“Qualia” is just a new word for what used to be meant by the word “sensations”, before “sensation” was redefined to mean “a type of brain process”. The idea that sensory qualities like color are in the sensations, and hence in us, has been around for hundreds of years—thousands, if you count Democritus.
The problem with the modern redefinition of “sensation” as “brain process” is now that color is nowhere at all, inside or outside the brain. Or, more precisely, it substitutes a particular theory of what a sensation is (brain event) for the thing itself (experience of a sensory quality) in a way which allows the latter to be ignored or even denied.
On this issue most materialists are dualists—property dualists—without even noticing it. The problem is very simple. Physics, and hence natural science, is based on a model of the world in which all that exists are fundamental entities (particles, wavefunctions, etc) which do not possess the “secondary sensory qualities” like color, either individually or in combination. There is a disjunction between the properties posited by physics and the properties known in experience.
There are three known ways of dealing with this while still believing in physics. You say that both properties exist—property dualism. You say that only physical properties exist—total “eliminativism”. Or you say that the experiential properties are directly playing a role in physics—which is best known via panpsychism, but one might doubt the necessity to regard everything (“pan”) as “mental” (“psych”).
Most materialists are property dualists because they say that only atoms exist, but then they think of their experience as how it feels to be a particular arrangement of atoms, when there is no such property in physics. It’s an extra thing being tacked onto the physics. And the realization that this is dualism is somehow pushed away by the use of a locution like “experiencing blue”—e.g. “my current state includes the property that I am experiencing blue”—which buries the fact that the sensation itself has the property of being blue.
It’s the fact that something is blue, which is why “qualia” have to be “posited”.
It’s only really your second paragraph that I disagree with. I’m a panpsychist, but I don’t often mention it because a lot of people take that to mean “I believe that everything in the universe has a mind, including rocks and stars”.
I go even further than you, though. I think that even of the materialists who aren’t accidental/secret property dualists, most of them are still dualists without realising it. The idea that there are physical objects which are related to one another causally is inherently dualist because it theorises two types of things in the universe—physical objects and causal relations. More importantly, the idea of physical objects as distinct from causal relationships is dodgy, because it opens us up to Humean skepticism: we never see the objects themselves, just detect them by their causal relationships to us, so how do we know what they’re actually like? All of the properties we associate with physical objects are products of their causal relationships with other matter, so separating the universe into physical things and causal relations paints us into the corner of believing in things which have no properties at all—a propertyless substrate a la the Scholastics.
The only hard and fast way to have a dualism-proof materialism that I’m comfortable with is to hold that objects are just clumps of causal relations. An electron isn’t a tiny little ball of substrate to which the properties of mass and charge and spin adhere, rather it’s just a likelihood that other particles in a given region will be affected by mass and charge and spin in an electron-like way. And that’s how I can be a panpsychist: all causal relations are equal. The only thing different about the ones in our heads is that they’re intricately interrelated in such a way that they’re self-referential, sensitively dependent on outside conditions, and persistent in a way that means that present interactions can recall interactions that happened years in the past (memory). The sensation of being alive is just what it feels like to be a really complex web of causal relations, and when this web reacts slightly to outside stimuli, that sensation changes slightly to, say, “the sensation of being alive and seeing the colour blue”. This is why I say that panpsychism isn’t the same as believing that rocks are conscious—consciousness is a special, complex type of causal relation, a sub-category into which inanimate objects don’t fit unless you spend a lot of time and energy constructing an AI out of them.
“Qualia” is just a new word for what used to be meant by the word “sensations”, before “sensation” was redefined to mean “a type of brain process”. The idea that sensory qualities like color are in the sensations, and hence in us, has been around for hundreds of years—thousands, if you count Democritus.
The problem with the modern redefinition of “sensation” as “brain process” is now that color is nowhere at all, inside or outside the brain. Or, more precisely, it substitutes a particular theory of what a sensation is (brain event) for the thing itself (experience of a sensory quality) in a way which allows the latter to be ignored or even denied.
On this issue most materialists are dualists—property dualists—without even noticing it. The problem is very simple. Physics, and hence natural science, is based on a model of the world in which all that exists are fundamental entities (particles, wavefunctions, etc) which do not possess the “secondary sensory qualities” like color, either individually or in combination. There is a disjunction between the properties posited by physics and the properties known in experience.
There are three known ways of dealing with this while still believing in physics. You say that both properties exist—property dualism. You say that only physical properties exist—total “eliminativism”. Or you say that the experiential properties are directly playing a role in physics—which is best known via panpsychism, but one might doubt the necessity to regard everything (“pan”) as “mental” (“psych”).
Most materialists are property dualists because they say that only atoms exist, but then they think of their experience as how it feels to be a particular arrangement of atoms, when there is no such property in physics. It’s an extra thing being tacked onto the physics. And the realization that this is dualism is somehow pushed away by the use of a locution like “experiencing blue”—e.g. “my current state includes the property that I am experiencing blue”—which buries the fact that the sensation itself has the property of being blue.
It’s the fact that something is blue, which is why “qualia” have to be “posited”.
It’s only really your second paragraph that I disagree with. I’m a panpsychist, but I don’t often mention it because a lot of people take that to mean “I believe that everything in the universe has a mind, including rocks and stars”.
I go even further than you, though. I think that even of the materialists who aren’t accidental/secret property dualists, most of them are still dualists without realising it. The idea that there are physical objects which are related to one another causally is inherently dualist because it theorises two types of things in the universe—physical objects and causal relations. More importantly, the idea of physical objects as distinct from causal relationships is dodgy, because it opens us up to Humean skepticism: we never see the objects themselves, just detect them by their causal relationships to us, so how do we know what they’re actually like? All of the properties we associate with physical objects are products of their causal relationships with other matter, so separating the universe into physical things and causal relations paints us into the corner of believing in things which have no properties at all—a propertyless substrate a la the Scholastics.
The only hard and fast way to have a dualism-proof materialism that I’m comfortable with is to hold that objects are just clumps of causal relations. An electron isn’t a tiny little ball of substrate to which the properties of mass and charge and spin adhere, rather it’s just a likelihood that other particles in a given region will be affected by mass and charge and spin in an electron-like way. And that’s how I can be a panpsychist: all causal relations are equal. The only thing different about the ones in our heads is that they’re intricately interrelated in such a way that they’re self-referential, sensitively dependent on outside conditions, and persistent in a way that means that present interactions can recall interactions that happened years in the past (memory). The sensation of being alive is just what it feels like to be a really complex web of causal relations, and when this web reacts slightly to outside stimuli, that sensation changes slightly to, say, “the sensation of being alive and seeing the colour blue”. This is why I say that panpsychism isn’t the same as believing that rocks are conscious—consciousness is a special, complex type of causal relation, a sub-category into which inanimate objects don’t fit unless you spend a lot of time and energy constructing an AI out of them.