Dominus Paradoxum

What are qualia? Qualia have been defined, most usefully, I think, as the substance of conscious experience.

First, those unaquainted with the issues should read the classic papers involved:

Facing up to the problem of consciousness
Quining Qualia
Qualia! (Now Showing at a Theater Near You)

Then ask yourself this question: Is the problem of qualia solvable within a broadly materialistic framework?

Ready set, debate!

Anti-Materialist

Holy cow, Dominus

I just started reading the first paper. That one is going to take me a few days to fully grasp. It's, like, some really abstract stuff.

Thank you for suggesting that article - it looks pretty cool.

I'll post a comment on it after I have properly pondered it.

In the meantime - do you think consciousness has an effect on reality?

God Fearing Atheist

I think so.

The confusion is primarily in thinking of qualia as something mystical or magical, and not a causal property of our brains. First person ontologies need not be special substances or carry religious overtones.

John Searle expands on this nicely in his books.

-GFA

Farren

I don't think qualia is a "problem" at all.

The utility of the term is in describing the experience of being a thing as opposed to the experience of seeing a thing. Since these of necessity must be seperate and different experiences, where's the problem?

The issue of how you see feel vs. how I think you feel is logically equivalent (in the scope of this discussion) to the issue of what the mass of a stone is vs. what you estimate it to be when it rests in your hands.

I'd have to agree with GFA that the "mystery" and "magic" of qualia is illusory. As a buddist influenced thinker I'd have to say part of the blame lies in our innate belief that we somehow function according to a different set of laws than rocks and running water (we don't)

Farren

Farren

Now an example of this innate belief in human differentness (in the physics sense) to rocks and rivers is provided in one of the links posted above by Dominus Paradoxum (my emphasis added):

See the problem? I can say

When a rock falls down a mountainside we can ascribe this to <insert physics explanation here>, but why is the function accompanied by experience?

"Nonsense!" you say. "We don't know that the rock is having an experience! But we can establish by communicating with other human beings that they in fact, do"

But applying this reasoning compels you to consider a different set of physical laws for humanity and rocks. If "experience" is a fundamental, rather than emergent quality, then rocks must have it too or there is a glaring inconsistency. Note that I'm not talking about the experience of being human and experiencing things in human ways: I'm talking about the generalised experience of being a thing.

If, on the other hand, the issue under consideration is specifically human experience, then there is equally little mystery. Douglas Hofstader illustrated it excellently in "Godel, Escher", Bach. Human qualia is like the emergent pattern of an ant farm.

1. Examine the ants and you will not experience the experience of being an entire ant farm
2. Examine the entire ant farm and you will not experience the experience of being an entire ant farm
3. Be an entire ant farm and you will experience the experience of being an entire ant farm!

See? Its simple.

So how can a collection of things experience being a single thing?

This too is easy. It would be hard if the set of physical laws we have made any one piece of the universe entirely discrete from the other, but nothing is.

In quantum mechanical terms, the entire universe is one vast inseperable wave function. Buddism (no, I'm not evangelising, its a system of thought not a religion) puts it like this: You see a wave. You can identify it as a wave but is is not "not the ocean". Its a continuous part of the ocean, inseperable. Note "continuous", not simply "contiguous" or "consecutive" which would allow discretion.

So the entire universe is one thing to start with. It works from the top down, not the bottom up. Modern physics agrees with this. The continued use of reduction to explain phenomena is because the configuration space of that universe, like waves in the ocean, is fractal in nature, and progessively closer examination, like a fractal, reveals more useful, not more true information and algorithms.

Its easy to concieve, from this point of view, how any collection of things within this one thing can consider themselves (and act as) one thing.

tribalbeeyatch

I will try to read those links, but in the meantime could somebody please sum up what exactly the problem in the problem of qualia is?

Farren

If you examine my brain by any modern means you cannot see my thoughts.

Because thoughts and feelings are extremely complex interactions between many parts of the brain they are difficult to trace in the practical sense, but this is not quite the problem.

The "problem" as I have seen it presented time and again is that the "experiencing" of those things remains unexplained (that we are conscious of what happens in our brains) even if the mechanical processes are explained.

Philosophers of consciousness have coined the term "qualia" to describe the experience of thinking as opposed to the observed mechanical behaviour of the brain when thinking, and have a reference term for this "problem"

Personally, I think its a nonevent, for the reasons given in my preceding posts.

Wyrdsmyth

This is just an updated version of:

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

It's a Buddhist koan, an unsolvable problem.

Other examples (not necessarily confined to Buddhism, but similar philosophical paradoxes) are:

If anyone who claims to be enlightened cannot be enlightened, then how can we know anyone is enlightened?

If one man suddenly begins to see reality for what it really is -- unmediatedly, like the man in Plato's Cave -- and he tells us the rest of us are still just seeing shadows, how can we know for sure that he is really seeing what is Real, and not just shadows like us?

All you have to do to become enlightened, is to stop desiring (After taking vows of poverty, chastity and silence, and isolating yourself on a mountaintop, to give up everything humanly possible, you realize you still desire to become enlightened).

In all of these cases, the "solution" is rendered impossible by the very way the problem is presented in the first place.

Farren

I've just realised my earlier post (ant farms et al) didn't quite close the loop on what I was trying to say.

The final question, why do we experience (brain) functions rather than just do them, without any experience of the event.

This is because we have accepted that action/experience is a valid dichotomy.

Einstein took science forwards in leaps and bounds by going against just such thinking. Great minds wasted immense energy trying to establish how the experiment showing that lightspeed is constant to all observers was wrong, because it was so counter-intuitive. Einstein said: Lets assume its right and see what comes up.

A similar thinking is in order here. If you assume that action (interaction) is experience, or qualia, then doing the function is the same as experiencing the function. What's more, you can make appropriate substitutions (I experienced love/ I loved) in any relevant scenario and absolutely no logical absurdities or difficulties crop up.

This is why I started out earlier about rocks experiencing things. IMHO its a valid application of Occam's razor to assume that experience is just another word for action.

You might say, but the observed action is then still different from the action. Of course, because observing the action is another action. No problem here. Try it out

Farren

Precisely