i'm not a professional philosopher or an academic, but i think they do sometimes do important work. are you one of those people that thinks any academic field outside of STEM is worthless?
So what is the important work being done on this 'hard problem' with no proof possible? Seems very much like a 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' kind of problem. I think there's much more fertile pursuits in the philosophy of science for instance.
it is a topic of logic rather than empiricism. that doesn't mean that purely logical pursuits are worhtless. math is also non-empirical, defined by reason rather than measurement.
these kinds of abstract discussions can define the terms of our engagement with a topic of study. for example, considering the specific nature and qualities of consciousness can help to decide which avenues of research a neuroscientist or AI researcher or psychologist should or should not devote resources to, which kinds of questions can be answered, and can determine how research and experiments are interpreted.
that is irrelevant, it is more like a logical parameter than a phenomena. we cannot do a test to find the definition of '3', we define it ourselves for the purpose of providing a useful logical framework to operate with.
speaking of irrelevant, this thread introduced me to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument
By analogy, it does not matter that one cannot experience another's subjective sensations. Unless talk of such subjective experience is learned through public experience the actual content is irrelevant; all we can discuss is what is available in our public language.
Wittgenstein suggests that the case of pains is not really amenable to the uses philosophers would make of it. "That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation', the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant."
let me put this a different way. what the hard problem of consciousness asks, is why do sentient beings like ourselves have any internal, private experience at all? we know from computers that pure information processing does not require an internal experience, we know from microorganisms and plants that lack a central nervous system that instincts and biological behaviors do not require an internal experience, and we know from physics that lifeless matter does not have an internal experience, so where do they come from, and how can they be explained in purely physical terms? why is pain associated with any internal experience at all?
I think the fundamental question is if we even comprehend sentience properly. How does qualia as a concept provide any useful way to understand sentience? If the existence of sentience is somehow contingent on the 'truth' unknowable qualia, then a lot of things might be considered sentient, and we don't have anyway of knowing that.
a lot of things indeed may be sentient in ways we can't know in terms of physics. i consider myself entirely agnostic on the subject. i am more concerned with the reality and fact that i am facing at any given moment. I am constantly inside of my internal experience, i am constantly experiencing it. i can't stop experiencing it, i can't access any other experience. in that way i am doing nothing BUT 'measuring' or 'researching' Qualia. I'm interested in Human experience and what it may or may not mean. qualia as a concept helps us understand sentience by associating it with that internal experience we are all experiencing at any given moment, and differentiating that particular aspect of reality from information processing or electrochemistry. it elucidates the boundaries of the potential for human knowledge with our current tools and ways of thinking. Qualia are not unknowable, they are simply not measureable in an external physical sense as we understand it. we are all constantly 'inside' of them. it is just not a subject that can be analysed with only physics, like many other subjects. i don't really know what else to say and i feel like i am repeating myself. i am a historical materialist in the sense that, whatever matter is or isn't in an ontological sense, it seems to determine the environment and potential outcomes of reality. Maybe there is some paradigm to reality that would explain it that we are unaware of. that seems at least as plausible as assuming we will eventually in the future figure out enough math and physics to somehow explain that our internal experience we all feel doesn't actually exist, even though its the only thing we have direct access to as sentient conscious beings.
edit: and to be clear i do agree that the example in the OP is silly and oversimplified. we have similar eyes and brains and therefore we probably see colors and experience other experiences similarly if not identically. regardless on the nature of consciousness it is very heavily correlated to physical structures in many ways.
I liked the Wittgenstein private language argument because it basically says "why does it matter? we only can connect through our shared experiences/communication, so why do philosophers get all hung up on this concept as some foundational 'truth'?". It smacks of solipsism being smuggled under a different name. I guess I've yet to see an application of the concept without some relation to the external, which makes it seem at best contingent if not entirely irrelevant. When over a quarter of philosophers say they don't think the hard problem exists, it makes me think Wittgenstein has a strong point here.
i don't see how it has anything to do with solipsism, and i also think it matters because qualia are the foundation of all of our other knowledge. we can only access 'objective' measurements through qualia. it is especially relevant when AI bazingas claim their math parrot is 'True Sentient AI'. it is relevant when we consider that our fellow humans and living beings mean more to us than the sum of their physical parts. it is relevant when we experience empathy for another person because we can experience some of their pain internally. Furthermore any argument against exploring an avenue of investigation is to be discarded in my opinion, it amounts to saying 'shut up about it'. Besides, there are just as many financial and egotistical and emotional incentives to promote pure phyiscal realism as much as any alternative. I haven't seen an argument that convinced me personally that the hard problem doesn't exist, so some statistic of academics believing one way or another is not likely to sway me, especially about a topic like philosophy. its not like either side of the philosophical debate has 'work' to show for their efforts beyond published books. and to say that qualia don't exist seems like much stronger of a claim than wittgenstein's "we should stop talking about it". speaking of wittgenstein i was unimpressed by the beetle in a box argument. by nature of the metaphor's qualities, it is quite a different situation than with qualia. the 'beetle' in the box, whatever it is, is already presumed to be a physical object, not a semiotic or logical principle or concept or situation. if we can look into our own boxes we could easily describe the contents in terms of abstract ideas we are familiar with to others, like shape and number and so on. the entire point of qualia is that they are not reducible to physical objects we can describe concretely, they are not an 'object' at all, or even a subject, but the conscious experience of percieved objects and subjects.
Qualia as defined seems to say empathy is inauthentic in all cases, not sure why empathy requires it in anyway whatsoever. Empathy is all about attempting to understand each other's experiences, which is impossible based on this concept.
When you say all knowledge is founded on qualia, that seems extremely solipsistic. Qualia can't be communicated, so I don't follow this wall of text at all.
i'm confused, how did you come to that conclusion about qualia and empathy? Qualia are nothing more and nothing less than internal subjective experiences of phenomena. without those experiences, we could not empathize at all except via pure information processing and automatic reflexive behavior. everyone, presumably, has qualia of some kind, likely similar if they are of the same species. it would be incredibly weird for one to assume that one is the only one that has them, even though every other human and most animals have basically the same central nervous system, especially if one has gone through episodes of unconsciousness or other experiences that prove that consciousness is contingent to some degree on the brain. Qualia can be described, even if they cannot be transmitted. I can describe to you how i feel about various topics, how things look from my perspective, how comfortable or uncomforable i am during a situation, etc. what I mean when I say that all knowledge is founded on qualia, I mean precisely that all objective physical measurements are performed by conscious subjectively experiencing humans, and conscious subjectively experiencing humans are the ones interpreting the results of those measurements. when you or I look at a research paper that contains some kind of data, we are not directly accessing the physical reality of that data, but we are experiencing the qualia of seeing the paper and reading and interpreting the symbols and thinking about the meaning of them, we have our own internal experience of interpreting the data. the scientist looking at an instrument isn't directly accessing the physical reality of what his machine is measuring, he is indirectly accessing it through both the instrument and his own senses and consciousness, and interpreting the data based on his internal subjective experience of it.
the scientist looking at an instrument isn't directly accessing the physical reality of what his machine is measuring, he is indirectly accessing it through both the instrument and his own senses and consciousness
This gets a bit closer to why I think qualia in not useful. Peer review is where the confirmation of the instrument and that of the senses of multiple consciousnesses agree about what has been observed. This is social phenomenon. Qualia does not enter into it because it can definitionally not.
it enters into it because all of the scientists are conscious beings that experience reality in terms of qualia. In fact that is precisely why we need peer review in the first place, because we are not perfect measurement machines but subjectively experiencing entities.
i want to know, do you believe that qualia do not 'exist' (i.e. that your internal experience of reality is 'illusory' or otherwise unreal) or do you think they are simply not useful to talk about?
It is not useful for philosophical discussions, in fact it is a dead end in my understanding of it. It is just a label for the philosophical misunderstanding of consciousness that says 'shut up about it'.
why do you think that discussions involving the hard problem of consciousness and qualia say 'shut up about it'? it really seems quite the opposite considering wittgensteins argument is essentially that. it isn't preventing any neuroscientist from making progress. no serious proponent of the literal mere existence of qualia would argue for less neurological research or anything like that. any serious theory involving the world has to take physical reality into account. we all agree that consciousnes and qualia are contingent on the brain and nervous system. I really don't understand your view of qualia at all, i feel like we are speaking different languages.
I guess the problem is the definitions I've come across are not contingent in the slightest. I was reading the wiki page about it, and even a neuroscientist in support of qualia seemed to contradict the definition.
The conscious mind and its constituent properties are real entities, not illusions, and they must be investigated as the personal, private, subjective experiences that they are. The idea that subjective experiences are not scientifically accessible is nonsense.
scientifically accessible does not necessarily mean directly, empirically, mechanically accessible. we can indirectly access subjective properties of internal subjective experience to some degree by interviewing other subjectively experiencing entities. we can't directly transmit a sujective experience, but we can attempt to incompletely describe parts of them. just like we can't directly measure all properties of a subatomic particle at once, but we can indirectly measure parts of it. i agree with the quote in that it is possible to scientifically study subjective phenomena to some degree. psychologists do it all the time, for example, by interviewing and observing their patients.
edit: to be specific, what i mean by Qualia is any internal subjective experience of phenomena. i make no assumptions about a 'self', a 'soul', a 'mind', or anything else, just the mere fact of the existence of internal subjective experiences.
See this contingency makes it much less definitive, which is great. I've not seen that stance of contingency from philosophers that support the definitional meaning, which is why the private language argument logic seems much more useful.
I don't think philosophers have any 'objective logic' for maintaining this 'unknowableness' without large helpings of contingency directly attached. It just comes off like an appeal to the divine that no longer carries much relevancy today.
So in sum, we all have our subjective experiences, but why make that the focus of absoluteness? Every material understanding has arisen from the contingency, not the absoluteness.
the unknowableness comes from the difficulties of causally explaining the phenomena of subjective experience in terms of physical processes. we can explain information processing, in those terms, we can explain automatic unconscious biological behavior in those terms, but we have yet to develop an understanding of a causal (as opposed to merely correlational) relationship between physical phenomena and subjective experience. obviously the fact that brain damage exists implies that, whatever the nature of consciousness and subjectivity, it is affected when certain physical structures are interacted with.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by absoluteness vs. contingency in this case, but as far as philosophical implications, what the existence of subjective experience MAY imply, is different kinds of metaphysics or ontologies or epistemologies. A physical realist worldview is that ONLY physical matter and physical processes exist and are knowable, and that subjective experience is "illusory" or not real or unkowable. What the existence of Qualia implies, is that there is at least a subjective, and perhaps even semiotic, component to reality, in some fashion, that we have access to in some capacity. Some philosophers use this to argue for Idealism, which posits that ONLY 'mind' or subjective experience really 'exists', and that matter is 'illusory' or 'not real'. I find both of these extremes unconvincing, I personally like Analytic Idealism myself, which is an ontology that posits that physical processes are the extrinsic appearance of mental processes, and that mental processes are the intrinsic appearance of physical processes. Other interpretations may be that there is some hidden, more fundamental reality from which both the mental and physical originate.
but definitionally it can't be proven, so must be fun to have job security I guess
i'm not a professional philosopher or an academic, but i think they do sometimes do important work. are you one of those people that thinks any academic field outside of STEM is worthless?
So what is the important work being done on this 'hard problem' with no proof possible? Seems very much like a 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' kind of problem. I think there's much more fertile pursuits in the philosophy of science for instance.
it is a topic of logic rather than empiricism. that doesn't mean that purely logical pursuits are worhtless. math is also non-empirical, defined by reason rather than measurement.
I never said purely logical pursuits are worthless. I said I don't see the worth of this problem.
these kinds of abstract discussions can define the terms of our engagement with a topic of study. for example, considering the specific nature and qualities of consciousness can help to decide which avenues of research a neuroscientist or AI researcher or psychologist should or should not devote resources to, which kinds of questions can be answered, and can determine how research and experiments are interpreted.
sure, but the concept in question is defined as untestable by the non-physicalists
that is irrelevant, it is more like a logical parameter than a phenomena. we cannot do a test to find the definition of '3', we define it ourselves for the purpose of providing a useful logical framework to operate with.
speaking of irrelevant, this thread introduced me to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument
let me put this a different way. what the hard problem of consciousness asks, is why do sentient beings like ourselves have any internal, private experience at all? we know from computers that pure information processing does not require an internal experience, we know from microorganisms and plants that lack a central nervous system that instincts and biological behaviors do not require an internal experience, and we know from physics that lifeless matter does not have an internal experience, so where do they come from, and how can they be explained in purely physical terms? why is pain associated with any internal experience at all?
I think the fundamental question is if we even comprehend sentience properly. How does qualia as a concept provide any useful way to understand sentience? If the existence of sentience is somehow contingent on the 'truth' unknowable qualia, then a lot of things might be considered sentient, and we don't have anyway of knowing that.
a lot of things indeed may be sentient in ways we can't know in terms of physics. i consider myself entirely agnostic on the subject. i am more concerned with the reality and fact that i am facing at any given moment. I am constantly inside of my internal experience, i am constantly experiencing it. i can't stop experiencing it, i can't access any other experience. in that way i am doing nothing BUT 'measuring' or 'researching' Qualia. I'm interested in Human experience and what it may or may not mean. qualia as a concept helps us understand sentience by associating it with that internal experience we are all experiencing at any given moment, and differentiating that particular aspect of reality from information processing or electrochemistry. it elucidates the boundaries of the potential for human knowledge with our current tools and ways of thinking. Qualia are not unknowable, they are simply not measureable in an external physical sense as we understand it. we are all constantly 'inside' of them. it is just not a subject that can be analysed with only physics, like many other subjects. i don't really know what else to say and i feel like i am repeating myself. i am a historical materialist in the sense that, whatever matter is or isn't in an ontological sense, it seems to determine the environment and potential outcomes of reality. Maybe there is some paradigm to reality that would explain it that we are unaware of. that seems at least as plausible as assuming we will eventually in the future figure out enough math and physics to somehow explain that our internal experience we all feel doesn't actually exist, even though its the only thing we have direct access to as sentient conscious beings.
edit: and to be clear i do agree that the example in the OP is silly and oversimplified. we have similar eyes and brains and therefore we probably see colors and experience other experiences similarly if not identically. regardless on the nature of consciousness it is very heavily correlated to physical structures in many ways.
I liked the Wittgenstein private language argument because it basically says "why does it matter? we only can connect through our shared experiences/communication, so why do philosophers get all hung up on this concept as some foundational 'truth'?". It smacks of solipsism being smuggled under a different name. I guess I've yet to see an application of the concept without some relation to the external, which makes it seem at best contingent if not entirely irrelevant. When over a quarter of philosophers say they don't think the hard problem exists, it makes me think Wittgenstein has a strong point here.
i don't see how it has anything to do with solipsism, and i also think it matters because qualia are the foundation of all of our other knowledge. we can only access 'objective' measurements through qualia. it is especially relevant when AI bazingas claim their math parrot is 'True Sentient AI'. it is relevant when we consider that our fellow humans and living beings mean more to us than the sum of their physical parts. it is relevant when we experience empathy for another person because we can experience some of their pain internally. Furthermore any argument against exploring an avenue of investigation is to be discarded in my opinion, it amounts to saying 'shut up about it'. Besides, there are just as many financial and egotistical and emotional incentives to promote pure phyiscal realism as much as any alternative. I haven't seen an argument that convinced me personally that the hard problem doesn't exist, so some statistic of academics believing one way or another is not likely to sway me, especially about a topic like philosophy. its not like either side of the philosophical debate has 'work' to show for their efforts beyond published books. and to say that qualia don't exist seems like much stronger of a claim than wittgenstein's "we should stop talking about it". speaking of wittgenstein i was unimpressed by the beetle in a box argument. by nature of the metaphor's qualities, it is quite a different situation than with qualia. the 'beetle' in the box, whatever it is, is already presumed to be a physical object, not a semiotic or logical principle or concept or situation. if we can look into our own boxes we could easily describe the contents in terms of abstract ideas we are familiar with to others, like shape and number and so on. the entire point of qualia is that they are not reducible to physical objects we can describe concretely, they are not an 'object' at all, or even a subject, but the conscious experience of percieved objects and subjects.
Qualia as defined seems to say empathy is inauthentic in all cases, not sure why empathy requires it in anyway whatsoever. Empathy is all about attempting to understand each other's experiences, which is impossible based on this concept.
When you say all knowledge is founded on qualia, that seems extremely solipsistic. Qualia can't be communicated, so I don't follow this wall of text at all.
i'm confused, how did you come to that conclusion about qualia and empathy? Qualia are nothing more and nothing less than internal subjective experiences of phenomena. without those experiences, we could not empathize at all except via pure information processing and automatic reflexive behavior. everyone, presumably, has qualia of some kind, likely similar if they are of the same species. it would be incredibly weird for one to assume that one is the only one that has them, even though every other human and most animals have basically the same central nervous system, especially if one has gone through episodes of unconsciousness or other experiences that prove that consciousness is contingent to some degree on the brain. Qualia can be described, even if they cannot be transmitted. I can describe to you how i feel about various topics, how things look from my perspective, how comfortable or uncomforable i am during a situation, etc. what I mean when I say that all knowledge is founded on qualia, I mean precisely that all objective physical measurements are performed by conscious subjectively experiencing humans, and conscious subjectively experiencing humans are the ones interpreting the results of those measurements. when you or I look at a research paper that contains some kind of data, we are not directly accessing the physical reality of that data, but we are experiencing the qualia of seeing the paper and reading and interpreting the symbols and thinking about the meaning of them, we have our own internal experience of interpreting the data. the scientist looking at an instrument isn't directly accessing the physical reality of what his machine is measuring, he is indirectly accessing it through both the instrument and his own senses and consciousness, and interpreting the data based on his internal subjective experience of it.
Qualia definitionally can not be transmitted.
This gets a bit closer to why I think qualia in not useful. Peer review is where the confirmation of the instrument and that of the senses of multiple consciousnesses agree about what has been observed. This is social phenomenon. Qualia does not enter into it because it can definitionally not.
it enters into it because all of the scientists are conscious beings that experience reality in terms of qualia. In fact that is precisely why we need peer review in the first place, because we are not perfect measurement machines but subjectively experiencing entities.
i want to know, do you believe that qualia do not 'exist' (i.e. that your internal experience of reality is 'illusory' or otherwise unreal) or do you think they are simply not useful to talk about?
It is not useful for philosophical discussions, in fact it is a dead end in my understanding of it. It is just a label for the philosophical misunderstanding of consciousness that says 'shut up about it'.
why do you think that discussions involving the hard problem of consciousness and qualia say 'shut up about it'? it really seems quite the opposite considering wittgensteins argument is essentially that. it isn't preventing any neuroscientist from making progress. no serious proponent of the literal mere existence of qualia would argue for less neurological research or anything like that. any serious theory involving the world has to take physical reality into account. we all agree that consciousnes and qualia are contingent on the brain and nervous system. I really don't understand your view of qualia at all, i feel like we are speaking different languages.
I guess the problem is the definitions I've come across are not contingent in the slightest. I was reading the wiki page about it, and even a neuroscientist in support of qualia seemed to contradict the definition.
scientifically accessible does not necessarily mean directly, empirically, mechanically accessible. we can indirectly access subjective properties of internal subjective experience to some degree by interviewing other subjectively experiencing entities. we can't directly transmit a sujective experience, but we can attempt to incompletely describe parts of them. just like we can't directly measure all properties of a subatomic particle at once, but we can indirectly measure parts of it. i agree with the quote in that it is possible to scientifically study subjective phenomena to some degree. psychologists do it all the time, for example, by interviewing and observing their patients.
edit: to be specific, what i mean by Qualia is any internal subjective experience of phenomena. i make no assumptions about a 'self', a 'soul', a 'mind', or anything else, just the mere fact of the existence of internal subjective experiences.
See this contingency makes it much less definitive, which is great. I've not seen that stance of contingency from philosophers that support the definitional meaning, which is why the private language argument logic seems much more useful.
I don't think philosophers have any 'objective logic' for maintaining this 'unknowableness' without large helpings of contingency directly attached. It just comes off like an appeal to the divine that no longer carries much relevancy today.
So in sum, we all have our subjective experiences, but why make that the focus of absoluteness? Every material understanding has arisen from the contingency, not the absoluteness.
the unknowableness comes from the difficulties of causally explaining the phenomena of subjective experience in terms of physical processes. we can explain information processing, in those terms, we can explain automatic unconscious biological behavior in those terms, but we have yet to develop an understanding of a causal (as opposed to merely correlational) relationship between physical phenomena and subjective experience. obviously the fact that brain damage exists implies that, whatever the nature of consciousness and subjectivity, it is affected when certain physical structures are interacted with.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by absoluteness vs. contingency in this case, but as far as philosophical implications, what the existence of subjective experience MAY imply, is different kinds of metaphysics or ontologies or epistemologies. A physical realist worldview is that ONLY physical matter and physical processes exist and are knowable, and that subjective experience is "illusory" or not real or unkowable. What the existence of Qualia implies, is that there is at least a subjective, and perhaps even semiotic, component to reality, in some fashion, that we have access to in some capacity. Some philosophers use this to argue for Idealism, which posits that ONLY 'mind' or subjective experience really 'exists', and that matter is 'illusory' or 'not real'. I find both of these extremes unconvincing, I personally like Analytic Idealism myself, which is an ontology that posits that physical processes are the extrinsic appearance of mental processes, and that mental processes are the intrinsic appearance of physical processes. Other interpretations may be that there is some hidden, more fundamental reality from which both the mental and physical originate.