Can we even talk about qualia, the phenomenal parts of conscious experience? Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent, as Wittgenstein advised, not lingering to resolve the paradoxical nature of the very phrase ‘whereof we cannot speak’ – it seems to do the very thing that it specifies cannot be done. We see what he meant, perhaps.
There is certainly a difficulty of principle in talking about qualia, to do with causality. Qualia have no causal effects – if they did, they would be an observable part of the world of physics, and it is part of their essential definition that they are outside, or over and above, the mere physical account. It follows, notoriously, that whatever we say or write about qualia cannot have been caused by them. At first glance this seems to demolish the whole discussion; no-one’s expressed belief in qualia can actually be the causal result of experiencing them.
But it is possible to talk sensibly of things that did not cause the talk. It takes a weirdly contorted argument to defend the idea that when I refer to Julius Caesar, the old Roman himself caused me to do it, but perhaps we can lash something together. It’s worse that I can talk of Nero and Zero the rollicking Romans, who existed only as heroes of a cartoon strip. If you’re still willing to grant them some causal role in physics, perhaps somehow through the material existence of the paper and ink in which they were realised, remember that I can even talk intelligibly about Baesar, who has no existence whatever, and in all likelihood was never spoken of before. He really cannot have caused me to write that last sentence.
So I would say that the absence of causal effects does not provide a knock-down reason why I cannot speak of qualia, though the fact that the other cases without causality involve entities that are fictions or delusions cannot be comfortable if I want my qualia to be real. It seems as if there must be a sort of pre-established harmony effect going on, so that my words remain truthful on the matter even though they are not causally determined by it, which feels, as technical metaphysicians say, kind of weird.
But apart from the difficulty of principle, it seems awfully difficult to speak of qualia in practice too. How can we verbally pick out a particular quale? With real things, we choose one or more of their most salient attributes; with imaginary entities, we just specify similar properties. But qualia have no individual attributes of their own; the only way to pick them out is by mentioning the objective sensation they accompany. So, we typically get a quale of red, or a red quale. This is pretty unsatisfactory, because it means many interesting questions are excluded from consideration. We cannot really ask whether every sensation has a quale; we cannot ask how many qualia there are, because our way of referring to them just has baked into it the assumption that they exactly match up with the objective sensations. If green, as a matter of fact, was the only colour with no qualia, the fact would be occluded from us by the only language we can use to discuss the matter.
All of this might seem enough to justify our concluding that talk of qualia adds nothing to talk of objective sensations, so that even if, by some uncovenanted harmony, our talk of qualia proves to be metaphysically true, it has absolutely no informative value, and might as well be abandoned. What remains is the unconquerable conviction that there is something there, or to use the little phrase on which so much metaphysical weight has been rested, ‘there is something it is like’ to, for example, see red.
Can this phrase be explicated into something clearer? The first problem is the ‘it’; are we actually speaking of anything there? To me it seems that the ‘it’ in ‘something it is like’ is as merely grammatical as the ‘it’ in ‘it is raining’, which does not cause us to entertain the idea that there is something ineffable and non-physical about precipitation. The second problem is the ‘like’ which suggests we are making a comparison while leaving it quite unclear what is being compared. Is seeing red meant to be like seeing another colour? Is seeing red phenomenally meant to be like seeing red objectively (whatever that would mean)? In fact we seem obliged to conclude that no actual comparison is being made. Suppose we assert of hang-gliding or our first taste of champagne ‘there’s nothing like it!’ Are we managing here to assert after all that these experiences are unaccompanied by qualia? Surely not. If anything we’re saying that the relevant qualia are exceptionally powerful.
In the end, doing my honest best, I think ‘there is something it is like to see red’ simply asserts that the experience of seeing red really exists. I’m fine with that, and there are genuine mysteries attached; but there still seems to be nothing more we can say about qualia as a result. Haven’t we all been a bit too accepting for a bit too long of ‘there Is something it is like’?
Well, qualia have an effect on the mind which experiences them, and that mind has measurable effects in the world, so you can’t say conclusively that “qualia have no physical effects”. At a minimum, qualia might have physical effects. Unless you are a substantial dualist?
I’m inclined to believe that mind and matter mutually entail.
I’m with Mike. “Qualia have no causal effects – if they did, they would be an observable part of the world of physics, and it is part of their essential definition that they are outside, or over and above, the mere physical account.”
This is simply begging the quesiton, asserting your conclusion. Perhaps people’s ability to talk about or act on conclusions they reached because of the qualia they experiences is indeed that causal effect. And, the physical account you’re seeking in defining intelligence is simply the very thing you simply decided to deny as a given.
According to Russellian monism, qualia are the intrinsic identities of causal entities or processes. So they have causal powers but are not described by physics because physics only describes their mathematical/logical relations to other entities or processes. For example, physics does not describe the intrinsic identity of an electron (what the electron is in itself), only the relations of the electron to other things, such as electromagnetic or gravitational interactions.
But what alleviates Hume’s criticism of Causality? What is it within physics that could explain causation.
It seems erroneous to grant such a high status to physics as the determiner of reality, rather than an explanatory tool, without a determinate solution to the body-body problem?
“Whereof we cannot speak” seems a compound negative, but with a direction (of fit) from a (propositional) attitude…
…Wittgenstein Quietism Pyrrhonism Buddhism-Hinduism, thank you Peter, but an attitude of uncertainty is only one of many attitudes we may find in ourselves…
Buddhism does not fit yet, here, in Western philosophy…
…IT is work, developing attitudes towards allowing qualia and being to exist together as oneself…
We humans have been meeting, in circle settings, for ever (involution)…
…developing attitudes towards qualia in weekly circle meetings could require, seeing first attitudes towards philosophy set aside…
…qualia in meta-physics verses qualia in exercise…
Philosophy and Neuralbiology, https://doi.org/10.1515/sh-2015-0023
I don’t think that bit is correct, Tomas; I believe only the extrinsic properties have causal powers.
It’s just part of the definition of qualia that they are not part of the story told by physics. If they affect the behaviour of physical things, they can’t help being part of that story. So they cannot have causal effects. If there is no aspect of experience that is without causal effects, there is no philosophical problem to talk about.
Of course all this stuff makes very little sense, but that’s not my problem because I disbelieve in qualia almost completely.
Actually, stuff like qualia is part of the story told by physics. Physicists give it names like “electron” or “quark” but can’t describe what they are, only how they are related to other stuff.
Tomas seems to have the right of it – physics is done in consciousness after all. In that sense there’s nothing extrinsic about physics, just relations described with the varied mental entities of mathematics…
It seems more likely that physics is (fundamentally?) incomplete than qualia like, say, confidence in a memory (which affects scientific observation) have no part in the story of causation?
I think qualia exist and have causal effects. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have evolved. For example, most mammals only have two types of retina cones, which limits the number of colors they can see, but primates have three cone types. The third type allows us to see in the red/yellow range, probably in order to detect ripe fruit.
The difficulty, it seems to me, is in understanding what language is, symbolic communication, where each symbol refers to something. That symbol may refer to another symbol or a collection of symbols (think “democracy”), but eventually if you follow the references, you end up at either an action of some type or raw conscious perception. When we get there, we get to the limitations of language, where all we can do is assign a designation to raw experience, such as the experience of red.
Qualia are information. But they evolved long before language or other symbolic communication. The components of central nervous systems had to have a way to communicate without those symbols. Qualia, such as the experience of red or the pain of a tooth ache, are simply the raw primal stuff of that communication. That they can’t be described in language to someone who hasn’t experienced them yet is simply due to the fact that language is built on top of them.
What if qualia are references? As such, they are merely abstractions, so do not have causal powers, yet they are intimately associated with things that do have causal powers, the causal entities or processes they reference.
Consider if you were in a room with two lights on a wall. One light is connected to a computer running software that recognizes cats, and the other light to a computer that recognizes dogs. Each computer turns on its respective light when it recognizes its target. Both computers are being fed from a camera looking at a different room. To make things easy, suppose the first time a light goes on a word is spoken on a loud speaker, and you know to associate that word with the light which is on (you can write the word next to the light).
Suppose someone else is in a third room with two output devices which are not lights (you don’t know what they are … water pipes?) but that function similarly. You can communicate with the person in the other room. How would you refer to the light with “cat” written next to it turning on?
Now suppose you add lights for “animal” and “face”, such that if a cat is facing the camera, the lights for cat,face, and animal are on. If the cat is there but turned away, just cat and animal are on. Likewise for dog, face, animal. So what would you say if “face” and “animal” were turned on, but neither cat nor dog?
Now let’s add lights for “chair”, “table”, and “furniture”. So what can you say now when just “animal” and “face” are on? How about “I don’t know what it is, but it’s more like a cat than a table.”
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[now imagine you didn’t have the words at the outset, and the person in the other room shares neither a language nor an alphabet.]
Just to associate what I wrote above more to the OP, I think that the “it” in “what it’s like” is not so much the it of “it is raining” as “it’s that one” but without having any means to point to or otherwise indicate.
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[“It’s one of the beetles in the box, in fact it’s that one, but you’re not allowed to look in the box.”]
Peter – You say that by definition qualia have nothing to do with physics and so cannot be causal. Also that you don’t believe in qualia. Well with that definition I can understand why.
However what I don’t understand then, is what you call those experiences we have that have causal properties. For example, we pick the red strawberry, not the green one. I always thought the experience of the red or green strawberry were qualia.
I am loath to yet again post my example of the different ways someone might think to answer “Do elephants have hair?” and that it quite easy to imagine someone giving the right answer if they take one approach and the wrong one if they take the other. No one thought the comment was interesting enough to respond to the last 2 or 3 times.
In short:
1- The expert system way:
Elephants kind-of mammal
For all mammals: hair part-of-mammal
Therefore:
Elephants have hair
2- The experiential way: Digging through my memory of pachyderm pictures, looking all over the elephant, do I see hair? When I compare imagined elephants w/ and w/out fur, which better resembles those memory?
It seems incredulous to even talk about quailia when it never even considered to be an objective experience. Fundamentally, quailia cannot be a subjective experience because there are no such things as subjects, there are only objects, some of which are determinate and some of which are indeterminate. Just because we do not know what those indeterminate objects actually are does not make them subjects……. Get it?
As I see it, there are two options on the table: 1. One can insist that quailia is a subjective experience as one can insist upon staying in the sandbox of discourse and sucking their own thumb. Or… 2. One can grow up and face the reality of the “thing-in-itself” and concentrate on doing some serious scientific research. For example: Can it be demonstrated scientifically that our phenomenal realm is an expression?
Well my experience of objects is done through my subjective self, so whether I’m in the sandbox sucking my thumb or doing serious scientific research it will be through subjectivity.
That said, regarding theories of consciousness I agree the only path through the wilderness at this time is to focus on theories that give testable predictions. Better that than trying to sort out which theory agrees with metaphysical preferences.
Re: Tomas’ point about physics & consciousness, an interesting interview by physicist N. David Mermin on his growing appreciation of Bohr’s philosophical conjectures:
http://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf
“it is part of their essential definition that they are outside, or over and above, the mere physical account.”
Says you. Not C.I. Lewis, who introduced the term into modern philosophical discussion. Not Eric Lormand, who has the best short discussion of qualia around.
I’m not denying that there are other philosophers who share your hasty overdefinition. But it’s still a mistake. There are a cluster of properties associated to varying degrees with the concept “qualia”. Insisting on a particular property against all doubters of its requirement, is like trying to deny that Frisbee is a game because it has no winners or losers. Or denying that Einstein’s physics has a concept of time because Relativity’s time isn’t absolute.
Outstanding article Sci…
You missed my point here Sci… One cannot have a subjective experience if there is no such thing as a subject. Subject/object metaphysics (SOM) is a construct we inherited from Plato, Aristotle and their Greek cronies. Intrinsically, it is a dualist architecture of rationality that massively suppresses meaning. The architecture of SOM is as primordial and primitive as the geocentric universe. We can all thank Copernicus for dismantling that suppressive paradigm.
The time has come to abandon the archaic architecture of SOM and replace it with a model of reasoning that does not suppress meaning. That model is grounded in noumenalism, an architecture that was first articulated by Parmenides, an architecture of reasoning that states the obvious as predicate: “I don’t know!” The unknown is clearly the elephant in the room, and that elephant isn’t going away any time soon. Materialism, idealism, substance dualism and property dualism have given it their best shot, and all of them have demonstrated that they are bankrupt models. It’s time to move on and try something new. It’s time to try intellectual honesty.
So here is the proposition: If the “thing-in-itself” is the Reality and our phenomenal realm is a representation and/or the appearance of that Reality, one should be able to demonstrate that scientifically.
This experiment can be performed by asking a simple question: What is one intrinsic, qualitative property that we already know about expression? In other words, what is the underlying form of expression? Both the arts and the sciences should be able to easily answer that question.
A little more on qualia practices possible in circle meetings…
…with an attitude towards etiological ‘causal-qualia inference’ wonderings…
Native Americans sitting in a circle, facing towards each other, serves consciousness of each self and themselves…
Philosophers sitting in a circle, facing “away” from each other, may serve consciousness of oneself and others…
…direct vs indirect experience…macro qualia modeling vs micro qualia modeling…
Apologies Lee, I seem to have misunderstood you…but I have to admit I am not sure about the one intrinsic, qualitative property we know about expression.
What is the easy answer?
If qualia are indeed – by definition – non-causal, then the definition sucks.
Asserting the existence of qualia while denying that they could have causal effects is to assert that physicalism is false. And when some physicalists buy into this view by suggesting that qualia are illusory, it seems like a straw-man attack to then ridicule illusionists for saying consciousness doesn’t exist, when the illusionists are trying to entertain the (wrong) claim that qualia are non-causal in the first place.
I think the definition is wrong, and illusionists are also on the wrong path. We should accept that qualia are real, but also that they have causal effects. It then becomes a matter of explaining how purely physical arrangements can account for this. I remain optimistic that this is possible.
Particular qualia exist for physical thing A (e.g., ME), but only exist for physical thing A. So physical thing B (e.g., YOU) can never verify physical thing A’s qualia, because these only exist for physical thing A. Qualia are the relation of physical things to a particular physical thing A. To physical thing B, they are just neurons firing, etc, not qualia. Qualia are subjective, not objective nor 3rd -person verifiable. Nor can A verify B’s qualia – they are in relation to B, and one needs to be B to experience them.
However, they are still dependent on the purely physical though.
To continue: “what it is like” is a half-complete account of qualia/phenomenal consciousness.
A complete account is: what it is like for me.
qualia are =always= associated with an experiencer. There is no “redness of red”, there is only “my experience of the redness of red”, or “Peter’s experience of the redness of red”
There is no such thing as consciousness as a 3rd-person property or substance.
Sci:
Every artist intrinsically knows, and every physicist should know through observation that the “underlying form” of expression consists of diversity, inequality and contrast, both within the texture, form and content.
This axiom is self-evident, unveiling itself across the entire spectrum of art, whether it be our phenomenal realm, a painting, a sculpture, a drawing, music, dance, or the syntax of poem and prose. The diversity of asymmetry not symmetry, the contrast of inequity not justice, the opposition of immorality, not morality are the fundamental building blocks of expression. In a world of justice, music would consist of a single analogue of sound for fear of being prejudice. In a world of morality, a painted work of art would consist of a single hue of color void of diversity or contrast, both in the texture, form and content for fear of being immoral. In a world of equality, dance would consist of a singular analogue of body position for the fear of inequity. In a world of morality, a sculpture made of stone would be the hewn marble untouched by human hands for the fear of being immoral. In a world of justice, a drawing would consist of a single line following an infinite plane into infinity for fear of bigotry. In a world of equality, the syntax of poem and prose would consist of a single letter in a never ending sentence for fear of partisanship.
This intrinsic qualitative property of diversity, inequality and contrast is ubiquitous and literally underwrites our phenomenal realm, demonstrating that our phenomenal world is a work of art, an expression, a representation, and/or the appearance of Reality. Art is a form of expression, and all works of art are literally the appearances or representations only, and not the reality.
Lee: But isn’t contrast base on the observation of relations, rather than that of the Being of any object? Are you suggesting the fundamental Ground is Information, the “difference that makes a difference”?
But this seems to get us back to contrast, and thus back to relations rather than some intrinsic relata. To put it another way, what is it about the electron that exists beyond its relations to the surrounding world?
I fear the paragraph referring to enforced equality lost me.
Can qualia be physical without being bound by mathematical relations/equations? Perhaps the problem lies with the continued revamped definitions of “physical” & “matter”, rather than the qualia themselves…
The key is to understand how conscious and subconscious thought actually works architecturally, which is a tractable problem. Trying to do it in words just leads to confusion.
Physics determines how the physical world evolves over time and space by, in effect, solving the partial differential equations determining infinitesimal interactions.
Thought and language deal in big chunks of the world – objects, processes, concepts – that are approximate descriptions of the underlying physics. Physics really has nothing to say about patterns at this level of abstraction, even if it underpins them.
Qualia then are the result of being conscious not just of the sensed property (red) or object (glass of wine) but also of feelings, potential actions, expected consequences, i.e. our though processes relative to that object. ‘Conscious’ here just means we are able to process the patterns representing our own thought processes, as they they were themselves sensed data.
Causality then flows through physics, and the mind deals in big crude chunks of patterns and solutions approximately, but well enough for the purposes of survival. It describes itself to itself in big handfuls, one aspects of which are qualia.
Sci:
1. “But isn’t contrast based on the observation of relations, rather than that of the Being of any object?” Answer: No. In any work of art, one must be compelled to consider: what comes first in hierarchy, the observation of relations or the creation of the “Being”?
2. “Are you suggesting the fundamental Ground is Information, the “difference that makes a difference”?” Answer: Yes, absolutely…
3. “What is it about the electron that exists beyond its relations to the surrounding world?” Answer: Its grounding representation which consists of diversity, inequality and contrast represented in the expression as mass, spin and charge. In other words, an electrons experience is what we refer to in our representation of experience as quailia.
4. I fear the paragraph referring to enforced equality lost me. I think you misunderstood Sci, there is no enforced equality, there is only inequality, diversity and contrast, the very grounding qualitative properties of expression.
What comes first in hierarchy, the creation of art or the observation of art?
Peter Martin:
Physics doesn’t “determine” anything, physics attempts to reify the complex relationships it observes with its discrete tool of mathematics. Currently, that tool of mathematics is grounded in a discrete, binary system called rationality. I do agree however, that qualia is the result and/or experience of being conscious.
Regarding the laws of physics, one must be compelled to consider: How far have we come, really? We’ve merely replaced the immortal gods of the Greeks with the immortal laws of nature. The construct of law has only two discrete outcomes, either obedience or disobedience. Law is an archaic, primordial construct grounded in mysticism. It is a system grounded in magic, a magical some “thing” which commands unwavering, unquestioning obedience from its unknowing, unsuspecting subjects. Does that really make any sense??
One would think, that well into the 21st century mankind would be able to come up with an architect that isn’t grounded in mysticism. A coherent theory of consciousness will provide the model which creates that paradigm shift, a model of consciousness grounded in noumenalism, or the “thing-in-itself”.
Pains in my body all feel similar except the pain I feel in my upper back today that feels similar to the pain I have been feeling in my lower back tells me something is wrong in my upper and not lower back. Just as pains let me build a model of my body, qualia of colors which are just as subjective as pains allow my neocortex to build a model of time and space outside of my body. Physics is a subset of our biological function that allows us to build all type of models of time and space with mathematics which is essentially colorless or without appeared qualia..
Lee: The things you mention about the electron are its relations. To project such measurement to the level of human beings, those are the equivalent to behaviorist approaches where only the external recordings matter.
I think this leaves the question of relata unanswered, which is not to say there is a definitive answer.
It may have something that is not consciousness, but perhaps informational…though I have trouble with the concept of “Information” in that it seems to include both physical measurement, and mental concepts…
On Consciousness & Causality, I’ve begun a read of Gregg Rosenberg’s work which makes consciousness the carrier of causation.
That might be where qualia fit in…
An example of consciousness via Reification–by a blind Italian, a deaf German and a British/American with normal senses…
…all are normal, they are in a room sitting in three chairs, two facing each other the third not facing the others, they also are all aware they are sitting this way…
Does their consciousness increase, of their selves, even though they have no interest in consciousness…
…and the follow through would be to do this with your friends, especially noting any transformative values…
This might help with disbeliefs about qualia…
Sci, if I am not mistaken here, the relata you are looking for in the electron would be the same thing Kant was looking for when he asked how synthetic a priori judgements are even possible? The short answer would be the same for both questions.
While we are prohibited from absolute knowledge of the “thing-in-itself”, we can impute to it a cause beyond ourselves as a source of representations within us. The same would be true for an electron.
I am in agreement with Gregg Rosenberg’s position that a restricted reducibility principle implies that consciousness must be the intrinsic root of things, and panpsychism is thereby established. The difficulty now lies in the ability to construct a model that is coherent and free of contradictions. The only grounding architecture that is capable of accommodating such a model is noumenalism, which itself is grounded in the Reality/Appearance distinction.
Currently, there are no models of consciousness out there other than my own model that firmly establish, rigorously maintain and respect the Reality/Appearance distinction. So, I guess the most compelling question now becomes: Why not?
Lee: Could you define Noumenalism – Google leaves me adrift sadly. Thanks!
Arnold: I am enjoying these koan-type writings. 🙂
Noumenalism states that there is such a “thing” as an objective reality that is unknown, and that objective reality, Kant’s “thing in itself”, underwrites and is responsible for our phenomenal world and everything in it. Kant asserts further that our phenomenal world is an expression of Power, and the only way this type of Power can accounted for is the noumenal realm. Kant further asserts that the noumenal realm is unknowable.
Kant’s Noumena/Phenomena Distinction corresponds to the Parmenidean Reality/Appearance Distinction and Nagarjuna’s Two Contexts of Reality.
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Hey Lee, my model of consciousness is noumenalistic. Whether or not it’s panpsychic depends on your requirements for “consciousness”. If all you need is physical interaction, then panpsychist it is. But most of us require a bit more to be able to label it Consciousness.
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James; according to your model, is consciousness the Reality, the “thing-in-itself”, or is consciousness the Appearance of reality or the “thing”?
Lee, of course consciousness is neither of those things. “Consciousness” refers to a set of processes, just like “life” refers to a set of processes. For any given process (conscious-type or not) there is a mechanism, i.e., the thing in itself, output, i.e., affordances for measurement, thus, Appearance, and input which are also affordances for measurement, but these are associated with what G.Rosenberg referred to as receptivity of the Mechanism/noumenon.
What kind of a process is a consciousness-type process? Different people have different ideas as to what’s minimally required. If “process” is enough, you have panpsychism.
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Actually, what I just wrote (#41) is not exactly right. Will update shortly.
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Okay, never mind about not exactly right. I’m going with 41 for now.
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[It gets tricky because a measurement is a process, but I have not thought all about that yet]
So…how does Peter think we tell the difference between a green or red strawberry? I suspect the answer would clarify a great deal about his position and help ensure we mean the same things when using the word “qualia”.
Admiring the commitment you put into your site and in depth information you present.
It’s awesome to come across a blog every once in a while that
isn’t the same out of date rehashed material. Great read!
I’ve bookmarked your site and I’m including your RSS feeds to
my Google account.
My latest crack at a more precise definition of consciousness, with a link to wiki-book:
Definition: Consciousness is a symbolic language for reasoning about cause-and-effect. It combines high-level conceptual theories with low-level linguistic concepts to generate a rolling internal narrative or ‘self-model’ for reflection, planning and communication.
Additional comments:
“I think consciousness is both a *language* for reasoning about causality *and* a form of causality itself! (Temporal perception and temporal action).
I think there’s 3 kinds of consciousness, each one associated with a component of time (past, present and future)”
“So, taking the 3 components of time:
Past – Reflective consciousness (memory)
Present – Active consciousness
Future- Planning consciousness (imagination)”
Wiki-book: ‘Machine Psychology’ (474 entries)
-Language Models & Ontology
-Natural Language Processing
-Scientific Method & Philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zarzuelazen/Books/Reality_Theory:_Machine_Psychology%26NLP
I think #11 SelfAwarePatterns has it! It’s all about communication and language.
But ontology and grammar frameworks are *prior* to natural language, they should thus be powerful enough to really understand the underlaying basis of symbols and communication (see my wiki-book linked above).
I call my theory of consciousness TPTA
TPTA : ‘Temporal Perception and Temporal Action’.
You only need 3 postulates to understand TPTA
(1) Consciousness is about how knowledge is represented (‘meaning’)
(2) Consciousness is about using knowledge to represent one’s own thoughts (‘reflection’) in order to achieve goals
(3) The mind is physical and embodied in a dynamical system. Consciousness is a process (e.g., like hurricane), not a thing
Then TPTA says:
Consciousness is the ‘time-keeper’ or internal clock of the dynamical system that is the mind. It does 2 main things
1) TEMPORAL PERCEPTION It generates an internal self-model or narrative that lets us reason about cause and effect and plan for the future via imagining alternative possibilities,
(2) TEMPORAL ACTION: It co-ordinates all the internal sub-processes of the system so they work towards integrated goals.
TPTA: Temporal Perception and Temporal Action
Qualia are the ‘ticks’ of the clock of consciousness! 😀
@mjgeddes makes an interesting stab at conceptualizing the whole thing. I think thinking of consciousness as a process is the most helpful way. To add my own 2 cents to their account…
Consciousness is itself the model of the world, where qualia are distinct measurements within this system. Why any two qualia have distinct qualities probably has to do with why light is different than dark. Across any two points, if there is a subset of some system that is sensitive across that medium, then a mapping of distinct and differentiated qualities will emerge between those two points.
Peter
“Qualia have no causal effects – if they did, they would be an observable part of the world of physics”
That’s just a dogma. It’s unscientific, there is no basis for this claim at all.In fact to the extent that science does address it, it’s the basis for all pyschological sciences.
Why on earth should causality be restricted to the domain of the world of physics ? What fact causes us to believe that man-made physics is more definitive than man-made experience ? They both have the same biological sources, restricted to the cognitive scope and limits of homo sapiens, an animal species.
By restricting and closeting in this pointless way, you end up asking yourself ludicrous questions, like some theologian asking how many angels can sit on a pinhead.
If it’s accepted that causality doesn’t have to be unnecessarily closeted by this dogma, the questions in the rest of the article don’t need discussion, and the paradoxes and quandaries can be seen as totally self-inflicted.
JBD
Re: Causal qualia, this seems to be an evolutionary argument for it? ->
https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/704/1253
What we can speak about is the experience of one’s own experiences. It is the unjustified assertion that there is something unavoidably inexplicable by physics going on that leads to confusion. What we need, apparently, is a term for the former without the latter.
With regard to Julius Caesar, part of the causal network leading to you referring to him is your knowledge of him, what he did, and what has been said about him. That leads back, in part, to the man himself, but that does not mean he was the sole cause of your reference: here, he was one of a great many options for being an example of what you wanted to speak of, and that was the primary cause. Your post is the primary cause of me referring to him here.
The characters from the comic present no greater difficulty: their causal role traces back through the comic’s author to his imagination, and through there to his knowledge of the world (in this case, the history of Rome.) There is no difficulty here, and no particular difficulty with the experience of our experiences (beyond the difficulty that we haven’t figured out how it works yet) unless you insist a-priori on conditions that are speculative at best, and possibly incoherent.
I think the question is what one means by “explicable by physics”, given physics (as yet?) lacks complete unification with chemistry and biology – and as noted by others it even lacks unification with itself at the moment.
To say consciousness is explicable by physics, do you mean completely reducible to mathematical description? On some level this has to be wrong, given we can’t get get a mathematical measure of raw feels, at best we can measure from the “other side” by examining neurons/Penrose’s microtubules/McFadden’s EM-field-in-the-skull/etc.
Re Knowledge of Caesar, knowledge reference would fall under Intentionality — That seems an even bigger problem than raw feels, given the determinate nature of thought as well as thought’s about-ness? As the eliminativist Rosenberg put it, where the does the referential power of matter come from? How can reference to Caesar be isomorphic to structure when we find no evidence of structure’s power to impart meaning in the atomic composition of the stop sign, or the word “Caesar” written in pixels or ink?
Rosenberg concludes thoughts are illusory, an obviously huge leap, but it does illustrate the depth of the problem.
But rather than worry overmuch about this, science can proceed to find correlates and relevant structures. I think with the rise of MWI and String Theory there is a lot of fictional “world building” that isn’t making predictions .
Sci: We can all agree that science is not complete, yet still it manages to explain quite a lot of things. Take, for example, the theory of evolution by natural selection: not only is it not reductive, but the reduction of the history of life on Earth to a sequence of physical events does not seem likely to fundamentally change the usefulness of the theory in explaining what it does explain, as a reductive story would be at an unsuitable level of abstraction (it could, of course, help a great deal in understanding the origin of life, but that is a different issue.)
Similarly, the bigger problem of Rosenberg’s question is not an issue in the specific question of the causes of Peter’s reference to Julius Caesar: it is sufficient, for the purpose of that discussion, to know the empirical fact that physical symbols can convey meaning.
What we have here, I think, are examples of what might be called ‘complexity contagion’ or ‘complexity paralysis’: avoiding addressing the smaller issues, and claiming that they are intractable, because the grandest questions have not been answered. Part of science’s success, I think, is because it put aside the big questions and looked into what could be studied: the road to a theory evolution, for example, started with taxonomy.
One of the consequences of this approach is that we may find that the hard problems are not what we thought they were. This is why we should look at what happens when we experience our own experiences without assuming, a priori, that doing so will ultimately be futile.
This is why epiphenomenalism makes absolutely no sense.
Qualia are real. That we are experiencers whose experiences consist of qualia is the one thing we can be literally100.00% certain of. Period. Any argument that seems to “explain away” of qualia is a desperate, utterly ridiculous attempt to preserve materialism as it is currently understood.
It really blows my mind that illusionists and eliminative materialists (is there really a difference?) aren’t laughed out of the room. They should be. Unless they’re P-zombies, which honestly doesn’t seem to be out of the realm of reasonable possibility.
So glad to see you back. Nice operations resume with heavy stuff.
The interrupted stream of consciousness flows again ala William James.