What else could what it's like to drink tea consist of if not each and every instance? — creativesoul

The continuous experience, unless you want to break perceived time down into atoms.

Sure; again, what has this to do with ineffable as-it-seems-to me's? That the coffee is not sugared is not ineffable, not Albert. — Banno

The coffee not being sugared is a chemical fact. The coffee not tasting sweet is the experience. You're equivocating here.

We're talking about a plurality. — creativesoul

Why suppose it needs to be broken down into instances? Our experiences change all the time. But it does depend on the experience. Focus on one of the images in this thread, and it will stay relatively constant.

Well, indeed. But I think we could say the same for red apples, or illusions, or whatever. They're just normal aspects of our experience which nonetheless seem to generate particular kinds of philosophical confusion. — Andrew M

Because some of them are properties of perception. Three people are in a room. It feels cold to the first, warm to the second and just right for the third. Yet the thermometer records the same temperature, which is a really a measure of the amount of kinetic energy the molecules in the atmosphere have. Our feeling cold or warm isn't the molecular energy. We didn't know anything about molecular energy until relatively recently. But humans were feeling cold and warm long before then.

So using objective property of the world such as spatial location to mock qualia is missing the point. Now if you want to talk about the feeling of being located somewhere, then we can talk about what it's like when you misjudge how close a wall is in the dark and what not. You have an experience of it being farther away than it is, and then you run into it.

All of these sort of example demonstrate that our experiences are not simply reflections of the world. They're generated by our act of perceiving and other mental activities. So appealing to some direct realism or externalism still needs to account for perceptual relativity and all the other stuff occurring for the organism.

iIts inherent in the subjective differences between individuals. Thus why we recognize that people have different tastes. “Oh, so coffee tastes good for you? I can’t stand that bitter taste!”

Also, I’m sure you recall the various debates with The Great Whatever, and how he liked to bring up the ancient Cyreneac school of philosophy, and their focus on individual sensation given the widely recognized problems of perception. So not entirely an invention of modern philosophers abusing language.

think qualia are functional. If they exists, they exist for a reason. — Olivier5

Even if so, we can’t communicate what it’s like, so we can’t know that from the functioning of a bat or robot. Unless it’s the same as ours. Bat sonar might be like vision as Dawkins has suggested, or it might be like a blind persons use of a walking stick, which the functioning of their nervous system could tell us. But if not, then we’re in the dark.

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

Yes, but one could suppose, like Chalmers has, that qualia is tied to function, or rich information streams, via some non physical scientific law.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Thus telling a blind person that the colour red is experienced as unary, warm, positive, advancing etc, would still not do the trick. — Qualities of Qualia

You can't tell a blind person what it's like to see color, no matter the words you use. There is something inexpressible for sensory modalities.

Qualia are supposedly ineffable because no description by itself can yield knowledge of what it is like to have an experience. A description might tell you certain things about qualia, but it won’t give you them. The question is how this is supposed to be radically different from any other sort of description? All descriptions are in some sense incomplete, in some way less than the things being described. This is not at all surprising. After all, descriptions are something different from the thing being described. — Qualities of Qualia

Which is just saying that language has its limitations. The world is more than language, or whatever is dreamt up in Dennett's denial.

This is what David de Leon has to say in response to not being able to tell whether the quale of the coffee taste has changed (or surgically altered), or judgement about it has changed (or surgically altered):

The most obvious response to the thought experiment is, that although introspection can’t decide between the alternatives, there is still a fact of the matter: either a change in qualia has occurred, or the change is in some other aspect of the individual. There is still the experience of a particular quale, but since we might be misremembering the past (or our tastes might have changed), we just can’t be sure whether that quale is the same as, or different from, some other particular quale.

Dennett dismisses this kind of response as vacuous, on the grounds that he thinks nothing follows from it and that it is as “mysterious as papal infallibility.” But these accusations don’t warrant Dennett in misinterpreting the property under suspicion. Both of his thought experiments are geared towards showing that we can’t be infallible in our comparisons of non-simultaneous qualia, but is this what immediate apprehension in consciousness is supposed to mean? I think not. What the notion implies, is that we are aware of our qualia directly and non-inferentially; there is no room for an is/seems distinction. That is, one cannot “... be unaware of one’s ‘real’ qualitative state of consciousness during the time one is aware of some qualitative state.” This is simply not the sort of mistake we can make; which still leaves a whole range of other sorts of mistakes we can, and routinely do make. It is trivially true, for example, that we often misremember our experiences of qualia (even without nocturnal neurosurgery). — The Qualities of Qualia

This accords with my response. We know first hand of the qualia we're having now, even though we can be wrong about the qualia we did have. Dennett thinks thinks you have to be in the same epistemic position toward both for direct apprehension to work, but that's not necessary.

Good point. I forget about that. There is something it's like which is being changed. Similar to your statement that illusions make a noticeable difference to us that we can empirically verify.

No, the intuition pumps 8-12 show that we cannot access these 'qualia'. If we could, then we'd be able to tell which pathway had bee tampered with. As we can't, we don't have access to them as a separate step. If they're not a separate step the wine-tasting machines have qualia. — Isaac

Intution pumps 8-12 look like we don't have direct access to previous qualia such that we can answer the question, Just the memory of them. And memories are fallible reconstructions. My memory qualia of tasting the coffee years ago might not be the same as it was when tasting it then. But that doesn't mean there is no qualia when tasting it now.

Dennett denies there is because it doesn't do any third-party verification for him. That's his loss.

We have this from late in the article:

To put the matter vividly, the physical difference between someone's imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow might be nothing more than the presence or absence of a particular zero or one in one of the brain's "registers". Such a brute physical presence is all that it would take to anchor the sorts of dispositional differences between imagining a purple cow and imagining a green cow that could then flow, causally, from that "intrinsic" fact. — Quining Qualia

This illustrates Dennett's denial most vividly. A difference in conscious experience could be nothing more than the equivalent of flipping a bit. And it is that which I just cannot agree with, whatever the status of the qualia properties.

What could it possibly mean to say that the difference between imagining a purple and green cow is a 1 or 0 (or the neural equivalent)? A 1 or 0 isn't purple or green. Neither for that matter or rgb values in a computer. They are just encoded for an output device that does produce the wavelengths of light we see as combinations of red, green and blue.

Maybe so, and it's even worse as we get farther away from our biology, such as when Data tastes wine.

This begs the question. Science only "can't" tell us that if you assume your conclusion that such sensations are private and intrinsic. If you don't, then science has merely failed to tell us that so far. — Isaac

So why were you tempted to agree that science needed to modify our nervous system in order for us to know?

...then they're not accessible. Only the beginning and the end of those pathways are accessible. — Isaac

Or at least, that's what the abstracted third-party account tells us, according to Dennett's setup. Doesn't change my first person experience.

But this doesn't show that such experience is 'necessarily' private. — Isaac

I should have added that science can't tell us that that bat necessarily has a sonar sensation, only whether it has recognizable neural structures (by comparison with ours).

It gets harder the farther from human you go. Ned Block goes into this in his The Harder Problem of Consciousness paper, using Commander Data as an example. Philosophers have imagined weirder scenarios, such as Chinese Brains and meteor showers that might instantiate analogous functions for conscious sensation.

If qualia are just the whole process from sources of sensation to response, then wine-tasting machine have it, so do p-zombies. — Isaac

Qualia are the resulting sensations that consciousness is made up of. But we only know that from first person experience. Solpsism is a difficult position to refute because of that.

So yeah, you could theoretically be a p-zombie, and the wine-tasting machine gives us no indication otherwise, so it probably is, unless one endorses panpsychism or functional qualia (Chalmers).

@Banno@Creative@Isaac@fdrake
Regarding privacy, one might say our mental activity is not radically private, in that an advanced enough science and technology could reveal the exact neural correlates for all mental activity, and from there infer exactly what is going on. It could even be piped into a monitor and speakers, or a VR device. Dennett mentions the Brainstorm machine.

And sure, I grant that much. The problem comes in with experiences we don't have the ability to experience. If bat physiology reveals that sonar creates a sensation in bats, but this is unlike any of our sensory modalities, then we can't know what that is. People born blind from birth, or who have suffered a neurological condition removing their ability to experience color, are presumably in this position with regard to vision. They understand many humans "see", but what that means to them isn't a colored in world, since they have no such experiences to compare to. They know the language of course, and learn how to use it, but they don't know the experience.

And that is what is radically private about consciousness that science cannot give us, without rewiring our nervous systems, or enhancing them.

3. But Dennett's third set of intuition pumps show that if we make neurological changes to path (a) - from object to qualia, or path (b) - from qualia to response, we cannot tell which change has been made. We cannot examine our 'qualia' independently to tell if they've been changed by a modification to path (a) or if instead we've simply been subject to a modification of path (b). — Isaac

I think a problem here is supposing that qualia is supposed to be able to tell us something about our neurology. But maybe the qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). You end up with the same qualia.

(3) How does that relate to the maxim "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality" (Searle) assertion you've been using your photos to intuition pump for (as I've read them anyway). — fdrake

Here is the crux of the matter, for me anyway. Dennett does not think the appearance of having sensations can be considered qualia in any meaningful sense. Therefore, it's a faulty intuition. Thus why elsewhere he thinks illusionsim is a good guess or starting point for dissolving the hard problem, or answering the hard question as he calls it. It's a magic trick in the brain, and the only thing left is for neuroscience to show how the trick is performed. Or something along those lines. I believe he's offered up several possibilities, but at any rate, there is nothing ineffable, intrinsic, private or direct to the appearance of seeing colors, etc.

And since that's the case, the appearance can entirely be understood from a third person perspective, when the science advances enough. What I take from this is the appearance of consciousness is not really an appearance. It only seems like it on reflection. Keith Frankish in his paper is careful to point out that the illusion itself must not lead to qualia.

It is a denial of phenomenalism.

(2) How do you think he argues for that position? — fdrake

A series of intuition pumps meant to walk the reader through disabusing them of the intuition that conscious experience has any sort of qualia-like properties (ineffable, intrinsic, private, direct). It should be noted here that Dennett is doing the intuition pumping. He has constructed the pumps to arrive at his conclusion.

Having finished rereading Quining Qualia, I'll answer the question one post at a time.

(1) What do you think Dennett's position is in Quining Qualia? — fdrake

That conscious experience is the dispositional, relational and functional properties of the biological systems responsible for conscious experience, and nothing additional. This part is key:

Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia. Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special. — Qunining Qualia

And this part right after:

The standard reaction to this claim is the complacent acknowledgment that while some people may indeed have succumbed to one confusion or fanaticism or another, one's own appeal to a modest, innocent notion of properties of subjective experience is surely safe. It is just that presumption of innocence I want to overthrow. — Qunining Qualia

Which includes my attempt to avoid any sort of strong statement about qualia properties which might be subject to quining, although I did defend privacy.

So what is being left out in my view after accounting for dispositional, relational and functional properties, that science can discover? The sensation itself of colors, sounds, feels, etc.

Yes.

The proponents of qualia and quale are the ones who attempt to decouple, sever, and/or otherwise separate some aspects of consciousness from the ongoing process, which is what experience amounts to. — creativesoul

Au contraire, it is the qualophobes who discard experence for the functional, dispisotional properties of the process.

Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of? — creativesoul

The various color, sound, taste sensations, but those are words used in language, so naturally you will complain that I'm using language.

Just want to point to out again that about a third of elgible voters didn’t vote, so Trump really has a little less than a third of the country’s support among elgible voters.

Must be.

I don’t care whether we use qualia, I just don’t agree with Dennett’s quining the phenomenonal in total, such that the seeming isn’t really. But sure, for sake of this discussion I’ll say the seeming is qualia.

[ Dennett also thinks being a collection mindless robots forming a meme machine does no real harm to free will, consciousness or intentionality.

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Yes.

We can call the appearance that if you prefer it to qualia. It doesn’t remove the what it’s like or seems to each of us. I will answer your three questions from earlier soon.

I guess, for perception anyway. What’s important is the appearance, not my muddled attempt to answer you.

I might be equivocating on Locke here, but the primary ones are taken to be related to the objective ones. We see a shape extended in three dimensions via the color shadings. The exact physics of the world is a bit different, but there is an object with mass in 3 spatial dimensions that reflects light of a certain wavelength.