Mind is the brain?

[Kiekeben]

Quote from you: " Qualia are the "what it's like" of experience-- what it's like to taste pineapple, for example, cannot be explained by any observations outside the direct experience of tasting pineapple."

So, have a person eat a pineapple for the first time (removing every other sense beside taste) and have them describe the "what it's like". Then (hypothetically) destroy the portion of the brain primarily responsible for taste. Have them eat pineapple again and get the description. The "what it's like" will have changed. This is seen in brain injury victims. Loss of taste, smell, touch, ability to understand speech, ability to speak, ability to recognize shapes/people/places. Their "what it's like" has changed.

You are then correlating not mind and brain, but words and brain.  You are relying on sounds coming out of a physical system to stand in lieu of mind.  Normally, this is perfectly sensible-- it's one of the more pragmatic assumptions that I've made, and makes communicating with people much more enjoyable.  However, it's still an assumption and not actually an observable fact.

You appear to be ignoring two things. First, that you could perform this test on yourself. You may not strictly speaking know that other people have qualia, but you know that you do. Second, that from everything else we know about the world around us, we have every reason to suppose that other people have qualia: similar causes, similar effects.

You are right that qualia present a unique problem. But in one sense, the problem has been way overstated, IMO. Both the materailists who are mysterians and the dualists go beyond merely saying that qualia are unique to arguing that this somehow makes consciousness problematic for materialism. I don't think so at all, because the uniqueness of qualia is something we should expect whatever is true about the makeup of the mind. It all has to do with the simple fact that qualia simply ARE the experiences each individual has, and are therefore private to each individual. So of course you can't experience someone else's qualia! And that's why there is a "problem" of zombies, and all that.

(In fact, it's not just that I can't experience your qualia and you can't experience mine. It's that right now you also can't experience any qualia other than the ones you are experiencing now (obviously), and so you cannot be certain - for the same reason you cannot be certain that I'm not a zombie - that you weren't a zombie five seconds ago. Your memory that you weren't could be false. But again, you do have every reason for thinking that you in fact were conscious, as per the above.)