The OP knows that we can study the development of an acorn into an oak. We can describe in detail how the seed germinated under the right conditions and went from sapling to mature oak in 20 years. He seems to think the mind is like an acorn. Contrast also the mind with a cell phone. Given the right tools and enough determination every part of the phone can be observed with the greatest clarity. The same is not possible with the mind.
qualia are the universal things which describes existence, it is made by universe ,and the universe feels through you, sensing an infrared light from eyes just like the machine is not the case because at our light frequency we see the best, universe created us in best forms, though it is just experiencing itself through you
Okay,
So here’s the question: what are those “felt qualities” if not the cacophony of our body’s physical senses, signals, crowded transportation channels bustling to the brain and back and all the rest of bewildering biology unfolding as we experience a moment.
{This is why I’m convinced a better understanding of our evolved body and its origins is so critical to getting a handle on oneself, which really ought to come before we start worrying about others.}
Nothing at all. That is what they are. But understanding the way your physical senses operate, how the nerves carry pain, does not capture the actual experience. Philosophy is the consideration or contemplation on the nature of lived existence. It’s neither biology nor physiology. That’s why I quoted a passage to you from Socrates the other day (although I didn’t notice a response.)
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Why would neural processes be happening in the first place if not to convey information and experience to help living and learning and making good decisions?
That’s what a serious understanding of evolution offers, it offers serious insights into how and why the body operates. Still, the deep time aspect of evolution needs to be comprehended (well at least struggled with) because it does explains why these things happened to better survive.
We now know that even single celled creature demonstrate a decided awareness of self and desire to thrive and the ability to pull it off even in hostile conditions. That tells us something, that’s worth taking on board. Would save a lot of nonsense.
Thanks for the feedback @Wayfarer
Incidentally, I found your words easier to follow and agree with than a fair amount of the other stuff shared up there.
Key to me is that I’m an Earth-centrist and my perspective is through a bottom-up, evolution, science respecting lens.
And I’ve fully internalized the fact of being an evolved animal and I have no pretense, or use, for the child of god longing, I’m a child of this Earth.
I’m just a thinker trying spending my life trying to make sense of my existence, and believe I’ve arrived at a good place.
You say philosophy is about consideration & contemplation on the nature of living existence. Been doing that all my decades.
How that can be done shying away from biology and physiology, I don’t know.
You ask about Socrates, that’s fine for ancient history, I’ve heard his greatest hits, though a sidewalk education to be sure. Still it doesn’t speak to me and reminds me of human hubris and the pretension that so often passes for philosophy. But that’s me. {I don’t call myself Citizenschallenge for nothing.} 
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Why not indeed? Look, you’re not talking to a creationist! I’m fully apprised of the facts of evolutionary biology. I grew up on the Time Life books on evolution and biology in the 1960’s, studied anthropology at university, and have always had a keen interest in all of those subjects. I don’t see anything that I’m saying as in contradiction to the facts of evolutionary biology.
Meaning what?
It can be said though that consciousness = brain function. That’s how most physicalists get through the day. The Chalmers-Nagel gap remains wide open. Neuroscience seems to be beating around the bush. It’s mostly scientific sensationalism - Did you know the left hemisphere this? Did you know if you do this the brain will do that? and so on. Perhaps it’ll add up to a nice number one day so to speak but at the present moment neuroscience is like a child in a toy shop.
I agree with you that the issue is important to many people because of this tedious culture war stuff.
That’s too bad, because there’s a strong secular and atheistic case against physicalism and therefore against qualia that gets lost in the noise.
The “qualia” that some insist on and the “trans-qualitative true physical object” are two sides of the same confused coin, both divorced from the way we live. Both neck-deep in metaphysicks as weird stuff that people pretend to believe when they play a certain game.
You don’t convey any knowledge of philosophy, regrettably. More like contempt for it.
Have a look at an Immaterial Philosophy of Mind.
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For context, I’m a secular pro-science atheist who rejects physicalism and the postulation of qualia. Why ? Because both are contrary to the spirit of science.
You mention observation. I connect this to perception. Perception is how objects are manifest to us in their quality.
Not qualia.
We don’t need qualia. Indeed, consciousness does not exist. Not as a stuff. Things exists. Not “qualia” but the quality of things in the world. Back to basics. Back to the red crunchy & sweet apple.
Science is just fetishized numerology without the primacy of perception.
But science — in its central manifestation as world-transforming technology — doesn’t need my help. Doesn’t need my interjection as its white knight.
The futility of my enterprise is humorously hinted at in this final monologue of American Psycho.
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I was thinking along the same lines, but about the movie Fight Club instead. I don’t know if I understand exactly what you’re getting at with the clip you present, but allow me to explain what I’m getting at.
Imagine every character in the movie (whether it’s American Psycho, or Fight Club, or whatever) ‘being’ an entire movie of their own, from their own “first person perspective.” Every character in the story-line is “internal to” every other character (mostly indirectly, but some directly). Every character is part of the “third person perspective” of at least one other character.
Each character would be constantly making associations like “when he gets and electric shock he behaves exactly as I do when I get an electric shock.” And “she walks around the tree just as I walk around the tree.” So there is much about the objects in the story line that all characters agree upon (like the tree) and some stuff that clearly not available to others but gets associated with others on grounds of similar behavior (like the experience of pain gets associated with pain behavior).
And so it is with the internal dialogue (narration) in each of these versions of the movie. How can any character in the story line profess to hear another’s internal dialogue?
Regardless of all this Q-talk (which I regard as a complete distraction to the significant issue here), does anybody really doubt that they can’t feel my pain?
And on a point I think you will appreciate, why should there be a ‘world’ other than all of these separate ‘movies’? The world need consist of nothing more than the ‘overlapping’ of them all.
Edit: Let me drive home the implications of that last comment. If there were no movies (i.e. no first person perspectives) then there would be no world. This is a rejection of metaphysical realism. So Chalmers’ Hard Problem arises because we are seduced into a propensity to try to account for the world in third person terms alone, and then can’t find a place for the first person perspective.
I didn’t comment on that thread; perhaps that is meant for another time.
Yeah, I’ve heard of that argument before. To my knowledge the key premise is that nowhere in the physical world are 2 things ever equal. There’s always a little difference even between 2 identical cars from the same assembly line. Hence, the idea of equality doesn’t come from physical reality. Does this support nonphysicalism? I don’t know but it is a compelling argument.
IMHO the Nagel-Chalmers gap is a hard problem for physicalists.
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It interests me, to some extent, that it seems so difficult to get agreement on what qualia actually refers to, or even what problem it’s supposed to raise. I find questions about experience and being more interesting. But ultimately, doesn’t it all end up coming back to consciousness?
The only mystery about qualia is why people can’t kick their useless qualia habit.
The qualia habit isn’t intellectual. It’s existential. The habit persists because the insight that dissolves it feels like loss, when it isn’t. Nothing is lost except the anxiety about losing it. And losing it doesn’t make you less human.
As a physicalist myself, I gotta say, I don’t think you’ve got it here. When you say “it can be reduced”, do you mean it HAS been reduced, or do you mean it’s in principle possible to reduce it but you acknowledge that nobody has yet?
Because it certainly hasn’t been reduced as far as I can tell, and the idea that it may be possible to reduce it is the physicalist speculation - a speculation I agree with, but a speculation still and talking about it like it’s a scientific fact seems like hubris to me.
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I’d say that the word “qualia” refers to qualia, which are a collection of mental phenomena dependent on but possibly not reducible to brain activity.
I don’t understand how you get from “private” to “irrelevant” or from “irrelevant” to “nonsense”.
If you and I stand next to each other and face a tower but some mad scientist has rotated your eyes 180 degrees then the orientation you see is not the orientation I see, even though we can both point to the sky and say that that’s the sky, point to the ground and say that that’s the ground, and point to the top of the tower and say that that’s the top of the tower — and if this mad scientist had done this to you at birth then you would say that the sky is up and that the ground is down like the rest of us because that’s how you would have learnt to use the words “up” and “down”.
So even if our private orientation-experiences do not change the way we talk or act in everyday life, they are nonetheless real, coherent phenomena with relevance to the philosophy and science of the mind, and it’s plausible that when we better understand the connection between the brain and the mind (which is plausibly deterministic), we will be able to infer that different people have different private experiences — whether orientation or colour or other — despite using the same words to describe them.
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This is a terrible attitude. To say that calling experience “private” adds nothing intelligible is completely misguided. The very nature of experience is such that it is intrinsic to the being and it cannot be sensed by any other being. This makes it “private”. So “private” is used to indicate that there is an internal aspect of these beings, which is very significant and meaningful, but also cannot, in any way, be perceived by any other beings. This is something which is very important for a philosopher such as yourself, to grasp, understand, and acknowledge. Not only is this the grounding for the reality of deception, it is also very clear, and strong evidence that there are aspects of reality which completely evade empirical (sense) observation, and this fact has far reaching ramifications.
Saying that we have “public means of dealing with them” does not negate the importance and significance of their privacy. A large part of Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations”, the beetle in the box for example, is spent demonstrating how human language necessarily fails in its attempts at public means of dealing with this internal, unobservable, private aspect of reality. That is what the so-called private language argument demonstrates. The superficial interpretation might be that a private language is impossible. The more important, and significant point, is the reason for this impossibility which is demonstrated. It is impossible because language, being public, is dependent on sensation, and built on this foundation, whereas the private is not. Therefore the private will always escape the limits of language.
Your words seem to say, or to imply, that we (science?) have bridged the abyss between brain and mind. Have I misunderstood? For it remains my understanding, at present, that the abyss is too huge for us to cross…