I think most would agree p-zombies are logically possible. — frank

Joke aside, I disagree with that. I view consciousness as a necessary feature, not some decorative item easily disposed of.

Because people who don't like cauliflower try to avoid eating cauliflower independently of the circumstances. — Olivier5

Category error - confusing someone's flavour preferences with flavours.

Because people who don't like cauliflower try to avoid eating cauliflower independently of the circumstances.

Because an optical illusion cannot be reasoned away, it will crop up again and again, independently of the circumstances.

Because you can recognise the timbre of a musical instrument, the scent of a rose, the color of a dress in spite of them being always a little bit different than the last time.

Because you can recognise the taste of some food that you haven't had for decades, e.g. Proust's madeleines.

Because dogs can follows trails, and find corpses even under water.

Because the same applies to words: their meaning varies from one sentence to the next, and yet we still use them and we still recognise their meaning somewhat. — Olivier5

I think the point is that none of these require talking in terms of qualia in order to be effectively and exhaustively explained.

Joke aside, I disagree with that. I view consciousness as a necessary feature, not some decorative item easily disposed of. — Olivier5

Funny thing: both pro-qualia and anti-qualia arguments depend on your ability to conceive the p-zombie.

I think the point is that none of these require talking in terms of qualia in order to be effectively and exhaustively explained. — creativesoul

Give it a try.

Category error - confusing someone's flavour preferences with flavours. — fdrake

Not confusing them, just saying you can't have flavour preferences if flavours don't exist.

you can't have flavour preferences if flavours don't exist. — Olivier5

What kind of claim is that? Is there anything that could convince you that it's false?

An existence claim. You can’t have movie preferences without movies.

?

But is it empirical, logical, grammatical, theoretical, what?

you can't have flavour preferences if flavours don't exist.
— Olivier5

What kind of claim is that? Is there anything that could convince you that it's false? — Srap Tasmaner

It is a logical claim. As such, it could be disproved by using propositional logic. I am saying something like:

If A and B do not exist, then the proposition (A > B) is meaningless.

You can’t have movie preferences without movies. — Marchesk

But nobody is denying that I can't have coffee preferences without there being coffees. We're just denying that preferring how one coffee tastes to how another coffee tastes necessitates there being such an entity as how each coffee tastes to me.

This is just the same old fight against Platonism.

It is a logical claim. As such, it could be disproved by using propositional logic. — Olivier5

How would I go about doing that? How would you go about proving that if I like how this coffee tastes, there is an entity, how this coffee tastes to me, that I like?

We're just denying that preferring how one coffee tastes to how another coffee tastes necessitates there being such an entity as how each coffee tastes to me. — Srap Tasmaner

How would you have a preference if the coffee didn’t taste like something to you? I wonder if @Banno really is wanting to go this far. Seems like it’s doing violence to ordinary language to deny there’s something it’s like to taste coffee.

How would you go about proving that if I like how this coffee tastes, there is an entity, how this coffee tastes to me, that I like? — Srap Tasmaner

Would you be able to recognise the coffee you like in a blind test?

At the end of all this discussion, however successful Dennett is in his intuition pumping, I wish to preserve the what it’s like. That is the one aspect of conscious experience for which a denial is prima facie absurd. It is what survives the quining, whatever we wish to do with the term qualia. Although as noted, Dennett did not attempt to quine privacy, and immediate apprehension was not directly challenged, just the epistemically access to comparing previous qualia.

How would you have a preference if the coffee didn’t taste like something to you? — Marchesk

This has nothing to do with coffee or with coffee tastes or with mental events, nothing like that; this is all about how to deal with words like "something".

You believe that if i experience something, there's something I'm experiencing, and the only alternative is that I'm experiencing nothing. But that's wrong. I've stipulated that I'm experiencing something; I'm denying the platonist inference that there's something I'm experiencing, period.

Would you be able to recognise the coffee you like in a blind test? — Olivier5

I dunno. What would it prove either way? What if there were a large trial and people couldn't; would that empirical result disprove the existence of qualia?

I'm working on an ordinary language rendering of the (consciousness)process. — creativesoul

A worthy endeavor. Opening major will be important.

Carry on!!

If you can recognize your favorite coffee only by its taste, it means you have memorized this taste somehow.

But that's wrong. I've stipulated that I'm experiencing something; I'm denying the platonist inference that there's something I'm experiencing, period. — Srap Tasmaner

I’m not sure how to parse this.

Like the way I memorize a phone number?

Memory is a whole 'nother complicated mess. How much do you need to oversimplify it?

How much do you need to complexify it?

Grammar, in the schoolbook sense, is not a sure guide to ontology. Think of Quine's puzzle about "seeking" and friends: if I'm looking for a spy, that doesn't mean there's a spy I'm looking for.

How much do you need to complexify it? — Olivier5

I'll leave figuring out how memory works to neuroscientists.

Grammar, in the schoolbook sense, is not a sure guide to ontology. Think of Quine's puzzle about "seeking" and friends: if I'm looking for a spy, that doesn't mean there's a spy I'm looking for. — Srap Tasmaner

So just because I’m tasting the coffee doesn’t mean there is a taste of coffee? Just because I see a color illusion, doesn’t mean there is a color illusion?

In everyday contexts, sure. The question is whether you should build a philosophical position on how the languages you and I know happen to handle the grammatical transformation here. Obviously I think that's not a formula for success.

I’m building on the foundation that there is a way things seem to us. How we express this in language, and which terms work is a secondary matter. The coffee tastes like something to me.

Let me explain with another gustatory example. I made dinner tonight, a carbonara. I picked a big piece of guanciale (a sort of extremely fat bacon made from the cheeks of a pig) in the fridge and sliced the whole of it. It was about a month old and I wanted it out.

I fried them slices in the pan, and a horrible smell soon filled up the kitchen. I stopped the fire and started to pay attention to the smell. Fried guanciale always smells a bit acrid, but this was different... What was it? It was like old walnuts when they become rancid, I reconned... I smelled it again, and then it downed on me that my old guanciale was simply rancid, i.e. a banal form of fat oxidation. But you see, I had never smelled rancid guanciale before.

Now I have. And I have memorized it. I won't even start to slice a piece of guanciale without smelling it first... This will spare me trouble. I lost 30 mn with this whole mess. I had to cut another piece of beacon made for amatriciana... It had hot pepper all over it, which tastes great in the amatriciana (these are pasta sauces, in case someone wonders) but wouldn't go in the carbonara, so I had to peel the thing before slicing it. Then I had to clean the pan because I didn't want the rancid fat to taint the taste of my sauce...

In the end, the pasta was good. Nobody complained.

The moral of this story is that a sense of smell would be nothing without the capacity to remember smells.

The senses of smell and taste provide an obvious Darwinian advantage in that they help the animal avoid certain foods that can be bad for its health (by tagging those with an unpleasant taste or smell) and gives it an incentive to consume other kind of foods (by giving them a pleasant taste or smell). Maybe rancid fat is bad for your health, or maybe it just correlates with other things bad for your health such as bacteria.

The animal is even capable of remembering tastes of food that it consumed in the past, and attach to them a positive or negative tag through taste modulation depending on whether past consumption led it to sickness, or on the contrary healed it. During pregnancy, the tastes and smells are somehow affected and certain smells become hard to bear, supposedly to get additional protection against toxins.

We don't know our food through chemical analysis of all components, we taste it. It's as good as a biological lab can get. To support this complex food analysis and signaling system, tastes must have some form of identity, some consistence, some presence. You must be able to remember them, identify them, etc.

Qualia vita sunt.

But the argument is precisely over how properly to theorize our experience, isn't it? Unfortunately that means there are facts we all agree on, in some vague sense -- we can and do taste coffee -- and there are some we don't -- there being the taste of this coffee to me right now, primarily as a theoretical entity, but related to our common-sense understanding.

So the question regarding "the sensation itself" I have is: what makes a sensation be more than relational, dispositional and functional properties?

I take it you'll agree that sensations are relational, dispositional and functional to some degree. Or have those as a component. Let's take as an example putting my hand on something too hot and reflexively withdrawing it. The sensation of heat derives from a relationship between my skin and the hot thing (relational), the reflex (a behaviour) of withdrawing my hand is coincident with treating the hot object as a threat to withdraw from (dispositional), and detecting sufficient heat serves as a cause of the reflex of withdrawal to end the threat that I have (functional).

It seems to me if I removed the relational component from the experience, I'd no longer be talking about the same thing at all. If I removed the behavioural component of it, I'd have had a different experience - my hand possibly would not have withdrawn in the reflex. If I removed the dispositional component, I'd no longer have unconsciously appraised the gathering sensation of heat as a threat. Furthermore, I removed that dispositional component, it seems to me I'd be removing the components of my experience that coincide with its character as a threat triggering a reflex - the stress, the panic, the pain, the unpleasantness - and removing those things also removes a substantial component of "what it was like" for me. If I remove the composite of these things and their functional relationships, I'm no longer talking about the experience at all - or I would have both done and felt nothing and burned off my finger. — fdrake

The relational, dispositional and functional aspects you describe appear to be reflexive and automatic; in other words: unconscious. You withdrew your hand as a reflex and "unconsciously appraised" the heat as a threat. It seems that the body could have done this without any additional feeling.

So it seems if there are phenomenal properties in that experience, they cannot be independent of relational, functional, behavioural, and dispositional properties, as if I changed all of those I'd change "what it was like" for me and even the scenario I was considering in the first place. Given that, why should someone commit themselves to an independent "phenomenal" type associated with the experiences, when the elements of the phenomenal type ("what is it likes") vary with changes in the type they are supposed to be independent of? — fdrake

I don't think that phenomenal properties are independent of the physical, but I do think they are private and inaccessible from a third-person (purely behavioural/functional) perspective. Phenomenal properties can be assumed or inferred from behaviour, but Dennett seems to want to go further than this.

I'll leave figuring out how memory works to neuroscientists. — Srap Tasmaner

So why did you want to go into that, then?

the end of all this discussion, however successful Dennett is in his intuition pumping, I wish to preserve the what it’s like. That is the one aspect of conscious experience for which a denial is prima facie absurd — Marchesk

So you would agree that explaining function doesnt explain qualia. That's a pretty common view.

So you would agree that explaining function doesnt explain qualia. That's a pretty common view. — frank

I think qualia are functional. If they exists, they exist for a reason.