Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[bennyboy]

You are the one trying to argue against this position by suggesting qualia to be a property of all matter or qualia existing without matter - so you are the one who has to provide evidence.

I'm not suggesting anything except that I don't know exactly what qualia are. I'm suggesting that I can't observe them, or even know them to exist, outside my own subjective experience. I'm suggesting that if qualia is only part of brain function, then brain function is physically sufficient to explain all behaviors, making it scientifically irrelevant whether someone actually has qualia or just seems to.

"Show me the evidence" fails as a response to agnosticism. The evidence that we are agnostic is that we are agnostic. If you think we are NOT agnostic about what qualia are and what causes them, then show me some, and show what made them. But you can't. And that's the point.

As for the alternatives you listed: those are the things you'd have to rule out to have a meaningful scientific experiment on the nature of qualia. If you want to show qualia are only a property of function, then you have to show that something lacking that function lacks qualia (which you can't) or that all qualia must be associated with that function (which you can't). You've defined and assumed, then asserted. What you haven't done is shown how you can prove your assertions represent the reality of what qualia are and how they are caused to exist.

Ironically, you've used the same process that I have to get started: "I know I have qualia, I know I have a brain, so what can I infer?" I've inferred that since others SEEM to be physically similar to me, and SEEM to act as though they have qualia, I should assume that they do, as this lets me get on with my meaningful life. You've formed the same process as a "scientific" hypothesis: "What evidence should I look for to establish qualia? I can only see behavior, so let's use that. Yep, that guy behaves as though he has qualia-- so there's evidence supporting my hypothesis."

The only difference is that I don't accept your evidence as proper evidence, or your hypothesis as scientifically meaningful. It introduces an unecessary property to a process (input/processing/output) which is already sufficient to explain behavior.

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If I might thow a monkey wrench into the mix. With all the talk about zombies and what not, I think the issue falls back on the question of whether qualia have any reason to exist at all. This reminds me of this argument:

1. Knowledge depends on significant correspondence between awareness (qualitative phenomenal experience) and cognition (physical brain processes).

2. Natural selection explains the correspondence between awareness and cognition.

3. Evolutionary processes cannot select for features that do not affect behavior.

4. If awareness supervenes on cognition, then awareness is causally inert and cannot influence behavior.

5. Thus, natural selection cannot explain the correspondence between awareness and cognition.

6. And thus, knowledge does not depend on any significant correspondence between awareness and cognition.

Given that human consciousness is a result of evolutionary processes then you have two possibilities, neither of which square with materialism. First, if awareness is causally relevant and does affect behavior that means phenomenal properties influence physical processes from the top-down. That means phenomenal properties cannot be reduced to physical properties and the physical universe is not causally closed. On the other hand, if evolutionary processes can select features that do not affect behavior, then it displays teleological behavior that is inconsistent with an undirected naturalistic process.

Is this your own line of argument? It's very elegant.

I'm not sure about #3, though. Some important traits, like color, don't affect behavior but are naturally selected. Unless being eaten is a behavior!