I don't know how many of us you've spoken to, but my views fall within the scope of the kinds of views you're referring to. I've also written a reply to you, which you can see here:
The one comment I'll make a point of drawing attention to here is this. You say:
"They’ll point out how introspection is often wrong and we’re often wrong about what we’re aware of. That is of course true. But then they use that to show that conscious experience is, in some sense, an illusion"
They do appeal to these facts, but they also appeal to other facts. You give the misleading impression that this is the only fact they appeal to. You do this again here:
"The fact that we’re sometimes wrong about what we’re aware of doesn’t show that we’re not actually conscious. "
I agree. But proponents of illusionism don't merely appeal to the fact that we're sometimes wrong about what we're aware of to argue against phenomenal consciousness. They appeal to a variety of other empirical findings and philosophical considerations. I think your remarks give the impression that illusionists think introspective error alone is sufficient. Some may think this, but stronger versions of illusionism don't.
Personally, there is no confusion. There is physical matter that can cause subjective experience without the need for a non-physical/panpsychic substance.
Back when we knew much less about biology, there was a similar confusion regarding life. How can physical matter create self-sustaining organisms? It was argued that there must be some elan vital beyond matter that is responsible for producing biological life.
This turned out to be false as we discovered how satisfactorily the physical world explained complex organisms. I expect the same to be true for subjective experience, especially as we continue to discover physical markers of consciousness. We've discovered so much about consciousness that I'm not sure if solving the "hard" problem would produce anything of significant value.
Chalmers is of course brilliant and worth reading, but zombies are conceptually impossible without a belief in the supernatural and my thermostat is not conscious.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, your physicalism is one that I think is false, but I can at least understand it. You seem like a type B physicalist. It's the type A physicalists that really puzzle me!
She does, type-A doesn't deny the reality of conscious experience. Only that there is no explanatory gap between mind and matter. What Mary learns can even be subject to third-person mapping, since mental states can be explained by physical properties. If Mary had a completely identical clone, that clone would have the same experience as Mary.
I think everyone agrees that Mary's clone would have the same experiences as Mary, if I understand what you're saying correctly. Type A materialists think Mary gains no propositional knowledge upon seeing red.
Mary gains the experience of red, although her articulable factual knowledge remains the same. Whether you refer to this as “learning” is its own issue.
If there is a significant explanatory gap between mind and matter, then a physical clone doesn’t necessarily have the same mental experience according to dualists. A clone with a different experience is as conceptually strange to me as zombies.
"There is physical matter that can cause subjective experience without the need for a non-physical/panpsychic substance. [..] I expect the same to be true for subjective experience, especially as we continue to discover physical markers of consciousness".
Well, which? You start of by confidently asserting that physics can account for consciousness,. then you concede that the required explanation is "in the post".
"If I had to explain what's going on, it's, while being as fair as I can be, that the non-type-A often refuses to even consider functionalist decompositions, for whatever reason. There's a very telling interview between Daniel Dennett and the mysterian journalist Robert Wright, where Dennett denies mental states have intrinsic properties just as money doesn't have intrinsic value. He further claims he can give a good explanation as to why people are predisposed to say that they do. "
That isn't a functional decomposition of a quale. It's an attempt to explain a report, that takes the report as being fundamentally mistaken. People are rightfully suspicious of arguments that "X could be a illusion, therefore X is an illusion", since it could apply to anything -- for instance, an external material world.
"Qualia are *defined* as being non-functional/relational"
Nope
"C.I. Lewis (1929)[17] was the first to use the term "qualia" in its generally agreed upon modern sense.
There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective.[18]"--WP
I don't don't doubt that the non functional nature of qualia has often been asserted, just that it is a matter definition.
There is probably plenty to contend with in the Lewis definition, but non functionallity is not amongst it.
If you ask for a functional decomposition of X, and you are instead offered a functional decomposition of your false belief in X, I think you are entitled to reject it, because the original question has not been answered
I look forward to your response. For the record, I would really, really like physicalism to be true. Maybe not type a physicalism, but I'm not even really sure what I'd think about it because I have trouble understanding the position. Dualism is so non-elegant as a model of fundamental reality.
I think the simplest way to explain it is by a ghost/ectoplasm analogy. In setting out to explain ghosts, there are 3 positions you can take - first is the radical realist position that we need to revise our ontology and picture of the world to include ectoplasm and ghosts in it, as they are a new kind of substance. Second is the conservative realist position - ectoplasm and ghosts are composite substances with strange properties, but we can still explain them via reduction to already known particles and forces; those particles and forces just interact in currently undiscovered ways to form ghosts. Third is the eliminativist option - we need to explain people's dispositions to judge that there are ghosts, without ever actually invoking their existence. We look at what people think are ghosts (e.g. this white orb in this spooky image) and explain away their belief (e.g. the flash of the camera reflected off dust in the environment to "form" a ghostly orb in the camera lens).
Qualia (whether they be intrinsic, ineffable, private, subjective feels, what-it's-likeness) can be explained away just as ghosts can. It sure seems to some people that they're being haunted by ghosts - this can be caused by ghosts actually existing, or it can be caused by people's faulty beliefs and misconceptions. Your seeming that there are qualia can likewise be caused by intrinsic, ineffable, private features of your experience - or the seeming can be caused by faulty beliefs about your introspective states. This should already be intuitive to you if you endorse zombies - they're supposed to be behaviorally indistinguishable from you, so they would be just as convinced that they have qualia as you do, but they "don't." If this is a conceivable state of affairs for you, then that's just what type A materialists claim is going on with qualia. We're deluded, just like zombies, to think that we have qualia, but we really don't. Of course I can't argue for this here, but I think section 2 of Dan Dennett's "Are Qualia What Make Life Worth Living?" is a really good anti-qualia intuition pump that uses change blindness as an example. (I think I also borrowed the ectoplasm analogy from Keith Frankish's "Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness.")
I don't know how many of us you've spoken to, but my views fall within the scope of the kinds of views you're referring to. I've also written a reply to you, which you can see here:
https://www.lanceindependent.com/post/zombies-see-red
The one comment I'll make a point of drawing attention to here is this. You say:
"They’ll point out how introspection is often wrong and we’re often wrong about what we’re aware of. That is of course true. But then they use that to show that conscious experience is, in some sense, an illusion"
They do appeal to these facts, but they also appeal to other facts. You give the misleading impression that this is the only fact they appeal to. You do this again here:
"The fact that we’re sometimes wrong about what we’re aware of doesn’t show that we’re not actually conscious. "
I agree. But proponents of illusionism don't merely appeal to the fact that we're sometimes wrong about what we're aware of to argue against phenomenal consciousness. They appeal to a variety of other empirical findings and philosophical considerations. I think your remarks give the impression that illusionists think introspective error alone is sufficient. Some may think this, but stronger versions of illusionism don't.
Physicalist here.
Personally, there is no confusion. There is physical matter that can cause subjective experience without the need for a non-physical/panpsychic substance.
Back when we knew much less about biology, there was a similar confusion regarding life. How can physical matter create self-sustaining organisms? It was argued that there must be some elan vital beyond matter that is responsible for producing biological life.
This turned out to be false as we discovered how satisfactorily the physical world explained complex organisms. I expect the same to be true for subjective experience, especially as we continue to discover physical markers of consciousness. We've discovered so much about consciousness that I'm not sure if solving the "hard" problem would produce anything of significant value.
Chalmers is of course brilliant and worth reading, but zombies are conceptually impossible without a belief in the supernatural and my thermostat is not conscious.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, your physicalism is one that I think is false, but I can at least understand it. You seem like a type B physicalist. It's the type A physicalists that really puzzle me!
Thanks for the reply. Type A, but feel free to hate my materialism.
So you think Mary learns nothing new?
She does, type-A doesn't deny the reality of conscious experience. Only that there is no explanatory gap between mind and matter. What Mary learns can even be subject to third-person mapping, since mental states can be explained by physical properties. If Mary had a completely identical clone, that clone would have the same experience as Mary.
I think everyone agrees that Mary's clone would have the same experiences as Mary, if I understand what you're saying correctly. Type A materialists think Mary gains no propositional knowledge upon seeing red.
Mary gains the experience of red, although her articulable factual knowledge remains the same. Whether you refer to this as “learning” is its own issue.
If there is a significant explanatory gap between mind and matter, then a physical clone doesn’t necessarily have the same mental experience according to dualists. A clone with a different experience is as conceptually strange to me as zombies.
" If Mary had a completely identical clone, that clone would have the same experience as Mary"
That would also be the case under almost any form of dualism.
"There is physical matter that can cause subjective experience without the need for a non-physical/panpsychic substance. [..] I expect the same to be true for subjective experience, especially as we continue to discover physical markers of consciousness".
Well, which? You start of by confidently asserting that physics can account for consciousness,. then you concede that the required explanation is "in the post".
"If I had to explain what's going on, it's, while being as fair as I can be, that the non-type-A often refuses to even consider functionalist decompositions, for whatever reason. There's a very telling interview between Daniel Dennett and the mysterian journalist Robert Wright, where Dennett denies mental states have intrinsic properties just as money doesn't have intrinsic value. He further claims he can give a good explanation as to why people are predisposed to say that they do. "
That isn't a functional decomposition of a quale. It's an attempt to explain a report, that takes the report as being fundamentally mistaken. People are rightfully suspicious of arguments that "X could be a illusion, therefore X is an illusion", since it could apply to anything -- for instance, an external material world.
"Qualia are *defined* as being non-functional/relational"
Nope
"C.I. Lewis (1929)[17] was the first to use the term "qualia" in its generally agreed upon modern sense.
There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it is purely subjective.[18]"--WP
I don't don't doubt that the non functional nature of qualia has often been asserted, just that it is a matter definition.
There is probably plenty to contend with in the Lewis definition, but non functionallity is not amongst it.
If you ask for a functional decomposition of X, and you are instead offered a functional decomposition of your false belief in X, I think you are entitled to reject it, because the original question has not been answered
I look forward to your response. For the record, I would really, really like physicalism to be true. Maybe not type a physicalism, but I'm not even really sure what I'd think about it because I have trouble understanding the position. Dualism is so non-elegant as a model of fundamental reality.
I think the simplest way to explain it is by a ghost/ectoplasm analogy. In setting out to explain ghosts, there are 3 positions you can take - first is the radical realist position that we need to revise our ontology and picture of the world to include ectoplasm and ghosts in it, as they are a new kind of substance. Second is the conservative realist position - ectoplasm and ghosts are composite substances with strange properties, but we can still explain them via reduction to already known particles and forces; those particles and forces just interact in currently undiscovered ways to form ghosts. Third is the eliminativist option - we need to explain people's dispositions to judge that there are ghosts, without ever actually invoking their existence. We look at what people think are ghosts (e.g. this white orb in this spooky image) and explain away their belief (e.g. the flash of the camera reflected off dust in the environment to "form" a ghostly orb in the camera lens).
Qualia (whether they be intrinsic, ineffable, private, subjective feels, what-it's-likeness) can be explained away just as ghosts can. It sure seems to some people that they're being haunted by ghosts - this can be caused by ghosts actually existing, or it can be caused by people's faulty beliefs and misconceptions. Your seeming that there are qualia can likewise be caused by intrinsic, ineffable, private features of your experience - or the seeming can be caused by faulty beliefs about your introspective states. This should already be intuitive to you if you endorse zombies - they're supposed to be behaviorally indistinguishable from you, so they would be just as convinced that they have qualia as you do, but they "don't." If this is a conceivable state of affairs for you, then that's just what type A materialists claim is going on with qualia. We're deluded, just like zombies, to think that we have qualia, but we really don't. Of course I can't argue for this here, but I think section 2 of Dan Dennett's "Are Qualia What Make Life Worth Living?" is a really good anti-qualia intuition pump that uses change blindness as an example. (I think I also borrowed the ectoplasm analogy from Keith Frankish's "Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness.")
Just be a type b physicalist then. They have answers to all the non-physicalist objections.