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.
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.