If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)

[bennyboy]

Of course there is. One has a rich experience of what things are like, and the other does not.

So, some examples of things that belong in either group?

Sure. The reddishness of red as I experience it belongs only to one with real qualia, and not to a philosophical zombie.

Ahhhh. . . so you know what qualia is, and that it is biochemistry. This is good news-- pray tell, what are the exact physical criteria by which I can establish that a physical system is subjectively experiencing its environment, rather than only seeming to?

LOL, if you had absorbed a single letter of anything I've posted to you in this thread you'd realize how ridiculous a question that is to ask of me. The "seeming" is the "experiencing". It doesn't, to my mind, matter a lick - between an observer - or the one who is either experiencing or "seeming" to experience. It is the same phenomena. Now look up at the first part of your post again.

Well, I'm talking about qualia-- the experience of what things are like, which a philosophical zombie by definition cannot have. If you think there's no such thing as qualia, then I have only to put my mouth in my pillow and scream to prove to my satisfaction that you are wrong. I'm happy to leave it at that.

You can conflate diametrically opposed ideas if you want to, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of qualia: that they are not included in, or explained by, any good mechanical or physical theory of reality.

I'm just not sure what I'm being asked to explain here. There's no good mechanical or physical theory of reality that accounts for what, exactly?

You have to explain why red looks so reddy-reddish to me.

The only thing you seem to be willing to offer up on the subject of qualia is that it is mysterious and different and inexplicable. Well, that sounds like a summary of your conclusion - not any chain of reasoning that led up to it.

I didn't say it's inexplicable. I said that there's no workable mechanical model of qualia, and no non-arbitrary criteria for determining where it even exists.

Qualia does not appear to be, by any observation that we have ever made of it - as indirectly as you choose to conceive of those observations; wholly mysterious, inexplicable, or extraneous.

I don't think I've said said those things. I've said that qualia are part of the natural universe, and that the capacity for qualia must necessarily be intrinsic TO the universe.

When I get drunk, I understand that my subsequent subjective experience is an issue of chemistry. How do you understand yours?

Since I've responded favorably to several posts now in which the nature of qualia was directly linked to brain parts, brain chemistry and brain function, I don't see the point of this question. My understanding is the same as yours-- changes to brain chemistry affect the way my brain processes incoming information, resulting in a distorted or altered experience. This has no bearing on the capacity for qualia to exist rather than not, and the philosophical arguments for a kind of God defgined in terms of that that capacity being intrinsic and possibly eternal.