Eliminativism is a radical school of thought, in that it really does question the reality of first-person experience - not simply 'reports' about it, but the reality of it. And it is exactly in that context that the term 'qualia' is debated. It's got little to do with Wittgenstein's 'private language' argument, as I have noted, Wittgenstein was not a materialist, but Dennett is. — Wayfarer
Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I do not deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. — Dennett
Searle said further: "To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have." — Wayfarer
Dennett doesn't deny the existence of consciousness as the above "Quining Qualia" quote makes clear. Contra Searle, Dennett rejects a first-person/third-person phenomenal distinction. — AndrewM
There is no private qualia property that could, even in principle, be switched on or off. — AndrewM
An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
And I'm saying you can't make that claim without invoking the very thing you're trying to explain. — Wayfarer
f for instance you did an fMRI study of 'brain states' (and, note, there is a huge cloud hanging over all that kind of science anyway), then you're obviously not going to see anything like 'an abstraction'. — Wayfarer
So whatever answers you find in analysing the data, must assume what they set out to prove — Wayfarer
Dennett doesn't deny the existence of consciousness as the above "Quining Qualia" quote makes clear. Contra Searle, Dennett rejects a first-person/third-person phenomenal distinction. Instead the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have - exhibit behaviorally. — Andrew M
which is why a materialist philosophy of any type must say that it can be accounted for in third-person terms. — Wayfarer
The first person perspective is never the object of experience, — Wayfarer
I'm saying that they're particular brain states (namely, the brain states that amount to concepts.) — TerrapinStation
Surely [Dennett] thinks that they can exhibit behaviorally, or that they're just the sorts of things that sometimes do exhibit behaviorally, no? — TerrapinStation
The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.
Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.”
“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?”
You continually claim that materialists philosophers must come to such and such conclusion. — TerrapinStation
How would you define "object"/"object of experience" here? — TerrapinStation
In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.
The problem is that like a stage magician, [Dennett] is using his honed skills of misdirection to make 'the hard problem of consciousness' seem to disappear, all the while standing in the way of the audience to see it. His approach uses instrumental reasoning to make a case against subjective realism from seemingly logical examples. In a car, his approach would cite the existence of a steering column, gear shift, and ignition to explain how the driver is unnecessary, and that in fact the seat belt must be the real driver since that’s all we see whenever we get out of the car and look at the driver’s seat. All that remains is for neuroscience to figure out the mechanism by which the buckle, steering wheel, accelerator, and DMV fit together.
He assumes that the fact of optical illusion exposes the unreality of perception, rather than ambiguity between layers of complex human perception. He assumes from the start that subjectivity can only arise from Cartesian dualism rather than something else (like a sense-based monism). He assumes that our experience of subjectivity is fatally flawed but that our sense of objectivity is beyond question.
So I'm arguing that self, in this sense, is something that must be excluded by materialism, or at any rate, it has to be accounted for in terms of the activities of brains, molecules, and physical forces, and so on - if there is a real subject, it defeats materialism. That attitude is what materialism or physicalism is, after all. And it appears possible to exclude the subject, because it really is nowhere 'out there'; it never is an object of experience, in the way others are, or animals are, or planets, stars, mountains, etc; it is not 'objectively existent'. — Wayfarer
I've been arguing that to equate a 'brain state' with a concept, requires conceptual analysis, and so must involve a circular argument. — Wayfarer
so to say that a brain state is an explanation of a concept — Wayfarer
Materialist philosophers must say that some material existent is the basis of reality — Wayfarer
Even if that were so, it would be about making claims as such. But that has no impact on what's the case ontologically. I'm saying that they're identical ontologically. Our claims do not matter for whether that's the case or not. It's not as if what's factually the case in the world somehow hinges on the claims we make or how well we make them, whether we make fallacious claims or not, etc.
In any event, I wasn't forwarding an argument, so the criticism that something was fallacious as an argument (specifically via circularity) doesn't even apply. — TerrapinStation
'An object' is just what it sounds like - ping-pong balls, computers, cars, trees, planets, stars, to pick a random sample. Objects are just that - things that exist in the world. — Wayfarer
The point about them is, that they're irreducibly first-person, so certainly not 'objects of experience' in the sense given above. — Wayfarer
There is a well-known analogy for this concept in the Upaniṣads, namely, that of 'the eye that can see other things, but cannot see itself, the hand can grasp things, but it cannot grasp itself'.) — Wayfarer
So I'm arguing that self, in this sense, is something that must be excluded by materialism — Wayfarer
But then the issue is, you're denying the very faculty that is proposing the argument! — Wayfarer
what, in fact, are you talking about? — Wayfarer
But then first person experience is an object, since it exists in the world. — TerrapinStation
It seems like you're saying that experience (or that perhaps one's self) is something other than experience. — TerrapinStation
That's an ontological fact. — TerrapinStation
remember when I said that you continually claim that materialists must think such and such, despite the fact that some of us think no such thing? — TerrapinStation
why do you find it so absurd that someone would act as if the world is always more than descriptions and explanations? — WillowOfDarkness
How then can we expect a description or explanation of them to be exhaustive? — TheWillowOfDarkness
The "hard problem" is demanding the incoherent-- knowledge which exhaustive of the subject. It is just as, if not more, reductionist as any eliminative materialist. — TheWillowOfDarkness
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
Rejecting the qualitiative difference between the first and third person perspective is the nub of the entire debate. — Wayfarer
Denett grants that first-person experience has properties, but he denies that they're intrinsic, he denies that there is anything that can't be explained in third-person terms. They appear real, but are not intrinsically real — Wayfarer
Surely he thinks that they can exhibit behaviorally, or that they're just the sorts of things that sometimes do exhibit behaviorally, no? — Terrapin Station
Although if there's a difference between what does exhibit behaviorally and what doesn't but could (and what nevertheless occurs while not exihibiting behaviorally), it would seem that one can't actually identify the "intentional stance" as what exhibits behaviorally. — Terrapin Station
What we think and feel may not always be noticeable in everyday observable behavior but, per materialism, there is always some material instantiation (e.g., in brain activity, particles shifting around, or some such). — Andrew M
Life used to be a deep mystery, and no doubt there were those who maintained that it could not be explained physically. But then a theory at the correct level of emergence was discovered, which not only explains life, bit explains it rather simply as a phenomenon of replicators subject to variation and selection. — tom
The problem of qualia is insoluble and not amenable to reason. — Tom
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