Sorry. What?

There's rather a lot of ambiguity which can be pivoted upon in that mixture. It's also quite difficult to tell if you're a direct or indirect representational realist (is seeing an object being in a representation relationship with that object - direct - or is it being in a relationship with a representation of that object - indirect) from how you argue. — fdrake

I get you. I'd explain it as: I don't adopt a position for the sake of adopting a position. That is, I don't subscribe wholesale to philosophical positions. I try to learn about how things work and build up an understanding that way. If that ends up being in accordance with a preexisting philosophical stance, great. If not, also great. I'm not pushing a hidden agenda or anything. Here I'm just making a case, quite openly, that qualia are a useful concept, nothing else.

In that regard, it's quite difficult (for me) to distinguish what your views are from the 'stroky beard dipshit views' about sense data. — fdrake

Ah okay, indelicate phrasing hit a wrong nerve, my apologies. I wasn't dumping on any particular theory, quite the opposite: I was characterising how people react to useful notions like qualia and sense-data. My point was that, whether or not you agree with a theory about a thing should be distinct from whether the concept of that thing is a useful one. Anyone can come up with a 'stroky beard dipshit theory' about, say, eggs. It doesn't follow that eggs are not to be talked about.

It is so odd, that the precursor to the human cognitive system, the mere transformation of one kind of energy into another, in a measly five modes of operation, in a near one-to-one correspondence, fully observable and reproducible......finds itself relegated to a non-entity. — Mww

I don't get this. Are you saying that if I personally don't know the collective noun for something, I'm saying that something is a non-entity? That's a logical leap too far for me and, more to the point, completely untrue.

I gather your main concern is really:

Perception is a brain function.
— Kenosha Kid — Mww

whereas you hold that perception is more the entirety of an individual's sense activation? I can find plenty of definitions and usages consistent with the former and none with the latter, but I'm open to whatever you've got.

The way I see it, when we use the English verb ‘to see’, it can mean ‘to look at’, ‘to perceive’, or ‘to understand’. The distinction between these ‘ways of seeing’ translate (in my mind) as dimensional - a temporally-located observation (4D), an a-temporal value (5D) or a non-judgmental relation (6D).

In Greek these are three different words, so they would look at (vlepo) the stick bent, perceive (horao) it as both straight and bent, and understand (eido) light refraction and human visual capacity that results in a straight stick appearing bent under certain experiential conditions.

We confuse the issue when we talk about perception as if it must follow logic, the law of excluded middle, etc. and insist on determining which perception is ‘reality’ and which is ‘illusion’, as if this matters at the level of language and talking about ideas. It matters at the level of determining action, but the capacity to hold seemingly contradictory perceptions in the mind simultaneously (and without judgement) is the key to understanding.

We are only fairly recently acknowledging the destructive nature of judgemental language, both to the flow and exchange of ideas, and to our temporal interactions with the world. Recognising categorisations such as better, naive, weirdness and sense as value structures under certain experiential conditions can help us to keep an open mind.

The use of ‘qualia’ as a consolidation of conscious experience into definable objects, seems to me a step in the opposite direction.

Well the senses themselves don't cogitate. So there's no puzzle by itself here. — Manuel

Believe it or not, I was about to butt in to yours and Janus’ dialogue with, “the senses don’t think and cognition doesn’t sense”, but I figured he’d think I was picking on him....again. So I deleted myself.
————-

Why not just have cognition alone? — Manuel

We always have cognition, but sometimes we have cognition alone, meaning without perceptions. Any mathematics done in your head, without transferring it to speech or paper or whatever, is cognition alone. Something else that seems to have bit the modernization dust....a priori knowledge. Can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t measure it, get rid of it.
————-

why is that what we sense differs so much from the phenomena that causes the sensing. — Manuel

Maybe it’s as simple as hardware vs software.

.

It matters at the level of determining action, but the capacity to hold seemingly contradictory perceptions in the mind simultaneously (and without judgement) is the key to understanding. — Possibility

The use of ‘qualia’ as a consolidation of conscious experience into definable objects, seems to me a step in the opposite direction. — Possibility

Funny that you say that, I recently finished re-reading C.I. Lewis' Mind and World Order. He was the person that introduced "qualia" into the philosophical literature as we understand it today, and in effect, he was arguing that these things are helpful in so far as they are guide to actions.

As for "seemingly contradictory" perceptions, I think you are right. Language is good for ordinary use, it becomes problematic when we try to do some kind of metaphysics with it, we force the world to conform to word use, which need not follow.

Recognising categorisations such as better, naive, weirdness and sense as value structures under certain experiential conditions can help us to keep an open mind. — Possibility

I agree. And saying that all this is weird is just true, because it is.

We always have cognition, but sometimes we have cognition alone, meaning without perceptions. Any mathematics done in your head, without transferring it to speech or paper or whatever, is cognition alone. Something else that seems to have bit the modernization dust....a priori knowledge. Can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t measure it, get rid of it. — Mww

It's interesting you mention math. I'm going down the rationalist road for the time being and questions arise. What you say is true, but I wonder how such a claim could be tested. In principle, yes, correct.

In practice, as in, imagining a baby locked in a space it can't move or have perceptions nor sensations other than darkness and growing in such horrid environments, would such a person develop math skills?

I guess it might, but I don't know. I think experience here plays some minor role in the flourishment of even basic math skills.

Maybe it’s as simple as hardware vs software. — Mww

Maybe. But it's not clear to me what is software and hardware here.

It’s just really not clear to me how neuroscience has changed the philosophical landscape here.

For instance, the SEP quote @fdrake posted — we already knew that was wrong, at least since Sellars, long before the advent of modern neuroscience. And Sellars is to some degree filling out Quine’s argument in “Two Dogmas”. All of this is either the shadow of Kant cast over analytic philosophy or re-invention of Kant. People just didn’t want to believe that Empiricism had died, so it had to be killed over and over and over again. (Point number one: this attachment to the idea of empiricism is worth thinking about.) If the neuroscientists tell us that we have no conscious access to any such ‘data’ and that by the time there’s something we can be aware of, it’s been scrubbed, munged, filtered, processed and modeled — yeah, we knew that already.

We are told that we have a mental model of — unclear. Not of the world exactly, or things in it, because we are told that everything “out there” is hypothetical. If that means we have only degrees of belief — not knowledge — so be it. But Hume already figured out that reasoning concerning matters of fact is only probable, and he had also recognized that this meant he was flirting with (if not marrying) scepticism. Sorry, but I’m still not seeing anything new here.

What is new is the word ‘model’. I haven’t read the literature, but around here it seems to be considered self-evident what a model is. (Excepting @apokrisis, who believes he has to account for how it is possible for the universe to have such critters in it as ‘models’.) Within the practice of science, in my limited understanding, ‘model’ might as well be short for ‘mathematical model’. (And that’s true even if you’re not doing statistics.)

If that’s the paradigm upon which the psychological term “model” is based, it has a curious side-effect: the traditional candidate (among benighted philosophers of the past) for direct, unmediated perception is mathematical objects. We do not perceive them with our senses but know them directly. Insofar as the models in our brains are modeled on the models of scientific theory, they ought to be — it turns out — made of stuff that is not hypothetical and that (thank goodness!) we need no sensory apparatus at all to understand. But I can’t imagine any of the neuroscience enthusiasts around here talking about mathematical objects this way... (Ha! cross-posting with @Mww!)

Are you seriously claiming that I can see a flower more clearly than I could when I was five years old, because that would be the implication of your 'ever-improving' model claim? — Janus

I think I said 'baby', but otherwise: yes.

Can't speak for KK but in a way my ability to see and appreciate (for want of a better word) a flower has definitely improved since I was 5. Given that flowers are not just objects to see but also objects to contextualize (flowers as symbols, flowers as a functioning part of nature, etc) the fullness of my understanding of a flower has evolved. And, if I studied botany, I would see a given flower in an even more enhanced way and see things others might not. Objects can be seen and not seen - if you understand my meaning. — Tom Storm

:up:

That all you got? — Janus

Well no, but there wasn't really anything to go on. It was just a flat contradiction. However...

How can it be right to say the external world is an hypothesis, when we all experience a world external to our bodies — Janus

I'm intrigued to hear how you think we do that. Because from where I'm sitting, nothing of the external world is, for instance, in my brain. Cut me open (please don't) and there's no aforementioned flower in there being experienced.

If you're thinking some kind of perfect divine insight, okay that's your belief system and I'm not going to try and talk you out of it, likewise for some exotic everything-is-one-consciousness-type belief.

But otherwise there's nothing in my actual experience that contains anything of the external world. We seem (from experience of other phenomena) to receive partial data, which isn't experienced, from our senses, that data is processed in complex ways, put together with other data (from other senses, memories, thoughts, etc.) to create the experience of the red flower, in whatever context. It doesn't come with a verifiable NFT relating it to an object in the outside world: indeed, experience can easily be demonstrated to be misleading or flat out erroneous. Some experiences have little or nothing to do with the outside world, such as dreams and hallucinations. There is no absolute certainty that any object we seem to perceive is as we perceive it, or even there at all. And the contexts in which those objects exist are even more abstract.

None of this is to say I am dubious about the existence of any object that purportedly causes my perception of it. An objective reality is by far the best, in fact imo the only sensible explanation for our experiences, though others have alternatives (such as simulation theory, which still has an external world, just not the one we experience). Nonetheless, I am proceeding only in extremely high confidence in the hypothesis that my experience of the red flower is caused by an external object with certain properties that cause that experience. I might be proven wrong, either about the flower or the external world as a whole.

Are you saying that if I personally don't know the collective noun for something, I'm saying that something is a non-entity? — Kenosha Kid

Not exactly. I’m saying that if perception is a brain function, then it has lost its established meaning, hence become a non-entity with respect to it.
———-

I'm open to whatever you've got. — Kenosha Kid

History. Not gonna help me much, is it.

Not exactly. I’m saying that if perception is a brain function, then it has lost its established meaning, hence become a non-entity with respect to it. — Mww

I didn't get that at all from what you said, thanks for clarifying. Can you cite the established meaning? I'm checking all the usual sources...

Wikipedia: Philosophy of Perception

External or sensory perception (exteroception), tells us about the world outside our bodies. Using our senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, we perceive colors, sounds, textures, etc. of the world at large. There is a growing body of knowledge of the mechanics of sensory processes in cognitive psychology.

Perception here "uses", and therefore is distinct from, senses, and the study of it is within cognitive psychology.

From Stanford: The Contents of Perception

In contemporary philosophy, the phrase ‘the contents of perception’ means, roughly, what is conveyed to the subject by her perceptual experience.

(I'm spotting a lot of humunculi now!)

From a randomly selected neuroscience article:

During the perception process, our brain is able to integrate a few typical features to a complex pattern.

I'm not finding anything suggestive of, say, nerves in skin firing, but not am I confident this is what you mean.

EDIT: And less randomly from Wiki again, citing Schacter's Psychology:

Perception (from the Latin perceptio, meaning gathering or receiving) is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.

which is what I had in mind.

EDIT-WITHIN-EDIT: Oh there you go. The correct term for sensory information is just 'sensory information'.

Anyone can come up with a 'stroky beard dipshit theory' about, say, eggs. It doesn't follow that eggs are not to be talked about. — Kenosha Kid

:up:

There's also the possibility that sense data don't exist. And a more pernicious possibility that thinking in terms of sense data makes it difficult to compare and contrast rival accounts. Not all accounts of perception have something like sense data in them, and talking in those terms might shroud out equally plausible theories.

It’s just really not clear to me how neuroscience has changed the philosophical landscape here. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

I get this suspicion too, not that I know much about the philosophical intuitions of neuroscientists.

What is new is the word ‘model’. I haven’t read the literature, but around here it seems to be considered self-evident what a model is. — Srap Tasmaner

I think everyone who uses it here treats it, self evidently, in a different manner. For me a model is a mapping of one set of values - the target - to another set of values - the modelled values which somehow presents information about them. Changes in the target should be tracked by changes in the modelled values (A changes correlate with B changes).

To my understanding, when people talk about 'the model', they are imagining that the world consists of set values (so called 'hidden states' or 'external states') which determine its behaviour, and the body models those hidden states to mine useful information out of the environment. There is ambiguity in the use of the word 'model' because sometimes people go interchangeably between the model as the relationship between the hidden states and the modelled values and the model as just the modelled values.

EG, my left foot has a current average temperature (hidden state), which is 'inferred' into a feeling of warmth or coldness (modelled value) through the model, though the warmth or coldness is coloured by considerations of too hot or too cold etc.

I don't think the overall approach talked about is so new philosophically, regarding embodied perception etc. Gibson made similar points in 1979 ("Ecological Approach to Visual Perception"), Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger before that. The discussion about models and representations is even older.

On forum too, the debates cover similar ground about perceptual intermediaries and direct and indirect perception most of the time. IMO the science theory is a terrain of debate in the same way as phenomenology can be the terrain of debate.

I've yet to see anything from the neuroscience discussions alone that are decisive regarding direct vs indirect realism one way or another, though I think @Kenosha Kid, @Isaac, @Banno you and I tend to have this debate in the shadow of the question: "does embodied cognition + active perception tend to favour direct or indirect realism and how?", and the science we end up discussing together might as well be a specific account of embodied cognition + active perception as far as that inference is concerned.

For instance, the SEP quote fdrake posted — we already knew that was wrong, at least since Sellars, long before the advent of modern neuroscience. And Sellars is to some degree filling out Quine’s argument in “Two Dogmas”. All of this is either the shadow of Kant cast over analytic philosophy or re-invention of Kant. People just didn’t want to believe that Empiricism had died, so it had to be killed over and over and over again. (Point number one: this attachment to the idea of empiricism is worth thinking about.) If the neuroscientists tell us that we have no conscious access to any such ‘data’ and that by the time there’s something we can be aware of, it’s been scrubbed, munged, filtered, processed and modeled — yeah, we knew that already. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with this a lot. If there's a philosophical contribution for the neuroscience here, it's that it gives a model (hur hur) of how these filtering steps are achieved and how the filtering steps relate to each other. So, in my imagination at least, it's more possible to rule out conjectures because of the 'hows'.

Funny that you say that, I recently finished re-reading C.I. Lewis' Mind and World Order. He was the person that introduced "qualia" into the philosophical literature as we understand it today, and in effect, he was arguing that these things are helpful in so far as they are guide to actions. — Manuel

Sure - ‘qualia’ as a term consolidates aspects of experience in potentiality, and can be useful in self-reflection, as a guide to structuring the potential of our own actions. But to use ‘qualia’ in relation to another’s actions seems fraught with unfounded assumptions.

As I see it, ‘qualia’ doesn’t lend any more to the notion of experience except the illusion of consolidation as an heuristic device. It’s like an imaginary number - its value is non-transferable, intangible. As long as all we’re taking about is potentiality, then qualia can be a useful term. But it has no function beyond the value structure in which it forms - beyond this it not only limits ideas, it also ambiguates intentionality.

There's also the possibility that sense data don't exist. — fdrake

Yes, I was saying this about qualia too. It may be, in the final wisdom, that it's not actually useful at all, for instance if, with advanced understanding, we build a refined language or otherwise employ a more fit one. However, with incomplete knowledge of how things are, how things seem is a useful thing to talk about, qualia included. Once we can explain how things seem, we can do away with seeming altogether.

Not all accounts of perception have something like sense data in them, and talking in those terms might shroud out equally plausible theories. — fdrake

But here you're speaking of the theories, not the term, right? Theories are liable to be wrong: they're ten a penny. My question is: does having a name for unappraised but still vivid perceptions help talk about how partially explained things seem? And maybe it does, for instance in the perceptions of enfants, or in perceiving a completely unfamiliar thing. Or maybe it doesn't, or won't in the end. Point is, the criteria for tossing the theory shouldn't be the same as for tossing the points of discussion. If it transpires in the final wisdom that there are no such perceptions, that's the criterion to drop the concept, surely? That's my meaning. Just as I'm not dumping on any particular theory, I'm not endorsing any either.

Which I'm thinking is frustrating to you, sorry, but I'm afraid I'm like that with almost everything. I rarely find theories something to pledge allegiance to, even quantum theory (my old field). When I do, it's based on lots of things (empirical evidence, acceptability of postulates, minimalisation of postulates, rigour of derivations), but we're discussing a field with a lot of unknowns. I prefer to talk about and around the knowns than die on a particular hill.

Which I'm thinking is frustrating to you, sorry, but I'm afraid I'm like that with almost everything. I rarely find theories something to pledge allegiance to, even quantum theory (my old field). When I do, it's based on lots of things (empirical evidence, acceptability of postulates, minimalisation of postulates, rigour of derivations), but we're discussing a field with a lot of unknowns. I prefer to talk about and around the knowns than die on a particular hill. — Kenosha Kid

The lack of definiteness isn't frustrating for me actually. I'm coming at it from the same angle - to my mind even thinking in terms of sense data is quite close to choosing a hill to die on, but without knowing that you've chosen to die on it! I'm gesturing towards one of those 'risk of unexamined presuppositions' arguments. If anything using the concept of sense data lends a non-neutral characterisation to things.

I guess. I mean, it personally doesn't cause me difficulties, but then again, I rarely use the word because of all a sudden conversations like these pop up and are fraught with accusations of vagueness, confusing words with things, dealing with false aspects of the world, denying the utterly obvious and so on.

I personally like "manifest reality" or manifest properties, the given. They likely won't lead to a science as is currently practiced, but it's the stuff of novels, art, delight and so forth.

What I don't see productive at all, is not so much quibbling over the word qualia, but denying that we experience the colour red (like blood) or blue (like the sky) or a beautiful piece of music (Mozart or the Beatles or whatever) and such things.

As I understand it, the point of talking of qualia is in part to make room for our (affective) reactions to our perceptions. If there is something it is like to see this particular instance of red, then I don’t just have the experience of seeing the thing which is this particular red color, I also experience myself experiencing it, am aware of having the underlying experience, and thus can thematize my experience reflectively or respond to it affectively. So there must be an intermediary, a quale, which is not just an artifact of the process of my experiencing things — not just some ephemeral, intermediate step — but an object that I can be conscious of, the end product of at least some phase of the process of experiencing things.

The need for such a thing arises because the way people ordinarily talk about things seems, in some circles, sometimes, to be plain wrong: we are inclined to say things like, “Oh my god! This cake tastes amazing! Here, have a bite!” In everyday conversation, we attribute to objects properties that, we have it on good authority, they do not have ‘on their own’ — coloration, taste, scent, all the exciting stuff in life. We know that taste ‘occurs’ only in the interaction of the cake and someone eating it, so if it is possible to experience a taste at all, this interaction must yield a product that can itself be experienced by the taster, a taste quale.

But we were right the first time. Cakes do have properties that reliably produce specific taste experiences when eaten by the sorts of creatures they were made for. It’s the whole point of making a cake in a particular way, the whole point of treating baking as art or science, as you prefer, of working at it and taking it seriously. (That people have variations in how things taste to them makes no difference at all.) When people marvel at the colors of a sunset, it’s the sunset that is the source of their remarkable visual experience, even if that particular experience is only likely available to creatures who see like us. In short, it is remarkable things that cause remarkable sensory experiences (and pedestrian things that cause pedestrian experiences) and there’s something perverse about ignoring that, and elevating the importance of where (in our brains) and how (via our senses) we become aware of the unique things we find in the world, whether extraordinary or pedestrian.

And people know perfectly well that, having had a range of experiences, sometimes their affective response is ‘colored’ by other factors: “Is it me, or is this coffee amazing?” “You’re in love, asshole, everything’s amazing, and the rest of us are tired of hearing it.” But there has to be groundwork laid for such displacement, experiences of things, just as there has to be for dreams and hallucinations.

There's a very simple word for the 'what it is like...' which is purportedly the subject of 'qualia'. It is being. Being is what objective physical descriptions can never capture or convey. Why there is so much to say about that is puzzling.

Did Dennett say that was why he posited that dreams are "coming-to-seem-to-remember"? We all know there is, for example, a visual field and that it is produced in the cerebral cortex.We all know we can visualize things and remember things, so why would the fact that we dream necessitate a "Cartesian theatre". type explanation? — Janus

Dennett didn't say that. But it's easy to infer from his attempts to debunk qualia and arguments against the Cartesian Theater. Dreams are a potential threat. I don't really understand why we focus almost exclusively on perception when it comes to consciousness. It's too easy to muddy the waters with other perception-related issues.

Dreaming is like watching myself participate in a play. Or playing a VR game, since I have a pair of VR goggles. But it's happening mostly without input from the external world. So it's clearly going on inside my head. I have visual, auditory and sometimes other experiences of sensations that are not coming from objects out there. I don't know how physicalists get around that difficulty. What exactly are dream sensations?

My reading/listening to Dennett's arguments are that he thinks we are the equivalent to Chalmers' p-zombies, except the real world is the p-zombie world, and the qualia conscious world is simply incoherent. So the qualia fans are making the mistake of Chalmers p-zombie twin, except of course there is no other world with a qualia Chalmers.

When Dennett and others like Keith Frankish argue that we're mistaken about consciousness, they're saying there's nothing it's like to see red or feel pain in a way that could be problematic for physicalism or functionalism. Frankish endorses the experience of sensation being an illusion, when understand as something more than it's functional/physical explanation. That's what a p-zombie is. It's being fooled by a cognitive trick. It's just patterns of neurons firing in a way that makes some of those neural patterns think that introspection yields some weird conscious quality.

As such, there is no "redness of red", or "what it's like to see red". There is only the functional role of perceiving a certain wavelength of light or a linguistic label for that ability. Which to me sounds ridiculous, because I do have color sensations. The functional role is a descriptive model, not what I experience. And a color word is not an experience, it's a label for an experience. If you get rid of the weird qualia consciousness, the only thing left is the p-zombie consciousness, with some sort of cognitive distortion or linguistic confusion.

That's why when Dennett tries to explain consciousness, it sounds like he's explaining it away, while wishing to keep the term instead of just embracing eliminativism. When Dennett says of course he's not denying consciousness, he means the functional definition of it, and not conscious sensation.

When people marvel at the colors of a sunset, it’s the sunset that is the source of their remarkable visual experience, even if that particular experience is only likely available to creatures who see like us. In short, it is remarkable things that cause remarkable sensory experiences (and pedestrian things that cause pedestrian experiences) and there’s something perverse about ignoring that, and elevating the importance of where (in our brains) and how (via our senses) we become aware of the unique things we find in the world, whether extraordinary or pedestrian. — Srap Tasmaner

But what sort of sunsets are we missing out on if we had different sorts of visual systems? We know that visible light is just a small part of the EM spectrum, and the sky is full of EM radiation we can't see.

In short, it is remarkable things that cause remarkable sensory experiences (and pedestrian things that cause pedestrian experiences) and there’s something perverse about ignoring that, and elevating the importance of where (in our brains) and how (via our senses) we become aware of the unique things we find in the world, whether extraordinary or pedestrian. — Srap Tasmaner

Wouldn't that be the result of adaptive evolutionary abilities? We find certain things remarkable because it's related to doing things which help us survive. In the future, we might be able to reengineer our nervous systems to find different things remarkable.

Why should you wanna explain them? — Goldyluck

Fairness? If the physicalist must explain qualia in physical terms, so too must the nonphysicalist in nonphysical terms.

to my mind even thinking in terms of sense data is quite close to choosing a hill to die on, — fdrake

And to mine it shouldn't be until the thing we mean by it is ruled out. All it means is having to come up with new terminology to describe the same thing in order to avoid association with particular theories, when the thing being referred to isn't necessarily different.

If there is something it is like to see this particular instance of red, then I don’t just have the experience of seeing the thing which is this particular red color, I also experience myself experiencing it, am aware of having the underlying experience — Srap Tasmaner

I think this is also doing exactly what I was describing in conflating a concept and a theory about it. Qualia are a pretty simple concept. Blindfolded me, then steer me right up against a red wall so that it's all I can see, and unblindfold me. Then reblindfold me, steer me right up against a green wall so that it's all I can see, and unblindfold me. If I can differentiate the colours of the walls when all else is equal, that's a legitimate use case for the word 'qualia'. I don't need to have a stroky beard theory about it as well: the question is can I refer to it in my experience, and the answer would seem to be 'yes'.

It's precisely this "Did he say qualia? Then he must believe XYZ!" that I find peculiar to philosophers' way of thinking. Whereas if you say, I don't know, 'cosmological constant' in physics, all you're really saying is it's a thing worth having a word for. It doesn't automatically mean you believe in relativity, or dark matter, or inflaton fields because the terminology transcends theories. Very different mentalities.

But we were right the first time. Cakes do have properties that reliably produce specific taste experiences when eaten by the sorts of creatures they were made for. — Srap Tasmaner

Except they don't. It is precisely because there isn't a 1-to-1 map between the chemical constitution of a glass of wine or piece of cake and how it tastes that it's interesting. And therefore worth having a language for.

But there has to be groundwork laid for such displacement, experiences of things, just as there has to be for dreams and hallucinations. — Srap Tasmaner

You also have to be able to refer to it to explain it. Even if the explanation ends up telling us that the thing it's explaining is an illusion, that statement alone is useful.

Fairness? If the physicalist must explain qualia in physical terms, so too must the nonphysicalist in nonphysical terms. — Agent Smith

The physicalist is the one saying everything is X. So when someone points out a Y, it's on the physicalist to explain how Y is really X. So, how is my pain sensation physical?

It's easy enough to avoid this tricky metaphysical issue. Don't be a monist.

What I don't see productive at all, is not so much quibbling over the word qualia, but denying that we experience the colour red (like blood) or blue (like the sky) or a beautiful piece of music (Mozart or the Beatles or whatever) and such things. — Manuel

I have a really hard time coming to terms with the idea that it only 'seems' like we're experience those things, but are actually performing biological functions instead. I don't know how many, if any, posters in this thread actually defend that 'seeming'. But some professional philosophers sure 'seem' to be making those arguments against qualia.

Seeming is in quotes because Dennett said to be suspicious when a philosopher uses that word.

And to mine it shouldn't be until the thing we mean by it is ruled out. All it means is having to come up with new terminology to describe the same thing in order to avoid association with particular theories, when the thing being referred to isn't necessarily different. — Kenosha Kid

I don't need to have a stroky beard theory about it as well: the question is can I refer to it in my experience, and the answer would seem to be 'yes'. — Kenosha Kid

That's the thing though, a theory which uses sense data is necessarily different from one which doesn't. Same with qualia.

"I don't believe in qualia or sense data at all"
"What plays the role in your theory though?"
"Nothing at all, even the use of the words is wrong-headed"
"Still useful to talk about, since I believe in "the same things" as you".

It's useful to talk about sense data when you're talking about sense data theories. If you're talking about a theory which doesn't have sense data in it, there's no use for it. It would be like labelling oxygen and phlogiston as phlogiston because they describe 'the same thing'. At the very least, it requires a reader charitably reinterpret what you write whenever you write it.

Which is actually complicated by the other things you write suggesting you do really believe in some sense data theory!

The physicalist is the one saying everything is X. — Marchesk

As far as I know, the nonphysicalist claims that qualia can't be explained physically. Well then, can it be explained nonphysically? It's a simple question.

As far as I know, the nonphysicalist claims that qualia can't be explained physically. Well then, can it be explained nonphysically? It's a simple question. — Agent Smith

You say everything is water. I say, what about fire? You retort that I need to explain fire non-waterly. Being that it's ancient times, I say I don't know how to explain fire, but it sure doesn't reduce to water.

It's useful to talk about sense data when you're talking about sense data theories. If you're talking about a theory which doesn't have sense data in it, there's no use for it. — fdrake

It's useful to talk about something when you want to discuss it too, not just theories about it or not about it. I don't need a theory of eggs to talk about them, which is helpful if I want to talk about eggs _in.order_ to describe a new egg theory.

I remember once using the word 'teleological' and my interlocutor dismissed me as a Jesuit. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I remember once using the word 'teleological' and my interlocutor dismissed me as a Jesuit. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. — Kenosha Kid

I can see why you'd find both equally ridiculous. I don't think this is as ridiculous though. If you're using the word sense data as a neutral term, but you're also referring to it as somehow a neutral entity between theories of perception which they're all concerned with, you're paying the price of distorting the idea to do so. Or alternatively, the price you pay is interpreting theories of perception in general as sense data theories.

Edit: how would you describe a theory of perception which didn't use sense data or qualia in terms of sense data and qualia?

You say everything is water. I say, what about fire? You retort that I need to explain fire non-waterly. Being that it's ancient times, I say I don't know how to explain fire, but it sure doesn't reduce to water. — Marchesk

Good point but the nonphysicalist has to admit s/he can't explain qualia in nonphysical terms and now we're in neti neti territory, Where do we go from here, sir/madam?

If you're using the word sense data as a neutral term, but you're also referring to it as somehow a neutral entity between theories of perception which they're all concerned with, you're paying the price of distorting the idea to do so. — fdrake

That second if... I'm not, that's the point, except in response to your more theory-centric way of thinking. We're probably going far too deep into what is essentially a complaint that the term 'sense-datum' has already been taken and can't, for weird reasons, be transported between theories, or between a theory and a more descriptive discussion, leading to a proliferation of terminology and an inability to define clearly where one ends and another begins. But...

how would you describe a theory of perception which didn't use sense data or qualia in terms of sense data and qualia? — fdrake

An example would be a more complete theory that can account for the existence or illusion of sense data and qualia. This would be as opposed to one that shows that such ideas are purely artefacts of bad stroky bearding.

Cakes do have properties that reliably produce specific taste experiences when eaten by the sorts of creatures they were made for.
— Srap Tasmaner

Except they don't. It is precisely because there isn't a 1-to-1 map between the chemical constitution of a glass of wine or piece of cake and how it tastes that it's interesting. — Kenosha Kid

I’m not sure what you’re saying here, but my claim is that — plausible or not, convincing or not — the following is not simply incomprehensible: