On Monday 08 September 2003 04:27, Ben Goertzel wrote:
> I am not sure if I define qualia exactly the same way as Dennett or not;
> that would take some thought to figure out...
Qualia are what-things-look-like-to-you (or to e.g. me). This generally
accepted in the philosophy of mind. But of course it's vague, clay in
anyone's hands. In the end all definitions of qualia are.
The attitude of Ned Block towards qualia is 'If you got to ask what jazz is,
you ain't never gonna know' (Louis Armstrong).
I think qualia have different related meanings on the personal level (1st
person), the psychological level (3rd person) and the physics level. What I'm
trying to do is get the term 'qualia' to the physics level, give it a place
there (not as properties of external objects, but as the ding-an-sich of
brain processes), and then handwave a bit at the qualia at the personal
introspective level.
>
> However, I think it's clear that qualia -- examples thereof, though
> perhaps not the abstract concept -- are found useful by people in
> conducting conversations about their own experiences.
>
> If I say, "To me, the color of that shirt and the color of that wall look
> exactly the same" but my son says "To me, the shirt looks darker", then in
> effect we're talking in terms of qualia.
This is first person (or second), and thus very murky and treacherous terrain.
First person view must always tried to be embedded in third person views.
>
> You could rephrase this mechanistically as
>
> "verbally_identify_color_output_visual_cortex(that shirt, my brain) =
> verbally_identify_color_output_visual_cortex(that wall, my brain)"
>
> versus
>
> " darkness ( verbally_identify_color_output_visual_cortex(that shirt, my
> brain) ) >
> darkness( verbally_identify_color_output_visual_cortex(that wall, my
> brain) ) "
>
> which is a very similar mechanistic story.
I don't know what you are trying to do here exactly. Place qualia in a
Language of Thought, 'hot' and 'cold'?
>
> The question is whether the qualia story is in some way conceptually
> simpler and more easily cognitively workable than the similar mechanistic
> story.
I disagree. There is no similar mechanistic story, or at least not a good one
(intentional stance, heterophenomenology?). The real mechanistic story the
qualia have to take a place in for them to exist (to be justifiably realist
about them), is the entirely different third-person scientifically sound
story of physicalistic cognitive neurosciences or even all the way down to
the fundamental level of elementary particles. The problem is to fit qualia
into a pure physicalistic ontology. Physical theories because of their
success have become the measure of all things.
The problem will not be/is not, in any case, whether qualia terms like 'red'
and 'soft' need to be eliminated or not outof all talk, and be treated
differently in the rough and tumble of daily life, with distrust, like
putting 'darkness(' and ')' around it. Like many of the concepts and
heuristics ('folk physics' 'folk psychology') we use in daily life we could
be anti-realists about them, just instrumentalists. They are simply useful,
but also lead to errors and are incomplete.
Does it come along with better cognitive heuristics for guiding
> thinking. If so, then qualia have a pragmatic role.
Well, to attribute sound qualities to crashing things is very practical (in
court ;-), but we know that crashing things that sound are better described
as crashing things that cause pressure waves in air. That description is more
complete, explains more,a nd better. (In questions of realism practicality is
not an argument, only the question of complete and good explanation is)
Explaining more competely has priority over Ockham's razor.
>
> It seems to me that, in fact "qualia stories" that we tell each other and
> ourselves have a lot of heuristic value for explaining our lives. Even
> though the things they explain could often be explained just as well by
> more complex mechanistic theories.
...leading to the conclusion of instrumentalism about qualia.
>
> In this sense, perhaps, qualia have a kind of pragmatic reality.... For
> after all, the mechanistic explanations are not an absolute reality either,
> they are only parts of an explanation of experience that our science has
> constructed...
>
Good point, that's why it's so 'dishonest' to eliminate qualia completely.
It's just forgetting the history of science, under the spell of 'ready made
science' (Latour) in text books. To deny qualia saying it's just illusion
generated by the human machinery is to pull the basis underneath *all*
evidence because human understanding is always a vital basis of any evidence
(for human beings). (Actually in a crude simplistic form it leads straight to
postmodernism: all we do is tell each other stories)
But still this doesn't mean that one needs to be realist about qualia,
instrumentalism is also an option. One can say: using the concept of qualia
is practical in expressing myself and understanding other people (and I'm
doomed to use qualia terms anyway), but there are better stories to tell,
more complete with less (predictive) failure, like the neuroscience story.
Why are we (I) realists (or more) about physics? Well, it's more complete,
explanatory and applicable to more(all) phenomena; there is less failure (<-
all due to clumsiness, laziness and stupidity?), especially in the details.
But why don't we use physics all the time then? Because we can't, we don't
have the thought and measuring capacity to use quantum field physics to
calculate the best way to the supermarket (luckily we don't have to). We are
locked up in our state of humanity with 'instruments' like arms legs neurons
and qualia terms.
(Maybe the singularity AI doesn't have to have this problem? (If it controls
nanobots in its 'brain', and therefor has a kind of 'recursive' existence
(complete, almost cartesian style ('claire et distincte') self-knowledge) we
lack?))
Anyway I try to get the qualia outof psychology, outof introspection, outof
daily life, giving it a place in the Standard Model of physics, as some sort
of 'Feynman diagrams in actions', the 'ding-an-sich's of the postulated
explanatory entities. Actually, I'm inventing a new word, I give 'qualia' a
new meaning, one that I can be realist (the physical level) about and not
just instrumentalist (the personal level and intentional stance level).
Arnoud
(see also chapter 10 of 'Mind brain quantum' of Lockwood, forget about the
rest)
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