“C. We can’t capture the ineffable core of raw experience with language because there’s really nothing there. One task in philosophy is articulating the intuitions implicit in our thinking, and sometimes rejecting the intuition should result from concluding it employs concepts illogically. What shows the intuition of raw experience is incoherent (self-contradictory or vacuous) is that the terms we use to describe raw experience are limited to the terms for its referents; we have no terms to describe the experience as such, but rather, we describe qualia by applying terms denoting the ordinary cause of the supposed raw experience.”
That’s an over-generalisation from colour. Pain is a textbook example of a quale, and “pain” describes an effect, a reaction, not a cause, which would be something like “sharp” or “hot”. Likewise, words for tastes barely map onto anything object. “Sweet” kind of means “high in calories”, but kind of doens’t, since saccharine is thousands of times sweeter than sugar, but not thousands of times more calorific. And so on.
″ The simplest explanation for the absence of a vocabulary to describe the qualitative properties of raw experience is that they don’t exist: a process without properties is conceptually vacuous.”
The simplest explanation for the universe is that it doesn’t exist. It’s not popular, because the universe seems to exist. Explanations need to be adeqaute to the facts, not just simple.
There is a perspective from which it is surpising we can describe anything that it going on in our heads. Billions of neurons must churn data in considerable excess of gigabits per second, but speech has a bandwidth of only a few bits per second. So the surprise is that some things, chiefly discursive thought, are expressible at all. Although that is not really a surpise, since we can easily account for it on the assumption that discursive thought is internalised speech.
Since the inexpressibility of qualia can be accounted for given facts about the limited bandwidth of speech, it does not need to be accounted for all over again on the hypothesis that qualia don’t exist.
“D. We believe raw experience exists without detecting it. One error in thinking about the existence of raw experience comes from confusing perception with belief, which is conceptually distinct. When people universally report that qualia “seem” to exist, they are only reporting their beliefs—despite their sense of certainty.”
Beliefs about what? It might be just about credible that other people are p-zombies, with no qualia, but with a mistaken belief that they have qualia. However, it is much harder for me to persuade myself that I am a zombie. When I look at a Muler-Lyer illusion, I have a (cognitive, non perceptual) belief that the lines are the same length, but I will also report that they look different. That second belief is not a belief about belief, it is a belief about how things look.
″ Where “perception” is defined as a nervous system’s extraction of a sensory-array’s features, people can’t report their perceptions except through beliefs the perceptions sometimes engender: I can’t tell you my perceptions except by relating my beliefs about them. This conceptual truth is illustrated by the phenomenon of blindsight, a condition in patients report complete blindness yet, by discriminating external objects, demonstrate that they can perceive them. Blindsighted patients can report only according to their beliefs, and they perceive more than they believe and report that they perceive. Qualia nihilism analyzes the intuition of raw experience as perceiving less than you believe and report you perceive, the reverse of blindsight.”
I don’t see where you are going with that. Unless your “less” amounts to a zero, that doesn’t amount to nihiism. Having some qualia, but less than we previosously thought, raises the same problems.
“3. The conceptual economy of qualia nihilism pays off in philosophical progress Eliminating raw experience from ontology produces conceptual economy.”
So does eliminating matter in favour of free-floating mental content, as do idealists (or perhaps we should call them matter nihilists). Parsimony can be a two-edged sword.
″ A. Qualia nihilism resolves an intractable problem for materialism: physical concepts are dispositional, whereas raw experiences concern properties that seem, instead, to pertain to noncausal essences. ”
The epiphenomenality of qualia is not something that “seems” intuitively or introspectively, it is a delicately argued position
″ Qualia nihilism offers a compelling diagnosis of where important skeptical arguments regarding the possibility of knowledge go wrong. The arguments—George Berkeley’s are their prototype—reason that sense data, being indubitable intuitions of direct experience, are the source of our knowledge, which must, in consequence, be about raw experience rather than the “external world.””
One can challenge such arguments on the grounds that the “about” doens’t follow.
“If you accept the existence of raw experience, the argument is notoriously difficult to undermine logically because concepts of “raw experience” truly can’t be analogized to any concepts applying to the external world. Eliminating raw experience provides an effective demolition; rather than the other way around, our belief in raw experience depends on our knowledge of the external world, which is the source of the concepts we apply to fabricate qualia.”
I have a more modest proposal: let’s eliminate the idea that some things X cannot represent, stand for, or inform us about, some thing Y without being similar or analogous to it.
“Against these considerations, the only argument for retaining raw experience in our ontology is the sheer strength of everyone’s belief in its existence.”
Whereas the argument for matter is...?
I have a feeling I will have a lot to say about this posting, but I will start with one small issue: what is the watershed that occurred in metaphycs circa 1980? I’m pretty sure the Wikipedia article isn’t going to tell me, because I wrote the “history and schools” section.