontological substrate. It could certainly be something entirely physical. By accepting the existence of qualia, you are not thereby committing yourself to anti-physicalism.
2.) An idea I sometimes see repeated is that qualia are this sort of ephemeral, ineffable “feeling” that you get over and above your ordinary sense perception. It’s as if, you see red, and the experience of seeing red gives you a certain “vibe”, and this “vibe” is the qualia. This is false. Maybe someone did explain it that way to you once, but if they did, then they were wrong. Qualia is nothing over and above your ordinary sense perception. It’s not seeing red plus something else. It’s just seeing red. That’s it.
Those are what I would call the “objective” misconceptions. Past this point, our intuitions may start coming apart, and it may become harder to communicate exactly what my position is. But I can still try.
When defining qualia as a “sense perception”, something crucial that’s implicit in the definition is that it is your first-person experience of the sense perception. It’s what you actually perceive. Some people may be thinking at this point, “well, I don’t know what this ‘first-person experience’ is. There is the data I take as input, there is the processing that my brain does on it, there is the behavior that I emit as a result, and I suppose you could call the totality of this whole thing a ‘sense perception’, but I don’t know what this ‘first-person experience’ component is supposed to add to the story.” For people who are in this position, I would add two more arguments to help clarify what’s going on:
1.) Do you know what it feels like to feel pain? Then congratulations, you know what it feels like to have qualia. Pain is a qualia. It’s that simple. If I told you that I was going to put you in intense pain for an hour, but I assured you there would be no physical damage or injury to you whatsoever, you would still be very much not ok with that. You would want to avoid that experience. Why? Because pain hurts! You’re not afraid of the fact that you’re going to have an “internal representation” of pain, nor are you worried about what behavior you might display as a result of the pain. You’re worried first and foremost about the fact that it’s going to hurt! The “hurt” is the qualia.
2.) Imagine that you have a very boring and unpleasant task to do. It could be your day job, it could be a social gathering that you would rather not attend, whatever. Imagine I offer you a proposition: while you are performing this unpleasant task, I can put you into a state that you will subjectively experience as deep sleep. You will experience exactly what you experience when you are asleep but not dreaming: i.e., exactly nothing. The catch is, your body will continue to function as though you were wide awake and functioning. Your body will move around, your eyes will be open, you will talk to people, you will do everything exactly as you would normally do. But you will experience none of it. It sounds like an enticing proposition, right? You get all the benefit of doing the work without the pain of actually having to experience the work. It doesn’t matter if you think this isn’t actually possible to achieve in the real world: it’s just a thought experiment to get you to understand the difference between your internal experience and your outward behavior. What you’re essentially being offered in the thought experiment is the ability to “turn off your qualia” for a span of time.
If you read all that and you think “ok, I have a better idea of what you mean by ‘qualia’ now, but I still don’t see why it’s a big deal or why it should be hard to explain with standard physics”, then that’s ok. That’s a reasonable position that’s shared by a number of experts in this area. I’m not trying to make you into a Believer In The Hard Problem, I’m just trying to make you understand what “qualia” means.
If you still think “I still have no idea what qualia is and I think you’re delusional”… well, that sort of makes me think that I still just haven’t found the right way to explain it. But, I suppose at some point we just have to accept that people will have wildly divergent intuitions and ways of modeling the world, and there’s only so much we can do to bridge the gap.
The thoughtexperiments suggest that qualia is tied to memory-formation. If your nociceptors are firing like crazy but the CNS never updates on it, was there any pain?
Then the obvious next question is what distinguishes qualia from memory-formation?
Yep, the first thing I thought after reading “this isn’t actually possible to achieve in the real world” was “Yes it is! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis, or that time I played in a concert while blackout drunk and I can only actually remember playing half of the set list.” The second thing I thought was “But did I actually have no qualia, or do I just not remember them?” The third thing I thought was “Is there any way I could possibly tell, even in principle? If there isn’t, doesn’t that mean that there’s no actual difference between qualia and the formation of memories of qualia?”
I’m pretty sure I’m in the Chalmers camp if I’m in either (because qualia are obviously epistemically primitive, and Dennett is being silly), and I’ve had the same thought about memory formation. Not from the above thought experiments, just from earlier musings on the topic. It seems possible that memory formation is required somehow, but it also seems possible that it isn’t, and I have yet to come up with a thought experiment to distinguish them.
I’m not ready to call a camera conscious just because it is saving data (although I can’t totally rule out panpsychism yet, I think we currently probably have no nonliving examples of things with consciousness), so I don’t know that memory formation is identical to qualia (but maybe). Maybe memory formation is a necessary, but not sufficient condition?
Or maybe the only methods we currently have to directly observe consciousness are internal to ourselves and happen to go through memory formation before we can report on it (certainly to ourselves). I believe things exist that can’t be interacted with, so the inability to observe (past) qualia without going through memory formation doesn’t prove that (present) qualia can’t exist in the moment without forming memory, but should we care? Midazolam, for example, is a drug that causes sedation and anterograde amnesia, but (reportedly) not unconsciousness. Does a sedated patient have qualia? They seem to act like they do. Is memory formation not happening at all? Or is it just not lasting? Is working memory alone sufficient? I don’t know.
Hard upvote for taking time to describe the concept explicitly and conprehensibly, highlighting the possible places of confusion—non-physical aspect of qualia that is occasionally smuggled in the definition.
When you define qualia like you do, I (a Camp 1 person, as it turned out) am completely on board with you. Indeed I expect them to be explained with neuroscience, but that’s as you’ve noticed yourself—a bit of a different story.
Once this story became popular among people in my country (most of whom are not interested in the philosophy of mind), I was surprised that many people chose to press the button for the money. It got me thinking that there are two distinct groups of people that don’t share the core intuition about mind.
I wonder if this lines up with camp 1/camp 2 distinction? It makes sense to me that camp 1 folks would be more likely to press the button—it fits with their way of thinking.
Also, I’m curious about how to model an agent to choose whether or not to press the button. Very rough thoughts on how to model:
- The agent who decides to press the button acts based on the future state of the physical world.
- The agent who decides not to press the button acts based on the timeline the agent will be in, which exists outside of the physical world.
Do we have any interesting work looking at this kind of approach?
Do you know what it feels like to feel pain? Then congratulations, you know what it feels like to have qualia. Pain is a qualia. It’s that simple. If I told you that I was going to put you in intense pain for an hour, but I assured you there would be no physical damage or injury to you whatsoever, you would still be very much not ok with that. You would want to avoid that experience. Why? Because pain hurts! You’re not afraid of the fact that you’re going to have an “internal representation” of pain, nor are you worried about what behavior you might display as a result of the pain. You’re worried first and foremost about the fact that it’s going to hurt! The “hurt” is the qualia.
I still don’t grok qualia, and I’m not sure I get your thought experiment.
To be more detailed, let’s imagine the following: ”I’ll cut off your arm, but you’ll be perfectly fine, no pain, no injury, well would you be okay with that? No! That’s because you care about your arm for itself and not just for the negative effects...” “How can you cut off my arm without any negative effect?” ”I’ll anesthesize you and put you to sleep, cut off your arm, then before you wake up, I’ll have it regrown using technanobabble. Out of 100 patients, none reported having felt anything bad before, during or after the experiment, the procedure is perfectly side-effect-free.” “Well, in that case I guess I don’t mind you cutting my arm.”
Compare: ”I’ll put you in immense pain, but there will be no physical damage or injury whatsoever. No long-term brain damage or lingering pain or anything.” ”How can you put me in pain without any negative effect?” “I’ll cut out the part of your brain that processes pain and replace it by technanobabble so your body will work exactly as before. Meanwhile, I’ll stimulate this bit of brain in a jar. Then, I’ll put it back. Out of 100 patients, all displayed exactly the same behavior as if nothing had been done to them.” ”Well, in that case, I don’t mind you putting me in this ‘immense pain’.”
I think the article’s explanation of the difference between our intuitions is quite crisp, but it still seems self-evident to me that when you try to operationalize the thing it disappears. The self-evidence is the problem, since you intuit differently—I am fairly confident from past conversations that my comparison will seem flawed to you in some important way but I can’t predict in what way (If you have some general trick for being able to tell how qualia-realist people answer such questions, I’d love to hear it, it sounds like a big step towards grokking your perspective)
As someone who could be described as “pro-qualia”: I think there are still a number of fundamental misconceptions and confusions that people bring to this debate. We could have a more productive dialogue if these confusions were cleared up. I don’t think that clearing up these confusions will make everyone agree with me on everything, but I do think that we would end up talking past each other less if the confusions were addressed.
First, a couple of misconceptions:
1.) Some people think that part of the definition of qualia is that they are necessarily supernatural or non-physical. This is false. A qualia is just a sense perception. That’s it. The definition of “qualia” is completely, 100% neutral as to the underlying ontological substrate. It could certainly be something entirely physical. By accepting the existence of qualia, you are not thereby committing yourself to anti-physicalism.
2.) An idea I sometimes see repeated is that qualia are this sort of ephemeral, ineffable “feeling” that you get over and above your ordinary sense perception. It’s as if, you see red, and the experience of seeing red gives you a certain “vibe”, and this “vibe” is the qualia. This is false. Maybe someone did explain it that way to you once, but if they did, then they were wrong. Qualia is nothing over and above your ordinary sense perception. It’s not seeing red plus something else. It’s just seeing red. That’s it.
Those are what I would call the “objective” misconceptions. Past this point, our intuitions may start coming apart, and it may become harder to communicate exactly what my position is. But I can still try.
When defining qualia as a “sense perception”, something crucial that’s implicit in the definition is that it is your first-person experience of the sense perception. It’s what you actually perceive. Some people may be thinking at this point, “well, I don’t know what this ‘first-person experience’ is. There is the data I take as input, there is the processing that my brain does on it, there is the behavior that I emit as a result, and I suppose you could call the totality of this whole thing a ‘sense perception’, but I don’t know what this ‘first-person experience’ component is supposed to add to the story.” For people who are in this position, I would add two more arguments to help clarify what’s going on:
1.) Do you know what it feels like to feel pain? Then congratulations, you know what it feels like to have qualia. Pain is a qualia. It’s that simple. If I told you that I was going to put you in intense pain for an hour, but I assured you there would be no physical damage or injury to you whatsoever, you would still be very much not ok with that. You would want to avoid that experience. Why? Because pain hurts! You’re not afraid of the fact that you’re going to have an “internal representation” of pain, nor are you worried about what behavior you might display as a result of the pain. You’re worried first and foremost about the fact that it’s going to hurt! The “hurt” is the qualia.
2.) Imagine that you have a very boring and unpleasant task to do. It could be your day job, it could be a social gathering that you would rather not attend, whatever. Imagine I offer you a proposition: while you are performing this unpleasant task, I can put you into a state that you will subjectively experience as deep sleep. You will experience exactly what you experience when you are asleep but not dreaming: i.e., exactly nothing. The catch is, your body will continue to function as though you were wide awake and functioning. Your body will move around, your eyes will be open, you will talk to people, you will do everything exactly as you would normally do. But you will experience none of it. It sounds like an enticing proposition, right? You get all the benefit of doing the work without the pain of actually having to experience the work. It doesn’t matter if you think this isn’t actually possible to achieve in the real world: it’s just a thought experiment to get you to understand the difference between your internal experience and your outward behavior. What you’re essentially being offered in the thought experiment is the ability to “turn off your qualia” for a span of time.
If you read all that and you think “ok, I have a better idea of what you mean by ‘qualia’ now, but I still don’t see why it’s a big deal or why it should be hard to explain with standard physics”, then that’s ok. That’s a reasonable position that’s shared by a number of experts in this area. I’m not trying to make you into a Believer In The Hard Problem, I’m just trying to make you understand what “qualia” means.
If you still think “I still have no idea what qualia is and I think you’re delusional”… well, that sort of makes me think that I still just haven’t found the right way to explain it. But, I suppose at some point we just have to accept that people will have wildly divergent intuitions and ways of modeling the world, and there’s only so much we can do to bridge the gap.
The thoughtexperiments suggest that qualia is tied to memory-formation. If your nociceptors are firing like crazy but the CNS never updates on it, was there any pain?
Then the obvious next question is what distinguishes qualia from memory-formation?
Yep, the first thing I thought after reading “this isn’t actually possible to achieve in the real world” was “Yes it is! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis, or that time I played in a concert while blackout drunk and I can only actually remember playing half of the set list.” The second thing I thought was “But did I actually have no qualia, or do I just not remember them?” The third thing I thought was “Is there any way I could possibly tell, even in principle? If there isn’t, doesn’t that mean that there’s no actual difference between qualia and the formation of memories of qualia?”
I’m pretty sure I’m in the Chalmers camp if I’m in either (because qualia are obviously epistemically primitive, and Dennett is being silly), and I’ve had the same thought about memory formation. Not from the above thought experiments, just from earlier musings on the topic. It seems possible that memory formation is required somehow, but it also seems possible that it isn’t, and I have yet to come up with a thought experiment to distinguish them.
I’m not ready to call a camera conscious just because it is saving data (although I can’t totally rule out panpsychism yet, I think we currently probably have no nonliving examples of things with consciousness), so I don’t know that memory formation is identical to qualia (but maybe). Maybe memory formation is a necessary, but not sufficient condition?
Or maybe the only methods we currently have to directly observe consciousness are internal to ourselves and happen to go through memory formation before we can report on it (certainly to ourselves). I believe things exist that can’t be interacted with, so the inability to observe (past) qualia without going through memory formation doesn’t prove that (present) qualia can’t exist in the moment without forming memory, but should we care? Midazolam, for example, is a drug that causes sedation and anterograde amnesia, but (reportedly) not unconsciousness. Does a sedated patient have qualia? They seem to act like they do. Is memory formation not happening at all? Or is it just not lasting? Is working memory alone sufficient? I don’t know.
Hard upvote for taking time to describe the concept explicitly and conprehensibly, highlighting the possible places of confusion—non-physical aspect of qualia that is occasionally smuggled in the definition.
When you define qualia like you do, I (a Camp 1 person, as it turned out) am completely on board with you. Indeed I expect them to be explained with neuroscience, but that’s as you’ve noticed yourself—a bit of a different story.
Your pain qualia argument reminds me of an interesting thought experiment - [the 500 million year button](https://danspub.quora.com/The-500-million-year-button-A-Japanese-existential-horror).
Once this story became popular among people in my country (most of whom are not interested in the philosophy of mind), I was surprised that many people chose to press the button for the money. It got me thinking that there are two distinct groups of people that don’t share the core intuition about mind.
I wonder if this lines up with camp 1/camp 2 distinction? It makes sense to me that camp 1 folks would be more likely to press the button—it fits with their way of thinking.
Also, I’m curious about how to model an agent to choose whether or not to press the button. Very rough thoughts on how to model:
- The agent who decides to press the button acts based on the future state of the physical world.
- The agent who decides not to press the button acts based on the timeline the agent will be in, which exists outside of the physical world.
Do we have any interesting work looking at this kind of approach?
I still don’t grok qualia, and I’m not sure I get your thought experiment.
To be more detailed, let’s imagine the following:
”I’ll cut off your arm, but you’ll be perfectly fine, no pain, no injury, well would you be okay with that? No! That’s because you care about your arm for itself and not just for the negative effects...”
“How can you cut off my arm without any negative effect?”
”I’ll anesthesize you and put you to sleep, cut off your arm, then before you wake up, I’ll have it regrown using technanobabble. Out of 100 patients, none reported having felt anything bad before, during or after the experiment, the procedure is perfectly side-effect-free.”
“Well, in that case I guess I don’t mind you cutting my arm.”
Compare:
”I’ll put you in immense pain, but there will be no physical damage or injury whatsoever. No long-term brain damage or lingering pain or anything.”
”How can you put me in pain without any negative effect?”
“I’ll cut out the part of your brain that processes pain and replace it by technanobabble so your body will work exactly as before. Meanwhile, I’ll stimulate this bit of brain in a jar. Then, I’ll put it back. Out of 100 patients, all displayed exactly the same behavior as if nothing had been done to them.”
”Well, in that case, I don’t mind you putting me in this ‘immense pain’.”
I think the article’s explanation of the difference between our intuitions is quite crisp, but it still seems self-evident to me that when you try to operationalize the thing it disappears. The self-evidence is the problem, since you intuit differently—I am fairly confident from past conversations that my comparison will seem flawed to you in some important way but I can’t predict in what way (If you have some general trick for being able to tell how qualia-realist people answer such questions, I’d love to hear it, it sounds like a big step towards grokking your perspective)