And then there's Qualia. What about it is a mystery?

Philosophy of Mind
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Here’s a typical rendition of the Qualia problem:

Qualia is a problem for physicalists because qualia is, subjective, first-person experiences—such as the redness of a rose or the sting of pain — it appear irreducible to objective brain states and physical laws.

But that’s not true from a modern scientific perspective.

Qualia can be biologically reduced down through many different layers of the folds within folds of harmonic, constructive biological systems and subsystems - processing the firehose of incoming sensory data, fired at us during that singular Living Moment of Now.

The “feeling” itself can not be experienced, but it can be known. The processes that trigger and carry “feelings” via a myriad of physical processes sloshing, and bustling, pushing up against each other, goal oriented. Yes, and that goal is the Drive to Thrive that we witness everywhere we look in the living kingdom of Earth’s biosphere.

The Living Moment of Now within our body is a crowded living cacophony, why should it not feel different from anything else you remember from the past, or dream about the future?

Then before we can take a breath, the next moment is slamming into us, so those systems better be humming along with exquisite millisecond timing.

The point is science has gotten down to observing the details of thought and emotional processes unfolding before their eyes.

From a host of different directions, all pointing at the same biology origins story. Yes they are not near cracking the hieroglyphics and unraveling the language - but we know about the vessels, and transportation routes, and signaling and decision mechanisms and engagement and on and on to make a head spin.

The only thing missing is the experience of the experience.

And all I ask is, so what?

… and perhaps aren’t there better mysteries to focus on?

Thanks for your time,
Peter

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I enjoy your posts.

I am a little sceptical we need another thread on consciousness but perhaps this one will produce a revelation.

I think you and I probably agree that consciousness is an evolved trait. All its uses: navigation, narrative ,abstract thinking appear to serve the requirements of a social and a problem solving animal.

The inituitive leap, or the leap away from intuition, we may need to make is that there is not a single self that experiences reality

What we regard as the self is an emergent property of the brain. Think of it as an ongoing conversation rather than a thing.

It is within this conversation, (which is substantiaed in neurons) that qualia are spoken of.

How does that work. Well as another philosopher once said on the subject “that’s not my department”

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There is no scientific explanation for qualia. There are devices that can detect electromagnetic radiation that we call the visible spectrum, and can differentiate its frequencies. But we see blue, red, etc. How does that happen? Why do we not simply differentiate the way those devices do, without seeing colors?

Many computers and other electronic devices get input from various sensors, act in specific ways based on the specific input, and reevaluate. Feedback loops. But we are aware of ourselves and these loops. How does that happen? Why do we not simply have input, react, add the reaction to new input, act again…?

No neurologist has the answer. They can say where in the brain something occurs - the neural correlates of consciousness. Yes, it happened there. That brain activity always takes place when this person sees blue. But that is not an explanation of how. We’re talking about things like calcium and potassium ions passing through the membranes of neurons. How does that translate vibrations in the air hitting inside my ear into music? Nobody has any idea. And it’s not like they haven’t been studying the brain and trying to figure it out.

From a physics pov, Brian Greene is sure qualia must come from the physical activity, but has no idea how. From Until the End of Time :

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@Citizenschallenge I guess qualia is a cornerstone of the culture war between physicalist and non-physicalist philosophy, and people often seem most attracted to whichever answers support their existing intuitions or biases. I’m not even sure we can reach agreement on what kind of knowledge is necessary to understand the question, let alone how we might go about finding a solution.

The key questions seem to be:

  1. Can consciousness be fully explained by physical facts alone?
  2. If we knew every physical fact about a mind, would we know everything there is to know about experience?
  3. Is subjective experience something that can be understood objectively, or does it require first-person knowledge that cannot be captured from the outside?

My suspicion is that if we dismiss this matter as a non-question, perhaps we haven’t understood it properly. I know I haven’t.

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A good first step in this discussion might be to see if the concept of qualia can be made coherent. I suspect not. Qualia lead to nonsense, and are best left out of our conversations.

Consider this little dilemma: qualia are either private or they are public, and neither option makes them useful. Either qualia are private, and hence irrelevant, or they are public, and hence already part of the discussion. If qualia are anything, they are our tastes and touch and so on, and since we already do talk about those, qualia are not private and they are not ineffable. So the private version is empty, and the public version is redundant with things we already discuss without needing the term “qualia.”

We might also consider “Quining Qualia.” Dennett’s project demonstrates that the notion of qualia is too fraught to be of much use; to show that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special, and to shift the burden of proof onto advocates of qualia rather than skeptics. The job of setting out what qualia are sits with the advocates of qualia: what is it you think talk of qualia adds to our discourse?

This is of course not to deny private experience itself. We may acknowledge a private aspect of conscious experience, but object specifically to the technical notion of qualia as it’s typically deployed, not to the existence of subjective experience as such; we can deny that this private aspect needs, or can coherently support, the special theoretical apparatus of “qualia.”

When claims that qualia had been “measured” in some study, a good response is skeptical interrogation rather than acceptance. Can one provide a link to the research? What exactly is supposed to have been measured?

The term “qualia” fails to pick out anything that is both distinctively theoretical and coherent, collapsing into either the ineffable-and-empty or the ordinary-and-already-discussed. Qualia-talk illegitimately reifies a grammatical and representational feature of self-locating belief into a metaphysical property.

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In point about ‘facing up to the problem of consciousness’, is because the feeling of it IS the knowing of it. I can know you’re in pain, because you are telling me, or because of your gestures or expressions of pain. But I cannot know your pain. I only know pain because I myself am susceptible to it and can feel it. AI systems, bless their silicon hearts, cannot feel pain, even if they can recite in minute detail all of the constitutive causes of it. If I see you in pain I might express sympathy or offer to help in whatever way I can. But that pain is irreducibly first-person, no amount of third-person knowledge of what causes pain, the physiological and biological processes that give rise to it, amount to feeling pain.

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What sounds like a profound observation is in the end no more than a grammatical artefact. the sentence “no amount of third-person knowledge amounts to feeling pain” is true only in the trivial sense that no amount of knowing about running amounts to running. You cannot run my 100m sprint.

On that topic, doing nicely in the Commonwealth Games, aren’t we?

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I think this presents a false alternative. The fact that we can publicly discuss taste, pain or colour does not make the experiences themselves public objects. Rather, public discourse about them is possible because each of us has first-person acquaintance with such experiences.

When you understand what I mean by “the taste of coffee” or “a sharp pain”, you don’t do so solely because you’ve learned the public use of those expressions. You also understand because you are yourself a sentient subject. The language works because it connects to a form of experience that speaker and listener each possess from their own first-person perspective.

So the first-person character of experience is not rendered irrelevant by the existence of a public vocabulary. On the contrary, it is what makes that vocabulary intelligible in the first place.

This is precisely the point at issue between Dennett and his critics. Dennett treats the first-person character of experience as something that can be dissolved by a sufficiently complete third-person account of cognition and behaviour. Critics such as Searle argue that this doesn’t explain consciousness but changes the subject, replacing the phenomenon to be explained with our capacities to report and reason about it (hence Searle’s description of his book as ‘Consciousness Explained Away’).

All such accounts have a blind spot regarding the hard problem. :smile:

And, yes although it is an easier field than the Olympics. That 9.85 100 m was particularly impressive.

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Your objection restates exactly the picture I’ve been arguing against, so it’s worth being explicit about why it doesn’t work.

The order of explanation is backwards. You want private acquaintance to ground public discourse. But how would we ever know that each of us has “acquaintance” with anything, let alone similar acquaintance, except through what we say? How do you know that we do have ‘similar experiences of redness and pain’? How else than by our common, shared talk of what is around us? The supposed private ground is only ever accessed via the public practice, which suggests the practice isn’t parasitic on the ground at all - rather what was taken to be private subjective stuff is instead an outcome of our shared language.

The “acquaintance” move reproduces the vicious circularity. If someone says “red” names my private acquaintance with a sensation, the natural question is: which sensation? The only available answer is “the red one, of course” - which is no answer, just circularity. Acquaintance-talk doesn’t give the word its content; it just gestures back at the word.

Your position collapses the same way colour-as-private-quale does:

  1. taste/pain/colour terms answer to private acquaintance;
  2. speakers can disagree about taste/pain/colour;
  3. speakers can be wrong about them;
  4. talk of them is public and communicable.

(1) is incompatible with (2)–(4). If each of us is simply reporting our own private acquaintance, none of us can be mistaken, and there’s nothing for two people to disagree about — yet we do ask “was it really painful,” “is that really red,” “what lighting was it under,” questions that only make sense if the terms are answerable to something beyond bare acquaintance.

“Private but discussable” is not a stable position. Either the experience is only accessible first-person, in which case it is private in the relevant sense and simply drops out of the conversation; or it can be talked about, in which case it is not private in the sense that matters. Saying “public discourse is grounded in private acquaintance” tries to have it both ways: keep the privacy for explanatory purposes while allowing full public discussability. But I don’t see what work “private acquaintance” is doing once we admit pain and colour are things you can talk about, ask about, correct me about, and that I can talk about, ask about, and correct you about.

Meaning is use, not label. If ‘mountain’ is a label to a set of private subjective experiences in each of us, we are never, when discussing mountains, talking about the same thing. But meaning is public. Better to talk of use". The same holds for “pain,” “red,” “sweet”.

It ought make one proud of one’s nationality, by all accounts.

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Very simply: we’re both human beings. We share biology, culture, and much else besides. A ‘heterophenomenological descroption’ of an experience could capture vast amounts of detail, but unless you had another being to send it to, it would mean nothing in itself.

We only have partial knowledge. I don’t know what it is like to be a Banno, let alone a bat. I can surmise, I can guess, but, you know, being IS a mystery. That is the realisation most fundamental to philosophy.

I dislike talk of ‘qualia’ altogether. It’s an ugly word, used to drag the entire debate under the very narrow streetlight of anglo analytic philoosphy. The subject of the discussion is actually the felt qualities of existence, which can only be realised by a being. It’s what ‘being’ means! Which is why existentialism and phenomenology are far better suited to the task.

Anyway - all of this is a smokescreen. The OP is someone I invited to this forum (from Medium) to discuss issues sorrounding Chalmers and Nagel’s philosophy and the ‘problem of consciousness’. As far as he’s concerned, it’s all simply biology, and is perfectly transparent to science. Perhaps you might address his OP.

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Yes - that’s not so far from the line I’ve been pushing. On the shared biology/culture point: why should they not be more or less the same if we share the same culture and biology; the same public expressions? I can go along with that, but I’m wary of pushing further into private phenomenology, since discussions of phenomenology very quickly turn into effing the ineffable… the discussion becomes mystical. My preferred move is to simply remove private mental language so that it becomes evident that these are somehow things in the world.

On your “heterophenomenology” point specifically - a description that only exists to be sent, and means nothing without a recipient - this fits with my objection to the claim that “meaning occurs only in individuals’ heads.” I’ll push back hard there: if you and I both use “Paris” to mean that city, we share the meaning of “Paris,” regardless of how our private ideas of Paris might differ in content (capital of France vs Belgium, etc.). Meaning isn’t sealed up in a head; it’s constituted by the shared use.

That’s also why I reject the Cartesian/dualist picture where “language is the passive naming of experiences and mind is sealed off from outer examination” - this leads inevitably to solipsism. Instead, language and the world are locked together, mind and body are one, subject and object is a false dichotomy. A heterophenomenological description, on this view, isn’t a report smuggled out of a private inner theatre - its very sense depends on there being an addressee, a shared practice it plugs into.

The same point holds against intersubjectivity and the “unknowable noumenon”: we overwhelmingly agree on which sentences are true and which are false. It’s as if we shared a world about which we are speaking… we are embedded in the world. The private “underlying thing” some worry we can’t access is irrelevant. Hardly worth talking about, really. We are embedded in the world, and the interaction is mutual; we ought to dismiss talk of external objects as mere products of experience.

So shared biology and culture aren’t just contingent aids to communication, they’re what makes meaning possible at all, and a description with no possible recipient isn’t really a description of anything - it’s not yet language.

Renaming the difficulty doesn’t dissolve it. Swap “qualia” for “felt qualities of existence” and the same fork reappears: either these “felt qualities” are things we can actually talk about - red, sweet, loud, the ache in a knee - in which case they’re just what we already discuss, dressed in more portentous language; or they are supposed to be something over and above that shared talk, something only “realised by a being” from the inside, in which case they drop out of the conversation exactly as qualia do. The ugliness of the word “qualia” isn’t the problem; the problem is structural, and it survives the redecoration.

Ask what the supposed “felt quality of existence” adds beyond “being conscious of something.” Nothing shows up except the impression of depth. That impression is worth being suspicious of.

Nor does invoking phenomenology or existentialism change the logic. If those traditions have something to say about experience that can be articulated, examined, disputed - fine, that’s just more talk, continuous with what analytic philosophers of mind already do with “red” and “sweet”.

So it’s not a matter of taste in vocabulary or which philosophical dialect is prettier. Either it can be said, and then it’s continuous with existing talk of sensation and no new category is needed, or it can’t, and then wrapping it in “being” or phenomenological jargon doesn’t rescue it from irrelevance to philosophical discussion.

Who am I kidding - I could hardly run 100m, let alone sprint.

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I thought I had. I’d agree with @Citizenschallenge 's conclusion but for somewhat different reasons. It’s not that the reduction is incomplete and one day biology will fill in the last gap called “the experience of the experience”, but that this last gap is an artefact of the way qualia were defined as necessarily separate from any physical or functional description. Once you notice that everything you wanted to point to (bitterness, redness, pain) is already effable and already public, “the experience of the experience” turns out to be no addition at all; just the same fact restated with mystifying jargon.

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I don’t think anyone needs to defend a Cartesian inner theatre or a private language. My point is much simpler. The fact that language is public doesn’t abolish the distinction between first- and third-person. We don’t have private objects called experiences, but we do have first-person acquaintance with experience that no third-person description simply is. Calling it a ‘private inner theatre’ is already smuggling in a particular interpretation of the nature of experience.

Where Cartesian dualism is relevant is in a way that Daniel Dennett would never acknowledge. It is at the basis of the very subject-object division that is the underlying target of both Nagel and Chalmers. The foundational move of Galilean science was the division between primary and secondary attributes and the restriction of science to the former. This already assumes the division between the objective domain of measurable objects from the inner world of sensation and experience, the self-other divide writ large. This is subject of both Husserl’s criticism in the Crisis of Western Sciences, and also of Whitehead’s ‘bifurcation of nature’.

So when Dennett said ‘ “…heterophenomenology was explicitly designed to be the neutral path leading from objective physical science… to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences…” he is operating wholly, but unconsciously, within that framework. He can’t see it, because he’s looking though it, not at it. As Thomas Nagel said in his review of Dennett’s last book:

Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

That captures the point exactly. The issue is not whether neuroscience is correct, but whether an exclusively third-person conception of explanation can ever account for the first-person character of experience.

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The existence of qualia isn’t necessary for its meaning. That we discuss qualia is evidence of its use and therefore proof it has meaning.

“Chair” may reference the chair, but that’s just what happens to be that word’s use. Not all words have referents, like “qualia” for example.

If we then ask what the non-public referent of “chair” is, as if to ask what the private ineffable feeling of chair is, what more can we say than that it’s ineffable, which means it can’t be expressed?

Isn’t the question “how do we express the inexpressible?” obviously incoherent?

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The trouble with your reply is that it re-introduces exactly what’s at issue by calling it “first-person acquaintance,” as if naming it settles the matter. Yes, there is no private object called an experience; I don’t deny we have experiences, only that calling them private adds anything intelligible. And yes, we already have public means of dealing with them: colour tables at the paint shop transfer exactly what’s needed, while the qualia—the private experiences—do not have any place at the paint shop.

The trouble is your “acquaintance” clause smuggles the private object back in through the side door. What’s actually there is a grammatical asymmetry: first-person ascriptions behave differently from third-person reports, so that the logical or public irreducibility of first-person ascriptions is linguistic; it does not explain the existence of conscious subjects. There’s no need to posit some further relation of “acquaintance” over and above that grammar to account for the asymmetry.

As for “no third-person description simply is” the first-person case—this cuts both ways. A third-person disquotation may have the same truth-functionality as the first-person utterance. If the first-person utterance itself doesn’t convey the pain, then the failure of the third-person description to “be” the experience isn’t evidence of some special first-person access; it’s just the general fact that utterances aren’t the things they’re about. The question, again, is whether the problem is with first and third person, or with putting pain into a proposition at all. Same point as you not being able to run my 100m race.

So do we agree there are no private objects, but disagree that there is a need for an “acquaintance” left over once the grammar is accounted for? What’s left, once you strip away the philosophical fiction of “first-person phenomenal experience,” is simple: we have pains, we see red things, we talk about them, and the first-person/third-person difference is a fact about grammar, not a metaphysical extra.

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That’s exactly the problem with “qualia”: its use is confined almost entirely to philosophical disputes about itself. It has a place only in philosophical discussions; outside philosophy fora, where do we actually use it? Wereas ordinary words like “red” or “pain” have uses tied to what we do, report, agreement and disagreement in our language-games. If a philosophical term can always be eliminated in favour of ordinary talk about experience or objects, that’s evidence its “use” is idle, not evidence that it’s doing semantic work. Let us be rid of it.

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Isn’t what’s really at issue experience itself, or awareness? Discussions about redness or the taste of chocolate seem like a distraction to me. I experience a state of being that is difficult to investigate and even harder to explain.

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So the term ought be abandoned because ordinary terms like “tastes like” and “feels like” do the job better than the abstracted term “qualia” that philosophers use?

Does this not apply to “free will,” a hopelessly incoherent concept that evokes nothing but mental puzzles about how an event can be uncaused? Can’t we just say “choose” and “coerced” without searching for incoherent underpinnings?

Surely there are other examples. Should we seek to identify and purge our vocabulary of such terms or does the fact that each brings about differing puzzles and proposed solutions suggest they might be doing some type of semantic work?

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@Banno

I’m a bit surprised by your response. Qualia is things like the perception of redness, strawberries, rock music, etc.. Compare that to a red strawberry sitting atop a saucer with rock music in the background in an empty room. The OP senses a mystery in qualia.

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You’re still not recognising what the argument is about. It concerns the inherent limitation of objective descriptions when it comes to lived experience. Nagel’s question wasn’t, “How do we talk about bats?” but “What is it like to be a bat?” Chalmers’ question isn’t whether we can describe neural processes, but why those processes should be accompanied by experience at all.

Calling the first/third-person distinction “merely grammatical” simply restates your position; it doesn’t answer the challenge. The issue is whether an objective description can do justice to the reality of first-person existence, not whether we possess a public language for talking about it.

The question is whether the subjective character of experience is exhausted by an account of our linguistic practices. Simply asserting that it is doesn’t engage the argument. That’s why I say there’s a cultural blind spot underlying this dispute.

I think it’s ultimately about the nature of being. Chalmers approaches it (rather awkwardly, I’ve always felt) through the analysis of consciousness, but the deeper issue is that objective thought excels at describing things while bracketing out the reality of felt experience. We can’t see the beings for the things (although that’s more Heidegger than Chalmers):

Consider this quote:

Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.”

“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?” ~ ‘Philosophy that Stirs the Waters’, New York Times, April 2013

He really means it, too. It’s obviously dehumanizing, at least to me.

It would be more accurate to say that the OP disputes that the qualitative aspects of experience (‘qualia’) elude science.

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