I’m sure I’ll link back to this post soon. But this post is motivated by a few things such as:
a) Disagreements over consciousness—if non-materialist qualia existed, then we wouldn’t be able to know about them empirically, but the universe doesn’t have to play nice and make all phenomenon accessible to our scientific instruments, so we should have more uncertainty about this than people generally possess
b) The theories that can explain everything post—as nice as it’d be to just be able to evaluate theories empirically, there’s no reason why we can’t have a theory that is important for determining expectations, which isn’t cleanly falsifiable
Many people believe qualia don’t exist because we wouldn’t be able learn about them empirically. But it seems spurious to assume nothing exists outside of our lightcone just because we can’t observe it.
“Qualia” is not a synonym for “non physical thingy”.
We have subjective evidence for qualia, otherwise the question would never have arisen.
Disagreements over consciousness—if non-materialist qualia existed, then we wouldn’t be able to know about them empirically
We wouldn’t be able to know about them using objective, third person empiricism. Whether third person empiricism is the only kind is part of the wider problem.
I’m sure I’ll link back to this post soon. But this post is motivated by a few things such as:
a) Disagreements over consciousness—if non-materialist qualia existed, then we wouldn’t be able to know about them empirically, but the universe doesn’t have to play nice and make all phenomenon accessible to our scientific instruments, so we should have more uncertainty about this than people generally possess
b) The theories that can explain everything post—as nice as it’d be to just be able to evaluate theories empirically, there’s no reason why we can’t have a theory that is important for determining expectations, which isn’t cleanly falsifiable
“Qualia” is not a synonym for “non physical thingy”.
We have subjective evidence for qualia, otherwise the question would never have arisen.
We wouldn’t be able to know about them using objective, third person empiricism. Whether third person empiricism is the only kind is part of the wider problem.