I’m with Tri on this one. Just because it’s not communicable doesn’t elevate it above his description, IMO. Communication is typically imprecise and incomplete as it is a compressed and alternate method of gaining information, I don’t see a reason why two very different methods with different internal activities should result in the same internal experience and feeling.
I was about to respond in this manner. The incommunicable part is the same incommunicable part of emotions. You can only poetically describe the details of fear. You can discuss the side effects of a rapid heart beat or perspiring, but each individual’s experience is different. It may be the lack of readily shared reactions that distinquish qualia, but that’s just an indication that qualia is used to describe abstract functions not tied to an instinctual reaction. Every stimulus and thought links associately with similar experiences within your mind, and beyond the most basic firmware reactions, everyone’s internal organization of information is going to vary.
I don’t understand. The point is that qualia is not information, and it fundamentally cannot be communicated. That is the whole point. Difficulty and imprecision of communication has nothing to do with it.
I disagree. Your inability to communicate something does not disqualify it as information. It may be meta information about a dyamic process or an organizational structure that makes it so difficult to reflect on precisely, or a lack of ability to seperate process from result that makes it so difficult to communicate. But if qualia are consistent within an individual mind, than they must be information based. There is either information that defines a ‘hard-wired’ mechanism, or a process, or an information structure, or the information itself.
There are two aspects of emotions, and I think you are conflating the two. There is the evolutionarily-derived neural weight that says (for example) “be sad if you don’t have food.” Here “sad” is a stand-in for “I feel a pressure that I need to relieve, and this pressure can be relieved by food.” This is fully communicable. Then separate from this is the qualia, the ineffable feeling of sad.
You are not describing qualia. In order to better orient you, consider the color red. You cannot poetically describe the color red. There is no way to describe the color red. And it has nothing to do with “linking associatively with similar experiences.”
I’ve not the slightest idea how the qualia of the color red accords with this analysis.
You are making an assumption which confidently bypasses decades of academic discussion on this topic. There are many, many arguments why it is not so simple as “if qualia are consistent within an individual mind, than they must be information based.” And this is coming from the most hard-core of physicalists. There is a reason the wikipedia page is extremely long.
By most accounts, communicability is what information’s all about. There should be some set of symbols, say a binary string, which can be unequivocally mapped to some other, comprehensible representation. But the blueness of blue does not seem to be such a kind of entity: otherwise, you could explain to a blind person what it is like to see blue, which most people would believe is impossible. On the other hand, a light ray impinging on the retina, the patterns of neuronal excitation it generates, etc., are all communicable information – they can all be coded into a string of bits, for example, and one would commonly believe that this encoding does not leave anything out. Yet, this phenomenon is evidently capable of generating within our minds the sensation of the blueness of blue!
This apparent gap, between the impossibility of explaining what blue looks like to a blind man, and the sensation of blue upon seeing blue light, while both are just means of delivering information, is what qualia were invented to bridge: they create the sensation of experiencing something, which is not contained within any physical description of the world.
Communicating with abstract concepts through various modes does not have the same effect on the neurons and ultimately the brain as a whole as direct stimulation of sensory nerves and their downstream neurons.
Two different ways for input to arrive in the brain, two different paths, seems ok that the one that was already packaged up with nice and neat abstract concepts can be passed along in that manner and that the one arriving through a different avenue does not share that attribute.
Not saying everyone is simply wrong and I am right, just not seeing the argument that makes me think there is more to it than the physical.
Just to add to this a bit: it’s really tough to adequately describe many internal things - we have a word for hungry just like we have a word for red, but in neither case can we really transmit the information other than using a label and hoping the other person has similar experience.
I think you have to be more careful in your comparisons. I’m not at all convinced, for example, that hunger even has a qualia associated with it. Information-wise, hunger is telling you to eat. Qualia aside, there is a mental pressure to find a way to eat, and the brain has to react to that pressure in various ways in an attempt to relieve it. This is communicable. Additionally, you can describe the various bodily reactions to hunger, such as stomach contractions, gas, acid secretion, etc, which is also communicable. All of this may blend together into an effective “je ne sais quoi” in practice, but I do not believe it rises above the sum of its communicable parts, a sum to which we have assigned a word rather than laboriously communicate each of the components. There may also be actual qualia involved, such as pain mixed in with the hunger, but the fact that you are taking as an example something that is almost entirely a description of internal things and comparing it with the color red makes me think you don’t have a clear picture of what qualia is. Please stick with examples such as the qualia associated with the five human senses. You will find that it makes less sense to try to describe them in terms of information, and your comparisons will be more easy to discuss in terms of the many arguments for and against qualia that can be found, for example, in the wikipedia article. Color is a pure example of qualia, and is generally the mode of choice in discussions. The Mary’s Room arguments are interesting, for example, though ultimately find the zombie arguments most convincing form a personal perspective, because I have always wondered regarding qualia at their non-necessity. I can “picture” a world in which I do not “see” anything, but I can, like a robot might, use the information from my eyes to navigate and distinguish wavelengths of light. I could form words “light” and “dark” to describe aspects of the information I am receiving (for example “dark” means “no information”), but these are just words, distinct from literally “seeing” light and dark. That this is not the case is surprising, because I can think of no use, evolutionary or otherwise, for the insertion of qualia into the above situation; without qualia there would be nothing to distinguish them from us so-imbued other than our insistence that qualia exists.
But this calls into question the unity of the mind. If there is one part of the mind that generates subjective color experiences when it receives certain information, and another part which doesn’t, then how is it that both these parts can generate unified phenomenal states that you experience? It would seem to be necessary for both to communicate to do so, and indeed, from ordinary experience, it seems they can: if I tell you ‘imagine red’, the part of you which processes speech has no trouble at all telling the part of you that generates color qualia to pull up the requisite impression; but it doesn’t seem possible to generate this quale via speech presented to you.
So if you think of the brain as made up of modules, the color qualia module can apparently only generate qualia when information comes in through port A (the eyes/optical nerves), but not if it arrives through port B (the interface with the speech-processing module). But fundamentally, both are the same thing – information, i.e. strings of symbols, patterns of activation, etc., arriving at the right part of the brain. But nevertheless, they have radically different effects! This motivates the conclusion that the information is not all there is.
Or just think about subtracting all the subjective qualities of experience: the information received through the senses is processed and used to generate behavior. This behavior can be made identical to the behavior of a human being. You can continue refining this automaton, ultimately up to simulating each individual neuron’s action. Does this simulation have subjective experience? Well, it seems clear that the coarse-grained version we started with doesn’t: it just generates outputs from inputs. But the same is true on every deeper, more fine-grained level! Thus, in the end, you have a being physically identical to an ordinary human, but seemingly without subjective experiences, without qualia. So, the story goes, qualia thus can’t be contained in the purely physical description of the world.
Nevertheless, there’s a way it feels like to be hungry, just as there’s a way it feels like to experience red; it seems to me that this hungriness is just as difficult to communicate, just as much part of subjective experience as the redness associated with detecting light of a certain wavelength. The same goes for the stomach contractions, the hunger pains, salivation etc. These are all concrete physical processes, but they also have a way they feel like, a subjective quality, associated with them – and that’s all qualia are.
But in the case of hunger these subjective qualities are reducible to a much more suitable choice of basis-states. Salivation, for example, is not in-itself qualia. But the feeling of salivation is reducible to qualia (mostly the sense of touch, but perhaps others). Similarly hunger, IMO, is not qualia per-se, but is an amalgam of qualia and non-qualia that unnecessarily complicates a discussion of qualia. It especially complicates matters given that the amalgam includes a non-negligible amount of non-qualia that can be grouped and confusingly mis-labelled as qualia and argued to be communicable in comparison with a more pure example of qualia.
Well, to each their own, but to me, the subjective experience of hunger is just as well (or ill) defined a quale as the subjective experience of redness. I don’t think it’s a terribly important point, though, so I won’t belabor it.
If hunger is not substantially a signal based on various sensory information about different aspects of the body - where do you think it’s getting it’s information from?
But ultimately I was trying to come up with an example that didn’t seem to be based on senses and was difficult to communicate and I think a better example would be love. It doesn’t seem like that is purely sensory based - it seems like there is other internal input driving that.
So, yes, I completely understand what qualia is and why the color “red” is a very pure way of discussing it - but I was attempting to find an example of something difficult or impossible to communicate that we would not classify as qualia to show that not all information is easily communicable.
Zombies:
I personally reject pretty much any zombie argument - it seems trivially flawed. To say that something is identical to a human but then pull out one aspect of our humanness that is intertwined with the entire operation of our very being just doesn’t seem immediately possible or consistent.
To draw a conclusion from something so speculative and possibly completely impossible seems invalid.
I think it’s ok to call into question the unity of mind. It seems perfectly reasonable (and it seems evidence supports this) to me to think that “the mind” is a big mess of competing interests at many different levels with communication inter and intra level and ultimately ending up with some sort of cohesive action. One of those levels can be the highest level primarily pulling different things together, but it’s not really in complete control, merely the highest level of awareness of abstraction.
I don’t think you can say that “fundementally, both are the same thing” - I think that’s similar to saying an apple and an orange are basically the same thing if they have the same number of electrons, protons and neutrons.
If we manually stimulated each rod and con with electrodes to match a particular scene (for simplicity ignore the complications of saccades and the predictive activation of visual cortex neurons, etc.) do you think we would basically have the same experience as the actual scene? If so, how can that not point to qualia as merely an internal attribute of our consciousness?
Since I’ve been busy I’ll just spectate as **Raft **handles this. I’ll just throw in some of the bases of my stance:
- Red is a stimulus response.
- Everyone has a different brain, based on some common generalized template, which grows differently at the hardware level, and programs itself differently at the software level.
- You can’t reflect very deeply on the internal operation of your brain.
There can be some value in studying “broken” objects. (Gandalf*, in Lord of the Rings, was full of poop!) Oliver Sacks, in his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” gives lots of examples. Horrible ones…but informative.
In roughly the same way, it was (horrible) head injuries that led to the understanding of how certain faculties are located in certain places in the brain. Soldiers with injuries to the rear of their heads, for instance, came home blind, even though there was nothing wrong with their eyes or optic nerves.
So, yes, “zombie” thought experiments (and, perhaps, with sufficient moral safeguards, practical experiments) can shed significant light on the issues of separability and reduction of human faculties.
- “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
Tell that to Otto Hahn!
But studying the actual working of a brain, whether a normal or altered brain is very different from speculating how an altered brain would behave. One is based on actual empirical evidence and the other is based on speculation that has no requirement to reflect reality in any way.
From p-zombie wiki:
“In fact we can conceive of a world physically indistinguishable from our world but in which there is no consciousness (a zombie world) and we can not see why it is not logically possible.”
That is such a ridiculously unsupportable position that I honestly can’t figure out how someone could ever have taken it seriously. The very point that is unknown and being debated (consciousness and it’s various attributes) can’t be extracted from our machinery just because someone says they can conceive of it. If I didn’t know the shape of our world, and I wasn’t aware of various physical constraints, I could conceive of our world being flat - but that is simply due to my lack of knowledge, not because it is actually possible.
Now, let me qualify my position as saying that if we agree (as you say with safeguards etc.) that the possibility of a p-zombie is completely unknown and that any conclusions must not rely on a p-zombie being possible, then there could be value in using a p-zombie in a thought experiment.
Is there any evidence of unusual physical brain structure in blind or colorblind people? I don’t know if it’s a hardware issue or not, but this would be interesting information.
You are unknowingly constructing a straw man. You are assuming the thought experiment requires that we must somehow be able to pluck out qualia from the working of an otherwise physically identical human mind. It doesn’t. We could in principle, for instance, produce a computer program that produced identical output to a human mind, but for which the database associating wavelengths of light with the environment is trivial enough to render the nonexistence of qualia particularly transparent. Qualia is not necessary to distinguish wavelengths of light in the same way it is not necessary to distinguish right from left, or the number 1 from the number 2. All that is necessary is a database.
Yes, I was reading “indistinguishable” as exactly the same physically as opposed to indistinguishable from an external perspective.
Having said that, it is completely unknown whether you could mimic a human’s responses perfectly and not have qualia, and my opinion is that it’s probably not possible. Meaning that our internal states are important in arriving at our next course of action, deviation would lead to different behavior.
I sort of agree…and sort of don’t… I think there is a valuable role for “thought experiments” and philosophical speculations.
We’re a million miles away from real “Artificial Intelligence,” or from a Star-Trek style Transporter, or time travel…or flying cars!..but it is still within the realm of imagination. It’s interesting to speculate on…even if the results tell more about us than about the subject matter!
I don’t see it. I agree with the cite: “…we can not see why it is not logically possible.” You apparently do, but I sure don’t…
I project it backward from the experience of severely autistic adults, to whom the world is populated by zombies. There is no objective evidence for anyone else’s “feelings” or subjective experiences.
Most of us take it for granted, extrapolating from our own feelings and taking as an axiom that pretty much all people are mostly the same as we are. I say something funny, and my sister laughs; it is a reasonable assumption that she is feeling the same subjective sensations that I feel when she says something funny and I laugh.
But it is, ultimately, an assumption. Solipsism is the only view that doesn’t depend on such postulates and stipulations.
I definitely agree that empirical research is better than a priori conjecturing. Sherlock Holmes said that, from a drop of water, a philosopher could deduce (induce?) the existence of a Niagara or an Atlantic. I dissent from this, as a drop of water doesn’t exhibit some of the large-scale behavior of water. The philosopher, given only a drop of water to study, wouldn’t predict the way Niagara turns white with foam.
Still…I defend, to some limited degree, armchair speculation. Yes, it can be nothing more than mental masturbation, but it prepares the mind for broader ideas.
Really, I think, that’s all I was saying.
(The experiments they have performed on highly autistic children are absolutely fascinating! The fact that there are people who simply cannot envision someone else’s point of view forces us to change at least some of our assumptions about consciousness.)