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

[bennyboy]

. . . under the computational model I;m offering you, qualia is a collection of very physical things, in the same way that what you see on your monitor right now has an actual place, a location on your hardware. It's not attached, not associated, it -is-.

I don't accept the semantic process of taking a word reserved specifically for the subjective, and redefining it in objective terms. You don't get to say, for example, "That vacuum cleaner knows when it hits a table, and responds by turning away," and saying the vacuum cleaner is experiencing qualia. The fact is that at least I definitely have subjective experience, and the word qualia refers to that fact, and any attempt to make it mean something else is a brute force method of begging the question.

But how could we know that was the case?

We could just ask it. After all, that's all we're going on with regards to ourselves anyway, isn't it? I'd say that we're already at that point with hardware, we simply don;t ascribe the same level of "whateverness" to the phenomena as expressed by relatively simple machines. There's nothing fundamentally different, to my mind, about our own. It's just an issue of scale and preference. You know I'm fond of describing all of the ways that plants exhibit behaviors we ascribe to "consciousness" in ourselves..but - for some reason, call mechanical and chemical interactions in them. But ultimately....why are we assuming that there is some division - in reality- between "seeming to" experience qualia and experiencing qualia? It -is- seeming, isn't it? There's not actually an elephant inside of your mind when you have the subjective experience of viewing an elephant, now is there?

Philosophical assumptions about qualia must be made due to our perceptual limitations. Either we must make an arbitrary line-in-the-sand where I accept that another entity is similar enough to myself that I'm willing to believe it has qualia as I do. . . or we must define qualia in terms that we CAN perceive: brain function, etc.

We already have words for brain function, and qualia is specially reserved to distinguish between mechanisms and experiences. As for your conflation of the two, it's wrong on a semantic level: redness as my brain processes it is a network of neurotransmitters, blood flow, etc. Redness as I experience it is. . . that reddish reddy color that I'm experiencing. These are clearly not the same, in the same way that the combination of a projector, a screen, and various pigments on a celluloid film are not "Casablanca."

But why not? You see how you've already determined that qualia is "just different" - so it's not surprising to see that you reach such a conclusion no matter what angle you look at the problem.

I can observe your brain function (at least in theory), but I cannot observe your qualia. Therefore, they are in fact different. At best, from your perspective, qualia is an additional property of the brain function-- but you've already strongly stated that you do not accept this.

Therefore, you do not have a working definition of qualia that I'm willing to accept as having linguistic meaning.

Conflating self-referential data processing (or any other kind of data processing) with qualia is essentially begging the question-- you are defining qualia in a special way, and your model subsequently seems to make sense.

I'm concluding that qualia doesn't appear to be any different, based upon observational data

You place too much emphasis on observational data. In the case of qualia, I already know for sure two things: 1) I experience qualia; 2) I cannot experience anyone else's qualia, nor they mine.

Given these 2 fundamental truths, any "observational data" you are talking about is meaningless. What are you hoping to observe which will shed any light, without first requiring philosophical assumptions which beg the question?

I'm attempting to explain the unknown by reference to the known. I've given repeated tips of the hat to the fact that, ultimately, it may be dead wrong, but I see no reason to make extraneous assumptions about something that doesn't seem to require them as of yet.

What's an "extraneous" assumption?

But this conflation is unsatisying philosophically.

Does the universe owe you philosophical satisfaction? I can think of a great many things that are "philosophically unsatisfying" -but so what?

The universe is not attempting to conflate things which are unlike by definition-- that's you. I know what it's like to experience things, and I know (to a degree) about the brain chemistry involved in perception. They are different at both a semantic level and an observational level.

As a physical monist, you are confronted with the fact that the most important aspect of human existence-- the subjective experience-- is completely outside the objective (read: shared) observational domain. So you have to redefine all words that reference subjective experience in physicalist terms, and pretend that you're still talking about the same thing. The alternative is to completely give up all subjective-referential words and ACTUALLY study what can be observed-- the brain and the behaviors it outputs.

You keep repeating this, so I know that you aren't actually absorbing this data. Your experience -is- a "simple mechanism".

You keep repeating this tautology, and ignoring the obvious fact that it's incorrect. My brain function is a mechanism. My qualia are experiences.

You seem to have a thing against what you perceive to be simple, as in "it;s too simple, that can;t be qualia"...

I've said nothing of the sort. I'm saying that the subjective and the objective are not the same. Evidence? There are different words for them, and they are taken as opposites.

You can tapdance around it, but even if there's a 1:1 correlation between brain states/function and qualia, that does not mean that a brain state IS qualia, any more than an apple is redness.

We can (at least hypothetically) make machines to replicate human function, and with ANNs we can make them self-referential. But there's nothing about supposing such a system to actually experience qualia that will improve our observations or understanding of the system.

In fact, we (and by we I mean you, specifically, in this conversation) seem to be entirely hung up on what amounts to neural folklore, brain based phlogiston- the strange shit we thought up before we even had any idea what it was that we were considering. I'd say that getting people to at least consider that the "special sauce" hypothesis is bankrupt (thus explaining the utter lack of data in that regard) just might be(and I'm suggesting this largely because it already -has- been) useful.

You keep implying (and sometimes saying) that I don't "get it"-- that I'm stuck in an archaic (read: non physical monist) word view which doesn't allow me to accept sensible default positions-- like the idea that subjective experience is not different than objective mechanisms.

I get it. And I disagree with you. I know that qualia are real, and that the words I use to talk about brain function and the words I use to talk about experiences are necessarily different-- because the things themselves are different.

This isn't "special sauce." The existence of qualia is the only fundamental truth which cannot be denied. ALL other things, including a belief the existence of a physical universe, are derived from qualia.