"the philosopher John Locke recognized that alternatives are possible, and described one such hypothetical case with the "inverted spectrum" thought experiment. For example, someone with an inverted spectrum might experience green while seeing 'red' (700 nm) light, and experience red while seeing 'green' (530 nm) light. This inversion has never been demonstrated in experiment.
Qualia are not physical measurements of a physical phenomena, it is how it subjectively 'feels' to experience the perception (measurement) of a phenomena. John Locke's inverted spectrum thought experiment is not necessarily intended to be a falsifiable claim about a real phenomena, but a simplified explanation of an example in differences between qualia between people. Its not a particularly good example, but he was not necessarily trying to claim that that specific case literally happened or will happen (as far as i know). A better example would be the difference between experiencing a view of something red, and the mathematically modelled and quantified wavelength of the light in nanometers. the mathematical model and empirical data does not tell you anything about what it feels like to see the red color, it only tells you what its quantifiable characteristics are, modelled in the form of numbers and symbols. the data alone cannot tell you anything qualitative, you have to at least ask other subjects like yourself to confirm such things. I do think it is reasonable that humans generally see colors similarly, for regardless of your opinion on the problem of consciousness, our experiences are highly correlated to various quantifiable physical phenomena in our bodies. the problem is that there has yet to be established a causal link between physical phenomena and subjective experience.
It simply a fact which forces one to consider the objectivity of their knowledge. The transmutation of subjective things into objective things (ideology being the most developed example) is the basis of many incorrect analyses, not least of which are those of the political economists whom Marx criticized and spent his career debunking.
Dialectics as first expounded by Hegel is an attempt to eliminate "one-sidedness" or limited subjective understanding, through contemplation of things not merely for what they are in isolation, but in all of their interrelations too. When looking at something from different perspectives, there are apparent contradictions i.e. exclusive "truths" between the perspectives. Sublation is the overcoming of these contradictions in a way that preserves each side, as they are in fact both true, only limited.
Dialectical materialism as a science focuses on objective truths because of its philosophy which recognizes the limitation of any given perspective and the "objective" facts recognized by each perspective.
All of that is a long-winded way to say, yes, both Hegelian and Marxian dialectic rely on qualia, although not necessarily by that name.
Marx and Engels both concluded that Hegelian philosophy, at least as interpreted by their former colleagues, was too abstract and was being misapplied in attempts to explain the social injustice in recently industrializing countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, which was a growing concern in the early 1840s, as exemplified by Dickensian inequity.
In contrast to the conventional Hegelian dialectic of the day, which emphasized the idealist observation that human experience is dependent on the mind's perceptions, Marx developed Marxist dialectics, which emphasized the materialist view that the world of the concrete shapes socioeconomic interactions and that those in turn determine sociopolitical reality.
In keeping with dialectical ideas, Marx and Engels thus created an alternative theory, not only of why the world is the way it is but also of which actions people should take to make it the way it ought to be.
Idealism vs materialism are where the valuable thinking happens, and qualia (or whatever you want to call it) is much more idealist than materialist as far as I can tell.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
Dialectical materialism is an aspect of the broader subject of materialism, which asserts the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought. Materialism is a realist philosophy of science, which holds that the world is material; that all phenomena in the universe consist of "matter in motion," wherein all things are interdependent and interconnected and develop according to natural law; that the world exists outside us and independently of our perception of it; that thought is a reflection of the material world in the brain, and that the world is in principle knowable.
Marx says he intends to use Hegelian dialectics but in revised form. He defends Hegel against those who view him as a "dead dog" and then says, "I openly avowed myself as the pupil of that mighty thinker Hegel". Marx credits Hegel with "being the first to present [dialectic's] form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner". But he then criticizes Hegel for turning dialectics upside down: "With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."
Qualia are not the mystical Hegelian shell Marx removed. For Hegel the starting point was the pure concept, while the point of Marx's materialism was to start from the material world as the dialectical object, because the material world is the objective basis of all concepts. The basic "form of working" (from your excerpt) is more or less identical between Marx and Hegel.
The reason Marx emphasized materialism is precisely because concepts arise from subjective perception of the material world. Concepts do not exist independently; their existence is contingent on human perception of an objective, material reality. Therefore a concept like "freedom" does not exist in itself, it exists as a concept in the human mind which is conditioned by their limited perspective.
Marx analyzed objective phenomena in order to understand the material world. It is not necessary, in fact it is impossible, to reconcile qualia except to the extent that they affect the material world. Two people can experience 400 nm light differently and consistently agree that it is blue, therefore experience has no material effect as long as it is consistent.
If you read that as a concession then you will find the same concession several posts ago.
If qualia do not affect the material world, then it is not possible to say for certain (as you have) that two people have identical experience of color. The fact that qualia do not affect the material world was the starting point not the conclusion.
Lmao what? It absolutely does. A core component of diamat is "qualitative change". Qualities exist only in our consciousness, they're a tag our minds attach to specific phenomena of the world, and our minds are composed of qualia.
Marx also warned against "vulgar materialism" which ignores the specific character of consciousness. "Vulgar materialism" is nowadays called "physicalism".
Marx's criticism of Hegel asserts that Hegel's dialectics go astray by dealing with ideas, with the human mind. Hegel's dialectic, Marx says, inappropriately concerns "the process of the human brain"; it focuses on ideas. Hegel's thought is in fact sometimes called dialectical idealism, and Hegel himself is counted among a number of other philosophers known as the German idealists. Marx, on the contrary, believed that dialectics should deal not with the mental world of ideas but with "the material world", the world of production and other economic activity. For Marx, a contradiction can be solved by a desperate struggle to change the social world. This was a very important transformation because it allowed him to move dialectics out of the contextual subject of philosophy and into the study of social relations based on the material world.
Engels made constant use of the metaphysical insight that the higher level of existence emerges from and has its roots in the lower; that the higher level constitutes a new order of being with its irreducible laws; and that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws of development which reflect basic properties of 'matter in motion as a whole'.
i'm not a professional philosopher or an academic, but i think they do sometimes do important work. are you one of those people that thinks any academic field outside of STEM is worthless?
So what is the important work being done on this 'hard problem' with no proof possible? Seems very much like a 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' kind of problem. I think there's much more fertile pursuits in the philosophy of science for instance.
it is a topic of logic rather than empiricism. that doesn't mean that purely logical pursuits are worhtless. math is also non-empirical, defined by reason rather than measurement.
these kinds of abstract discussions can define the terms of our engagement with a topic of study. for example, considering the specific nature and qualities of consciousness can help to decide which avenues of research a neuroscientist or AI researcher or psychologist should or should not devote resources to, which kinds of questions can be answered, and can determine how research and experiments are interpreted.
that is irrelevant, it is more like a logical parameter than a phenomena. we cannot do a test to find the definition of '3', we define it ourselves for the purpose of providing a useful logical framework to operate with.
speaking of irrelevant, this thread introduced me to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument
By analogy, it does not matter that one cannot experience another's subjective sensations. Unless talk of such subjective experience is learned through public experience the actual content is irrelevant; all we can discuss is what is available in our public language.
Wittgenstein suggests that the case of pains is not really amenable to the uses philosophers would make of it. "That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation', the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant."
let me put this a different way. what the hard problem of consciousness asks, is why do sentient beings like ourselves have any internal, private experience at all? we know from computers that pure information processing does not require an internal experience, we know from microorganisms and plants that lack a central nervous system that instincts and biological behaviors do not require an internal experience, and we know from physics that lifeless matter does not have an internal experience, so where do they come from, and how can they be explained in purely physical terms? why is pain associated with any internal experience at all?
I think the fundamental question is if we even comprehend sentience properly. How does qualia as a concept provide any useful way to understand sentience? If the existence of sentience is somehow contingent on the 'truth' unknowable qualia, then a lot of things might be considered sentient, and we don't have anyway of knowing that.
a lot of things indeed may be sentient in ways we can't know in terms of physics. i consider myself entirely agnostic on the subject. i am more concerned with the reality and fact that i am facing at any given moment. I am constantly inside of my internal experience, i am constantly experiencing it. i can't stop experiencing it, i can't access any other experience. in that way i am doing nothing BUT 'measuring' or 'researching' Qualia. I'm interested in Human experience and what it may or may not mean. qualia as a concept helps us understand sentience by associating it with that internal experience we are all experiencing at any given moment, and differentiating that particular aspect of reality from information processing or electrochemistry. it elucidates the boundaries of the potential for human knowledge with our current tools and ways of thinking. Qualia are not unknowable, they are simply not measureable in an external physical sense as we understand it. we are all constantly 'inside' of them. it is just not a subject that can be analysed with only physics, like many other subjects. i don't really know what else to say and i feel like i am repeating myself. i am a historical materialist in the sense that, whatever matter is or isn't in an ontological sense, it seems to determine the environment and potential outcomes of reality. Maybe there is some paradigm to reality that would explain it that we are unaware of. that seems at least as plausible as assuming we will eventually in the future figure out enough math and physics to somehow explain that our internal experience we all feel doesn't actually exist, even though its the only thing we have direct access to as sentient conscious beings.
edit: and to be clear i do agree that the example in the OP is silly and oversimplified. we have similar eyes and brains and therefore we probably see colors and experience other experiences similarly if not identically. regardless on the nature of consciousness it is very heavily correlated to physical structures in many ways.
I liked the Wittgenstein private language argument because it basically says "why does it matter? we only can connect through our shared experiences/communication, so why do philosophers get all hung up on this concept as some foundational 'truth'?". It smacks of solipsism being smuggled under a different name. I guess I've yet to see an application of the concept without some relation to the external, which makes it seem at best contingent if not entirely irrelevant. When over a quarter of philosophers say they don't think the hard problem exists, it makes me think Wittgenstein has a strong point here.
i don't see how it has anything to do with solipsism, and i also think it matters because qualia are the foundation of all of our other knowledge. we can only access 'objective' measurements through qualia. it is especially relevant when AI bazingas claim their math parrot is 'True Sentient AI'. it is relevant when we consider that our fellow humans and living beings mean more to us than the sum of their physical parts. it is relevant when we experience empathy for another person because we can experience some of their pain internally. Furthermore any argument against exploring an avenue of investigation is to be discarded in my opinion, it amounts to saying 'shut up about it'. Besides, there are just as many financial and egotistical and emotional incentives to promote pure phyiscal realism as much as any alternative. I haven't seen an argument that convinced me personally that the hard problem doesn't exist, so some statistic of academics believing one way or another is not likely to sway me, especially about a topic like philosophy. its not like either side of the philosophical debate has 'work' to show for their efforts beyond published books. and to say that qualia don't exist seems like much stronger of a claim than wittgenstein's "we should stop talking about it". speaking of wittgenstein i was unimpressed by the beetle in a box argument. by nature of the metaphor's qualities, it is quite a different situation than with qualia. the 'beetle' in the box, whatever it is, is already presumed to be a physical object, not a semiotic or logical principle or concept or situation. if we can look into our own boxes we could easily describe the contents in terms of abstract ideas we are familiar with to others, like shape and number and so on. the entire point of qualia is that they are not reducible to physical objects we can describe concretely, they are not an 'object' at all, or even a subject, but the conscious experience of percieved objects and subjects.
Qualia as defined seems to say empathy is inauthentic in all cases, not sure why empathy requires it in anyway whatsoever. Empathy is all about attempting to understand each other's experiences, which is impossible based on this concept.
When you say all knowledge is founded on qualia, that seems extremely solipsistic. Qualia can't be communicated, so I don't follow this wall of text at all.
i'm confused, how did you come to that conclusion about qualia and empathy? Qualia are nothing more and nothing less than internal subjective experiences of phenomena. without those experiences, we could not empathize at all except via pure information processing and automatic reflexive behavior. everyone, presumably, has qualia of some kind, likely similar if they are of the same species. it would be incredibly weird for one to assume that one is the only one that has them, even though every other human and most animals have basically the same central nervous system, especially if one has gone through episodes of unconsciousness or other experiences that prove that consciousness is contingent to some degree on the brain. Qualia can be described, even if they cannot be transmitted. I can describe to you how i feel about various topics, how things look from my perspective, how comfortable or uncomforable i am during a situation, etc. what I mean when I say that all knowledge is founded on qualia, I mean precisely that all objective physical measurements are performed by conscious subjectively experiencing humans, and conscious subjectively experiencing humans are the ones interpreting the results of those measurements. when you or I look at a research paper that contains some kind of data, we are not directly accessing the physical reality of that data, but we are experiencing the qualia of seeing the paper and reading and interpreting the symbols and thinking about the meaning of them, we have our own internal experience of interpreting the data. the scientist looking at an instrument isn't directly accessing the physical reality of what his machine is measuring, he is indirectly accessing it through both the instrument and his own senses and consciousness, and interpreting the data based on his internal subjective experience of it.
the scientist looking at an instrument isn't directly accessing the physical reality of what his machine is measuring, he is indirectly accessing it through both the instrument and his own senses and consciousness
This gets a bit closer to why I think qualia in not useful. Peer review is where the confirmation of the instrument and that of the senses of multiple consciousnesses agree about what has been observed. This is social phenomenon. Qualia does not enter into it because it can definitionally not.
it enters into it because all of the scientists are conscious beings that experience reality in terms of qualia. In fact that is precisely why we need peer review in the first place, because we are not perfect measurement machines but subjectively experiencing entities.
i want to know, do you believe that qualia do not 'exist' (i.e. that your internal experience of reality is 'illusory' or otherwise unreal) or do you think they are simply not useful to talk about?
It is not useful for philosophical discussions, in fact it is a dead end in my understanding of it. It is just a label for the philosophical misunderstanding of consciousness that says 'shut up about it'.
why do you think that discussions involving the hard problem of consciousness and qualia say 'shut up about it'? it really seems quite the opposite considering wittgensteins argument is essentially that. it isn't preventing any neuroscientist from making progress. no serious proponent of the literal mere existence of qualia would argue for less neurological research or anything like that. any serious theory involving the world has to take physical reality into account. we all agree that consciousnes and qualia are contingent on the brain and nervous system. I really don't understand your view of qualia at all, i feel like we are speaking different languages.
I guess the problem is the definitions I've come across are not contingent in the slightest. I was reading the wiki page about it, and even a neuroscientist in support of qualia seemed to contradict the definition.
The conscious mind and its constituent properties are real entities, not illusions, and they must be investigated as the personal, private, subjective experiences that they are. The idea that subjective experiences are not scientifically accessible is nonsense.
scientifically accessible does not necessarily mean directly, empirically, mechanically accessible. we can indirectly access subjective properties of internal subjective experience to some degree by interviewing other subjectively experiencing entities. we can't directly transmit a sujective experience, but we can attempt to incompletely describe parts of them. just like we can't directly measure all properties of a subatomic particle at once, but we can indirectly measure parts of it. i agree with the quote in that it is possible to scientifically study subjective phenomena to some degree. psychologists do it all the time, for example, by interviewing and observing their patients.
edit: to be specific, what i mean by Qualia is any internal subjective experience of phenomena. i make no assumptions about a 'self', a 'soul', a 'mind', or anything else, just the mere fact of the existence of internal subjective experiences.
See this contingency makes it much less definitive, which is great. I've not seen that stance of contingency from philosophers that support the definitional meaning, which is why the private language argument logic seems much more useful.
I don't think philosophers have any 'objective logic' for maintaining this 'unknowableness' without large helpings of contingency directly attached. It just comes off like an appeal to the divine that no longer carries much relevancy today.
So in sum, we all have our subjective experiences, but why make that the focus of absoluteness? Every material understanding has arisen from the contingency, not the absoluteness.
the unknowableness comes from the difficulties of causally explaining the phenomena of subjective experience in terms of physical processes. we can explain information processing, in those terms, we can explain automatic unconscious biological behavior in those terms, but we have yet to develop an understanding of a causal (as opposed to merely correlational) relationship between physical phenomena and subjective experience. obviously the fact that brain damage exists implies that, whatever the nature of consciousness and subjectivity, it is affected when certain physical structures are interacted with.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by absoluteness vs. contingency in this case, but as far as philosophical implications, what the existence of subjective experience MAY imply, is different kinds of metaphysics or ontologies or epistemologies. A physical realist worldview is that ONLY physical matter and physical processes exist and are knowable, and that subjective experience is "illusory" or not real or unkowable. What the existence of Qualia implies, is that there is at least a subjective, and perhaps even semiotic, component to reality, in some fashion, that we have access to in some capacity. Some philosophers use this to argue for Idealism, which posits that ONLY 'mind' or subjective experience really 'exists', and that matter is 'illusory' or 'not real'. I find both of these extremes unconvincing, I personally like Analytic Idealism myself, which is an ontology that posits that physical processes are the extrinsic appearance of mental processes, and that mental processes are the intrinsic appearance of physical processes. Other interpretations may be that there is some hidden, more fundamental reality from which both the mental and physical originate.
According to a 2020 PhilPapers survey, 29.72% of philosophers surveyed believe that the hard problem does not exist, while 62.42% of philosophers surveyed believe that the hard problem is a genuine problem.
It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
Nothing can prove qualia.
Okay, I won't publish it in a positivist journal then
If you can prove it, it isn't qualia, right?
Qualia are not physical measurements of a physical phenomena, it is how it subjectively 'feels' to experience the perception (measurement) of a phenomena. John Locke's inverted spectrum thought experiment is not necessarily intended to be a falsifiable claim about a real phenomena, but a simplified explanation of an example in differences between qualia between people. Its not a particularly good example, but he was not necessarily trying to claim that that specific case literally happened or will happen (as far as i know). A better example would be the difference between experiencing a view of something red, and the mathematically modelled and quantified wavelength of the light in nanometers. the mathematical model and empirical data does not tell you anything about what it feels like to see the red color, it only tells you what its quantifiable characteristics are, modelled in the form of numbers and symbols. the data alone cannot tell you anything qualitative, you have to at least ask other subjects like yourself to confirm such things. I do think it is reasonable that humans generally see colors similarly, for regardless of your opinion on the problem of consciousness, our experiences are highly correlated to various quantifiable physical phenomena in our bodies. the problem is that there has yet to be established a causal link between physical phenomena and subjective experience.
Qualia is inherently non-falsifiable.
it is a logical concept, not an empirical physical phenomena. it is as non falsifiable as the number 3 or the concept of 'Up'
so what's 'the problem' then?
It simply a fact which forces one to consider the objectivity of their knowledge. The transmutation of subjective things into objective things (ideology being the most developed example) is the basis of many incorrect analyses, not least of which are those of the political economists whom Marx criticized and spent his career debunking.
Dialectical materialism doesn't rely on qualia existing as far as I'm aware though.
Dialectics as first expounded by Hegel is an attempt to eliminate "one-sidedness" or limited subjective understanding, through contemplation of things not merely for what they are in isolation, but in all of their interrelations too. When looking at something from different perspectives, there are apparent contradictions i.e. exclusive "truths" between the perspectives. Sublation is the overcoming of these contradictions in a way that preserves each side, as they are in fact both true, only limited.
Dialectical materialism as a science focuses on objective truths because of its philosophy which recognizes the limitation of any given perspective and the "objective" facts recognized by each perspective.
All of that is a long-winded way to say, yes, both Hegelian and Marxian dialectic rely on qualia, although not necessarily by that name.
Idealism vs materialism are where the valuable thinking happens, and qualia (or whatever you want to call it) is much more idealist than materialist as far as I can tell.
Qualia are not the mystical Hegelian shell Marx removed. For Hegel the starting point was the pure concept, while the point of Marx's materialism was to start from the material world as the dialectical object, because the material world is the objective basis of all concepts. The basic "form of working" (from your excerpt) is more or less identical between Marx and Hegel.
The reason Marx emphasized materialism is precisely because concepts arise from subjective perception of the material world. Concepts do not exist independently; their existence is contingent on human perception of an objective, material reality. Therefore a concept like "freedom" does not exist in itself, it exists as a concept in the human mind which is conditioned by their limited perspective.
Marx analyzed objective phenomena in order to understand the material world. It is not necessary, in fact it is impossible, to reconcile qualia except to the extent that they affect the material world. Two people can experience 400 nm light differently and consistently agree that it is blue, therefore experience has no material effect as long as it is consistent.
Thanks for conceding I guess.
If you read that as a concession then you will find the same concession several posts ago.
If qualia do not affect the material world, then it is not possible to say for certain (as you have) that two people have identical experience of color. The fact that qualia do not affect the material world was the starting point not the conclusion.
This time with extra emphasis:
Correct, if this is your view then you should not have started the thread complaining about other people's interpretations.
TIL asking a yes or no question is complaining.
deleted by creator
I must have missed that part.
Lmao what? It absolutely does. A core component of diamat is "qualitative change". Qualities exist only in our consciousness, they're a tag our minds attach to specific phenomena of the world, and our minds are composed of qualia.
Marx also warned against "vulgar materialism" which ignores the specific character of consciousness. "Vulgar materialism" is nowadays called "physicalism".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
but definitionally it can't be proven, so must be fun to have job security I guess
i'm not a professional philosopher or an academic, but i think they do sometimes do important work. are you one of those people that thinks any academic field outside of STEM is worthless?
So what is the important work being done on this 'hard problem' with no proof possible? Seems very much like a 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' kind of problem. I think there's much more fertile pursuits in the philosophy of science for instance.
it is a topic of logic rather than empiricism. that doesn't mean that purely logical pursuits are worhtless. math is also non-empirical, defined by reason rather than measurement.
I never said purely logical pursuits are worthless. I said I don't see the worth of this problem.
these kinds of abstract discussions can define the terms of our engagement with a topic of study. for example, considering the specific nature and qualities of consciousness can help to decide which avenues of research a neuroscientist or AI researcher or psychologist should or should not devote resources to, which kinds of questions can be answered, and can determine how research and experiments are interpreted.
sure, but the concept in question is defined as untestable by the non-physicalists
that is irrelevant, it is more like a logical parameter than a phenomena. we cannot do a test to find the definition of '3', we define it ourselves for the purpose of providing a useful logical framework to operate with.
speaking of irrelevant, this thread introduced me to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument
let me put this a different way. what the hard problem of consciousness asks, is why do sentient beings like ourselves have any internal, private experience at all? we know from computers that pure information processing does not require an internal experience, we know from microorganisms and plants that lack a central nervous system that instincts and biological behaviors do not require an internal experience, and we know from physics that lifeless matter does not have an internal experience, so where do they come from, and how can they be explained in purely physical terms? why is pain associated with any internal experience at all?
I think the fundamental question is if we even comprehend sentience properly. How does qualia as a concept provide any useful way to understand sentience? If the existence of sentience is somehow contingent on the 'truth' unknowable qualia, then a lot of things might be considered sentient, and we don't have anyway of knowing that.
a lot of things indeed may be sentient in ways we can't know in terms of physics. i consider myself entirely agnostic on the subject. i am more concerned with the reality and fact that i am facing at any given moment. I am constantly inside of my internal experience, i am constantly experiencing it. i can't stop experiencing it, i can't access any other experience. in that way i am doing nothing BUT 'measuring' or 'researching' Qualia. I'm interested in Human experience and what it may or may not mean. qualia as a concept helps us understand sentience by associating it with that internal experience we are all experiencing at any given moment, and differentiating that particular aspect of reality from information processing or electrochemistry. it elucidates the boundaries of the potential for human knowledge with our current tools and ways of thinking. Qualia are not unknowable, they are simply not measureable in an external physical sense as we understand it. we are all constantly 'inside' of them. it is just not a subject that can be analysed with only physics, like many other subjects. i don't really know what else to say and i feel like i am repeating myself. i am a historical materialist in the sense that, whatever matter is or isn't in an ontological sense, it seems to determine the environment and potential outcomes of reality. Maybe there is some paradigm to reality that would explain it that we are unaware of. that seems at least as plausible as assuming we will eventually in the future figure out enough math and physics to somehow explain that our internal experience we all feel doesn't actually exist, even though its the only thing we have direct access to as sentient conscious beings.
edit: and to be clear i do agree that the example in the OP is silly and oversimplified. we have similar eyes and brains and therefore we probably see colors and experience other experiences similarly if not identically. regardless on the nature of consciousness it is very heavily correlated to physical structures in many ways.
I liked the Wittgenstein private language argument because it basically says "why does it matter? we only can connect through our shared experiences/communication, so why do philosophers get all hung up on this concept as some foundational 'truth'?". It smacks of solipsism being smuggled under a different name. I guess I've yet to see an application of the concept without some relation to the external, which makes it seem at best contingent if not entirely irrelevant. When over a quarter of philosophers say they don't think the hard problem exists, it makes me think Wittgenstein has a strong point here.
i don't see how it has anything to do with solipsism, and i also think it matters because qualia are the foundation of all of our other knowledge. we can only access 'objective' measurements through qualia. it is especially relevant when AI bazingas claim their math parrot is 'True Sentient AI'. it is relevant when we consider that our fellow humans and living beings mean more to us than the sum of their physical parts. it is relevant when we experience empathy for another person because we can experience some of their pain internally. Furthermore any argument against exploring an avenue of investigation is to be discarded in my opinion, it amounts to saying 'shut up about it'. Besides, there are just as many financial and egotistical and emotional incentives to promote pure phyiscal realism as much as any alternative. I haven't seen an argument that convinced me personally that the hard problem doesn't exist, so some statistic of academics believing one way or another is not likely to sway me, especially about a topic like philosophy. its not like either side of the philosophical debate has 'work' to show for their efforts beyond published books. and to say that qualia don't exist seems like much stronger of a claim than wittgenstein's "we should stop talking about it". speaking of wittgenstein i was unimpressed by the beetle in a box argument. by nature of the metaphor's qualities, it is quite a different situation than with qualia. the 'beetle' in the box, whatever it is, is already presumed to be a physical object, not a semiotic or logical principle or concept or situation. if we can look into our own boxes we could easily describe the contents in terms of abstract ideas we are familiar with to others, like shape and number and so on. the entire point of qualia is that they are not reducible to physical objects we can describe concretely, they are not an 'object' at all, or even a subject, but the conscious experience of percieved objects and subjects.
Qualia as defined seems to say empathy is inauthentic in all cases, not sure why empathy requires it in anyway whatsoever. Empathy is all about attempting to understand each other's experiences, which is impossible based on this concept.
When you say all knowledge is founded on qualia, that seems extremely solipsistic. Qualia can't be communicated, so I don't follow this wall of text at all.
i'm confused, how did you come to that conclusion about qualia and empathy? Qualia are nothing more and nothing less than internal subjective experiences of phenomena. without those experiences, we could not empathize at all except via pure information processing and automatic reflexive behavior. everyone, presumably, has qualia of some kind, likely similar if they are of the same species. it would be incredibly weird for one to assume that one is the only one that has them, even though every other human and most animals have basically the same central nervous system, especially if one has gone through episodes of unconsciousness or other experiences that prove that consciousness is contingent to some degree on the brain. Qualia can be described, even if they cannot be transmitted. I can describe to you how i feel about various topics, how things look from my perspective, how comfortable or uncomforable i am during a situation, etc. what I mean when I say that all knowledge is founded on qualia, I mean precisely that all objective physical measurements are performed by conscious subjectively experiencing humans, and conscious subjectively experiencing humans are the ones interpreting the results of those measurements. when you or I look at a research paper that contains some kind of data, we are not directly accessing the physical reality of that data, but we are experiencing the qualia of seeing the paper and reading and interpreting the symbols and thinking about the meaning of them, we have our own internal experience of interpreting the data. the scientist looking at an instrument isn't directly accessing the physical reality of what his machine is measuring, he is indirectly accessing it through both the instrument and his own senses and consciousness, and interpreting the data based on his internal subjective experience of it.
Qualia definitionally can not be transmitted.
This gets a bit closer to why I think qualia in not useful. Peer review is where the confirmation of the instrument and that of the senses of multiple consciousnesses agree about what has been observed. This is social phenomenon. Qualia does not enter into it because it can definitionally not.
it enters into it because all of the scientists are conscious beings that experience reality in terms of qualia. In fact that is precisely why we need peer review in the first place, because we are not perfect measurement machines but subjectively experiencing entities.
i want to know, do you believe that qualia do not 'exist' (i.e. that your internal experience of reality is 'illusory' or otherwise unreal) or do you think they are simply not useful to talk about?
It is not useful for philosophical discussions, in fact it is a dead end in my understanding of it. It is just a label for the philosophical misunderstanding of consciousness that says 'shut up about it'.
why do you think that discussions involving the hard problem of consciousness and qualia say 'shut up about it'? it really seems quite the opposite considering wittgensteins argument is essentially that. it isn't preventing any neuroscientist from making progress. no serious proponent of the literal mere existence of qualia would argue for less neurological research or anything like that. any serious theory involving the world has to take physical reality into account. we all agree that consciousnes and qualia are contingent on the brain and nervous system. I really don't understand your view of qualia at all, i feel like we are speaking different languages.
I guess the problem is the definitions I've come across are not contingent in the slightest. I was reading the wiki page about it, and even a neuroscientist in support of qualia seemed to contradict the definition.
scientifically accessible does not necessarily mean directly, empirically, mechanically accessible. we can indirectly access subjective properties of internal subjective experience to some degree by interviewing other subjectively experiencing entities. we can't directly transmit a sujective experience, but we can attempt to incompletely describe parts of them. just like we can't directly measure all properties of a subatomic particle at once, but we can indirectly measure parts of it. i agree with the quote in that it is possible to scientifically study subjective phenomena to some degree. psychologists do it all the time, for example, by interviewing and observing their patients.
edit: to be specific, what i mean by Qualia is any internal subjective experience of phenomena. i make no assumptions about a 'self', a 'soul', a 'mind', or anything else, just the mere fact of the existence of internal subjective experiences.
See this contingency makes it much less definitive, which is great. I've not seen that stance of contingency from philosophers that support the definitional meaning, which is why the private language argument logic seems much more useful.
I don't think philosophers have any 'objective logic' for maintaining this 'unknowableness' without large helpings of contingency directly attached. It just comes off like an appeal to the divine that no longer carries much relevancy today.
So in sum, we all have our subjective experiences, but why make that the focus of absoluteness? Every material understanding has arisen from the contingency, not the absoluteness.
the unknowableness comes from the difficulties of causally explaining the phenomena of subjective experience in terms of physical processes. we can explain information processing, in those terms, we can explain automatic unconscious biological behavior in those terms, but we have yet to develop an understanding of a causal (as opposed to merely correlational) relationship between physical phenomena and subjective experience. obviously the fact that brain damage exists implies that, whatever the nature of consciousness and subjectivity, it is affected when certain physical structures are interacted with.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by absoluteness vs. contingency in this case, but as far as philosophical implications, what the existence of subjective experience MAY imply, is different kinds of metaphysics or ontologies or epistemologies. A physical realist worldview is that ONLY physical matter and physical processes exist and are knowable, and that subjective experience is "illusory" or not real or unkowable. What the existence of Qualia implies, is that there is at least a subjective, and perhaps even semiotic, component to reality, in some fashion, that we have access to in some capacity. Some philosophers use this to argue for Idealism, which posits that ONLY 'mind' or subjective experience really 'exists', and that matter is 'illusory' or 'not real'. I find both of these extremes unconvincing, I personally like Analytic Idealism myself, which is an ontology that posits that physical processes are the extrinsic appearance of mental processes, and that mental processes are the intrinsic appearance of physical processes. Other interpretations may be that there is some hidden, more fundamental reality from which both the mental and physical originate.
We love the hard problem of consciousness folks!
1950's called they want their dead philosophical movement back.