Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[bennyboy]

Actually, it is exactly the same kind of agnosticism.

Either, there were no planes and no towers and the whole thing is a fantastic conspiracy to deceive you or there were plane that hit the towers and the videos and news-reports are evidence for the event.

Similarly, either nobody has any capacity for subjective experience, except you and all of them saying that they do and acting in that way is a fantastic conspiracy to deceive you - or they do have qualia and their behavior and statement are evidence of it.

I've seen planes and explosions in real life, as things objectively observable to be existent outside myself (assuming at least physicalism, which we are). I've never seen a mind, as a thing objectively existent outside myself.

You ignore the fact that subjective experience is an essential part of "brain processing it". Without the subjective experience or qualia being included in the processing, the behavioral output cannot be sufficiently explained. Qualia is necessary to explain behavior.

Since qualia cannot, in a physical monism, be MORE than brain function, then they are not required to explain any physical behavior: the brain function is sufficient. In order to establish a qualia-> behavior relationship, you have to know for sure that there ARE qualia actually there. But the problem is, if you determine that only by looking at behavior, then you're introducing a vicious circle. It's the same as: "I know God is real because the Bible says so, and I know the Bible is true because God says so."

You do - in a manner of speaking. You have personal experience of existing planes and of existing buildings and that is what you extend by "philosophical pragmatism" to 9/11. If, instead, I told you that a spaceship flew into a crystal spire and showed you videos and news-reports to that effect, you would not believe that.

Yes, but my internal representation of the idea/symbol "plane" is of an object apparently exterior to the self. My internal represeentaion of the idea/symbol "mind" or now "qualia" is of something obviously interior to the self. So the philosophical question is this: is something SEEMING by its behavior to have qualia a good enough match to that symbol?

On a pragmatic sense, you and I both agree that yes, it is. On a philosophical sense, you see a monism as simpler and singly sufficient, therefore better, than a dualism. But that's where I draw my line-- I don't consider Occam's Razor a sufficient proof of an idea.

Aren't you the one who keeps insisting that qualia is a brute fact. Which means they are not invisible secondary properties that you have to assume.

MY qualia are a brute fact, for me. Ideas about who/what, might have or not have them is a matter of observation mated to arbitrary philosophical assumptions. The reason you and I arrive at different conclusions is that we like working under different assumptions, and no more than that.

And the capacity for subjective experience is a part of that explanation.

Not in robots or computers, it's not.

I agree - there is no mystery that demands extra inference. The existence of qualia is required to explain how and why some behavior occurs and if its existence can be explained by brain function, there is no need to invoke anything extra like a "soul" or "atomic quale".

That's fine. But how complex a system do you need to have the most primitive "qualia" that deserves that name? Do you need a fully functioning being with the ability to symbolize experiences and reference them to memories? Or do you just need a system capable of phsyical homeostasis? Or or any kind of recursive or self-referential function? Or of any form of energy being transmuted to another and processed?

In the human being, ALL those things are true. In a machine, some of them are true, but not others. How are we to separate the human-ness from the definition of qualia, and arrive at an understanding of exactly what level of processing would be required for OTHER entities to actually experience their environment, rather than being responding machines minus qualia? We can't know, because if you ask a neuron what it's feeling, or hook a single neuron up to an EEG, you can obtain no meaningful data.