In this book, why does Chalmers seem to believe that by invoking illusory concepts such as "qualia" and "phenomenal experience" he is disproving materialism? If such things existed, I guess it would disprove materialism, as it would suggest there was something in our universe that doesn't "supervene on the physical". But I've never known any "qualia" or "phenomena". There is nothing that I find that doesn't "supervene on the physical". If I learn about the way our neurons behave when we see the colour red, if I learn about the eye and every physical element of a homo sapien's interaction with the colour red, this is all that is to be known about it. When I look at the colour red, these physical facts are all that my interaction with the colour amounts to. In this interaction I don't find "qualia" or "phenomenal experience", I simply find a complex of the facts that I can learn about it in any good neuroscience book, so why should I believe these phenomena exist any more than ghosts and ectoplasm? Why is it necessary for me to believe in qualia for my conception of the world to be coherent? What am I missing?
In this book...
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Ask any anti-materialist a simple question: if you believe it is unnecessary to assume that manmade machines do not experience qualia (I'm sure no one but a total lunatic would think that it is crucial for his worldview to include the possibility that his computer might be capable of phenomenal experience), then why should you assume that it is necessary to believe that biological machines experience qualia? They will having nothing to say back to this.
Nice argument. Does a good job of showing why it is completely superfluous to believe in conscious experience. Materialism can survive perfectly well without it, thank you very much.
>I'm sure no one but a total lunatic would think that it is crucial for his worldview to include the possibility that his computer might be capable of phenomenal experience
it can't be proven tho just like it can't be proven that a rock doesn't experience qualia. try harder nerd.
Why would I base my views on the possibility that qualia exists if qualia is some phenomena that can't be described in physical terms? Why is it any different to basing your views on the possibility that ghosts exist?
I'm having trouble following your argument here. This seems to me to be an argument AGAINST materialism, not for it. Since we can imagine that there could be sufficiently advanced AI with no conscious experience it seems to prove Chalmers point since an advanced AI would essentially be for all intents and purposes a P-Zombie and if P-Zombies are even possible in principle then his argument is correct that we don't need conscious experience either and materialism alone cannot account for subjective first person experience. Why there is a "like" attached to every action, what it is like to drink, to see red, to sing. If an AI could perform such actions without any experience attached to the action of performing them, rather just following rote programming it seems sensible that biological life should be the same
What do you mean the "possibility" that qualia exist? You experience them, the existence of qualia is beyond dispute. Arguing that Qualia are not real is as stupid as punching someone in the face and claiming their pain isn't real since it's locked away within their experience of the world and inaccessible to you.
If you can deny manmade machines experience qualia what prevents you from denying other people experience qualia is the argument
You’re recognizing the kind of argument that Chalmers makes for a non-physicalist view of consciousness, and yes, it is unconvincing from the point of view of empiricism. Chalmers’ zombie argument is an argument from conceivability, which is essentially just another way of saying ‘possibility’.
It is conceivable there could be some humanoid that possessed every trait of a conscious human being, except for consciousness. Therefore, it is conceivable that consciousness is non-physical, since every physical aspect of the conscious human being would be present in the humanoid, aside from consciousness.
Chalmers also gives examples where this might’ve actually been the case — e.g., a fully animated human being that supposedly lacked conscious awareness for a period of time.
I’m yet to be reasoned out of physicalism. Although, a good way to bridge the gap between Chalmers and physicalism is to read Gale Strawson’s response to Chalmers’ critics, such as Dennett.
this.
If manmade machines don't experience qualia they're p-zombies and you've just proven Chalmers right. The traditional attack on Chalmers position is to argue that P-Zombies are not possible, if you concede they are then you've conceded the argument entirely.
No you don't understand if you concede p-zombies are possible you have no way of knowing other people aren't p-zombies. Like you're the only person
Uh yeah. That's correct. So....Under materialism on what basis do you claim other people are NOT P-Zombies? You've kneecapped your own position since the existence of other minds is not accessible to empirical verification and you concede that it's fundamentally possible that other people could indeed be p-zombies. You've created an intractable epistemological problem for materialism.
It's not a problem for materialism because with materialism there are no p-zombies or qualia.
Believe it or not, such skeptical arguments (that for example, you can't know some other person is a P-zombie) are ALWAYS realist arguments, because realism is the position that truth and falsehood stand independent of our knowledge of them. Anti-skeptics typically tend to be anti-realists as a result. The same people who say we can't not-know that someone is or isn't a P-zombie are the people who want to say P-zombies are impossible, and then go around denying qualia. This is a pattern that repeats in other cases. For example, the people who typically think it's somehow incoherent to deny the external world exists tend to say there is no such thing as metaphysical reality independent of us or our language or thought or what have you. Unsurprisingly, Dennett is to some extent allied to that camp of neo-pragmatists and constructivists, not surprising given the influence of older anti-realists on him. Same is true of the Churchlands and other people like that.
You CAN deny that other people experience qualia. That user mentioned P-Zombies, that is, philosophical zombies. You do know what that is, right user? In any case, that's not an argument against qualia because you can at least be certain that YOU, if no one else, experience qualia.
A p-zombie is a being that doesn't experience qualia. Claiming there are no qualia and no p-zombies is contradictory, either one or the other exists.
I do not experience qualia, so how can I know that I'm unique in this manner? I assume others don't experience it either.
I mean most people take it as an argument against qualia if you wind up doubting other people exist.
You know what I mean, qualia doesn't exist under materialism so the special distinction of p-zombie is irrelevant.
>qualia doesn't exist under materialism
I don't think you understand what that entails. You're basically claiming you're the same as a robot, you have no phenomenal experience of the world, no intentionality, no experience of what it's like to be you. Clearly you do have a qualitative experience of the world user, denying its reality as a cope that materialism is false will not do you any good.
>Clearly you do have a qualitative experience of the world user, denying its reality as a cope that materialism is false will not do you any good.
Of course I do and it's a direct consequence of my material being. If that's what you mean by qualia I agree with it. It's when you start talking about immaterial inaccessible stuff when it goes off the rails.
>It is conceivable there could be some humanoid that possessed every trait of a conscious human being, except for consciousness. Therefore, it is conceivable that consciousness is non-physical, since every physical aspect of the conscious human being would be present in the humanoid, aside from consciousness.
You're looking at it backwards. It isn't just "concievable" that a humanoid might not experience phenomenal consciousness. There is no evidence that ANY human DOES experience phenomenal consciousness, and there never could be, because "qualia" is supposedly something that doesn't "supervene on the physical". So why should I believe in it? What purpose could such a belief serve? My world view is consistent without it, but I don't see how it would be if I had to believe in something that didn't "supervene on the physical". It would be like me randomly deciding that I should believe in ghosts, and throwing away materialism for the sake of this bizarre belief.
>Of course I do and it's a direct consequence of my material being.
Why does your material being give rise to an experience of "being you" and the material being of a computer not give rise to the experience of "being a computer"? What is the ontological status of this being? You talk about it being distinct from the physical processes that underlie it but how do physical processes generate a first person subjective experience?
>My world view is consistent without it
No it isn't. You just haven't thought through the issue carefully enough to realize your world view is actually irrational and inconsistent without it.
>Why does your material being give rise to an experience of "being you" and the material being of a computer not give rise to the experience of "being a computer"?
Computers can't pass the Turing test yet, they don't seem conscious in conversation. When they do I'll be glad to admit they're conscious same as I do with. I don't believe is some spooky qualia that the computer or you may not have.
Both you and the poster directly above you think physical processes that very usefully prescind from the phenomenal can explain the phenomenal. Unfortunately you to date have produced nothing but a promise to explain at some future date.
>You talk about it being distinct from the physical processes that underlie it but how do physical processes generate a first person subjective experience?
Neuroscience still has a long ways to go before they get real understanding but there are alot of really interesting examples of brain damage leading to bizarre cognitive defects.
I mean that goes both ways doesn't it? If you think qualia exist how do they effect the material?
Tell my how my materialist worldview requires me to believe in qualia if qualia is something that doesn't "supervene on the physical", and tell me why this is any different to saying it is necessary for me to believe in God or ghosts.
I don't use the desperate rearguard concept of qualia in the first place. I think the material is a working of the more-than-material. Materialism has been very useful in investigation but it's become an outworn dogma.
No, I simply don't believe in the phenomenal, so there is nothing to explain. What use does a belief in the phenomenal have for a materialist such as myself?
Or even better assuming qualia exist how does the material cause them? We have first person experiences or qualia caused by our material circumstances like if I hit myself with a hammer I feel the qualia of pain. How can that happen if the material can't cause them?
Huh? I thought you were arguing for the existence of qualia. If not we're in agreement qualia don't exist
You're forced to believe in qualia by the brute fact you experience them. It's up to you to explain how qualia fit into a materialist ontology and you can't, ergo your worldview fails. Keep in mind this isn't an issue of something you think might be solved by more science in the future, your worldview rules out an explanation for qualia even in principle, as in theres an aspect of reality you will never be able to properly account for by the very fact that materialism deliberately brackets out phenomenal experience and that's exactly the issue you're trying to explain the existence of.
And again if you accept the idea of qualia as inaccessible phenomenal experience you have no way of even knowing he has any. Your position leads you to believing you may be the only real person and everyone else is a p-zombie. That seems pretty crazy.
What is the material? Usually it's connected to the (physical) sciences and explanation by them. If you want to import more into the concept of the material such that it covers absolutely everything you're doing something beyond science.
Different poster. I don't usually engage in philosophy of mind discussion or have any use for the concept of qualia. But materialism is either dogmatic or self-aware enough to know it's promising en explanation, though it hasn't yet given one.
Inaccessibility is in my opinion one of the major flaws of the concept qualia. It's a quasi-materialist concept with no legitimate use.
>You MUST believe in ghosts, just cos! I say I see them, so you must believe that you do too.
Cool argument
>What is the material? Usually it's connected to the (physical) sciences and explanation by them. If you want to import more into the concept of the material such that it covers absolutely everything you're doing something beyond science.
Exactly, I don't believe in things beyond science, so I don't believe in qualia.
>And again if you accept the idea of qualia as inaccessible phenomenal experience you have no way of even knowing he has any
It's not inaccessible. It's accessible to precisely one person, you. It's a prerequisite for thought and thus you cannot deny qualia without defeating the argument you're trying to make since denying the phenomenal experience of being yourself is denying thought itself and your ability to make judgements. Whether or not other people experience qualia is not relevant to the point here.
Mind you it does present a problem for materialist epistemology, the existence of other minds will always present a real problem to the committed materialist but at the moment it's sufficient to point out the existence of your personal experience of the world is enough to prove qualia exist and you must have a sufficient explanatory framework to explain how chemicals interacting give rise to the first person sensation of pain, or any other experience that is felt. You don't, and you can't because no matter how hard you try you can never manage to get from chemicals to feeling because chemicals are material and feeling is not.
>Your position leads you to believing you may be the only real person and everyone else is a p-zombie. That seems pretty crazy.
I'm not a materialist but it does seem crazy this is what materialists are forced to believe. You'd think they'd grow up and accept a more rational worldview like Platonism instead of accepting such blatantly irrational consequences from their commitments.
>It's not inaccessible. It's accessible to precisely one person, you.
You are using you when you shouldn't be. You can't access my qualia so you have no idea if I have any or not. You can't distinguish between if I'm conscious or a p-zombie. That seems like a pretty schizo position imagining you may be surrounded by a bunch of people who aren't really conscious
Huh? Materialists don't believe in accessible qualia so there is no question of p-zombies. It's people that do believe in qualia that have the everyone else maybe a p-zombie problem
Platonists assemble
Keep on Fucking Loving Science then
*inaccessible qualia
Exactly. WE know we don't experience qualia. We know we are not conscious, in the phenomenal sense. We just have awareness. The burden of proof rests on anti-materialists to prove that their beloved "conscious experience" actually exists.
What's the scientific theory or explanation of awareness?
>Materialists don't believe in accessible qualia
Bit harsh there. They're misguided yes but saying they can't even access the content of their own brain is too much
The same one that explains why cars with sensors are aware of the objects nearby. We're no different to those cars. It doesn't "experience" anything when it detects a wall, and neither do we. Some people just think that they do.
Bit of typing error. See . I am definitely a materialist since I believe other people exist
Saying you have awareness but no conscious experience is contradicting yourself, I hope for your own sake that you are trolling and didn’t post that seriously
> How can that happen if the material can't cause them?
Because the mind is a physical organ that has a two-way causal relation with the world, just like our limbs do, and when the mind is acting it is hence able to respond to, be changed by, and produce changes in the world. The unique qualitative aspect characterizing the first-hand subjectivity that inherent to being conscious itself illuminates these actions of the mind like a flashlight revealing an object in the dark, all while itself remaining spontaneously present and unproduced by anything, this is why the mind has the ability to participate in two-way causal relations with the world at the same time that consciousness is non-physical and not produced by matter/neurons.
Well, you may say so, but ignoring conscious experience won't make it go away, and also it is totally feasible for a computer to experience qualia. Or if I've misunderstood you, then you're arguing for solipsism.
I think, if you were really trying to disprove anti-materialism, then you would somehow try to use Wittgenstein's "Beetle in a Box" experiment to demonstrate that nothing meaningful can be said about conscious experience. Although I am not sure that this works, since the mere existence of language allows us to communicate our conscious experience, thus proving that we are conscious.
>this is why the mind has the ability to participate in two-way causal relations with the world at the same time that consciousness is non-physical and not produced by matter/neurons.
This doesn't make any sense. Hitting your hand with a hammer causes the qualia of pain(again assuming qualia exist). So a material event causes a supposedly inaccessible qualia. How?
Easy to disprove materialism
Is the sensation of pain identical to the neuronal activity that underlies the sensation? No. They're different, feeling pain is clearly different than a chemical reaction, they are not identical. Thus there is something about feeling pain that seperates it from the neuronal activity.
So then what exactly is the neuronal activity giving rise to? What is the ontological reality of the feeling of pain? We've established that it can't be identical to a chemical process since that's nonsensical and feeling pain is a seperate phenomena than the activity that causes the first person subjective sensation of pain. So we have two different things, we have the activity of the brain, or the brain state and we also have the feeling. So materialists can easily prove the first but cannot in anyway address the second since there's no material component to a phenomenological experience.
This is the essence of the hard problem.
>Is the sensation of pain identical to the neuronal activity that underlies the sensation? No. They're different, feeling pain is clearly different than a chemical reaction, they are not identical.
I mean this is just straight wrong. The feeling of pain is identical to the neuronal activity underlying the sensation.
Obviously cars are not aware of anything, that's a metaphor. I'm also sympathetic to deflationary tendencies, I don't think qualia or "experience" should be taken seriously as primitives. But clearly you can't appeal to a car's functioning as requiring the same explanation as even a monkey. That's cargo-cult "science".
Chalmers actually makes a distinction between awareness and consciousness. I don't believe there is such a distinction, as there is only awareness. But I suppose I made the distinction here to distinguish between something real (awareness) and something that doesn't exist (consciousness).
Prove it. Prove that I have some kind conscious experience that the car doesn't have. Explain why it even makes sense that I would have such an experience.
No it isn't. Feeling pain has qualities that a chemical interaction does not. You're breaking the concept of identity just to try and force your square peg of silly metaphysics into a round hole.
>An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality. For qualia, esse = percipi. If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means. The very notion strikes me as absurd. We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective. And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.
>As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness of the experience. And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental. But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning. His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'
>If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say we are being fed nonsense. We are being served grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.
>Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.
Exactly. If you describe to me what the neurons are doing when I feel pain, it's no different to me feeling pain.
Ask any materialist a simple question: would he object to getting murdered by you right this moment? Because, explain, a true materialist, to remain consistent with his philosophy, must believe that no conscious experience will be expunged by such an act, only a slew of neurons that fire will cease to fire, and will not have any moral objections against the termination of these firings. As the materialist begins to stutter and foam at the mouth, tip your hat and say "G'day sire", turn 360 degrees, and walk away
Why would a computer contain something that "supervenes on the physical". Are suggesting that computers have a non-physical component? Can I buy such components at PC World?
Also awareness is not a component of any scientific theory or explanation that I know of.
Cars don't deliberate, reason, speak, invent things or scientific theories, cry, act, love, hate, ask questions, ask questions about themselves, or desperately try to believe they understand the world. Most people who study animal and human behavior seem to agree there is a difference from cars.
Whenever that pattern of neuronal activity happens I feel pain. When it doesn't I don't feel pain. If you cut those neurons out I would no longer feel pain. I don't know what else you could mean by identical.
I wouldn't agree with just describing the activity causes pain but certainly causing the same activity will hurt
I wouldn't have a problem with this, because there is no magic "consciousness" I will be losing. I will simply remain being what I always was: physical matter. I have no delusions that anything magical will be "lost".
>Cars don't deliberate, reason, speak, invent things or scientific theories, cry, act, love, hate, ask questions, ask questions about themselves, or desperately try to believe they understand the world. Most people who study animal and human behavior seem to agree there is a difference from cars.
Why does me doing any of those things suggest that I have conscious experience? Why is a phenomenal component required for me to do all those things?
There's a lot of materialists ITT revealing themselves as philosophical zombies, huh? Crazy to think they're not real people with no feelings or experience of thought.
Neither do you. You've just tricked yourself into believing you do. I'm sure you could programme a computer to do the same thing.