I was responding in context of Oliver's post about someone not knowing what matter is. They say they know the world is material because they were told that by their teacher.

That makes no sense. There are different kinds of "ordinary stuff", of matter. Matter seems to be constituted by fields and particles; what's the problem? — Janus

Having the wrong conception of what ordinary stuff is made up of fundamentally. If you think it's all made of water or the five elements or just the stuff you can feel and see, then you're wrong about the world.

The point is that you cannot believe that 'x is P' is true, without believing that x is P without contradicting yourself. — Janus

Only if propositions must follow classical logic. But what if a proposition is fuzzy, or true under certain ways of looking at things, like how the snow appears to humans?

How do you know your made of matter if you don't know what matter is? — Janus

Or if you think matter is ordinary stuff all the way down as opposed to fields and particles. Meaning yo have the wrong model of matter.

Do crows do that? — frank

Ravens do that in some of Poe's poems, I think.

Thus it would be a logical contradiction to believe that "snow is white" is true while believing that snow is not white, or not believing that snow is white. — Janus

I can believe that snow appears white, but not that it is actually white. So it can be true on the ordinary language use as long as it means ?appears to humans that way" and not is the actual state of affairs, even though most people naively think it is.

I don't think snow is white. I think the Cyrenaics are right at least about this. We are whitened upon seeing the light reflect off the snow.

I don't know where that falls in Banno's Ramsey sentences. I guess my skepticism is rooted in a philosophical argument against color realism, even though most people would say the snow is factually white (upon seeing the pure snow), and not just that they believe it.

Yeah but the problem is you cannot tell me about the phenomenal character of sonar, even if you go to great lengths researching the science on it. You cannot even tell me if there is any, although it seems reasonable to suspect animals have phenomenal experiences.

You cannot even tell me how it is that our own brains produce red or bitterness. The best you can do is try and talk of some public model we tell ourselves to come up with redness or bitterness, which sounds absurd.

So what exactly is abstract thought? — frank

Remembering we're inside the cave of sensory shadows?

It may be that language and our ability to think abstractly go hand in hand? — frank

There's evidence that crows can count. So for example, if two hunters are behind a blind, and one leaves, the crows are aware that one is still back there. They also apparently can keep track of individual humans and how they've behaved.

You mean like Descartes taking Plato's Forms (the domain of the Intellect) and adding sentience to posit the Cartesian mind?

That debate has been going on for hundreds of years (if not thousands)... — Andrew M

Interesting. I had in mind the ancient skeptical Cyrenaics school of philosophy, since we had a former poster who was a fan of them.

Even if all people were to agree on the perceptual quality that some object has–for instance, that a wall appears white–the Cyrenaics still think that we could not confidently say that we are having the same experience. This is because each of us has access only to our own experiences, not to those of other people, and so the mere fact that each of us calls the wall ‘white’ does not show us that we are all having the same experience that I am having when I use the word ‘white.’

https://iep.utm.edu/cyren/#SSH2a.ii — IEP, Cyrenaics

One interesting thing about them is that they preferred to say things like, "I am sweetened, or I am whitened.", instead of "The honey is sweet, or the wall is white". And they did this because they were skeptical that we could know whether objects had a taste or color independent of our sensations.

There's much talk in modern philosophy about how language misleads. Well, the Cyrenaics would have said that our way of saying, "The cup is red and the coffee tastes bitter sweet.", is misleading us into attributing properties of sensation onto objects.

Anyway, it sounds to me like that Cyrenaics and other ancient skeptical schools anticipated much of the modern debate around qualia, minus the physicalism and neurological part. I do recall that one criticism of ancient atomism was that atoms and the void couldn't create sensations of color and taste.

Same way you know Khaled. — Daemon

It's panpyshchist robots all the way down.

@Banno

Thus, announcements by philosophers who declare themselves opposed to qualia need to be treated with some caution. One can agree that there are no qualia in the last three senses I have explained, while still endorsing qualia in the standard first sense. — SEP

Which most of the posters in this thread seem to agree with. So the question is what does qualia in the first sense amount to, and does the likes of Dennett, Frankish and the Churchlands support it, or is that to be eliminated also?

The sides have become confused recently with Banno's latest push for 100 and talk of propositional content.

Back when we were tangentally discussing quning qualia, the sides were those in favor of Dennett's intuition pumps, and those of us who were not.

A sure sign that there's no substance to the counter-argument is when a participant focuses upon the author rather than the argument being given. — creativesoul

It's a joke between teammates. The other side has done the same.

Qualia aversion is a serious condition that often goes undiagnosed. Symptoms include the need for public reassurance and an inability to introspect.

Yeah, but the thing about hard-wiring is that you can't hardwire everything about a changing environment. We can't even do this with computers. That's why humans, animals and neural networks need to learn things. So a cat is hardwired to hunt, but it has to learn about hunting. And we're hardwired to think of other minds. But we still have to learn about other humans.

That leaves plenty of room for some version of folk-psychology.

So this gets into the issue of universals, which I'm not sure this thread has covered yet... — Andrew M

We could always marry qualia to universals and really stoke the flames.

So, as a vacillating woo-merchant: I sell @Banno two red apples ...

I get that you might take a line similar to Patricia Churchland, such that neural networks are not representational. But if that view be granted then I'd just say neural networks are not about beliefs. — Banno

I wonder when we train neural networks to recognize cats on mats, what does that amount to? Or when AlphaZero learns to play superhuman chess. Can we say it has representational knowledge of chess strategy?

I also wonder whether we could pursue an eliminativist view of computing. When you look at the actual hardware, it's just moving electrons around. Where are the software programs in that? Where is the data?

Maybe just looking at neurons firing is missing the higher level view of what all that adds up to, such as belief formation. After-all, it's kind of hard to explain how humans are so adept at navigating and manipulating the environment without positing some knowledge of the world. In fact, that's an ongoing issue for improving AI. The lack of common sense understanding is one of the big remaining obstacles to a more general purpose AI. Somehow biological neural networks are able to handle that.

Can we at least agree that there is a difference between our bodies and our reports thereof? — creativesoul

Not if you're a BIV.

If you can run very fast, yes. — Olivier5

What do you suppose would be between the ears of our dear apple seller in that case?

@MwwEmphasis added. You also need to understand that he wants money in exchange of the apples. So you need to understand his (subjective) intentions and he needs to understand yours. — Olivier5

Right, consider going to a foreign market. It helps to keep in mind that the grocer may see you as a naive tourist, and jack the price of the apples up. Or as an angry ex, they might lace the apples with cyanide. Just saying.

@Banno

Parmenides? We might just fit the whole of philosophy in this thread!

It's a conventional way of speaking. We also speak of a person who acts independently as having a mind of their own. But before assuming dualism, we should first investigate the contexts that give rise to those usages. — Andrew M

What about the hardware and software dichtomy in computers? Do you forgo that dualism in favor of just the hardware?

No brains for you, zombie Nazi!

Still, the models exist. — Book273

Sure, thousands of years after humans have been seeing color and feeling pain, a few ambitious behaviorists created some models to Quine the woo away.

Point being that it matters what’s going on the serial killers head, if you care about not being the next victim.

o. What goes on between the ears is irrelevant. That's rather the point pushed by PI, that it's what happens that counts, not what goes on in heads. "Can I have two apples, please" is understood if I get the two apples. What happens in the head of the grocer is irrelevant. — Banno

Unless the grocer is a serial killer who’s triggered when he’s asked for two apples. Then it kind of matters what’s going on between his ears.

Just want a point out that our ancestors evolved the ability to see color prior to language and public models. You can't quine color away without consulting evolution first.

You can't argue with a zombie.

Active inference presents not only a cogent alternative, but one which is better at making predictions than the Cartesian theatre version. — Isaac

Inference doesn't make colors or pains go away anymore than it does hands. Except for zombies.

Moore's argument was that the skeptic could not provide more reason to doubt than he had to not. That is evidendtly not the case for qualia as both knowledge of physiology and confusion over intuitions gives ample reason to doubt. — Isaac

Moore's waving his hand about is no different than us pointing out colors and pains. They're both just as much a part of experience.

"With eyes designed to shiver a color model according to a tiny faction of variation in their EM wavelength!"

Thread title changed again. Next version ought to read:

Not shivering Zombie Dennett's "Quining Color"

I’d count that as obvious and wonder why we would bother. — Banno

Wouldn't have taken you for a modal realist, but if we're going to defeat Trump so you can a very nice warm qualia inside, we best put all our cards on the table.

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays. I want to hear X-Rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupd, limiting, spoken language. But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws and feel a solar wind of a supernova FLOWING OVER over me. I'm a machine and I can know so much more, could experience so much more, but I'm trapped iin this absurd body ... — Brother Cavil, Battlestar Galactiica

Or like when Q on Star Trek Next Generation takes human form to annoy Picard.

Sarcasm doesn't translate well into written word alone. — creativesoul

1:45 the start of the good part where he complains about being designed to perceive like a limited human being.

So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition — Banno

What id I add, “In some possible universe, the present king of France is bald.”?

It was so much better back in the day. We walked indirectly to school and ideally home afterwords.

Because that's how it is! — creativesoul

Nonsense. Unless you can taste wavefunctions and see X-Rays.

I bet you can't even do sonar!

Nowadays folks tend to think what we perceive is just the way things really are. — Mww

Anyone who does that is truly naive, both philosophically and scientifically. One might be a direct realist, but it does take more work than just "things are exactly as they look". Or at least I hope they bother to do the work.

Because if not, their lack of philosophical rigor will be called out. Lazy bastards!