It’s just that physicalists take the controlled and repeated findings of physics and neuroscience as being stronger evidence than their own subjective experience is.
This is not a straightforward matter. There are people who deny the existence of colors, of time, of any sort of will, or any sort of subjective experience, on the basis of “physicalism” or “science”. Physics and neuroscience actually contain no such thing as “subjective experience”. Do you therefore conclude that there is no such thing at all? No, you believe it’s there and it has a semi-obscure relationship to the physical facts, and you use what you hear from science to adjust your beliefs about the nature of that relationship, and also to adjust your attitude towards the naive beliefs that arise naturally from your experience.
What’s actually going on in the minds of people who make private attitude adjustments in order to be good little physicalists, is itself best described as a subjective process. The complex of beliefs peculiar to this site, as recently summarized in the Gospel According to Zed, are a great case study in such self-shaping of subjectivity. It’s subjectively experienced, it’s subjectively willed, and it’s done in response to a subjectively imagined idea of what Science is saying. This is true both for the more spectacular ontological commitments that people make and break, and for the epistemological adjustments performed in response to the psychological demonstration of fallibility of judgment. And I’d say it usually has about as much basis as the belief of someone who thinks there is a gay gene because they remember hearing about it on TV. Science can be wrong, the popular description of what science says can be wrong, and the private implications that a person draws from this can be wrong.
No, you believe [subjective experience is] there and it has a semi-obscure relationship to the physical facts
I think you understate the problem. The relationship is totally obscure.
On the one hand, there is the “it’s all made of atoms” tradition that got started two centuries ago, which, together with the Baconian idea that you have to look at nature to discover anything about it, has proved enormously successful everywhere it has been applied, and continues to be so.
And on the other hand, there is subjective experience, the problem with which is that no-one has any idea at all of how such a thing could possibly exist in a world made of atoms. Not only do we not know how it arises, we cannot see any way it could possibly arise from atoms. The two things appear absolutely, utterly incompatible.
But hardly anyone looks squarely at that conflict and acknowledges it. Instead, they confabulate to fill the gap. Some invent ontologically fundamental mental entities, which amounts to no more than plastering labels like “soul” or “the divine” over their ignorance. Some deny the existence of subjective experience. Some give explanations only of how we come to talk about subjective experience, but leave the thing itself untouched—p-zombie theories. Some come up with explanations that amount to finding a correlation with some observable physical phenomenon and identify it with that—as if, in cruder terms, one were to explain the mind by saying it’s the brain, or to take such fake explanation to the point of absurdity, one were to explain the mind by saying it’s made of atoms.
This is more than just not knowing how it works: nobody knows how it could possibly work.
If one of the “confabulations” were true, how would you know?
Likewise for if no one knew how it worked, but thought they knew how it could possibly work; how would you know if they were right aside from having a full explanation?
If one of the “confabulations” were true, how would you know?
Which one? Ontologically fundamental mental entities? Show me one that isn’t an empty label. The other three—denying the existence of subjective experience, p-zombie explanations, and interpreting correlation with a physical phenomenon as identity all miss the mark. They are not things that even could be explanations. That’s probably not an exhaustive list—it can’t be, if there really is an explanation—but vague hypotheticals don’t help. Show me a purported explanation of the existence of subjective experience that isn’t an example of one of these four fallacies and then there will be something to talk about.
Likewise for if no one knew how it worked, but thought they knew how it could possibly work; how would you know if they were right aside from having a full explanation?
Well, how would you know if someone was right about the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity? You would look at whatever they did—theoretical modelling, experiments, whatever—and judge whether the reasoning and the experimental setup were sound. You would compare it with other work in the field. You might do theoretical and experimental investigations of your own.
This is intended to be a simple answer to a simple question.
The same sort of processes are how you would judge any explanation of the existence of subjective experience.
Here, for example, is an imaginary explanation of consciousness: control systems are conscious! Firstly, even accepting that all living organisms are
chock full of control systems, this is an example of fallacy no.4: finding a physical phenomenon apparently causally linked with consciousness and saying the two are the same. But leaving that aside, one can very easily find control systems in the human brain that are inaccessible to consciousness: motor control. When you move an arm you are not aware of the individual muscles you are operating. Even when you learn a complex motor skill like juggling, the processes by which the cerebellum learns the task are completely inaccessible to you. So there’s a large and complex collection of control systems sitting right next to and intimately connected with what appears to be the physical substrate of consciousness, and is made of very similar stuff, yet itself is devoid of the property. This refutes the proposed explanation.
They are not things that even could be explanations
I don’t understand what single thing, if any, disqualifies them. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think you would agree they have unique issues, just as “being an empty label” is something that won’t be wrong with, say, denying subjective experience.
You made a good point about the inexhaustibility of wrong explanations, which I suppose is true for everything. So I certainly don’t ask for anything like a complete list of bad explanations and their problems! But of the other three you mentioned, do they share a problem, or what are their unique problems, or is it too complicated to explain in a comment? Can you explain why the other three are hopeless as well as you did for the first?
This is a thing it might be hard to do well. Were I called upon to support my claim that “’being an empty label” is something that won’t be wrong with, say, denying subjective experience, I might not last long against an honest skeptic before resorting to profanity and threats of violence if they disagreed. “Because they say there is nothing so they are not saying that there is something where the “something” is literally no more than the thing. Because there is no thing. %@*!” But please try.
Well, how would you know if someone was right about the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity? You would look at whatever they did—theoretical modelling, experiments, whatever—and judge whether the reasoning and the experimental setup were sound.
I’m trying to get at the difference between knowing about something that no one has a perfect model and knowing that no one has the correct framework to think about building a working model. From “This is more than just not knowing how it works: nobody knows how it could possibly work,” building a working model shows one knows how something works, and absence of one is evidence someone does not know how something works.
But how does one distinguish the various ways to not have a perfect model? What evidence is there about whether people are working on something correctly, aside from a complete and finished explanation?
To put it another way, what stops one from being able to point at an unsolved problem, say one universally admitted to be unsolved, and declaring no one has any idea how to think about it, or that no one knows how it could possibly work, or similar?
I don’t understand what single thing, if any, disqualifies them. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think you would agree they have unique issues, just as “being an empty label” is something that won’t be wrong with, say, denying subjective experience.
You made a good point about the inexhaustibility of wrong explanations, which I suppose is true for everything. So I certainly don’t ask for anything like a complete list of bad explanations and their problems! But of the other three you mentioned, do they share a problem, or what are their unique problems, or is it too complicated to explain in a comment? Can you explain why the other three are hopeless as well as you did for the first?
I feel a bit like I’m Eliezer expaining the instant failure modes of most AGI research (but not as smart), and that there could be a whole sequence of postings on the instant failure modes of explanations of consciousness.
Well, I don’t think I can write those postings, or at least, devote the many days it would take me. Just some brief notes here amplifying the fallacies with examples.
What evidence is there about whether people are working on something correctly, aside from a complete and finished explanation?
A partial and unfinished explanation. But it must go some distance: it must suggest practical experiments and predict their results. (Thought experiments do not count.) Consider the four different fallacies I described by this standard:
Empty labels: saying consciousness is “the soul”, “a spark of the divine within us”, “self-awareness”, etc. fails to constrain expectations.
Denying the existence of subjective experience: well, we do have it. At least, I do, and I’ve no reason to suppose I’m exceptional in this. (Those who seriously deny it might be exceptions in the other direction.) So this one has the virtue of constraining expectations but is instantly refuted by observation. It amounts to sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and going “la la la can’t hear you!” Arguments against the existence of subjective experience (consciousness, qualia, etc.) generally take the form of arguing against other people’s arguments in favour. Since no-one has a good account of what it is, it is not difficult to demolish their bad accounts. This is like refuting the phlogiston theory to prove that fire does not exist.
In the p-zombie category is Minsky’s “society of mind”, which gives a hypothetical account of how a system might come to talk to itself about itself in the ways that we do. But how we talk about ourselves and how we feel about ourselves are two different things, and the latter is left unaddressed. Besides, there are plenty of computer systems that talk to themselves about themselves, and we see no reason to attribute consciousness to them. In the form in which Greg Egan expressed the theory in his story “Mr. Volition”, consciousness is the piece of brain that does consciousness, just as the cerebellum is the piece of brain that does motor control. This is no better than any other homunculus theory: it is either passing the buck or asserting that we are all philosophical zombies, beings that talk about consciousness without having it.
Physical correlates: Neuroscience is always finding more and more physical correlates of mental phenomena, from the fact that gross lesions to various brain locations produce predictable patterns of cognitive impairment, to the results of live brain imaging during task performance. This is compelling evidence that the brain must be either the physical substrate of consciousness or an interface with something else. Neither alternative goes very far. We still don’t know how the brain or anything else made of atoms could be a physical substrate for consciousness, however compelling the evidence that it is. Contrast this with the fact that we do know how ever-so-slightly impure silicon can be a substrate for computation. And the brain as an interface to something else fares even worse, as we have no idea what that something else could be. The soul? See (1).
So those are four basic ways in which attempts to explain consciousness can go wrong. I have yet to see an attempt that doesn’t fail one or more.
The comments of yours I’ve read are always clear and insightful, and usually I agree with what you say. I have to disagree with you here, though, about your supposed second fallacy.
Arguments against the existence of subjective experience (consciousness, qualia, etc.) generally take the form of arguing against other people’s arguments in favour. Since no-one has a good account of what it is, it is not difficult to demolish their bad accounts. This is like refuting the phlogiston theory to prove that fire does not exist.
I disagree. Arguments against qualia typically challenge the very coherence of anything which could play the desired role. It’s not like trying to prove fire doesn’t exist, it’s like trying to prove there is no such thing as elan vital or chakras.
I deny the existence of UFOs. It’s pretty clear what UFOs are—spaceships built and flown to Earth by creatures who evolved on distant planets—and I can give fairly straight-forward probabilistic reasons of the kind amenable to rational disagreement, for my stance.
I (mostly) deny the existence of God. Apologies if you’re a theist for the bluntness, but I don’t think it’s at all clear what God is or could be. Every explication I’ve ever encountered of God either involves properties which permit the deduction of contradictions (immovable rocks/unstoppable forces and what-not), or are so anodyne or diffuse as to be trivial (‘God is love’ -hence the ‘mostly’). There is enough talk in our culture about God, however, to give meaning to denials of His existence—roughly, ‘All (rather, most of) this talk which takes place in houses of worship and political chambers involving the word ‘God’ and its ilk, involves a mistaken ontological commitment’.
Do I deny the existence of consciousness, or subjective experience? If my wife and I go to a hockey game or a play, we in some sense experience the same thing -there is a common ‘objective’ experience. But equally we surely have in some sense different experiences—she may be interested or bored by different parts than I am, and will see slightly different parts of the action than I. So clearly there is such a thing as subjective experience, in some sense. This, however, is not what is at issue. Roughly, what we are concerned about is a supposed ineffable aspect of experience, a ‘what it is like’. I deny the existence of this in the sense in which I deny the existence of God. That is, I have yet even to see a clear and coherent articulation of what’s at issue. You imply the burden of argument is with the deniers; I (following Dennett and many others) suggest the burden is with defenders to say what it is they defend.
Are qualia causally efficacious, or not? If they are, then they are in principal objectively detectable/observable, and hence not worthy of the controversy they generate (if they have a causally efficacious ‘aspect’ and a non-efficacious, one, then just factor out the causally efficacious aspect as it plays no role in the controversy). On the flip side, of course, if qualia are not causally efficacious, then they aren’t responsible for our talk of them—they aren’t what we’re presently talking about, paradoxically.
It seems to me the best case for exponents of consciousness is to force a dilemma—an argument pushing us on the one hand to accept the existence of something which on the other appears to be incoherent (as per just above). But I have yet to see this argument. Appeals to what’s ‘obvious’ or to introspection just don’t do it—the force of the sort of arg above and the several others adduced by Dennett et. al., clearly win out over thumping one’s sternum and saying ‘this!’, simply because the latter isn’t an argument. The typical candidates for serious arguments in this vein are inverted spectrum or Black and White Mary type-arguments, but it seems to me they always just amount to the chest thumping in fancy dress. Would be interested to hear of good candidate arguments for qualia, though, and to hear any objections if you think the foregoing is unfair.
Arguments against qualia typically challenge the very coherence of anything which could play the desired role. It’s not like trying to prove fire doesn’t exist, it’s like trying to prove there is no such thing as elan vital or chakras.
I think there’s some hindsight bias there, in the case of chakras. It is by no means obvious that these supposed centres of something-or-other distributed along the spine and in the head don’t exist. One might be sceptical purely on account of the sources of the concept being mystical or religious, but the same is true of meditation, which has been favourably spoken of by rationalists. It’s only by actually looking for structures in the places where the chakras are supposed to be and not finding anything that could correspond to them that the idea can be discarded. There is also (I think) the fact that different traditions assert different sets of chakras.
“Élan vital” was always a fake explanation for a phenomenon—life—that no-one understood. It’s like a doctor listening to a patient’s symptoms and solemnly making a diagnosis by repeating the symptoms back to the patient in medical Latin. No-one talks about élan vital now because the subject matter succumbed to investigation based on “stuff is made of atoms”.
But consciousness is different—we experience it. We have no explanation for it, just the experience—the fact that there is such a thing as experience. “Consciousness”, “sensation”, “experience”, “qualia”, and so on are not explanations, just names for the phenomenon.
So clearly there is such a thing as subjective experience, in some sense. This, however, is not what is at issue.
To me, this is exactly what is at issue. We have subjective experience, yet we have no idea how there can possibly be such a thing. All discussions of this, it seems to me, immediately veer off into people on one side putting up explanations of what it is, and people on the other knocking them down. The fact of experience remains, ignored by the warring parties.
It seems to me the best case for exponents of consciousness is to force a dilemma—an argument pushing us on the one hand to accept the existence of something which on the other appears to be incoherent (as per just above).
There is no case to be made. Either you have this experience or you do not. I have it and I think that most people do. What people—at least, those who do have subjective experience—need to do first is recognise that there is a problem:
I have subjective experience.
It is impossible for there to be any such thing as subjective experience.
All of the argument is about proposed solutions to this problem. But refuting every solution to a problem does not solve the problem.
In the p-zombie category is Minsky’s “society of mind”, which gives a hypothetical account of how a system might come to talk to itself about itself in the ways that we do. But how we talk about ourselves and how we feel about ourselves are two different things, and the latter is left unaddressed.
I find this class of explanations plausible, myself. I find it at least imaginable that my “feeling” of consciousness basically is the stream of potential reports about myself that I could voice, if there were an interested listener to voice them to. To put it another way: Are you quite sure that the way we feel about ourselves isn’t the same as the way we talk about ourselves (except for the inhibition of actual vocalization)? How would one show that the stream of potentially vocalized self-reports isn’t consciousness? What would distinguish them?
Are you quite sure that the way we feel about ourselves isn’t the same as the way we talk about ourselves (except for the inhibition of actual vocalization)? How would one show that the stream of potentially vocalized self-reports isn’t consciousness? What would distinguish them?
I look around, and have visual experiences. These, it seems to me, are obviously different from any words I might say, or think but not say, about those experiences.
Good point! I might sketch a visual experience, but I don’t ordinarily consider my visual experience to be a sequence of sketches, analogous to an ongoing interior monologue...
This is not a straightforward matter. There are people who deny the existence of colors, of time, of any sort of will, or any sort of subjective experience, on the basis of “physicalism” or “science”. Physics and neuroscience actually contain no such thing as “subjective experience”. Do you therefore conclude that there is no such thing at all? No, you believe it’s there and it has a semi-obscure relationship to the physical facts, and you use what you hear from science to adjust your beliefs about the nature of that relationship, and also to adjust your attitude towards the naive beliefs that arise naturally from your experience.
What’s actually going on in the minds of people who make private attitude adjustments in order to be good little physicalists, is itself best described as a subjective process. The complex of beliefs peculiar to this site, as recently summarized in the Gospel According to Zed, are a great case study in such self-shaping of subjectivity. It’s subjectively experienced, it’s subjectively willed, and it’s done in response to a subjectively imagined idea of what Science is saying. This is true both for the more spectacular ontological commitments that people make and break, and for the epistemological adjustments performed in response to the psychological demonstration of fallibility of judgment. And I’d say it usually has about as much basis as the belief of someone who thinks there is a gay gene because they remember hearing about it on TV. Science can be wrong, the popular description of what science says can be wrong, and the private implications that a person draws from this can be wrong.
Do they deny the existence of rainbows?
I think you understate the problem. The relationship is totally obscure.
On the one hand, there is the “it’s all made of atoms” tradition that got started two centuries ago, which, together with the Baconian idea that you have to look at nature to discover anything about it, has proved enormously successful everywhere it has been applied, and continues to be so.
And on the other hand, there is subjective experience, the problem with which is that no-one has any idea at all of how such a thing could possibly exist in a world made of atoms. Not only do we not know how it arises, we cannot see any way it could possibly arise from atoms. The two things appear absolutely, utterly incompatible.
But hardly anyone looks squarely at that conflict and acknowledges it. Instead, they confabulate to fill the gap. Some invent ontologically fundamental mental entities, which amounts to no more than plastering labels like “soul” or “the divine” over their ignorance. Some deny the existence of subjective experience. Some give explanations only of how we come to talk about subjective experience, but leave the thing itself untouched—p-zombie theories. Some come up with explanations that amount to finding a correlation with some observable physical phenomenon and identify it with that—as if, in cruder terms, one were to explain the mind by saying it’s the brain, or to take such fake explanation to the point of absurdity, one were to explain the mind by saying it’s made of atoms.
This is more than just not knowing how it works: nobody knows how it could possibly work.
If one of the “confabulations” were true, how would you know?
Likewise for if no one knew how it worked, but thought they knew how it could possibly work; how would you know if they were right aside from having a full explanation?
Which one? Ontologically fundamental mental entities? Show me one that isn’t an empty label. The other three—denying the existence of subjective experience, p-zombie explanations, and interpreting correlation with a physical phenomenon as identity all miss the mark. They are not things that even could be explanations. That’s probably not an exhaustive list—it can’t be, if there really is an explanation—but vague hypotheticals don’t help. Show me a purported explanation of the existence of subjective experience that isn’t an example of one of these four fallacies and then there will be something to talk about.
Well, how would you know if someone was right about the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity? You would look at whatever they did—theoretical modelling, experiments, whatever—and judge whether the reasoning and the experimental setup were sound. You would compare it with other work in the field. You might do theoretical and experimental investigations of your own.
This is intended to be a simple answer to a simple question. The same sort of processes are how you would judge any explanation of the existence of subjective experience.
Here, for example, is an imaginary explanation of consciousness: control systems are conscious! Firstly, even accepting that all living organisms are chock full of control systems, this is an example of fallacy no.4: finding a physical phenomenon apparently causally linked with consciousness and saying the two are the same. But leaving that aside, one can very easily find control systems in the human brain that are inaccessible to consciousness: motor control. When you move an arm you are not aware of the individual muscles you are operating. Even when you learn a complex motor skill like juggling, the processes by which the cerebellum learns the task are completely inaccessible to you. So there’s a large and complex collection of control systems sitting right next to and intimately connected with what appears to be the physical substrate of consciousness, and is made of very similar stuff, yet itself is devoid of the property. This refutes the proposed explanation.
Easy, yes?
I don’t understand what single thing, if any, disqualifies them. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think you would agree they have unique issues, just as “being an empty label” is something that won’t be wrong with, say, denying subjective experience.
You made a good point about the inexhaustibility of wrong explanations, which I suppose is true for everything. So I certainly don’t ask for anything like a complete list of bad explanations and their problems! But of the other three you mentioned, do they share a problem, or what are their unique problems, or is it too complicated to explain in a comment? Can you explain why the other three are hopeless as well as you did for the first?
This is a thing it might be hard to do well. Were I called upon to support my claim that “’being an empty label” is something that won’t be wrong with, say, denying subjective experience, I might not last long against an honest skeptic before resorting to profanity and threats of violence if they disagreed. “Because they say there is nothing so they are not saying that there is something where the “something” is literally no more than the thing. Because there is no thing. %@*!” But please try.
I’m trying to get at the difference between knowing about something that no one has a perfect model and knowing that no one has the correct framework to think about building a working model. From “This is more than just not knowing how it works: nobody knows how it could possibly work,” building a working model shows one knows how something works, and absence of one is evidence someone does not know how something works.
But how does one distinguish the various ways to not have a perfect model? What evidence is there about whether people are working on something correctly, aside from a complete and finished explanation?
To put it another way, what stops one from being able to point at an unsolved problem, say one universally admitted to be unsolved, and declaring no one has any idea how to think about it, or that no one knows how it could possibly work, or similar?
I feel a bit like I’m Eliezer expaining the instant failure modes of most AGI research (but not as smart), and that there could be a whole sequence of postings on the instant failure modes of explanations of consciousness.
Well, I don’t think I can write those postings, or at least, devote the many days it would take me. Just some brief notes here amplifying the fallacies with examples.
A partial and unfinished explanation. But it must go some distance: it must suggest practical experiments and predict their results. (Thought experiments do not count.) Consider the four different fallacies I described by this standard:
Empty labels: saying consciousness is “the soul”, “a spark of the divine within us”, “self-awareness”, etc. fails to constrain expectations.
Denying the existence of subjective experience: well, we do have it. At least, I do, and I’ve no reason to suppose I’m exceptional in this. (Those who seriously deny it might be exceptions in the other direction.) So this one has the virtue of constraining expectations but is instantly refuted by observation. It amounts to sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and going “la la la can’t hear you!” Arguments against the existence of subjective experience (consciousness, qualia, etc.) generally take the form of arguing against other people’s arguments in favour. Since no-one has a good account of what it is, it is not difficult to demolish their bad accounts. This is like refuting the phlogiston theory to prove that fire does not exist.
In the p-zombie category is Minsky’s “society of mind”, which gives a hypothetical account of how a system might come to talk to itself about itself in the ways that we do. But how we talk about ourselves and how we feel about ourselves are two different things, and the latter is left unaddressed. Besides, there are plenty of computer systems that talk to themselves about themselves, and we see no reason to attribute consciousness to them. In the form in which Greg Egan expressed the theory in his story “Mr. Volition”, consciousness is the piece of brain that does consciousness, just as the cerebellum is the piece of brain that does motor control. This is no better than any other homunculus theory: it is either passing the buck or asserting that we are all philosophical zombies, beings that talk about consciousness without having it.
Physical correlates: Neuroscience is always finding more and more physical correlates of mental phenomena, from the fact that gross lesions to various brain locations produce predictable patterns of cognitive impairment, to the results of live brain imaging during task performance. This is compelling evidence that the brain must be either the physical substrate of consciousness or an interface with something else. Neither alternative goes very far. We still don’t know how the brain or anything else made of atoms could be a physical substrate for consciousness, however compelling the evidence that it is. Contrast this with the fact that we do know how ever-so-slightly impure silicon can be a substrate for computation. And the brain as an interface to something else fares even worse, as we have no idea what that something else could be. The soul? See (1).
So those are four basic ways in which attempts to explain consciousness can go wrong. I have yet to see an attempt that doesn’t fail one or more.
The comments of yours I’ve read are always clear and insightful, and usually I agree with what you say. I have to disagree with you here, though, about your supposed second fallacy.
I disagree. Arguments against qualia typically challenge the very coherence of anything which could play the desired role. It’s not like trying to prove fire doesn’t exist, it’s like trying to prove there is no such thing as elan vital or chakras.
I deny the existence of UFOs. It’s pretty clear what UFOs are—spaceships built and flown to Earth by creatures who evolved on distant planets—and I can give fairly straight-forward probabilistic reasons of the kind amenable to rational disagreement, for my stance.
I (mostly) deny the existence of God. Apologies if you’re a theist for the bluntness, but I don’t think it’s at all clear what God is or could be. Every explication I’ve ever encountered of God either involves properties which permit the deduction of contradictions (immovable rocks/unstoppable forces and what-not), or are so anodyne or diffuse as to be trivial (‘God is love’ -hence the ‘mostly’). There is enough talk in our culture about God, however, to give meaning to denials of His existence—roughly, ‘All (rather, most of) this talk which takes place in houses of worship and political chambers involving the word ‘God’ and its ilk, involves a mistaken ontological commitment’.
Do I deny the existence of consciousness, or subjective experience? If my wife and I go to a hockey game or a play, we in some sense experience the same thing -there is a common ‘objective’ experience. But equally we surely have in some sense different experiences—she may be interested or bored by different parts than I am, and will see slightly different parts of the action than I. So clearly there is such a thing as subjective experience, in some sense. This, however, is not what is at issue. Roughly, what we are concerned about is a supposed ineffable aspect of experience, a ‘what it is like’. I deny the existence of this in the sense in which I deny the existence of God. That is, I have yet even to see a clear and coherent articulation of what’s at issue. You imply the burden of argument is with the deniers; I (following Dennett and many others) suggest the burden is with defenders to say what it is they defend.
Are qualia causally efficacious, or not? If they are, then they are in principal objectively detectable/observable, and hence not worthy of the controversy they generate (if they have a causally efficacious ‘aspect’ and a non-efficacious, one, then just factor out the causally efficacious aspect as it plays no role in the controversy). On the flip side, of course, if qualia are not causally efficacious, then they aren’t responsible for our talk of them—they aren’t what we’re presently talking about, paradoxically.
It seems to me the best case for exponents of consciousness is to force a dilemma—an argument pushing us on the one hand to accept the existence of something which on the other appears to be incoherent (as per just above). But I have yet to see this argument. Appeals to what’s ‘obvious’ or to introspection just don’t do it—the force of the sort of arg above and the several others adduced by Dennett et. al., clearly win out over thumping one’s sternum and saying ‘this!’, simply because the latter isn’t an argument. The typical candidates for serious arguments in this vein are inverted spectrum or Black and White Mary type-arguments, but it seems to me they always just amount to the chest thumping in fancy dress. Would be interested to hear of good candidate arguments for qualia, though, and to hear any objections if you think the foregoing is unfair.
I think there’s some hindsight bias there, in the case of chakras. It is by no means obvious that these supposed centres of something-or-other distributed along the spine and in the head don’t exist. One might be sceptical purely on account of the sources of the concept being mystical or religious, but the same is true of meditation, which has been favourably spoken of by rationalists. It’s only by actually looking for structures in the places where the chakras are supposed to be and not finding anything that could correspond to them that the idea can be discarded. There is also (I think) the fact that different traditions assert different sets of chakras.
“Élan vital” was always a fake explanation for a phenomenon—life—that no-one understood. It’s like a doctor listening to a patient’s symptoms and solemnly making a diagnosis by repeating the symptoms back to the patient in medical Latin. No-one talks about élan vital now because the subject matter succumbed to investigation based on “stuff is made of atoms”.
But consciousness is different—we experience it. We have no explanation for it, just the experience—the fact that there is such a thing as experience. “Consciousness”, “sensation”, “experience”, “qualia”, and so on are not explanations, just names for the phenomenon.
To me, this is exactly what is at issue. We have subjective experience, yet we have no idea how there can possibly be such a thing. All discussions of this, it seems to me, immediately veer off into people on one side putting up explanations of what it is, and people on the other knocking them down. The fact of experience remains, ignored by the warring parties.
There is no case to be made. Either you have this experience or you do not. I have it and I think that most people do. What people—at least, those who do have subjective experience—need to do first is recognise that there is a problem:
I have subjective experience.
It is impossible for there to be any such thing as subjective experience.
All of the argument is about proposed solutions to this problem. But refuting every solution to a problem does not solve the problem.
I find this class of explanations plausible, myself. I find it at least imaginable that my “feeling” of consciousness basically is the stream of potential reports about myself that I could voice, if there were an interested listener to voice them to. To put it another way: Are you quite sure that the way we feel about ourselves isn’t the same as the way we talk about ourselves (except for the inhibition of actual vocalization)? How would one show that the stream of potentially vocalized self-reports isn’t consciousness? What would distinguish them?
I look around, and have visual experiences. These, it seems to me, are obviously different from any words I might say, or think but not say, about those experiences.
Good point! I might sketch a visual experience, but I don’t ordinarily consider my visual experience to be a sequence of sketches, analogous to an ongoing interior monologue...
No, it’s not straightforward. I didn’t want to get into all that, so I’ve removed that sentence from my post now.