Jessica Taylor. CS undergrad and Master’s at Stanford; former research fellow at MIRI.
I work on decision theory, social epistemology, strategy, naturalized agency, mathematical foundations, decentralized networking systems and applications, theory of mind, and functional programming languages.
Blog: unstableontology.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessi_cata
I feel like the single particle universe clearly instantiates the logical system: ∃x (particle(x)).
Nope, because they didn’t write down the system. (This might be quibbling. I mean it doesn’t write down that formal system anywhere.)
Let me move to a different example, why do you think our universe instantiates PA
Because mathematicians have written down the rules of PA. And they have programmed computers to use PA.
Do you think that our universe then either instantiates Con(ZFC) or doesn’t?
Our universe instantiates formal system such as ZFC + Con(ZFC), because mathematicians can write them down. (It also instantiates inconsistent formal systems such as “ZFC + axiom of choice is false”.)
Backtracking a bit. I reject axiom 6 (which is not to say I actively disbelieve it, but that I don’t actively believe it) and I’m giving an idea of why. If you could logically prove axiom 6, you wouldn’t need it to be an axiom. So you’re going to have some trouble convincing me of it on logical grounds. Rather it’s more metaphysical and so on.
Let us say that PA consists of a formal system with exactly the standard axioms of PA. There is some quibbling about which “paper copies” work or which “translations” work. But PA only exists in a universe if it is instantiated as physical information. Instantiating large numbers does not instantiate PA.
Okay, noting that you made a stronger claim, that there is a universe where there is no sound logical system (i.e. P and not P are true in some possible universe), but I’m happy to move to this, sure.
Not what I meant. Two interpretations (a) in the single-particle universe, no logical system, sound or unsound, is instantiated, because no non-trivial physical info is instantiated. (b) Perhaps we could say that PA’s prefect-generating property is stronger than soundness. It is soundness plus “having provably distinct terms that number in the countable infinity”.
Imagine a universe that consists of a single particle. The law is that the particle stays in the same state always. Actually, the particle only has 1 possible state in this universe. So it’s just always in the same state as a matter of math not just physics.
There is no way for PA to exist in this universe.
“PA is possible” sure ok.
“PA has a perfect generating property” let is suppose this. for example, maybe there is some list of perfect properties of PA, and they all follow from some property of it.
“It is possible for that perfect-generating property to be instantiated (it is instantiated in Peano Arithmetic)” sure, ok
“Therefore it is possible for something to have the property of perfect-essential necessity.” absolutely wild claim.
“We say that something has the property of “perfect-essential necessity” if (and only if) whenever there is a perfect-generating property for that thing, it implies that there necessarily must exist something (i.e. in every world) which instantiates that perfect-generating property.”
Seems like a wild claim. For PA to have this property would mean that its perfect-generating property (perhaps logical consistency, or soundness?) has a corresponding object having that property (e.g. soundness) in every possible world. But that’s a wild claim. Maybe there’s a possible universe with so little information that no sound logical system exists there.
Idk. But suppose there is an essence that generates all perfect properties of PA. How would “perfect-essential necessity is possible” follow? (And if it does follow, why do you need axiom 6?)
In this case I haven’t accepted that perfect-essential necessity is a perfect property. Peano arithmetic, for example, is (I claim) logically consistent, but does not have the property of perfect-essential necessity. And suppose I claim logical consistency is a perfect property. This seems ok so far.
Couldn’t I think the property of “being logically consistent” is perfect, and possible, without thinking “perfect-essential necessity” is perfect (and therefore possible)?
We already have reasons to think triangles are logically possible. Based on axiomatic systems like Euclidean geometry. We don’t have a similar mathematical model of perfect-essential necessity, that shows it to be realistic/possible.
Roughly, axiom 3 requires perfect properties to be realistic. Then axiom 6 is roughly assuming, as an easy implication, that perfect-essential necessity is realistic. But why would perfect-essential necessity be realistic?
Rather, information travels through the network and is realised by the quiddities in the neuronal substrate.
I see what you mean, the idea is that the quiddites within are relevant to the having of the experience, even if the info gets there by way of an information bottleneck.
Prosopagnosia would be the kind of thing that would show up at a high level rather than quiddites.
So I think the thing to explore here is the general picture of internal quiddites and how they relate to external ones, and to functional aspects of experience.
To explore this I’m going to imagine a sci fi world that has intrinsic color properties. In our world people might think “color has intrinsic properties” then they do more science and then they realize that the colored light has different structural properties. So physics discards the idea of intrinsic color properties.
In this other world we imagine physics works as if there are three “intrinsic color essences”, called chroma. These are either quiddites, or structure that works as-if quiddites. They exist in light partices and matter, and determine color-related physical properties. Physics is equivariant on chroma. The way chroma work in matter is like the Ising model and ferromagnetism, except with three states (Potts model). So the chroma in matter “flip” in a general tendency to match their neighbors, when at high temperatures. In crystals, large groups of matter, or the entire crystal, can have the same chroma.
The way crystals interact with light is that they preferentially allow similar-chroma light to pass through. So if you look at a white light source through a crystal of chroma X, you get more X light.
This allows building “cone”-like machines that determine information about the chroma of incoming light. But these machines must themselves contain chroma! So for example, you could put a crystal of chroma X in front of a light ray detector. That way, the detector preferentially fires when the light has chroma X.
It’s also possible to do equivariant optical computing more directly. This might involve something like putting two beams of light together, and somehow noticing whether the beams have similar chroma.
Nothing in physics distinguishes between the chroma in an absolute sense. Rather, physics is symmetric over . Like how the laws of Newtonian mechanics are symmetric over the Galilean group, not singling out particular positions/rotations/velocities.
Now in this world, there evolve human-like aliens who can “perceive chroma” except of course there are qualifiers. There are some different possibilities to play with here:
The aliens are born with cone-like chroma detectors. The functional chroma are in their eyes. They process light into neural firings. In the brain, there are no chroma. (This is most like humans)
The aliens are born with the three chromatic clusters put in three brain positions (say, vertices of an upward-facing equilateral triangle towards the back of their heads), in an arbitrary permutation. Then they do “optical computing” on incoming chromatic light. They can for example “trap” light in cells, to form chromatic memories. Since they are born with chroma, they can use their own inborn chroma to gain a reference frame on the light. So chroma can feel “up-ish”, “left-ish”, “down-ish”.
The aliens are born with no chroma. They do optical computing. They trap incoming light into chromatic memories. Then they recall this light (letting some of it exit the cell) to do comparisons. They can do something like a “nearest neighbor check” when looking at new chromatic light, does it look more like the ocean or a stop sign?
Now we want to think about what “folk language” they would develop for color and chroma, without using loaded terms like red/blue/green. They may develop something analogous to red/blue/green when they only exist in their “home territory”, like their village. Within the village, the aliens they interact with have the same chromatic patterns as them; they don’t look like blue-ish aliens who bleed blue. So they could anchor on “red = color of blood”, “blue = color of lake”, and so on. But then they encounter others from different villages, and they appear to the originals to be color swapped, e.g. R/B swapped. Then their intra-village language stops working well.
One adaptation they use is to carry around chromatic crystals. Then they can both (a) take out the crystals in the middle of a sentence, to refer to the chroma, (b) use the crystal like a colored pencil to write chroma in letters. (This is a lot like the “quoting” idea, using external chroma)
When explorers go around the world, they realize that the planet has certain asymmetries. There’s more X chroma towards the north pole, more Y towards the south pole, and more Z around the equator. So they standardize on the terms “north-ish”, “south-ish”, “equ-ish” for chroma. (Compare north/south terms in magnetism.)
The explorers come from a cultural context where X is like our blue, Y is like our green, and Z is like our red. They are, like the British in our world, highly influential in global culture. Hence, “north-ish” has a default association with “calm lake”, “south-ish” has a default association with “trees and grass”, and “equ-ish” has a default association with “blood and strawberries”.
Now the explorers have enough context to ask “inverted qualia”-ish questions. They ask, “what if your experience of north-ish was like mine of equ-ish and vise versa?”
The thing is, they can literally go out and find aliens who are north-ish / equ-ish swapped relative to them. They might have somewhat different culture, but they’re reasonably similar. This other group sort of looks analogous to “red/blue swapped” to the explorers; for example, the explorers bleed equ-ish, while the other group bleeds north-ish.
The situation is pretty symmetric! This second group associates north-ish with the color of blood, and equ-ish with the color of lakes. So it looks weird to them if the explorers bleed equ-ish.
Here’s a general thing I’m getting at with this hypothetical: It seems to me that the experience of color in this world is something in relations and interactions between chroma, not in the chroma themselves. To locate the experience you have when seeing a stop sign, you don’t just point at the stop sign or your brain. You point at both; your experience exists in the differences, as the chromatic light from the stop sign interacts with the chroma within, which form cone-like color receptors, memories, and so on.
I don’t think in this world, the experience of color is found in the chroma within. You could imagine a strange situation where an alien was in a room, and the whole room including the alien’s body got a north-ish / equ-ish chroma swap instantaneously. They wouldn’t notice a thing. If you just changed the chroma within them, they would notice. If you just changed the chroma in the room outside their body, they would also notice. That indicates that the experience is more “of” relations between chroma, rather than of the chroma within.
(A quick analogy with Newtonian mechanics: when you see an object you get an idea of its vector relative to you. This is a “difference in absolute positions”, assuming absolute positions are real. Absolute position here seems like the quiddite intrinsic property, while the vector difference is relational, and corresponds more with the experience.)
Roughly, the objection says that if qualities exist as intrinsic properties of the categorical base and the brain is “aware” of the qualities then it’s conceivable that a qualitative zombie could exist i.e. the quality could be present but the structure of the brain would conceivably not be able to become aware of it.
Yeah pretty much. The qualitative zombie’s possibility would be a consideration against the idea that there is direct acquaintance with qualitative intrinsic properties, by way of being an epistemic block. (If OSR is plausible then ESR is true; if ESR is true then quiddites can’t be phenomenal even if they exist; except possibly through a ‘direct realism’ type dodge?)
On my view the brain is part of the categorical qualitative base and it’s just in those qualitative states. It’s not a separate type of stuff so I don’t think it needs to “reach across” by indexing or quoting them in a special way, it just needs to minimally represent the qualities.
So I think I have at least partial agreement here. Summarizing my current (Sellars-inspired) angle of attack on philosophy of mind:
The visual phenomena to explain are 3d, not 2d.
The appearance to explain is the appearance of direct realist transparency.
The illusions of consciousness function to make the representation match the environment.
So as a relatively simple example, the environment is actually approximately continuous; the neural representation of it is discrete; yet visual phenomena are again continuous-seeming. This points at something illusionary (inflation of e.g. visual neural info to a continuous-looking image, that appears to have “more bits” taken as info). But some “hallucination” is needed in the decompression step, to make the map match the territory. (Compare autoencoders)
In the example of “the redness of red”, actual red in the environment is deep, there’s deep optical physics behind it. The neural representation of red is, at some stage, shallow, like ‘optic nerve firings corresponding to red cone stimulation’. Then there’s an (apparent) inflation into a deep-seeming phenomenon of red.
The information bottleneck (e.g. optic nerve) enables hallucination to be possible, by sending different info through the info bottleneck. Yet under normal conditions, the intuition that red is deep is correct, if interpreted intensionally.
Russelian monism starts with: structuralism about physics, and quiddism (underlying relata) of sub-physics. That’s what I would see as a reasonable set of assumptions to work with, even if not proven. The third claim, quiddism about phenomena, initially seems to me like a wild epistemic claim. I could steelman it as, quiddism about phenomena is through representation; the human representational system “believes” relata exists, so the representation is “of” a relata-containing world, and a Russelian monist can say the representation is correct due to a representational link with quiddites.
To be clear this might be rounding off the position too close to standard cogsci. The thing this steelman is consistent with is phenomena coming from the world to phenomenal consciousness through an informational bottleneck. This avoids positing unusual physics in, say, the intrinsic quiddite properties being mapped equivariantly to phenomenal properties in a direct way (rather than intermediately through a Shannon info space, which would have to eliminate all intrinsic relata.) This is perhaps in analogy with skepticism of claims like “quantum states pass into the brain in a cognitively/phenomenally relevant way”; quantum states can’t be transferred through a Shannon info bottleneck, in common with relata. (Apparently equivariance is a constraint on which unitary operators count as physically valid in quantum mechanics! I’m not a QM expert, but there is a significant analogy here.)
The “direct acquaintance” here with quiddites would be similar to the direct realist sense of “direct perception” of objects. It is causally mediated through an information bottleneck (optic nerve and so on). But there is an epistemic sense in which the actual objects out there are causing representations of objects. Knowledge as justified true belief plus Gettier resolutions, a causal chain of sorts. (Or in the Russelian view, actual quiddites out there are causing phenomena with apparent intrinsic properties.)
The main way I could imagine the Russelian view being more tenuous than direct realism about environmental objects is that quiddites are obscure implementation details, unlike environmental objects. (For direct realism I’m drawing on: Wilfred Sellars, “Phenomenalism”.) The ambient deepness corresponding with the visual phenomenon of the deepness of red is, primarily, deepness of a physical/relational nature (the quantum mechanics of red light, for example), not deepness of an intrinsic property nature.
In common with direct realism, the Russelian view would have some amount of trouble with an “argument from hallucination”, under which the optic nerve would receive the same stimulation even assuming completely different underlying relata, or even absent relata.
Now getting back to inverted qualia. Let’s again compare with direct realism about objects. It is logically possible to have a hallucination of an object, which yields the same brain state as if the object was really there. The direct realist says, knowledge of the object wasn’t had in this case. But the same doxastic primary intension is present in the hallucination and ordinary perception cases.
The Russelian monist wants something similar to that. There are skeptical hypotheses about quiddites: absent quiddites (OSR) or very different quiddites. These produce the same optic nerve stimulation and so on. In analogy with direct realism, this would be a case of absence of knowledege. But if we continue with the analogy, then the primary intensions between the “correctly represented quiddites” case and the “hallucinated quiddites” case have to be the same. That is, the original and the copy have the same primary intensions.
This somewhat undermines the idea that pheonmena are quiddish, rather than that phenomena depict quiddite-like relata. (Since intuitively, phenomena go with primary not secondary intensions.) Now what about the secondary intension? Perhaps the original and the copy have primary intensions of qualitative aspects of color that refer to different secondary intensions. The primary-to-secondary mapping would, by analogy with twin Earth, happen by looking at the thing they are both pointing to: a control red object such as a stop sign. But then it looks like they have the same secondary intension: whatever quiddites underly the red properties of standard red objects. The Russelian Monist who wants to accept the inverted qualia hypothetical might instead want them to be disagreeing about quiddites. But it isn’t apparent how they could disagree. They have the same primary intensions, and if they point at what their primary intension seems to be about (control red objects), they get the same secondary intensions.
It could of course be the case that their brains have differing underlying relata. But perhaps “these are not the quiddites you are looking for”. The way red looks would seem to be a representation of a red object, and that representation can postulate quiddites; the primary intension of that representation can connect with the secondary intension of actual quiddites in the red object. But on the direct realist analogy, it can’t connect with the quiddites of the brain.
Briefly looking at the article: Panpsychism does seem wrong in supposing that there is consciousness corresponding to quiddites in general (that’s a wild epistemic claim). Rather quiddites are qualitative, and consciousness seems to represent qualitative intrinsic essences. So the “pan” is more naturally “panqualityism” than “panpsychism”. The paper has the “quoting” idea which is… I understand it kind of like you could point right or left instead of saying “right” or “left”? It seems to involve the relata appearing as part of the sentence, which requires a somewhat expanded idea of what a sentence is. For redness this could involve something like “At home my laptop is the color of” points at red stop sign. (But again, I’m not convinced this works with inverted qualia, as the original and the copy would both point at control objects of the same color. Whereas inverted qualia requires something like them pointing at intrinsic properties in their brain. But then they need to find where the color is in their brain… I believe it’s more natural to point at the apparent red object!)
This is possibly a misinterpretation on my part, and perhaps the Russelian monist wants the representation of intrinsic properties of color to point at the brain somehow, so that the original and the twin could actually have different intrinsic properties corresponding to color perception. I don’t see how to square this with the direct realism analogy, although maybe I’m not adequately exploring alternative ways to operationalize direct acquaintance.
(Very brief compression: 1. If Russelian monism then direct acquaintance with quiddites. 2. If direct acquaintance with quiddites, then direct realism about macro-scale objects (they’re less obscure). 3. If direct realism about macro-scale objects, then “inverted qualia” is semantically problematic (standard Sellars; visually presented phenomena are of 3d, public objects.))
So Russellian views are typically thought to evade epiphenomenalism objections.
Yeah it evades epiphenomenalism. Quiddites cause physics, even though different quiddites could cause the same physics.
The phenomenal character of red in my experience and the categorical base property R are the same thing. So when I have a red experience, in a sense, I’m directly acquainted with R as this quality in experience (which is the primary intension.)
I want to read “directly acquainted” here carefully. There is a sense in which Oscar is “directly acquanited” with H20 in that he can touch it and so on. However this is very much not like “Oscar directly perceives H20”. Rather if he directly perceives anything, it is either a higher-level feature like “watery substance” or some less object-y “sense data” type thing.
I realize the analogy to twin Earth can’t quite hold, because R is an experience in a way H20 isn’t. I agree R can’t be defined as analytically equivalent to some complex physical or structural proposition.
I do want to push back on the idea of “literally tokening R”. “Tokening” would make me think of information processing systems, like parsers. In that sense I can “token” neuro-red by receiving red cone stimulation. Except of course neuro-red can’t equal R in the general case. I can see an analogy to Drescher’s “gensym” idea, that the mind operates as if it has access to symbols that can be equality-compared with each other, but from which it can derive no other information. (For color qualia, there would be 3 gensyms for the 3 primary colors; other colors could be vector combinations.) In that case the gensym would be token-like, yet not Shannon info (not serializable), and accordingly dis-analogous from linguistic tokens. (But also in that case, the actual value of the gensym (#:G430 or whatever) seems more like an implementation detail that I’m not directly acquainted with.)
And at the point where you have “non-serializable tokens” it seems more like they are encapsulated “objects” in the sense of object-oriented programming, rather than “tokens”.
I agree 128-bit float isn’t quite like “intrinsic property of mass” because it leads to different physical predictions. But perhaps the “intrinsic property of mass” is more like details of how 128-bit floats are stored in hardware. It does 128-bit either way, there’s no difference internal to our physics (as 128-bit floats are different from 256-bit floats), but there is some intrinsic difference. (Again, if simulation hypothesis, there is some way this could counterfactually leak into our simulation, in a way that would break physics and break the symmetry; physics requires the symmetry to hold.)
So in this case I would say:
we don’t exactly know if “intrinsic property of mass” is a thing, for standard ontological uncertainty reasons
assuming it is a thing, we can’t straightforwardly refer to properties of it; the most available analogies are to things in our universe, but there’s a geometric barrier between these
yet there might be a careful way of referring to these differences, such as “hardware differences in numeric representation assuming simulation hypothesis”, through counterfactual analysis or something.
again, “intrinsic property of mass” is an implementation detail, not something people are directly acequainted with
Your semantics is doing a lot of work here
Yes I’d agree that by assuming semantics is informational I’m risking begging the question. The thing I don’t have much clarity on is a non-Shannon account of semantics.
And I’d argue that this acquaintance-based form of semantics works for all sorts of things like “this pain”, “that red” and arguably even “that object” without needing informational differences to specify them up to some structural isomorphism.
It seems like (a) the semantics can be interpreted physically/functionally, in a way that gets the same thing for the original and twin, (b) the semantics can be interpreted to refer to “intrinsic sub-physical” implementation details, in which case it could get something different for the original and twin.
The thing I’m having a hard time imagining is a third alternative, where the semantics refer to an intrinsic property, and one that both the original and twin are acquainted with (in a MUCH stronger sense than Oscar is acquainted with H20).
Here’s how something could work in substance dualist land: The brain connects to the soul through a Pineal gland. Souls have their way of processing Shannon-inputs (physical) to Shannon-outputs (physical). That processing involves extra-physical implementation properties. “This person’s mind” has a secondary intension referring to something interior to the soul. So by secondary intension, a person’s mind is directly acquainted with some extra-physical properties interior to the soul, not with anything physical. Now “the experience of red” is referring to a soul quasi-info property that doesn’t line up with Shannon info, and which the mind is more directly acquainted with. And the “inverted qualia thought experiment” could correspond with a “real distinction”, in the sense that counterfactually mind-melding souls (rather than brains) could lead to noticing the qualia difference.
This is of course not something people believe now. But the hypothetical leads me to think that things like “the mind” and “direct acquaintance with the experience of red” could have secondary intensions referring to extraphysical qualia; the secondary intensions would work out if substance dualism were true.
I think this secondary intension picture works out less well in an epiphenomenalist and/or property dualist setting. In that case, by emergence (physical → mental causation) or pre-established harmony (physical → physical, and mental → mental) or neutral emergence (neutral → neutral, neutral → physical, neutral → mental) or similar, mental properties line up with physical ones (natural supervenience). Then you can try to refer to mental properties by the ones lining up with the physical ones (e.g. red cone stimulation).
This might even work. But it lines up less well with folk theory of mind than substance dualism. The minds could be directly acquainted with color qualia that have no physical definition. But then who am I talking to? The mind isn’t causing any talking. It’s a bit like the deterministic MMORPG situation. (I realize this gets into “standard problems with Chalmers-type views” territory and is less of a knock-down semantic argument.)
I am not sure if you would consider “figure out how qualia Kripkean semantics would work assuming substance dualism, then deflate from there to be realistic” to be a strawman of the semantics.
Your view sounds to me like it leans towards 1) with some epistemic humility about whether a richer structure like 2) really underlies reality.
Yep. To elaborate on what methodological OSR could look like, homotopy type theory has a “univalence” axiom which approximately says “isomorphic things are equal”. That means isomorphism classes always have only one element. That seems like the kind of ontological assumption one would want for OSR, and homotopy type theory makes it clear that Shannon info processing and Turing computation remain possible under univalence. So homotopy type theory could have the spirit of OSR without collapsing into grammatical absurdity (“relations but no relata”). (Of course, asserting univalence to be simply true would be dogmatic; usual situation with metaphysics.)
I take your view as saying: we have epistemic access to the structural relations, and it’s at least plausible that they’re populated by some kind of relata, even if our information-based semantics can’t get a clean handle on them. If that’s right, then there’s actually some convergence in our views: the phenomenal realist just wants to say “yes, there are such relata and their intrinsic nature is presented to us in experience.”
That seems right. I think “relata are real” and “relata aren’t real” are both in dogmatic metaphysics territory, but I’m ok playing with the idea that relata are real, as “relata aren’t real” is more conceptually speculative. The part that seems hardest to me is how direct acquaintance with relata is possible, that would grant the relevant epistemic access and so on. (Kantian framing would be “is this claiming to have epistemic access to noumena? and if so, is there a skeptical hypothesis perhaps OSR-like that undermines this claimed epistemic access; which need not be true, only possible, to undermine epistemic access?”)
The Russellian identifies the physical properties within universe such as whatever plays the mass-role and charge-role and says these have an additional intrinsic property which is not fixed by the causal/functional role that they play. If mass was instead realised by something different (say pseudo-mass or schmass) then it would really be different in a meaningful sense even if it caused no third-person change to the physics.
This seems reasonably analogous to the 256-bit float example. That’s what I’m saying is dis-analogous from qualia/experience.
They’re saying they’re directly acquainted with a quality in experience i.e. “this red” and the phenomenal character of this experience fixes its primary intension. This quality also has a secondary intension which rigidly designates the categorical base property R. So they don’t have direct access to R, in the same way Oscar doesn’t have direct access to H20 molecules when he’s looking at the watery stuff in the rivers and lakes.
It’s hard for me to read this as compatible with the qualia realist view. The phenomenal character of red is the primary intension, so far so good. But the secondary intension designates something distinct from the phenomenal character, which is called R. It’s an implementation detail (like 256-bit floats?) that the person doesn’t know about. It’s ok to say they can reference that, as they can reference 256-bit floats, or H20 and so on, with a primary intension not containing the details.
The problem is that the qualia realist wants to say that R is the phenomenal character of red. The original and the twin in the inverted qualia thought experiment are supposed to have different phenomenal experiences. If they had the same phenomenal experience but different extra-physical implementation details (note, this is not inherently contradictory bc physics could be scoped to quotient over some of these), that is not satisfying the requirements of the thought experiment. The issue is that R is, in this view, not the phenomenal character of red, but an implementation detail.
(Analogously, with twin Earth, Oscar and twin Oscar could have the same phenomenal experience, and the same primary intension, despite different secondary intensions. That suggests phenomenal experiences go with primary intensions, not secondary intensions. They of course can’t do the science required to distinguish the secondary intensions by looking at their experience introspectively.)
Finally, I have a bit of a challenge for you. How exactly do you specify the “base” that’s instantiating the structure on your view?
So we have to distinguish between (a) my actual view (b) the view I’m stipulating, generously to the qualia realist picture, to show a semantic issue
Regarding (a) I think something like, “physics picks out a homomorphic structure in reality” and “mind picks out a homomorphic structure in reality”, where it’s not clear what the right category is, but it should have computational properties not just model-theoretic properties. (See post on homomorphic encryption) Now even though I’m validating neutral monism to get computational properties, I still don’t think this validates color qualia in the sense of Chalmers.
Regarding (b) what I’m stipulating is that the relevant category theoretic structure is something like CQS. The base properties “exist” in a sense weaker than how Shannon information exists. Whenever you convert to Shannon information (equivariantly), you only preserve “which orbit you are in”. And this is a bit more speculative, but there’s going to be way to study CQS that don’t reify the base properties, as an alternative formulation. I think on this view you still have trouble “referring to R”, on relatively standard semantic views like “you refer to things by saying information specifying them”, requiring a significant weakening of semantics to get the references to work out.
Now when you present the alternatives with ‘relata’ I actually don’t know what you mean. At a high level I am taking a category theoretic view where there are type-like objects and function-like morphisms. But the objects don’t exactly have to be sets, or contain sets; there can be equivalent descriptions. And reifying everything as “existing” is perhaps a bit much metaphysically.
A basic realist picture is that propositions in general have truth values (as long as they are well formed). So a minimal realist view is that reality maps propositions to truth values (being representable as elements of Cantor space). But then you notice that there are different isomorphic languages for the propositions. And so you get more of a category-theoretic view that way.
I’m dubious about the existence of “multiple substances” in the classical philosophical sense. There is a “syndiffeonesis” argument that for things to be different, they have to have something in common. And as long as they have something in common, what is the meaning of claiming they have “multiple substances”?
Now I’m not sure if “multiple substances” is like “relata”. But in any case, my view contains at least Shannon information and resource-bounded Turing computation. (Which is not to claim that they are fundamental, they could be homomorphic from a fundamental structure)
And also I’m in general skeptical of the idea of things “directly presented to us” on Sellars-type grounds (myth of the given). The case of “directly acquainted with the redness of red, which could be switched with the greenness of green while keeping the rest of physics the same” is an especially dubious case. This is the sort of consideration that makes me doubt “relata being phenomenal” in general, even grating relata.
Reading the SEP article, ESR seems about true, since we couldn’t know if we’re looking at a model of a given theory, or an equivalent model of an isomorphic theory (this is the category-theoretic reading). And more generally we could suppose, what we think is reality or physics could be something which the real reality has a homomorphism to. (Simulation hypothesis is a crude example; virtual embedding as homomorphism)
OSR seems like a somewhat dubious meatphysical hypothesis, although perhaps a methodologically useful one. That is, finding explanations that have only relations no individuals might be useful, but would require something like category-theoretic tools to find isomorphic structures that don’t reify sets (at objects and so on). Arguably, if we have the isomorphic structure then we can Occam’s razor our way into “no relata being related!” but the devil is in the details.
Rather, my view is that different views (inculding ones that have relata) can be developed, one can find isomorphisms/homomorphisms between them, and one should doubt finding “the Real True view” (rather than, some homomorphism from the Real True view to a true-ish real-ish one) for standard Humean/Kantian reasons.
The chess analogy suggests a comparison to the simulation hypothesis. Perhaps our universe is simulated within another universe. That universe has extra properties that get “attached” to physical coordinates and so on, perhaps implementation details, or perhaps extraneous but “nearby” entities. That raises the question, can we in any meaningful way refer to them?
One thing that suggests “yes” is that perhaps glitches are theoretically possible, which would give away the simulation, and noumenal information leaks into our universe. Or maybe the glitches are just counterfactually possible. Either way, it seems like it’s vaguely possible to directionally point at properties of the simulation through counterfactual glitches in the Matrix. Perhaps there’s a buffer overflow that prints the source code and program state into our universe, or whatever.
While it seems there’s a legitimate obstacle to reference (through the simulation being actually a good simulation), it’s not clearly impossible. It seems like, yes, our universe could meaningfully be simulated, and then there would be corresponding specifics.
Here’s where the analogy breaks down. Someone could say, “theoretically, I can hypothesize our universe is simulated and uses 256-bit floats for physical spatial quantities”. That seems ok as a hypothesis. But it would be a bit strange for them to be asserting that they’re directly acquainted with the 256-bit float nature of the simulation’s implementation. They can’t really distinguish it from 512-bit floats without ridiculously impractical experiments (particle colliders won’t do). So it’s not really analogous to qualia. The idea of qualia as physics implementation detail breaks down.
So it seems there is a ‘rigid designator’ story that lets “the universe runs on 256-bit floats” be theoretically meaningful, even if glitches that would allow determining that never actually occur. But this isn’t the sort of direct acquantiance that the qualia realist wants there to be.
Here’s a different analogy to chess. What about role-playing games? People play, say, a MMORPG with each other. They can claim to be “directly acquantied” with things outside the world. And they can make their characters say things like “I’m going to take a break to go to the park, afk for a while”. It doesn’t make much sense in-universe, but it’s sensible communication anyhow.
Physics is more like if the MMORPG got so detailed that they way you play is that you construct an entire deterministic brain emulation as your avatar. Then the avatar works on its own, deterministically. Now it seems much harder for the players to make the avatars say something like “I’m going to take a break, afk”, meaningfully. Any behavior like that had to result from the initial conditions and the update rules. (And a “non-deterministic physical system” that allowed players to intervene would be like interaction dualism.)
It seems like the avatars saying things like “umm, yes, of course I am directly acquainted with ‘my laptop model’ and ‘afk at the park’” can only work communicatively if the semantic info was baked into the initial conditions of the game world. But now we’re back at “extremely weird models of free will” (see Aaronson on freebits). The players only have volition through creating the initial setup. If the universe’s initial conditions have too low K-complexity, they have no volition, and there is no way for the info to leak in. (Like, if the players get a lot of bits to specify the avatars as brain emulations and so on, I guess semantics is possible, but it doesn’t as well map to our universe and standard physics.)
I’m not really sure I’ve found a great argument against the view you’re presenting, but it’s more like, while it has some initial intuitive plausibility, when you fill out the details of how the semantics work, the picture starts to look extremely strange, and ability to make semantic references is at least pretty dubious.
Re Chalmers article:
I wrote Generalizing zombie arguments on the general conceivably/possibility structure, it’s familiar.
To be clear, inverted qualia thought experiment fails if either (a) it fails to express semantically some well-formed possible situation (e.g. situation represented as a proposition), (b) it semantically expresses something that is not logically possible (which seems reasonably similar to “ideally conceivable”?)
Rigid designation seems to be the movement from primary to secondary intension, in Chalmers’ language. It’s a long article so I’m not sure what relevant it adds on top of Kripkean rigid designation.
I accept the primary-to-secondary movement in the twin earth case, but not the inverted qualia case. I think there is an actual disanalogy. There are third party verifiable facts that allow the primary-to-secondary passage to be shown to work differently on Earth and twin Earth. Not so with inverted qualia. So I don’t think you can just say they are analogous and specify the semantics that way.
And equivariance of course puts a hard limit on “referring to R”; if either the original or the copy (in inverted qualia thought experiment) could follow the instructions “imagine R”, then they could break symmetry. Hence R is not imaginable in any specific way. Which lends credence to the idea that R isn’t semantically well-formed in propositions like “My experience is R when I see a stop sign”. (Possibly, it is semantically possible to refer to a supposed distinction between R and R’, which qualia realists are asserting exists and illusionists are asserting does not exist, such that they are succeeding in really disagreeing; but it does not follow that either R or R’ is individually something that can be referred to.)
There is no analogous problem in twin Earth; Oscar can refer to “water”, third parties can figure out the rigid designation by looking at the environment, etc. And Oscar can think “H2O” and “XYZ” as hypotheses (imagining molecular structure and so on), there’s no “equivariance so you can’t actually imagine either possibility specifically” constraint.
I’m tempted to say that the brain is able to “notice” when it’s tokening a qualitative state R if it develops enough cognitive sophistication.
Anything the brain does has to work the same across the orbit, though. You could imagine all 6 observers sitting above the same physical body. It seems a semantic problem to say the brain is tokening a qualitative state R at all. (In original inverted qualia, the original and the twin both have the same brain states, so similarly, speaking of the brain tokening R is invalid; whatever the brain does it must do the same in both cases, and anything about R has to work differently in both cases by stipulation.)
Going to paste in a short Twitter thing I wrote that has some relevance:
The mirrored universe thought experiment
Suppose hypothetically, the universe is deterministic, and has exact mirror symmetry about some plane. Everything on one side has a mirrored counterpart on the other side, evolving identically (but reflected). If you approach the plane, you can see the other half, as if it’s through a perfect mirror. (Perhaps photons bounce exactly on mirror-photons, or perhaps physics allows them to pass through each other.)
Now consider, Ray goes towards the plane of symmetry and raises his right hand, saying, “This is my right hand”. His mirror copy looks, to Ray, like he raises his left hand, and says, “This is my right hand”.
First question: Is Ray correct when he says “This is my right hand”, and similarly for mirror-Ray? A symmetry argument suggests that they’re both correct, or neither is. But it appears, to Ray and mirror-Ray, that only one is correct.
Second question: What is the experience of mirror-Ray like? Does mirror-Ray have chirality-reversed experience (visual, auditory, tactile)? And if mirror-Ray’s experience is chirality reversed, why does he act the same (mirrored) as Ray? Why can’t they tell the difference and have different physical behavior?
Suppose Ray gets confused about left/right. He remembers, like most people, he’s right handed. So he raises his dominant hand, assured it’s his right hand.
Same goes for mirror-Ray. But when mirror-Ray does this, it really looks to Ray like mirror-Ray is raising his left hand.
On a functionalist account, Ray and mirror-Ray have the same experiences. They’re not mirrored versions of each other; they are the same experience, as “right” and “left” get their meaning through structural relations, to hand dominance, heart positioning, and so on, not through an absolute spatial quality.
The inverted qualia thought experiment (of Chalmers and so on) asks, what if there were an exact physical copy of someone, who had their color channels permuted, e.g. swapping their red with their blue experience? A similar chiral question: what about an exact physical copy who had their left/right experience mirrored? (And if such a person existed, what would be the relationship between their mirrored experience and mirrored physics?)
I think the illusionist move here is to, while doubting that the base property distinguishing world A from world B really exists, go with the hypothetical to find a semantic issue. You’re saying there is a way to “rigidly designate experience”, referencing the base property, through Kripke style semantics. I doubt this, even on a view where such base properties exist.
From having read Naming & Necessity (though not super carefully), I think a paradigmatic case of Kripke semantics is referring to a length such as a meter. What do I mean by a meter? “One meter” rigidly designates the length of the standard meter in Paris. Once you look at how I said “one meter” and look at the physical world, you can figure out what length I mean. That is a step from a string “one meter” to an actual length.
Another example: Twin Earth thought experiment. Oscar is on Earth where the watery substance is H2O. Twin Oscar is on an alien planet where the watery substance is XYZ. Both say “water” and rigidly designate different chemicals. Even if Oscar and Twin Oscar have the same functional mind states, they mean different things by way of rigid designation.
Both these cases of rigid designation work, because you can look to the physical world to find the “realistic property” corresponding to the string (“one meter” or “water”). With color qualia, I simply don’t see any way to do that, even buying into the idea that there could be a base property that differs between worlds A and B. As an example, with inverted qualia, it doesn’t seem like a third party can rigidly designate a color qualia by pointing to anything in the environment (analogous to the standard meter, or watery substance); any object they point to would, under these stipulations, look different (have different color qualia) for the original and twin, so it wouldn’t actually pick out the base property.
So I think the physicalist-leaning person has an answer as to “what it means to have an R experience”, e.g. “to have the sort of internal representation people tend to have when viewing standard red objects (e.g. stop signs, ~700nm light) under standard conditions” (this is a Sellars-inspired formulation, though he’d have something more precise; I realize my definition probably works badly in some edge cases). Then the inverted qualia thought experiment is rejected on semantic grounds. (In particular there appears to be no way to semantically refer to the difference between R and R’ through inter-subjective language)
I realize this might seem like begging the question to the qualia realist; it is more demonstrating that it’s possible to adequately use qualia non-realist language, not that qualia aren’t real. It does open the question of what the qualia realist is imagining when thinking that R and R’ are distinct experiential states.
The CQS picture could say: you can equivariantly imagine swapping red and blue in your visual field (i.e. experiences had when seeing standard red/blue objects), then think you’re imagining the experience of a possible physically identical twin. The thing is, if you let stand for that equivariant color swap map and for your present color qualia, then you’re not noticing the difference by looking at alone, you’re more mapping to and then noticing an internal distinction on the output pair. That’s what allows you to produce Shannon information “I imagine f(x) != x”.
The difference is effective in this case; when you put the imaginations of and side by side, you can effectively (through an equivariant map to a Shannon space) find the difference. The thing is, the difference between the original’s and the twin’s experience can’t be effective in any way. If they could “brain meld” and share neurological bases of color qualia (visual cortex info or whatever), they could at no point see that one has and the other has , and produce Shannon information indicating the distinction.
This seems to indicate some confusion where the initial intuition that they would have different experiences was based on imagining an omniscient perspective “original has , twin has ”, an omniscient perspective which can (equivariantly) notice the difference. But there’s no way to instantiate a perspective that notices the difference, by mad science brain-melding and so on. So maybe the initially imagined distinction was illusory. It’s hard for me to say exactly why this indicates a problem, but it seems problematic nonetheless.
I would agree that, at least shallowly, CQS provides weak evidence for qualia realism, in that it failed to find a severe theoretical problem, while an illusionist may have expected that.
In the case of special relativity, one might naively expect that “objects objectively have lengths”. However their lengths differ depending on relative velocity of the reference frame. So the naive intuition was invalid. You can still ask “how long is that object from my reference frame?”, indexically. Though probably there’s a better, deeper description of reality than in terms of centered world models corresponding with the reference frames (acted on by a symmetry group).
The case of qualia inversion seems somewhat worse than this. As long as we could imagine the twin having inverted qualia, why not imagine them inhabited by multiple consciousnesses, whose qualia span the entire orbit (of size 6)? Then there isn’t a fact of the matter of ‘what is the twin’s qualia space element’, the twin (physical) corresponds to 6 different conscious perceivers in an orbit. The perceivers would, if correct, have to realize there is not a fact of the matter of ‘which orbit element is the consciousness corresponding to this body perceiving’. (This is a bit more of an ‘inflationary’ direction of hypothetical, compared to ‘deflationary’ standard physicalism.)
(Note, to get to behavior you are basically equivariantly mapping to a “Shannon” qualia space, by which I mean a space where the group action does nothing, all orbits are singletons. Equivariantly mapping to a Shannon qualia space preserves only information about which orbit. Once it’s in a Shannon space it’s valid to convert it to specific behaviors and so on, without worrying about equivariance. So at the level of behavior, it’s only necessary to track ‘which orbit’.)
I think there is some reason to expect that either (a) qualia inversion isn’t really possible or (b) there’s a deeper theory than positing different color-permuted reference frames. In the relativity case it seems like initially differentiating/expanding the reference frames did real work, even if there’s eventually a more unified theory. But in the color qualia case it seems less like it’s doing work; it doesn’t seem to yield predictions for the physicalist, while relativity sure does yield new predictions for the Newtonian.
To be clear one can do something like “imagine swapping red and blue” equivariantly, you just have to be looking at, or recall in memory, control red and blue (physical) objects. (This is like the “naive BRG rotation” mentioned)
On the more general point, there seems to be some reason why qualia theorist really like color. Inverted qualia, “redness of red”, and Mary’s room. My suspicion is that there is something specifically confusing about color, which makes qualia realism seem relatively strong in this domain, while weaker in other domains. This probably has to do with CQS-like group theory.
I’m not convinced CQS provides much new evidence, but I thought previous evidence indicates that the color qualia non-realist wouldn’t have too much trouble with color; Chalmers types would already agree there is a physical, functional explanation for the physical situation that doesn’t involve color qualia. What CQS and similar can do is make the general area of color less confusing.
This could lead to a clearer picture of both “what color qualia are, if they exist” and “what produces the illusion of extra-physical color qualia”. My guess is that the second, modestly illusionist picture is going to look more compelling, though that’s hard to establish ahead of time.
Someone linked me to Yuxi’s Hole Argument and Inverted Qualia, which I hadn’t read before writing this post; it is more philosophically ambitious while having a broadly compatible group-theoretic picture.
Yeah I think it might be more productive, if I wanted to make progress on this, to look at the math rather than the metaphysical back-and-forth.