Qualia

>qualia

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=UeiH9Mm0E5Y
web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/eb9.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

>shitposts

>noumena

>my philosophy commits me to the position that people don't feel things

lmao

>scientism has dissolved my brain into such a degenerate pile of shit that I deny my own existence

kek

"Qualia" are as real as numbers or words are, which is to say they're useful abstract fictions and trying to discern some new science to explain them is retarded. People don't literally have non-physical qualia phenomena, they just have physiology / behavior and qualia is the fictional abstraction of that used to tell a story and make sense out of it. Your brain is fully capable of making you believe these abstract reference points are "really there" even though they aren't, and your brain making you believe in untrue things for convenience isn't a philosophical mystery.

In which reading again just renders qualia as a bogus term. One should either speak of consciousness or emotions or not at all. This limpdick compromise is disgusting

It's not a compromise, it's how it really is. Do you think we shouldn't talk about numbers just because they aren't physically real and only exist as abstraction? That's retarded. Abstract objects are extremely useful and perfectly valid to talk about.

You're not getting the point. Why ever refer to this autistic neologism when we have a vast historical archive of more sophisticated and nuanced terms to understand conscious experience?
There is a difference between a term being valid and justifiable

I don't see an argument for why any alternative terms you might be thinking of are actually more sophisticated or nuanced in reality. You're welcome to try making that argument though.

Oy vey, you're of those guys eh. Yeah have a nice day friend

One of those guys who wants you to try making an actual argument? I don't see why that's an unreasonable expectation for me to have. I can't do anything with a baseless vague assertion. If you want to go somewhere with your idea you should probably explain what it is specifically and why anyone should believe it.

No I simply believe that either you're being disingenuous when you are telling me that you don't believe terms like love, pain, despair and experience should supersede this term qualia or you don't see the worth in them in which case we operate on such radically different notions of reality that I really don't care to try struggle to find bridges between each other on which actual debate can occur. If indeed it could occur as the worth of these terms by their very nature can only be recognized through personal intuitive experience and are perhaps beyond those who are numb to them. Like discussing color theory with a blindman

>love, pain, despair
Arguing those words should replace "qualia" is like arguing that "apple, hamburger, spaghetti" should replace the word "food." Why would you want to get rid of general terms for classes of things? What if you don't want to talk about apples but instead want to talk about all food in general?
>experience
And as for that one, how is that not just interchangeable with "qualia?" I don't see any difference between "experience" and "qualia" as terms, they both mean the same thing as far as I can tell.

Its my understanding that Analytic philosophers prefer not to use the term experience because it presupposes a subject experiencing for which they'd rather not assume. Which I find absurd

>honorificabilitudinitatibus

holy hell, this and mostly this. my old drinking buddy used to use nothing but the words "qualia," "salient," and "gödel" in our philosophical discussions. she was a feisty tart who had half a brain, but she relied on those terms like a crutch and got the fury in her whenever i questioned their meaning or relevance.

Oompf, wouldn't mind getting a qualia of her

>qualia
>coining a new word so that it looks as if former philosophers never thought about it

>eliminative materialism

both qualia and abstract objects are real. they actually exist. not just as useful concepts or "fictional abstractions". physicalism is retarded.

Infact conscious experience is the only thing we can truly know to exist. The difference arrising between Phenomenology and Analytic philosophy is due to two different epistemological starting points. One disingenuous and petty and the other is truthful and genuine

where does one meet qt pseud drinking buddies?

>abstract objects are real
The number 5 isn't floating above the fingers on your hand. It doesn't exist in the real world. It's a fiction based on the idea of abstracting something in common between a hand's fingers, a work week's days, the cost of footlong subs at Subway, etc.
>conscious experience is the only thing we can truly know to exist
You don't have any way of knowing it exists that isn't "it feels real to me." And "it feels real to me" can be applied to a very long list of things that aren't real. The brain's job is to produce useful behavior, and doing this job frequently involves leading you to believe things that aren't objectively true.

>numbers aren't physically real
>not projecting your being into the world of forms and experiencing the concept of 2 with the carnal senses

absolutely plebian

>truth
>genuine
Sure is sppooky in here

False, I have no way of proving it exists. "It feels real to me" is perfectly legitimate as such a statement inherently contains experience. There's no need to even say "real to me", "It feels" is perfectly sufficient

Shh, adults are speaking

Thread theme
youtube.com/watch?v=UeiH9Mm0E5Y

>"It feels real to me" is perfectly legitimate as such a statement inherently contains experience.
It doesn't inherently contain experience. To claim that you would have to claim that it's impossible for anyone to ever report "it feels real to me" or, to address this while we're at it...:
>There's no need to even say "real to me", "It feels" is perfectly sufficient
...to report "it feels" in the absence of an alleged feeling. And people who believe qualia are real don't believe in that. The philosophical zombie argument is proof they don't believe in that because they can suppose of the existence of people who report "it feels real" without having the alleged feeling in reality.
Also look into the condition of blindsight. People with it have perfectly healthy / working eyes and will successfully see and avoid obstacles you put in front of their path, but they'll report not being able to see anything. Which is more evidence there's nothing "inherent" about the alleged reality of qualia since they're definitely making use of sight but don't have any reporting behavior of "it feels" associated with their use of sight.

Again you're talking from a third party perspective, I already made clear that experience can not be proven to others. But to the self its immanence is undeniable and others can never dispute that TO ONESELF

Again as I said earlier this is a matter of an epistemological starting point. To the Analytic they begin as if propositions should be treated as having an independent existence from subjects which to me is retardedly absurd and counter-productive.

>But to the self its immanence is undeniable and others can never dispute that TO ONESELF
The belief in having experienced sensation is not immediate, immutable, or absolute. Each of those qualities are illusions. This is verifiable. It's a pretty popular topic for psych experiments.

And psychology is a laughable pseudo-science for this very reason. Frankly as I said earlier and should have stuck to my guns with I'm not interesting in engaging with someone who proposes such disingenuous drivel, what you're proposing isn't philosophy its a petty language game.

Why y'all trying to put words to the ineffable, like you dont know its ineffable.

Because facing the ineffable is unbearable

>The number 5 isn't floating above the fingers on your hand. It doesn't exist in the real world. It's a fiction based on the idea of abstracting something in common between a hand's fingers, a work week's days, the cost of footlong subs at Subway, etc.
again with the physicalism. why does "5" need to float in the air to exist when it's perfectly obvious that the quality of "5" exists in certain groups of objects and inside most linguistic systems? going by this logic, your list of things that "don't exist" would be absurd: "yes, a song is playing right now, but is there any 'rock music' that's floating in the air around it? no, therefore rock music does not exist."

you're just making an arbitrary demarcation between "real" and "fiction" even though it's clear that what you consider "fiction" has an undeniable effect on the "real" world. if numbers are "fiction" then why are certain numerating systems better at describing some situations than others? sure, physicists know now that no one single axiomatization of mathematics can fully describe the world, but if all math is a fiction, why is chaos theory better at describing two storm systems colliding than arithmetic is?

you say it's all abstractions, but an abstraction is a SELECTION of certain features in a situation that are then formalized and applied to other situations with the same selection of features. so for instance you can't abstract the color red from the sound of someone saying "motorcycle", since there's nothing "red" to select in the sound of the word. therefore there's something in abstraction beyond mere "fiction" that is entirely made up.

Reminder that physically moving your fingers to type a post reporting on your non-physical qualia is a performative contradiction.

Assuming the apparent sense of having "experienced" something is immediate or ineffable is intellectually lazy and will get you nowhere. When you actually make an honest effort to explore seemingly "basic" or "immediate" processes, what you actually find is they only seem basic or immediate because they're so complicated that your brain doesn't even bother having you begin thinking about it. There's a tendency to believe for example that mathematics are complicated but "common sense" is simple, yet in reality it's much more complicated to try to encapsulate what counts as common sense when you're forced to think about what it actually means for the sake of constructing a program that has access to it. Mathematics seems more complicated only because it's something we all had to deliberately think about and learn, while "common sense" seems simpler because we never even began thinking about its complexities. The brain took care of these complexities for us without our being aware of it.
web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/eb9.html
>Feelings are hard to describe because they are complex!
>Our folk-psychology still maintains that our sensations have certain 'basic' or ‘irreducible’ qualities that, somehow, stand all by themselves and cannot be reduced to anything else...
>I want to discuss this briefly here, because some readers might object that if we cannot explain such ‘subjective’ things, that would undermine the whole idea that we can explain the human mind entirely in terms of physical things (such as our brain’s machinery). In other words, if the sensation of sweetness can never be measured or weighed, or detected in any physical way, then it must exist in a separate mental world, where it cannot possibly interact with any physical instruments.
>Well, let’s first observe that this claim must be wrong, because it is self-contradictory. For, if you can tell me that you have experienced sweetness then, somehow, that sensation has caused your mouth to move! So clearly, there must be some ‘physical instrument’ in your brain that recognized the mental activity that embodies your experience...
>In other words, to understand how feelings work in more detail, we’ll have to stop looking for simple answers, and start to explore more complex processes. >When a ray of light strikes your retina, signals flow from that spot to your brain, where they affect other resources, which then transmit other kinds of reports that then influence yet other parts of your brain...
>The old idea that sensations are 'basic' may have been useful in its day, the way the four kinds of 'atoms' of antiquity were supposed to be elementary. But now we need to recognize that our perceptions are far less 'direct,’ because they are affected by what our other resources may want or expect.

>your brain
>your brain
>the brain
>your brain
>brain brain brain brain brain
>brain

ways to spot an analytic cuck

You're a silly, unserious little man

Just read Marvin Minsky's arguments then, he was obviously a lot more credible than any of us are if that's something you're concerned with.

Its actually the sweetest bliss. It just takes practice

Thanks, that's a name I'll be filtering from now on

>just read this book that I read and then you'll agree with me

Maybe the fact you choose to filter what makes you upset has something to do with your mistaken beliefs about reality.

I never said you'd agree with him or with me. You complained about me as a source of information so I gave you an alternative source to go to.

>my understanding of reality is so unshakable that I'm in a position to psychoanalyze the ulterior motivations of those who disagree with me

You don't need an unshakable understanding of reality to point out that actively suppressing your own access to information because it makes you feel bad probably isn't conducive to understanding reality.

>information

I don't exist so why should I care

>Relevant write-up by cognitive scientist who founded MIT's AI laboratory
>Not "information"
Oh, right, it's probably bad and doesn't count because he acknowledges the existence of the brain.

?

>using the analytic single question mark
>not using the continental dreifragezeichnen to indicate the level of intensity of the experienced qualia

>believing there is a 3d video game world out there
>believing this because you think science demonstrates it
>science, which is derived from measurement
>measurement, which is justified by direct perception
>using this theory to try and refute direct perception

You're confusing one person's perception with heterophenomenology. Would you want to live under a legal system that let you get convicted of crimes on the basis of a single person's claims about what they saw? Or would you prefer a requirement of more substantial evidence that more than one person has access to inspect?

You should really rethink your life priorities friend. This is sad

Hot non-argument.

...

None of what you saix has any relevance. The social structures we come up with to negotiate a shared agreement on the truth must ultimately be derived from direct perception of individuals.

One person's belief in their own perception isn't always identical with reality. That's why you check these things across multiple observations made in more than just one way by one person.

The very fact of perception itself is not though retard

>The very fact of perception itself is not
Is not always identical with reality?

>subjective perception isn't always reality
>that's why you check shared subjective perceptions and call it reality to deny subjective perceptions

Direct perception is always truth. The medium is the message. Inferences drawn from it, or the language used to articulate it may be faulty but that is something else entirely. Even hallucinations are real.

If you have five different diagnostic tools it's not a contradiction that each could individually have an accuracy level less than 70% but all five reading one way or the other could have an accuracy level of greater than 99%. The point of corroboration is to learn something about the objective world based on what can consistently be demonstrated across a variety of different approaches to observation. If you and a hundred other people can independently see, hear, touch, mechanically detect, and mathematically model a given phenomenon in consistent ways then it's likely that consistency is due to all those different approaches to observation picking up the same objective thing.

>objective world

The word your looking for is intersubjective. And its a spook.

That "spook" was the basis for the elaborate computer network you used to transmit your argument across the planet just now. That seems like enough evidence for me to consider it more substantial than mere "spook."

Not that absurd if you are a solipsist. >law is as valid as science
Let me guess, you are Jewish?

I never claimed law is as valid as science. It's an analogy meant to show you why there's a meaningful difference between one person's alleged perception vs. a robust collection of cross-checked alleged perceptions and abstract mathematical modeling that all syncs up with one another.

>you don't really feel things, it only feels to you like you do

Direct experience is far more of a basis for it, and yet you have no trouble denying that

Nah, it's that you're compelled to behave and report as though you do.
>Direct experience is far more of a basis for it
Nope, abstract mathematics and physics play a much bigger role in making all that work. There's a reason non-human animals never built their own computer networks. They have the same "direct experience" we do, so that's not what let us build them.

>There's a reason non-human animals never built their own computer networks. They have the same "direct experience" we do, so that's not what let us build them.

This is the stupidest thing I read all day

Indeed but there is huge doubt placed on claims.

Go ahead and check on the debate about mathematical platonism (ie the reality of abstract objects). The platonists have always been winning.

Chimpanzees have opposable thumbs (on all four limbs in fact) and can manipulate physical material as well as we can (better even). And they have sensory organs that work about as well as ours do, if not better. Yet they can't build computer networks. Because the limiting factor isn't in their physical abilities, nor in their access to perception. The limiting factor is they don't have the abstract systems necessary for making something like that work.

I think abstract objects are very important, in many ways more important than physical phenomena. But I wouldn't claim abstract objects are the same as physical objects. I don't think platonists would claim this either. Whether or not you call them "real" is kind of arbitrary. I would usually not call them "real" just because I would differentiate between them and physical phenomena and would call the physical phenomena "real," but that's not to say the physical phenomena are more important or more meaningful.

If you're denyong that you have conscious experiences, I think you're lying and nothing you say will convince me otherwise.

It's not as simple or black and white as affirming or denying "conscious experience." The issue is how you specifically define and explain what goes on when people report having "conscious experience." My explanation for what goes on is that there's physiology and behavior in the "real" world and what we refer to as "experience" is an abstract reference point like numbers or words are rather than an actual thing like a rock or grass that you can take apart and explain in a physical way.

>consciousness is an illusion
who is experienceing that illusion?

The very nature of qualia means it can never be empirically verifiable. Subjective experience cannot be directly shared. But you're insane (or a philosophical zombie) if you deny the imminent reality of your own qualia. You have to recognize the difference between qualia and concepts of what "consciousness" is as a whole (how much the feeling of a united "self" is illusory, etc.).

...

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHA

So dumb i'm not even mad

who's the old hag?

Analytic philosophy of mind was a terrible, terrible mistake.

Patricia Churchland

>frogposting
pic related

>who is experiencing that illusion?
"Experience" is the illusion. Nobody is "experiencing" the illusion of "experience." We report and behave as though there are "experiences" and that's the illusion. The word "illusion" can seem to imply there must be an "experience," but A) as far as that implication exists it's not any more an argument for dualism than the fact we have the words sunset and sunrise are an argument for geocentrism and B) that's not actually the only way of defining the word "illusion" even given that historical language point. One perfectly valid definition for "illusion" is "a false idea or belief," and this definition doesn't assume the existence of an "experience." At a more basic level an illusion is just any case where something is being misinterpreted. If a smudge on a barcode results in a supermarket scanner misinterpreting a box of cereal as a carton of milk, then you can call that situation an illusion. Or pic related, which involves illusions that impact non-human AI specifically. You could argue the scanner or the AI have "qualia" of their own (and David Chalmers does exactly that in his What it is like to be a Thermostat essay), but I think it's more common for dualists to deny they have this.
>But you're insane (or a philosophical zombie) if you deny the imminent reality of your own qualia.
You're misunderstanding the philosophical zombie argument. Philosophical zombies don't differ in any way from non-zombies in terms of what they say to you or how they appear. If you believe they'd be more likely to deny "qualia" as a real thing then you don't get how that argument works. It only gets to be logically consistent as an argument by supposing the zombies are exactly like we are in every physical way including how they speak and act. The fact so many dualists make this same mistake in assuming the zombies would behave differently just goes to show how even dualists recognize on some level that the real thing underlying reported "qualia" is behavior.

>I'll use this passive aggressive meme to discourage them using passive aggressive memes

>there are no mental events, you're just imagining them

You're not "imagining" them. You're behaving and reporting in terms of abstract reference points that aren't there in physical reality. In fact this brings up another good example supporting this argument which is that you can prompt people to try to "imagine" something and then ask them followup questions on the specifics to reveal they never actually "saw" what they claimed to "see" in the first place. Their brain just gave them the lazy notion "I saw an elephant," but when pressed for details they realize they never really looked at shit.

Here's a good Julian Jaynes passage on this topic:
>Although the metaphor of the blank mind had been used in the writings ascribed to Aristotle, it is really only since John Locke thought of the mind as a tabula rasa in the seventeenth century that we have emphasized this recording aspect of consciousness, and thus see it crowded with memories that can be read over again in introspection. If Locke had lived in our time, he would have used the metaphor of a camera rather than a slate. But the idea is the same. And most people would protest emphatically that the chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time.
>So it seems. But consider the following problems: Does the door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.
>I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘knew’, but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.
>Experiments of this sort demonstrate that conscious memory is not a storing up of sensory images, as is sometimes thought. Only if you have at some time consciously noticed your finger lengths or your door, have at some time counted your teeth, though you have observed these things countless times, can you remember. Unless you have particularly noted what is on the wall or recently cleaned or painted it, you will be surprised at what you have left out. And introspect upon the matter. Did you not in each of these instances ask what must be there? Starting with ideas and reasoning, rather than with any image? Conscious retrospection is not the retrieval of images, but the retrieval of what you have been conscious of before, and the reworking of these elements into rational or plausible patterns.

Isnt it funny that the ultimate test of truth today is whether something "can be seen"?

Truly we are living in the century of the image

I don't think anybody is committed to the idea that qualia are like little sense packets that accumulate in your mind. It's not clear though, how they could be abstractions in the manner of words or numbers. I experience qualia. I don't "experience" numbers or words.

Fucking Kek

>One perfectly valid definition for "illusion" is "a false idea or belief," and this definition doesn't assume the existence of an "experience."
re you stupid? Beliefs and ideas don't actually exist, bro. The world is all just atoms and neutrons and shit, and since atoms can't have experiences, can't believe anything and can't hold ideas, that means that illusions can't actually exist.

That's a big problem with the philosophical zombie argument. I'd use the term zombie sort of jokingly, to mean zombies which can only do every physically-determined (ie not qualia-determined) thing a non-zombie can. In this case they'd be only very slightly distinguishable from non-zombies. It might mean being functionally identical in every way except for no capacity to speak truthfully about qualia (since they have none), and more proneness to deny the reality of qualia. That makes the concept ambiguous and maybe arbitrary but still fun for shitposting about physicalists.

""""""."Analityc"""""" """"""school"""""" of """"""""philosophy"""""""" should be erased from history and all their scholars genocided
It is just one big reductio ad scientism/empirism/absurdum amd favourite.

Oh , and don't ever forget muh mental experiments kek.

So qualia are just "qualitative experiences"? What use can this even have aside from a buzzword?