I think the argument actually implies that p-zombies don’t exist and therefore anything acting human is going to feel human from the inside. There isn’t something special called “raw-experience” that we happen to have but that a p-zombie could not have.
We experience things in our mind, but reductionism implies that this experience has direct physical causes and effects and is therefore understandable and explainable by rational science. The experience of “red” has a specific physical description for each individual and, while it may be possible that two people disagree about whether a particular thing is “red”, they could in principle study their brains until they found the precise points where their experiences/definitions diverged.
In practice, however, there is still a very strong sense of private language existing. We do not yet have the ability to reduce our internal experience into physical cause and affect, and so we have no way to truly understand how other people feel and experience. For instance, I could not adequately describe “red” to a blind person and a person who can see into the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum could not explain the colors “ultraviolet” or “infrared” to me. We lack a shared sensory framework, and further lack a shared mental model of ourselves that can understand what experience is like and therefore think accurately about what someone else actually experiences. For standard humans in the past it’s arguable that private language actually existed. In the 21st century we have a chance to see private language dictionaries in our lifetimes.
Theres a difference between causation and reduction. The idea that qualia have physical causes is compatible with dualism, the idea that they are not ieducible to physics.
Knowing what causes non standard qualia, or where they diverge, still doesn’t tell you how non standard qualia feel to the person having them.
For that reason, we are not going to have private language dictionaries any time soon. Looking at brain scans of someone with non standard qualia us not going to tell me what their qualia are as qualia.
Granted; we won’t have definitive evidence for or against dualism until we’re at the point that we can fully test the (non-) reductive nature of qualia. If people who have access to each other’s private language dictionaries still report meta-feeling that the other person feels different qualia from the same mental stimulus then I’ll have more evidence for dualism than I do now. True, that won’t help with incomparable qualia, but it would be kind of...convenient...if the only incomparable qualia are the ones that people report feeling differently.
I think the argument actually implies that p-zombies don’t exist and therefore anything acting human is going to feel human from the inside. There isn’t something special called “raw-experience” that we happen to have but that a p-zombie could not have.
We experience things in our mind, but reductionism implies that this experience has direct physical causes and effects and is therefore understandable and explainable by rational science. The experience of “red” has a specific physical description for each individual and, while it may be possible that two people disagree about whether a particular thing is “red”, they could in principle study their brains until they found the precise points where their experiences/definitions diverged.
In practice, however, there is still a very strong sense of private language existing. We do not yet have the ability to reduce our internal experience into physical cause and affect, and so we have no way to truly understand how other people feel and experience. For instance, I could not adequately describe “red” to a blind person and a person who can see into the ultraviolet and infrared spectrum could not explain the colors “ultraviolet” or “infrared” to me. We lack a shared sensory framework, and further lack a shared mental model of ourselves that can understand what experience is like and therefore think accurately about what someone else actually experiences. For standard humans in the past it’s arguable that private language actually existed. In the 21st century we have a chance to see private language dictionaries in our lifetimes.
Theres a difference between causation and reduction. The idea that qualia have physical causes is compatible with dualism, the idea that they are not ieducible to physics.
Knowing what causes non standard qualia, or where they diverge, still doesn’t tell you how non standard qualia feel to the person having them.
For that reason, we are not going to have private language dictionaries any time soon. Looking at brain scans of someone with non standard qualia us not going to tell me what their qualia are as qualia.
Granted; we won’t have definitive evidence for or against dualism until we’re at the point that we can fully test the (non-) reductive nature of qualia. If people who have access to each other’s private language dictionaries still report meta-feeling that the other person feels different qualia from the same mental stimulus then I’ll have more evidence for dualism than I do now. True, that won’t help with incomparable qualia, but it would be kind of...convenient...if the only incomparable qualia are the ones that people report feeling differently.
We are not going to have private language dictionaries.