All your examples seem like errors of judgements about our experiences, not experiences that are misrepresented to the subject. They’re all mistaken beliefs about the experience or the limits of introspection as a way of giving reports of our experiences, not mistakes about the existence of the experience.
The monochrome example, the subject has some kind of quale, shades of black and white with various intensities. Those shades are associated with learned colour associations, and so their mistake is a conceptual error, not an error about their qualia.
The peripheral cards is a mistake about the detail in your peripheral vision, not that you were mistaken about the quale, but your interpretation of the quale. You assumed your peripheral vision had the same level of detail as normal vision, but in fact it’s low resolution. Notice you know it must be red or black, so those details are filled in. But when you actually try and determine the colour you can’t. Not because you’re not having some quale or other, but because your peripheral vision doesn’t have the detail you’re expecting it to have. And you’re surprised because your theory about the resolution of peripheral vision is wrong.
And you discovered peripheral vision is low resolution by introspection because you end up saying the quale was “something indeterminate or unclear”. That sounds like introspection actually led you to an accurate description of peripheral vision, not the mistaken belief that everything in our visual field is the same level of detail.
Reports of experience are always interpretative. Qualia realists don’t require infallible introspective precision, they only require there to be some kind of qualia available to introspection.
And just to up the ante, your entire argument relies on realism. The lines seemed a certain length the card colour was a quale you describe as indeterminate colour, the monochrome is experiencing some kind of quale they then report incorrectly. All of which requires qualia to exist to be misreported.
It doesn't rely on qualia realism, if qualia are "private, ineffable, intrinsic, directly apprehensible" elements of experience. A robot could have a functional misrepresentation of the card color.
Now, you can say that upon introspection, you don't believe that the representation is merely functional; you believe that it is qualitative in that private, etc. way. But if you can misclassify shades of grey as red coloration, then why couldn't you misclassify a mere functional state as a private, etc. state?
Because a misclassification about the properties of some quale isn’t a misclassification about the existence of that quale. To mistake red for grey presupposes qualia realism, it’s mistaking one phenomenal appearance for another, not mistaking no phenomenal appearance for a phenomenal appearance.
Introspection can be fallible about content, but that doesn’t entail it’s fallible about the existence of experience. That inference doesn’t follow.
> Introspection can be fallible about content, but that doesn’t entail it’s fallible about the existence of experience.
I'm not saying experience doesn't exist. I'm saying it's not private, ineffable, and intrinsic. When people hear about the hard problem of consciousness, they make a judgment that "I see, my experience is of this ineffable nature, not a functional nature." Couldn't *that* judgment be wrong? If not, why not? Why would we be confident that we infallibly classify experience *as ineffable*, even though we can mistakenly misclassify other things about experience?
I don’t think realists claim to infallibly classify experience as ineffable etc. If the word infallible is relevant, it’s only regarding the existence of our experience. In other words, if it seems like I’m experiencing something, then I am. We can’t be mistaken about that.
Of course I agree I could be mistaken about what consciousness is and if it’s purely functional. But so far I haven't heard any good reason to think so. Being mistaken about our judgements about the contents of qualia isn’t a reason to think qualia can be captured by reference to function and structure.
The arguments that structural and functional explanations leave out the phenomenal character seem unaffected. So until a functionalist account explains that aspect rather than explaining away our reports about it, the realist position has the strongest support.
I mean, there's all the problems that qualia realism raises: how is it supposed to interact with brains? Why don't we see any other irreducible phenomena? Does it cause anything? If it does, why do brains look mechanistic, and if it doesn't, then how can we form justified beliefs that we have it? What about the problem of psychophysical harmony? All of those problems go away if qualia are just functional states.
I'll also flip the question on you: what reason do you have to believe that qualia *aren't* functional? It seems like the only reason is your introspective classification. That does provide some evidence; introspection isn't nothing. But if that could be a misclassification, and we even have examples of misclassifications occurring, then illusionism seems pretty reasonable. So what other reason to you have? Why cling to qualia?
The problems you list seem to be problems for physicalism, not for qualia realism. They come from assuming experience is an irreducible feature added to a fundamentally physical world. But only in that case do all those things you list become problems. So these are problems for physicalist metaphysics, not for the reality of experience.
Functionalism avoids the problems but that only works if the functional description captures what needs explaining. The hard problem is precisely the claim that it doesn’t. Even a complete functional/structural explanation leaves open the question of an inner feel.
So the reason I don’t think qualia reduce to functional states isn’t just an appeal to introspective classification. It’s that functional explanations appear to leave out the phenomenal character of experience entirely. If that’s right, then the conclusion shouldn’t be that qualia are illusory, it should be that physicalism is incomplete.
Qualia aren’t an explanatory posit, they’re the data we want to explain. And normally we adapt our explanations to the data, not the other way around.
> But if you can misclassify shades of grey as red coloration, then why couldn't you misclassify a mere functional state as a private, etc. state?
I could, *in the analogous way* - which is to say I could misunderstand what it is that other people mean by private, etc. But I still know what *I* mean by private etc. That's part of what it means for me to mean something, presumably - if I don't know what I intend then I don't actually intend a thing. And what I mean by private, etc - or rather, what I ostend by phenomenal; whether there are distinct subjects in any sense that would make "private" meaningful is unclear to me - is incompatible with what I ostend by functionalism. The thing I am pointing to when I say "red" is not of a kind with the thing I am pointing to when I say "rhodopsin", period, even if they should turn out to derive from some common source. Or to put it in other terms: whether something is a functional property is analytic. Whether something is real is synthetic as fuck.
We are not very much not qualia realists, but the set-up here seems to slip into a false assumption, namely, that a qualia realist is committed to saying that directly knowing that you have a phenomenal experience is directly knowing the correct concept to associate with it. All qualia realists will deny this (it is one of the things that distinguished qualia theory from versions of the older sense-data theory for which qualia theory was proposed as an alternative). If someone comes to you claiming that things look colored to them, you check this by simply testing whether they can make color judgments correctly (and ruling out that they are not doing so due to faulty testing set-up, etc.). This is because identifying the qualia as 'looking colored' is a *conclusion* that they are drawing, and it is tested like any other conclusion. They are drawing the conclusion (the qualia realist will generally say) on the basis of how the perception is located in their experience (the conditions associated with it, the qualia-patterns of which it is part, what other people say about the situation), which leads them to *associate* the immediate experience with concepts like 'color'.
In other words: How do you know that you have qualia *of some kind*? The qualia realist will say, you have immediate experience; the qualia are just those things in experience that are immediate. (Depending on the qualia realist, you may be told that you can know this by introspecting that you are having an immediate experience, although not all qualia realists put the same importance on introspection.) How do you know that qualia are *of this or that particular kind*? This requires a very different answer. The standard qualia realist answer has usually been that, since they are non-conceptual, you can only indirectly classify them by locating them in experience; this is why one usually uses circumlocutions ('what it's like to see something as colored') to talk about them rather than just labeling them directly. Recognizing that these qualia are 'what it's like to see red' just means that we reasonably and consistently group them with a bunch of experiences that we associate with the concept and label 'red'. Qualia realists don't generally think you directly see that this quale is what it's like to see red (if any do, they are heretics); all of your qualia could completely change, and this has nothing at all to do with how you classify it *unless the change also changed how your experiences were groupable*.
Thus on at least a standard qualia realist view, we call deceptive experiences 'deceptive' because of conceptual problems, despite the fact that they are obviously real experiences, which is why we call them 'experiences'. The existence of qualia for a qualia realist is what makes them real experiences; what makes them deceptive is that we are misfiring, in some way, in how we are associating them with concepts. Deceptiveness just *is* a conceptual matter, not a matter of immediate experience. The qualia realist would take your card experience as an example of why the qualia and the concepts have to be kept distinct.
But then, how do you know that your qualia aren’t just functional states? It seems like the judgment that a quale ≠ a functional state, which is held very strongly by many people, is just another kind of conceptual classification. Because conceptual classifications are possible, the simplest explanation by far of the hard problem of consciousness is that folks are misclassifying qualia as ineffable stuff when in fact they are just plain old functional states.
We are not entirely sure how this would be an objection (it concedes that there are qualia and that they are really immediate in experience), and especially since we are not qualia realists ourselves, it is difficult for us to extrapolate what an actual qualia realist would say, given that. But it seems likely that a qualia realist would at least respond that saying that qualia are *not* something is not a classification of what they are.
Going out more on a limb: Qualia are not 'ineffable stuff' in qualia realism; they are not any kind of stuff at all. And 'ineffable' in this context means only that one characterizes them not by direct determination of their nature, but indirectly by locating how they relate to the rest of experience. In this sense, **functional states are also ineffable**, because functional states, in whichever of the many different and mutually exclusive versions of functionalist theory we might choose, are characterized not by direct conceptual definition of their nature but indirectly by their relations to other things. The difference between qualia and functional states (for a qualia realist) would perhaps be, more or less, that qualia are known in and by immediate experience, as that for which we originally formulate and to which we apply empirical concepts, and functional states are known through causal analysis of entire systems, which is impossible unless we already have empirical concepts somehow. For a qualia realist, saying that we experience functional states immediately is saying that we can identify immediately in experience what can only be identified by extensive investigation and testing, which is absurd; but, they might say, we do identify something immediately in experience -- that's qualia.
>But then, how do you know that your qualia aren’t just functional states? It
Because you have been persuaded by an argument to that effect? Not everything that is asserted of Qualia has to be directly given in experience. Almost no one asserts the immateriality of Qualia as directly given, while we're in the subject, that's pretty much a strawman.
Really really interesting! I’m working on a ‘master post’ for illusionism and this is by far the best articulation of the positive case against qualia I’ve seen on Substack.
Here is one objection I’ve run into: radically deceptive experiences only show that we can be mistaken about which type of qualia, in a particular modality, our experiences token. I can surely mistaken that I am having a red quale, or a green quale, or what have you, but I cannot be mistaken that I’m having *some visual quale or other.*
Here is one case I’ve been mulling over in response to this sort of reply: Consider a scientist who attempts to create genetically engineered super humans. His goal is to create a man-bat. His first step is to get the perceptual system right, so he increases the size of the man’s ears, contorts them into bat shapes, and so on, via some science fiction gene editing. At the end of the process the subject has bat quality hearing, and he is able to use sonar in the same way bats do to navigate their environment. The cost of this genetic treatment is blindness. The subject gains bat like sonar navigation abilities but their rods and cones cease to function.
The scientist conducts the treatment on a man named Jones. Jones awakens and responds quite oddly. “Nothing has changed.” Says Jones. The scientist is confused. Jones stands up and begins to navigate the room, and he shows no evident difficulty. “Did the surgery work?” He asks. The scientist is befuddled, had something gone wrong?
The scientist conducts numerous test and finds the following interesting observations: Jones can do no better than chance on color differentiation tests of unknown objects. Indeed, he can describe the contours of the object reliably, but not the shape. Further, Jones is able to spatially navigate just as well as he did before. Finally, when Jones is wearing headphones, he stumbles around like a drunk, yet he swears he can still see.
Jones is a confabulator par excellence. He confabulates the spatial information his auditory system conveys to him with visual information. Such a case strikes me as entirely intelligible. Further, I think it’s *close* to actual. I don’t want to die on the empirics, but the presentation of some cases of Anton syndrome strikes me as relevantly alike to this case, with the main difference being that subjects can’t achieve perfect spatial orientation without the use of their sight, while Jones can.
So the phenomenal realist is wrong. For practically the same reasons you outlined here, we can also be mistaken about possessing qualia of a particular modality, not just of a type *within* each sensory modality. I think this is the last big hurdle to the plausibility of an illusionist theory.
Thanks! I'm quite excited about this being in a master post, because it was radically deceptive experiences which *singlehandedly* broke my staunch qualia realism. No Graziano, no Dennett, no Lance Bush ever made sense to me until I got this point, and then it pretty much all made sense. I don't know if that'll be the case for everyone, but it is by far the most persuasive phenomenon I have encountered.
I think part of the ‘reorienting’ that is helpful with illusionism comes by recognizing these two facts: (1) We couldn’t know if we had qualia, and (2) All the anti-physicalists arguments are arguments that we don’t. The first point is the hard pill to swallow but I think everything you say here pushes us towards that conclusion. If you accept that qualia can *only* be recognized by introspection and then realize that we *can’t introspectively differentiate ourselves* from someone who lacks qualia, then all we need to do is provide some reason for thinking we don’t have qualia, and our bare belief that we have them is undermined. All the anti-physicalist arguments effectively do this if you’re a physicalist, because the conclusion of those arguments should always strike you as less plausible than the absence of qualia if you accept the above reasoning. Aside from that though you can just appeal to the apparent strangeness of qualia and so on which I think is sufficient to justify their theoretical poverty.
So I think a real argument for illusionism (which I want to lay out in the post) has to get people to see and accept *that* picture. Part of what helps, I think, also comes with presenting a story of why we went wrong, which I also want to do in that post. Anyway, the point is that I think the core insight of this post *is* the argument for illusionism. I don’t think my post will end up saying much different in that regard, or provide a substantially different argument for the same conclusion (except for maybe one exception, we’ll have to wait and see for that!); but I think the post will say a lot about the surrounding intellectual landscape which helps make this reorientation more palatable.
Can't we just say that the man really does have visual experience. Qualia just arise after a lot of interpretation and processing has been done on the input. So he really does have color experiences--but they are a sort of hallucination.
They definitely could say that! It just strikes me as an ad hoc response. If someone accepts the lesson of the color discrimination cases that Jack outlined, then it seems that they should accept we can be mistaken about our beliefs of what qualia type we token. Once you accept the possibility of error there, I don’t see a clear principled distinction that could be drawn with sensory modality, and inter modality qualia type, that should make us think we could be mistaken in our beliefs about the latter and not the former. Sensations in different modalities probably strike me as more different then different types of sensation in the same modality, but why should I think that difference is sufficient for infallibility?
If someone rejects the easier cases I’d want to step through those first. There are also a couple real world phenomenon (Anton syndrome, blindsight, and synesthesia namely) which just make me strongly suspicious that the sort of confabulation I describe is possible. I don’t think it has ever occurred, but you could imagine someone with Anton like symptoms, who is blindsighted, and the standard qualia realist line is to say that blindsighted people lack visual qualia, so it would seem surprising to say that someone with the joint symptoms would not be. You could even imagine someone who exhibited standard Anton symptoms and was retinally blind, had their retinal blindness reversed and was instead cortically blinded, who after the fact exhibited closer to normal performance on visual tasks, whose verbal reports never changed. These sorts of scenarios just strike me as clearly possible. We can certainly *say* they aren’t but then *I* want to say we are just table thumping.
Right okay, so maybe I was misinterpreting the dialectical context. I thought you were giving the case as a problem case for PR to make sense of. But if you're already committed to PR, it wouldn't be that hard, since you could just say that the qualia arise after some layers of processing.
But I think your point with the case was to show how, if we accept that the other cases imply that we can make mistakes about the types of qualia within a modality, this case shows that we can make mistakes about whole sensory modalities.
I think that might be right, though I'll have to think about it. Something seems suspicious--or at least I'm not sure how problematic this has to be for PR. I guess I'd want to say that people clearly can make false judgements about experiences, but I'm unsure whether that debunks the knowledge people that do not have these sorts of conditions have about their experiences. Maybe by expanding on the sort of story I give here (https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/are-my-experiences-given-unlocked?utm_source=publication-search) (not to self-promo too hard, I just feel like there's something to the picture I give here that fits with the apparent obviousness of experiences while respecting illusionist style challenges).
Well, I think this is a problem case for the phenomenal realist who accepts the weaker cases and tries to stop the buck here. You might think "Well, there are phenomenal properties, and I can be mistaken about them here, and here, but not there!" where 'there' is at sensory modalities, and I just want to say that is wrong.
I need to read that post of yours! I will soon.
On the question about whether the ability to make false judgements about experience debunks knowledge in normal conditions, here is the problem I see: Qualia are supposed to be identifiable only by introspection. If you accept zombie arguments, invert arguments, and other minds arguments, all third personal evidence will be consistent with the non-existence of qualia, or the existence of different qualia, even third person evidence observed 'from the inside,' i.e. me seeing that I am moving my arms and legs and so on in a way that is indicative of jubilence. These cases show an incorrect qualia judgement, but they also seem to be *introspectively* indistinguishable. In the case of the patient with strange color vision, he can't tell just by introspecting whether he has colored qualia or merely believes he does. Given that, ex hypothesi, qualia are also extrinsically indistinguishable, it's hard to see how the subject could be justified in thinking he has qualia at all. Now, at this point, we might make something like a phenomenal conservative appeal. "Well, the subject believes it, so he's justified in the absence of defeaters" (or it seems that way to him or he has the intuition or... specify your favorite necessary state for PC to apply). But now all the evidence *against* qualia (incompatibility with physicalism, and the apparent strangeness of them as entities) kicks in, and will override the PC considerations, even if you think that evidence is rather weak.
So you run a pincer attack. You keep undercutting the evidence we have for qualia, until you reach the point of a very weak intuitive appeal. At the same time, you stack up the evidence against it. Once the evidence for qualia gets so weak, even if the evidence against it isn't super strong, it won't matter, anti qualia views win out.
To the last to paragraphs, I suppose the situation reminds me a lot of the trivialism discourse (shivers). Sure, a trivialist would say that they didn't believe whatever I say that I don't believe, but the problem is that there actually *are* things that I don't believe, and I know that there aren't, even if the trivialist believes the same things. Similarly, a cognitive zombie version of me with all the judgements but none of the P-experiences would make all the same claims to have P-experiences as me. The problem is that I *do* have those experiences, and I just see them.
Again, that's just table-thumping to some extent. But all the illusionist cases and experiments I've tried really haven't shaken my sense that I just do know that I have experiences. Maybe I just have to spend more time meditating on it or something, but it all seems to me like puzzles with how to give an account of our knowledge of P-experiences, than anything (obviously you won't agree, and you probably intuitively feel the same way, but have ascended to illusionist nirvana).
I think the difference is that there’s some evidence you don’t have your qualia, I don’t think there’s any evidence you lack a belief in trivialism. I actually think you have some 3rd person evidence for your lack of belief in trivialism (planning to go into this in a post soon) so I don’t think replying to the trivialist fully leans on this move fwiw. Anyway, the ‘seeing’ point is just a point about justification, if you see that P your justified in believing that P even though ‘seeing’ there is non-factive. Maybe trivialist you *does* see that he lacks a belief, and is just wrong about it. He would, in that case, also have some justification for his belief that he’s a trivialist.
Yea it’s a real ‘zen master’ view, once you get it you unlike your third eye and master all 4 elements to defeat Fire Lord Ozai. I’m hoping to include as many intuition pumps as possible in my next post so maybe something will spark your introspective feelers there, but I do think some people might hear all the arguments and still just be like “I don’t buy it” and that’s fine. I think a lot of philosophical issues are like that for some people. I would love for you to come around though!
Thanks for highlighting Dennett's example of the individual that could match colors but not name them. I'm a phenomenal realist and yet for a while I did wonder for a while if that case disproved qualia. The fact that the patient can color match suggests he is seeing colors correctly. But how could he be seeing colors correctly and yet not name them? It's the same blue quale that we use to match colors as name them.
My first hypothesis to save qualia was that he was seeing colors but incorrect colors. Somehow color information was getting mixed up, but in a consistent way where two blue tiles might appear to be a different color, but the same different color. Thus he would name the tiles wrong but still be able to match them.
My second hypothesis was he was seeing the correct colors, but had trouble naming them due to memory. He remembers the word blue, knows the sky is blue, but upon seeing the quale blue he would have trouble remembering the name of it.
Upon further reflection, I decided the second hypothesis was much better. Being "mixed up but consistent" seemed unlikely to happen, but not remembering the name of a color is very much in line with other experiences I've had. For example, I know the name Steve, know my good friend from high school is named Steve, but might not come up with the name Steve upon looking at a face of someone who introduced themselves to me minutes earlier.
I wasn't able to access the original article, but based on the title I assume the patient had "pure alexia" which is trouble reading. These cases are often due to a injury that affects the connection between the visual system and the language system. I was able to access a similar article: "Two Systems for Colour Naming Defects: Verbal Disconnection vs. Colour Imagery Disorder (Luc Pieter De Vreese, 1990)". Case I seemed especially similar, except he was less confident and would say things like "Blue, no wait, red .. maybe, umm, yellow!" when asked to name colors. Furthermore, the patients, when given the outline of say a carrot, they could correctly choose the right crayon to color it in. All this additional information is inconsistent with my first hypothesis, but very much in line with my second. I'm now cautiously optimistic the second hypothesis is correct. (Notice how useful the idea of a quale was to the IMO correct second explanation).
Dennett says that when confronted by scenarios like these, philosophers often give confidently different answers, or pause and refuse to give any answer. He seemed to suggest this is because they don't work with the concept of qualia, but perhaps there are just multiple possible answers on how these can coexist with qualia and further testing is needed to determine which is best (if any). So ultimately I don't think this is the smoking gun Dennett would like it to be, nor would I consider it a likely candidate for a radically deceptive experience.
Hmm, I'll have to look into the case more, but for my tired brain this seems like a pretty good answer to this case! Probably isn't a slam dunk, though I think radically deceptive experiences do still exist based on my & Pete's experience.
Okay, it's past my bedtime, so this will just be a brief gesture, but I felt like I should say something.
I'm not sure about this, but my initial reaction would be a combination two things: 1) We can think that qualia arise after quite a bit of processing has already been done to visual stimuli, which would account for why we see more colors than we should, have inconsistent experiences over time, etc. and 2) I think we could say that we make cognitive mistakes when comparing experiences, or thinking about them on higher orders, even if our immediate experience is infallible--just like how I could figure out that the solution to one equation is X and that the solution to another equation is also X, but not realize that the two solutions are the same (maybe a bad example, but I hope you get what I mean.
That leaves a lot of stuff unaddressed, but I feel like it's the beginnings of an explanation.
The question is then: why shouldn’t we believe we are merely misclassifying functional states as private, ineffable, intrinsic states? Isn’t “my qualia ≠ a physical, functional state” also a “higher-order” judgment? In that case, if you admit fallibility about higher-order judgments, isn’t this a much more parsimonious explanation of the hard problem?
I suppose I would be inclined in a few directions:
1) On one level we *can't* misclassify our experiences--either as the wrong color, or as phenomenal to begin with--on the sort of proposal I have in mind. There is a sort of layer of just cognitively "noticing" that the experiences are there (this is the sort of picture I try to give in the linked post). On another level, we can make mistakes. But those mistakes are in comparing experiences. In the checkerboard illusion, I'm certain that I'm experiencing *that* color *there* and *this* color *here*. But I'm not sure whether *this* and *that* are the same color. But whether or not my experiences are qualitative is presumably going to be an intrinsic property, so the same sort of problem doesn't arise (I'm not sure how good this response is).
2) Even if we say that our knowledge of our experiences is fallible all the way down, I'm increasingly starting to wonder why this should be a problem. Sure, there might be cases where I'm 50/50 about whether some edge case experience is this or that. And when I attend to a very small part of my visual field, it becomes murky what's going on. Still, as I include more and more of my experiences, and more and more regular everyday cases, my credence that I'm not mistaken about all of them approaches 1. Sure, maybe these things show that illusionism *could* be true, or that it's not epistemically impossible or whatever. But the probability that I'm making mistakes about every single judgement in my experience is just vanishingly small.
3) On an intellectual level, it's puzzling how to make sense of the connection between our experiences and our judgements, and how we could get any particularly good knowledge of the experiences. And when I consider puzzles like this, I can lose some faith in my experiences.
But then I zoom out, and just take a look around, listen to some sounds, etc., and I just want to slam my table in protest! It's hard to see how I can know that my experiences are there, but *LOOK* there they are, and the question isn't *whether* I have knowledge of my experiences, but *how*. It's simply not the sort of thing that could be debunked by a clever enough explanation of why I make the judgements I do.
Maybe I just need to have an experience of my experiences failing, to get me to appreciate the point, but I haven't felt the inclination yet. I tried the card trick. It was definitely an interesting exercise, but I didn't really feel any deep worry about what was going on.
> But the probability that I'm making mistakes about every single judgement in my experience is just vanishingly small.
I'm willing to bet you are just flat-out wrong here, because I think you're confusing bias and variance.
Suppose a group of astronauts are traversing Mars in a rover with lots of sensors: pressure, wind speed, cameras, etc. Most of these sensors serve the crew quite well, and they successfully navigate many obstacles. But the crew notices something a little odd: the temperature sensor always reads within a few degrees of 10°C, even when atmospheric calculations suggest -50° or -60°. The engineer conjectures that the temperature sensor is busted. The captain scoffs, "Improbable! We've been on this mission for 100 days. How likely is it that the sensor didn't work on day 1, *and* day 2, *and* day 3, *and* day 4… and so on?"
Actually, pretty likely, if the temperature sensor was busted on day one! That's the illusionist position, that there is something about the way the brain classifies our experiences that it *systematically* classifies them as ineffable, and this is a byproduct of helpful, oversimplifying schematic representations.
The "edge cases" in the essay indicate that your thermometer is imperfect; it can be thrown out of whack. If that's the case, then it becomes way easier to believe your thermometer can also be *biased*. And isn't that a *much* simpler explanation for the mind-body problem?
Right okay, so that depends on what you think is most analogous to the illusionist cases. I would have interpreted them in a way where a better analogy is that you have, say, a caliper with some degree of error. So in certain precise measurements, you can't be very sure that it's correct, but you can be almost certain that a piece you're measuring is around 9.7cm
I took the cases to be something like: you are unable to tell what experience you're having. I can't tell, for instance, whether I'm seeing red or black, or whether some taste is the same. I didn't find out that my experience wasn't ineffable or phenomenal, but just that I wasn't sure about the details of it, regardless of phenomenality or lack thereof.
That fits perfectly well with the idea that my knowledge of my experiences is like the caliper, rather than the thermometer; in certain cases my judgement is very clouded, but in standard cases it's fine, and I can be almost certain that it's reasonably accurate on the whole. In fact that seems like a very natural interpretation of the cases to me.
Maybe there's something about the cases that forces us in the other direction that I missed? Please correct me if I'm just missing the thrust of the arguments
"Does one have to introspect into one’s mind to discover and conclude that you are having an experience right now, that there is phenomenal consciousness? No.”
The only mystery here is why these are at all convincing to you.
The first example is trivial. Imagine a man with colour blindness who thinks everyone else is lying about their experiences. If cured of his colour blindness, he would come to realise that others really did have a radically different experience all along.
The second example is self-defeating and has no force to it. Whether the card seems black, red, or you're not sure, or you have it wrong, doesn't change that you really are having an experience of the card. You're talking about what it's like for you to be looking with your peripheral vision.
Illusionists don't deny that people have experiences. They deny that experiences have private, ineffable, intrinsic, directly apprehensible properties. Do you think these are definitionally necessary features of the word experience—that experience refers only to states which have these properties?
If so, then we should amend what you just said to make it more explicit:
> The second example is self-defeating and has no force to it. Whether the card seems black, red, or you're not sure, or you have it wrong, doesn't change that you really are having a [private, ineffable, intrinsic, directly apprehensible] experience of the card. You're talking about what it's like [in a private, ineffable, intrinsic, directly apprehensible way] for you to be looking with your peripheral vision.
I'm only self-defeating if I am saying "You don't have private, ineffable, etc. qualia, it only seems to you *in a private, ineffable, etc. way* that you do." But nobody holds that position, not even the illusionists!
I'm not going to sit and argue for or against every single adjective you've got bundled here (it could turn out that any given conceptualisation of qualia is wrong about some specific aspect)– but the basic standpoint is that there is a character to our experiences, there is something it's like to be that person looking at a card. That's what you're describing in your examples, and that's what an illusionist is denying if they're saying there is no such thing as qualia.
But then why couldn't that character be a functional character, a representational character, a dispositional character, or something like that? If you don't specify what it is that is distinct about this character from other kinds of properties, then your stance is perfectly compatible with illusionism!
Again, if you can't specify a property, then all that you're really saying is that when you think about functional states vs. mental states, you have a really strong inclination to judge that they can't be the same thing, that there's some missing "character." I am arguing that that *judgment* could be wrong.
It's not that I can't specify properties, I was just trying to avoid getting lost in the weeds. But sure, the "function" of functionalism does seem to me to be hopelessly vague. Does a camera see? Does a thermometer feel the temperature? Does a computer have memories? You can give a functionalist account for why these are like humans experiencing, but there's nothing its like to be a camera, thermometer or computer.
My sense when it comes to the illusionists is that Frankish just reinvents phenomena when he talks about pseudo-phenomena, and Dennett invents a restricted version of qualia to beat up, leaving the hard problem untouched.
I mean, again, you're just relying on the same judgment to say that (a) experience cannot be a vague phenomenon, and (b) there is no sense in which a camera has an experience.
Ironically, I think it's harder to say there's nothing its like to be a camera if you're a qualia realist. If qualia are private, then how could you know that there's nothing it's like to be a camera?
Meanwhile, if there are only functional/representational/dispositional/etc. states, an illusionist can answer honestly: a camera has a kind of "perception," which is like human perception in some ways (light & color receptive) but very unlike it in other ways (no embodiment, no object recognition, no motion detection, no attention mechanism, no introspection or reasoning capabilities, etc.). Whether you want to call these both "experiences" or not comes down to definitions, but the illusionist can maintain that they aren't ontologically different *and* they are really different in many ways.
There's only a metaphorical sense in which a camera has an experience. We know that because there's no reason to think that a camera has consciousness. Accepting that consciousness emerges from recognisable physical processes (e.g. having bodies with brains) isn't the same as saying consciousness is identical to a third-person account of those processes, any more than the narrative of War and Peace is reducible to the atoms that make up copies of the book.
I better stop here. After much engagement with position over the last year, it's still not really clear to me what the llusionist position is really affirming or denying.
It's hard for me to empathize with your experience because I can't put myself in the perspective of experiencing indeterminate colors, and I don't have a deck of cards at home to try it out. But I don't think we need to go that far to show that we sometimes don't have direct acquaintance with all the properties of our subjective experiences 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺. Imagine these situations:
* You go to the doctor and he asks you to rate your pain between 0 and 10. It's not far from reality to imagine someone rating their pain as a 4 when it is actually closer to a 3.
* People often have a set of preferred dishes like lasagna bolognese, fettuccine alfredo, and tiramisu but they can't tell the exact ranking among them.
This demonstrates that even though these experiences are presented to us, we may still be unable to grasp all their properties with perfect accuracy. That might refute a strong version of phenomenal realism (PR), but it seems to me like we could instead stipulate a weaker version of PR rather than accepting illusionism.
I think you’re on the right path to free us from endless puzzlement about phenomenal consciousness, qualia, etc. You hit on the crux when you asked: “How can it seem to you that it seems to you that p, if it does not seem to you that p? “.
Not that I know the answer, only that the answer lies beyond the door of that paradox.
All your examples seem like errors of judgements about our experiences, not experiences that are misrepresented to the subject. They’re all mistaken beliefs about the experience or the limits of introspection as a way of giving reports of our experiences, not mistakes about the existence of the experience.
The monochrome example, the subject has some kind of quale, shades of black and white with various intensities. Those shades are associated with learned colour associations, and so their mistake is a conceptual error, not an error about their qualia.
The peripheral cards is a mistake about the detail in your peripheral vision, not that you were mistaken about the quale, but your interpretation of the quale. You assumed your peripheral vision had the same level of detail as normal vision, but in fact it’s low resolution. Notice you know it must be red or black, so those details are filled in. But when you actually try and determine the colour you can’t. Not because you’re not having some quale or other, but because your peripheral vision doesn’t have the detail you’re expecting it to have. And you’re surprised because your theory about the resolution of peripheral vision is wrong.
And you discovered peripheral vision is low resolution by introspection because you end up saying the quale was “something indeterminate or unclear”. That sounds like introspection actually led you to an accurate description of peripheral vision, not the mistaken belief that everything in our visual field is the same level of detail.
Reports of experience are always interpretative. Qualia realists don’t require infallible introspective precision, they only require there to be some kind of qualia available to introspection.
And just to up the ante, your entire argument relies on realism. The lines seemed a certain length the card colour was a quale you describe as indeterminate colour, the monochrome is experiencing some kind of quale they then report incorrectly. All of which requires qualia to exist to be misreported.
It doesn't rely on qualia realism, if qualia are "private, ineffable, intrinsic, directly apprehensible" elements of experience. A robot could have a functional misrepresentation of the card color.
Now, you can say that upon introspection, you don't believe that the representation is merely functional; you believe that it is qualitative in that private, etc. way. But if you can misclassify shades of grey as red coloration, then why couldn't you misclassify a mere functional state as a private, etc. state?
Because a misclassification about the properties of some quale isn’t a misclassification about the existence of that quale. To mistake red for grey presupposes qualia realism, it’s mistaking one phenomenal appearance for another, not mistaking no phenomenal appearance for a phenomenal appearance.
Introspection can be fallible about content, but that doesn’t entail it’s fallible about the existence of experience. That inference doesn’t follow.
> Introspection can be fallible about content, but that doesn’t entail it’s fallible about the existence of experience.
I'm not saying experience doesn't exist. I'm saying it's not private, ineffable, and intrinsic. When people hear about the hard problem of consciousness, they make a judgment that "I see, my experience is of this ineffable nature, not a functional nature." Couldn't *that* judgment be wrong? If not, why not? Why would we be confident that we infallibly classify experience *as ineffable*, even though we can mistakenly misclassify other things about experience?
I don’t think realists claim to infallibly classify experience as ineffable etc. If the word infallible is relevant, it’s only regarding the existence of our experience. In other words, if it seems like I’m experiencing something, then I am. We can’t be mistaken about that.
Of course I agree I could be mistaken about what consciousness is and if it’s purely functional. But so far I haven't heard any good reason to think so. Being mistaken about our judgements about the contents of qualia isn’t a reason to think qualia can be captured by reference to function and structure.
The arguments that structural and functional explanations leave out the phenomenal character seem unaffected. So until a functionalist account explains that aspect rather than explaining away our reports about it, the realist position has the strongest support.
I mean, there's all the problems that qualia realism raises: how is it supposed to interact with brains? Why don't we see any other irreducible phenomena? Does it cause anything? If it does, why do brains look mechanistic, and if it doesn't, then how can we form justified beliefs that we have it? What about the problem of psychophysical harmony? All of those problems go away if qualia are just functional states.
I'll also flip the question on you: what reason do you have to believe that qualia *aren't* functional? It seems like the only reason is your introspective classification. That does provide some evidence; introspection isn't nothing. But if that could be a misclassification, and we even have examples of misclassifications occurring, then illusionism seems pretty reasonable. So what other reason to you have? Why cling to qualia?
The problems you list seem to be problems for physicalism, not for qualia realism. They come from assuming experience is an irreducible feature added to a fundamentally physical world. But only in that case do all those things you list become problems. So these are problems for physicalist metaphysics, not for the reality of experience.
Functionalism avoids the problems but that only works if the functional description captures what needs explaining. The hard problem is precisely the claim that it doesn’t. Even a complete functional/structural explanation leaves open the question of an inner feel.
So the reason I don’t think qualia reduce to functional states isn’t just an appeal to introspective classification. It’s that functional explanations appear to leave out the phenomenal character of experience entirely. If that’s right, then the conclusion shouldn’t be that qualia are illusory, it should be that physicalism is incomplete.
Qualia aren’t an explanatory posit, they’re the data we want to explain. And normally we adapt our explanations to the data, not the other way around.
"Might be a mistake" just isn't wrong enough.
> But if you can misclassify shades of grey as red coloration, then why couldn't you misclassify a mere functional state as a private, etc. state?
I could, *in the analogous way* - which is to say I could misunderstand what it is that other people mean by private, etc. But I still know what *I* mean by private etc. That's part of what it means for me to mean something, presumably - if I don't know what I intend then I don't actually intend a thing. And what I mean by private, etc - or rather, what I ostend by phenomenal; whether there are distinct subjects in any sense that would make "private" meaningful is unclear to me - is incompatible with what I ostend by functionalism. The thing I am pointing to when I say "red" is not of a kind with the thing I am pointing to when I say "rhodopsin", period, even if they should turn out to derive from some common source. Or to put it in other terms: whether something is a functional property is analytic. Whether something is real is synthetic as fuck.
We are not very much not qualia realists, but the set-up here seems to slip into a false assumption, namely, that a qualia realist is committed to saying that directly knowing that you have a phenomenal experience is directly knowing the correct concept to associate with it. All qualia realists will deny this (it is one of the things that distinguished qualia theory from versions of the older sense-data theory for which qualia theory was proposed as an alternative). If someone comes to you claiming that things look colored to them, you check this by simply testing whether they can make color judgments correctly (and ruling out that they are not doing so due to faulty testing set-up, etc.). This is because identifying the qualia as 'looking colored' is a *conclusion* that they are drawing, and it is tested like any other conclusion. They are drawing the conclusion (the qualia realist will generally say) on the basis of how the perception is located in their experience (the conditions associated with it, the qualia-patterns of which it is part, what other people say about the situation), which leads them to *associate* the immediate experience with concepts like 'color'.
In other words: How do you know that you have qualia *of some kind*? The qualia realist will say, you have immediate experience; the qualia are just those things in experience that are immediate. (Depending on the qualia realist, you may be told that you can know this by introspecting that you are having an immediate experience, although not all qualia realists put the same importance on introspection.) How do you know that qualia are *of this or that particular kind*? This requires a very different answer. The standard qualia realist answer has usually been that, since they are non-conceptual, you can only indirectly classify them by locating them in experience; this is why one usually uses circumlocutions ('what it's like to see something as colored') to talk about them rather than just labeling them directly. Recognizing that these qualia are 'what it's like to see red' just means that we reasonably and consistently group them with a bunch of experiences that we associate with the concept and label 'red'. Qualia realists don't generally think you directly see that this quale is what it's like to see red (if any do, they are heretics); all of your qualia could completely change, and this has nothing at all to do with how you classify it *unless the change also changed how your experiences were groupable*.
Thus on at least a standard qualia realist view, we call deceptive experiences 'deceptive' because of conceptual problems, despite the fact that they are obviously real experiences, which is why we call them 'experiences'. The existence of qualia for a qualia realist is what makes them real experiences; what makes them deceptive is that we are misfiring, in some way, in how we are associating them with concepts. Deceptiveness just *is* a conceptual matter, not a matter of immediate experience. The qualia realist would take your card experience as an example of why the qualia and the concepts have to be kept distinct.
But then, how do you know that your qualia aren’t just functional states? It seems like the judgment that a quale ≠ a functional state, which is held very strongly by many people, is just another kind of conceptual classification. Because conceptual classifications are possible, the simplest explanation by far of the hard problem of consciousness is that folks are misclassifying qualia as ineffable stuff when in fact they are just plain old functional states.
We are not entirely sure how this would be an objection (it concedes that there are qualia and that they are really immediate in experience), and especially since we are not qualia realists ourselves, it is difficult for us to extrapolate what an actual qualia realist would say, given that. But it seems likely that a qualia realist would at least respond that saying that qualia are *not* something is not a classification of what they are.
Going out more on a limb: Qualia are not 'ineffable stuff' in qualia realism; they are not any kind of stuff at all. And 'ineffable' in this context means only that one characterizes them not by direct determination of their nature, but indirectly by locating how they relate to the rest of experience. In this sense, **functional states are also ineffable**, because functional states, in whichever of the many different and mutually exclusive versions of functionalist theory we might choose, are characterized not by direct conceptual definition of their nature but indirectly by their relations to other things. The difference between qualia and functional states (for a qualia realist) would perhaps be, more or less, that qualia are known in and by immediate experience, as that for which we originally formulate and to which we apply empirical concepts, and functional states are known through causal analysis of entire systems, which is impossible unless we already have empirical concepts somehow. For a qualia realist, saying that we experience functional states immediately is saying that we can identify immediately in experience what can only be identified by extensive investigation and testing, which is absurd; but, they might say, we do identify something immediately in experience -- that's qualia.
>But then, how do you know that your qualia aren’t just functional states? It
Because you have been persuaded by an argument to that effect? Not everything that is asserted of Qualia has to be directly given in experience. Almost no one asserts the immateriality of Qualia as directly given, while we're in the subject, that's pretty much a strawman.
Really really interesting! I’m working on a ‘master post’ for illusionism and this is by far the best articulation of the positive case against qualia I’ve seen on Substack.
Here is one objection I’ve run into: radically deceptive experiences only show that we can be mistaken about which type of qualia, in a particular modality, our experiences token. I can surely mistaken that I am having a red quale, or a green quale, or what have you, but I cannot be mistaken that I’m having *some visual quale or other.*
Here is one case I’ve been mulling over in response to this sort of reply: Consider a scientist who attempts to create genetically engineered super humans. His goal is to create a man-bat. His first step is to get the perceptual system right, so he increases the size of the man’s ears, contorts them into bat shapes, and so on, via some science fiction gene editing. At the end of the process the subject has bat quality hearing, and he is able to use sonar in the same way bats do to navigate their environment. The cost of this genetic treatment is blindness. The subject gains bat like sonar navigation abilities but their rods and cones cease to function.
The scientist conducts the treatment on a man named Jones. Jones awakens and responds quite oddly. “Nothing has changed.” Says Jones. The scientist is confused. Jones stands up and begins to navigate the room, and he shows no evident difficulty. “Did the surgery work?” He asks. The scientist is befuddled, had something gone wrong?
The scientist conducts numerous test and finds the following interesting observations: Jones can do no better than chance on color differentiation tests of unknown objects. Indeed, he can describe the contours of the object reliably, but not the shape. Further, Jones is able to spatially navigate just as well as he did before. Finally, when Jones is wearing headphones, he stumbles around like a drunk, yet he swears he can still see.
Jones is a confabulator par excellence. He confabulates the spatial information his auditory system conveys to him with visual information. Such a case strikes me as entirely intelligible. Further, I think it’s *close* to actual. I don’t want to die on the empirics, but the presentation of some cases of Anton syndrome strikes me as relevantly alike to this case, with the main difference being that subjects can’t achieve perfect spatial orientation without the use of their sight, while Jones can.
So the phenomenal realist is wrong. For practically the same reasons you outlined here, we can also be mistaken about possessing qualia of a particular modality, not just of a type *within* each sensory modality. I think this is the last big hurdle to the plausibility of an illusionist theory.
Again, great post. Enjoyed it a lot!
Thanks! I'm quite excited about this being in a master post, because it was radically deceptive experiences which *singlehandedly* broke my staunch qualia realism. No Graziano, no Dennett, no Lance Bush ever made sense to me until I got this point, and then it pretty much all made sense. I don't know if that'll be the case for everyone, but it is by far the most persuasive phenomenon I have encountered.
I think part of the ‘reorienting’ that is helpful with illusionism comes by recognizing these two facts: (1) We couldn’t know if we had qualia, and (2) All the anti-physicalists arguments are arguments that we don’t. The first point is the hard pill to swallow but I think everything you say here pushes us towards that conclusion. If you accept that qualia can *only* be recognized by introspection and then realize that we *can’t introspectively differentiate ourselves* from someone who lacks qualia, then all we need to do is provide some reason for thinking we don’t have qualia, and our bare belief that we have them is undermined. All the anti-physicalist arguments effectively do this if you’re a physicalist, because the conclusion of those arguments should always strike you as less plausible than the absence of qualia if you accept the above reasoning. Aside from that though you can just appeal to the apparent strangeness of qualia and so on which I think is sufficient to justify their theoretical poverty.
So I think a real argument for illusionism (which I want to lay out in the post) has to get people to see and accept *that* picture. Part of what helps, I think, also comes with presenting a story of why we went wrong, which I also want to do in that post. Anyway, the point is that I think the core insight of this post *is* the argument for illusionism. I don’t think my post will end up saying much different in that regard, or provide a substantially different argument for the same conclusion (except for maybe one exception, we’ll have to wait and see for that!); but I think the post will say a lot about the surrounding intellectual landscape which helps make this reorientation more palatable.
Can't we just say that the man really does have visual experience. Qualia just arise after a lot of interpretation and processing has been done on the input. So he really does have color experiences--but they are a sort of hallucination.
They definitely could say that! It just strikes me as an ad hoc response. If someone accepts the lesson of the color discrimination cases that Jack outlined, then it seems that they should accept we can be mistaken about our beliefs of what qualia type we token. Once you accept the possibility of error there, I don’t see a clear principled distinction that could be drawn with sensory modality, and inter modality qualia type, that should make us think we could be mistaken in our beliefs about the latter and not the former. Sensations in different modalities probably strike me as more different then different types of sensation in the same modality, but why should I think that difference is sufficient for infallibility?
If someone rejects the easier cases I’d want to step through those first. There are also a couple real world phenomenon (Anton syndrome, blindsight, and synesthesia namely) which just make me strongly suspicious that the sort of confabulation I describe is possible. I don’t think it has ever occurred, but you could imagine someone with Anton like symptoms, who is blindsighted, and the standard qualia realist line is to say that blindsighted people lack visual qualia, so it would seem surprising to say that someone with the joint symptoms would not be. You could even imagine someone who exhibited standard Anton symptoms and was retinally blind, had their retinal blindness reversed and was instead cortically blinded, who after the fact exhibited closer to normal performance on visual tasks, whose verbal reports never changed. These sorts of scenarios just strike me as clearly possible. We can certainly *say* they aren’t but then *I* want to say we are just table thumping.
Right okay, so maybe I was misinterpreting the dialectical context. I thought you were giving the case as a problem case for PR to make sense of. But if you're already committed to PR, it wouldn't be that hard, since you could just say that the qualia arise after some layers of processing.
But I think your point with the case was to show how, if we accept that the other cases imply that we can make mistakes about the types of qualia within a modality, this case shows that we can make mistakes about whole sensory modalities.
I think that might be right, though I'll have to think about it. Something seems suspicious--or at least I'm not sure how problematic this has to be for PR. I guess I'd want to say that people clearly can make false judgements about experiences, but I'm unsure whether that debunks the knowledge people that do not have these sorts of conditions have about their experiences. Maybe by expanding on the sort of story I give here (https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/are-my-experiences-given-unlocked?utm_source=publication-search) (not to self-promo too hard, I just feel like there's something to the picture I give here that fits with the apparent obviousness of experiences while respecting illusionist style challenges).
Well, I think this is a problem case for the phenomenal realist who accepts the weaker cases and tries to stop the buck here. You might think "Well, there are phenomenal properties, and I can be mistaken about them here, and here, but not there!" where 'there' is at sensory modalities, and I just want to say that is wrong.
I need to read that post of yours! I will soon.
On the question about whether the ability to make false judgements about experience debunks knowledge in normal conditions, here is the problem I see: Qualia are supposed to be identifiable only by introspection. If you accept zombie arguments, invert arguments, and other minds arguments, all third personal evidence will be consistent with the non-existence of qualia, or the existence of different qualia, even third person evidence observed 'from the inside,' i.e. me seeing that I am moving my arms and legs and so on in a way that is indicative of jubilence. These cases show an incorrect qualia judgement, but they also seem to be *introspectively* indistinguishable. In the case of the patient with strange color vision, he can't tell just by introspecting whether he has colored qualia or merely believes he does. Given that, ex hypothesi, qualia are also extrinsically indistinguishable, it's hard to see how the subject could be justified in thinking he has qualia at all. Now, at this point, we might make something like a phenomenal conservative appeal. "Well, the subject believes it, so he's justified in the absence of defeaters" (or it seems that way to him or he has the intuition or... specify your favorite necessary state for PC to apply). But now all the evidence *against* qualia (incompatibility with physicalism, and the apparent strangeness of them as entities) kicks in, and will override the PC considerations, even if you think that evidence is rather weak.
So you run a pincer attack. You keep undercutting the evidence we have for qualia, until you reach the point of a very weak intuitive appeal. At the same time, you stack up the evidence against it. Once the evidence for qualia gets so weak, even if the evidence against it isn't super strong, it won't matter, anti qualia views win out.
To the last to paragraphs, I suppose the situation reminds me a lot of the trivialism discourse (shivers). Sure, a trivialist would say that they didn't believe whatever I say that I don't believe, but the problem is that there actually *are* things that I don't believe, and I know that there aren't, even if the trivialist believes the same things. Similarly, a cognitive zombie version of me with all the judgements but none of the P-experiences would make all the same claims to have P-experiences as me. The problem is that I *do* have those experiences, and I just see them.
Again, that's just table-thumping to some extent. But all the illusionist cases and experiments I've tried really haven't shaken my sense that I just do know that I have experiences. Maybe I just have to spend more time meditating on it or something, but it all seems to me like puzzles with how to give an account of our knowledge of P-experiences, than anything (obviously you won't agree, and you probably intuitively feel the same way, but have ascended to illusionist nirvana).
I think the difference is that there’s some evidence you don’t have your qualia, I don’t think there’s any evidence you lack a belief in trivialism. I actually think you have some 3rd person evidence for your lack of belief in trivialism (planning to go into this in a post soon) so I don’t think replying to the trivialist fully leans on this move fwiw. Anyway, the ‘seeing’ point is just a point about justification, if you see that P your justified in believing that P even though ‘seeing’ there is non-factive. Maybe trivialist you *does* see that he lacks a belief, and is just wrong about it. He would, in that case, also have some justification for his belief that he’s a trivialist.
Yea it’s a real ‘zen master’ view, once you get it you unlike your third eye and master all 4 elements to defeat Fire Lord Ozai. I’m hoping to include as many intuition pumps as possible in my next post so maybe something will spark your introspective feelers there, but I do think some people might hear all the arguments and still just be like “I don’t buy it” and that’s fine. I think a lot of philosophical issues are like that for some people. I would love for you to come around though!
I'm hyped
Thanks for highlighting Dennett's example of the individual that could match colors but not name them. I'm a phenomenal realist and yet for a while I did wonder for a while if that case disproved qualia. The fact that the patient can color match suggests he is seeing colors correctly. But how could he be seeing colors correctly and yet not name them? It's the same blue quale that we use to match colors as name them.
My first hypothesis to save qualia was that he was seeing colors but incorrect colors. Somehow color information was getting mixed up, but in a consistent way where two blue tiles might appear to be a different color, but the same different color. Thus he would name the tiles wrong but still be able to match them.
My second hypothesis was he was seeing the correct colors, but had trouble naming them due to memory. He remembers the word blue, knows the sky is blue, but upon seeing the quale blue he would have trouble remembering the name of it.
Upon further reflection, I decided the second hypothesis was much better. Being "mixed up but consistent" seemed unlikely to happen, but not remembering the name of a color is very much in line with other experiences I've had. For example, I know the name Steve, know my good friend from high school is named Steve, but might not come up with the name Steve upon looking at a face of someone who introduced themselves to me minutes earlier.
I wasn't able to access the original article, but based on the title I assume the patient had "pure alexia" which is trouble reading. These cases are often due to a injury that affects the connection between the visual system and the language system. I was able to access a similar article: "Two Systems for Colour Naming Defects: Verbal Disconnection vs. Colour Imagery Disorder (Luc Pieter De Vreese, 1990)". Case I seemed especially similar, except he was less confident and would say things like "Blue, no wait, red .. maybe, umm, yellow!" when asked to name colors. Furthermore, the patients, when given the outline of say a carrot, they could correctly choose the right crayon to color it in. All this additional information is inconsistent with my first hypothesis, but very much in line with my second. I'm now cautiously optimistic the second hypothesis is correct. (Notice how useful the idea of a quale was to the IMO correct second explanation).
Dennett says that when confronted by scenarios like these, philosophers often give confidently different answers, or pause and refuse to give any answer. He seemed to suggest this is because they don't work with the concept of qualia, but perhaps there are just multiple possible answers on how these can coexist with qualia and further testing is needed to determine which is best (if any). So ultimately I don't think this is the smoking gun Dennett would like it to be, nor would I consider it a likely candidate for a radically deceptive experience.
Hmm, I'll have to look into the case more, but for my tired brain this seems like a pretty good answer to this case! Probably isn't a slam dunk, though I think radically deceptive experiences do still exist based on my & Pete's experience.
Okay, it's past my bedtime, so this will just be a brief gesture, but I felt like I should say something.
I'm not sure about this, but my initial reaction would be a combination two things: 1) We can think that qualia arise after quite a bit of processing has already been done to visual stimuli, which would account for why we see more colors than we should, have inconsistent experiences over time, etc. and 2) I think we could say that we make cognitive mistakes when comparing experiences, or thinking about them on higher orders, even if our immediate experience is infallible--just like how I could figure out that the solution to one equation is X and that the solution to another equation is also X, but not realize that the two solutions are the same (maybe a bad example, but I hope you get what I mean.
That leaves a lot of stuff unaddressed, but I feel like it's the beginnings of an explanation.
The question is then: why shouldn’t we believe we are merely misclassifying functional states as private, ineffable, intrinsic states? Isn’t “my qualia ≠ a physical, functional state” also a “higher-order” judgment? In that case, if you admit fallibility about higher-order judgments, isn’t this a much more parsimonious explanation of the hard problem?
Okay, so I definitely feel the pull, and I'm torn in two different directions here. (I talk about this a little here, if it's of any interest: https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/are-my-experiences-given-unlocked?utm_source=publication-search)
I suppose I would be inclined in a few directions:
1) On one level we *can't* misclassify our experiences--either as the wrong color, or as phenomenal to begin with--on the sort of proposal I have in mind. There is a sort of layer of just cognitively "noticing" that the experiences are there (this is the sort of picture I try to give in the linked post). On another level, we can make mistakes. But those mistakes are in comparing experiences. In the checkerboard illusion, I'm certain that I'm experiencing *that* color *there* and *this* color *here*. But I'm not sure whether *this* and *that* are the same color. But whether or not my experiences are qualitative is presumably going to be an intrinsic property, so the same sort of problem doesn't arise (I'm not sure how good this response is).
2) Even if we say that our knowledge of our experiences is fallible all the way down, I'm increasingly starting to wonder why this should be a problem. Sure, there might be cases where I'm 50/50 about whether some edge case experience is this or that. And when I attend to a very small part of my visual field, it becomes murky what's going on. Still, as I include more and more of my experiences, and more and more regular everyday cases, my credence that I'm not mistaken about all of them approaches 1. Sure, maybe these things show that illusionism *could* be true, or that it's not epistemically impossible or whatever. But the probability that I'm making mistakes about every single judgement in my experience is just vanishingly small.
3) On an intellectual level, it's puzzling how to make sense of the connection between our experiences and our judgements, and how we could get any particularly good knowledge of the experiences. And when I consider puzzles like this, I can lose some faith in my experiences.
But then I zoom out, and just take a look around, listen to some sounds, etc., and I just want to slam my table in protest! It's hard to see how I can know that my experiences are there, but *LOOK* there they are, and the question isn't *whether* I have knowledge of my experiences, but *how*. It's simply not the sort of thing that could be debunked by a clever enough explanation of why I make the judgements I do.
Maybe I just need to have an experience of my experiences failing, to get me to appreciate the point, but I haven't felt the inclination yet. I tried the card trick. It was definitely an interesting exercise, but I didn't really feel any deep worry about what was going on.
> But the probability that I'm making mistakes about every single judgement in my experience is just vanishingly small.
I'm willing to bet you are just flat-out wrong here, because I think you're confusing bias and variance.
Suppose a group of astronauts are traversing Mars in a rover with lots of sensors: pressure, wind speed, cameras, etc. Most of these sensors serve the crew quite well, and they successfully navigate many obstacles. But the crew notices something a little odd: the temperature sensor always reads within a few degrees of 10°C, even when atmospheric calculations suggest -50° or -60°. The engineer conjectures that the temperature sensor is busted. The captain scoffs, "Improbable! We've been on this mission for 100 days. How likely is it that the sensor didn't work on day 1, *and* day 2, *and* day 3, *and* day 4… and so on?"
Actually, pretty likely, if the temperature sensor was busted on day one! That's the illusionist position, that there is something about the way the brain classifies our experiences that it *systematically* classifies them as ineffable, and this is a byproduct of helpful, oversimplifying schematic representations.
The "edge cases" in the essay indicate that your thermometer is imperfect; it can be thrown out of whack. If that's the case, then it becomes way easier to believe your thermometer can also be *biased*. And isn't that a *much* simpler explanation for the mind-body problem?
Right okay, so that depends on what you think is most analogous to the illusionist cases. I would have interpreted them in a way where a better analogy is that you have, say, a caliper with some degree of error. So in certain precise measurements, you can't be very sure that it's correct, but you can be almost certain that a piece you're measuring is around 9.7cm
I took the cases to be something like: you are unable to tell what experience you're having. I can't tell, for instance, whether I'm seeing red or black, or whether some taste is the same. I didn't find out that my experience wasn't ineffable or phenomenal, but just that I wasn't sure about the details of it, regardless of phenomenality or lack thereof.
That fits perfectly well with the idea that my knowledge of my experiences is like the caliper, rather than the thermometer; in certain cases my judgement is very clouded, but in standard cases it's fine, and I can be almost certain that it's reasonably accurate on the whole. In fact that seems like a very natural interpretation of the cases to me.
Maybe there's something about the cases that forces us in the other direction that I missed? Please correct me if I'm just missing the thrust of the arguments
Weak. You can be wrong about the external world, too, but that's no reason to reject the whole idea.
"Does one have to introspect into one’s mind to discover and conclude that you are having an experience right now, that there is phenomenal consciousness? No.”
https://inversemetaproblemofconsiousness.substack.com/p/illusionism-and-the-irrelevance-of
The only mystery here is why these are at all convincing to you.
The first example is trivial. Imagine a man with colour blindness who thinks everyone else is lying about their experiences. If cured of his colour blindness, he would come to realise that others really did have a radically different experience all along.
The second example is self-defeating and has no force to it. Whether the card seems black, red, or you're not sure, or you have it wrong, doesn't change that you really are having an experience of the card. You're talking about what it's like for you to be looking with your peripheral vision.
Illusionists don't deny that people have experiences. They deny that experiences have private, ineffable, intrinsic, directly apprehensible properties. Do you think these are definitionally necessary features of the word experience—that experience refers only to states which have these properties?
If so, then we should amend what you just said to make it more explicit:
> The second example is self-defeating and has no force to it. Whether the card seems black, red, or you're not sure, or you have it wrong, doesn't change that you really are having a [private, ineffable, intrinsic, directly apprehensible] experience of the card. You're talking about what it's like [in a private, ineffable, intrinsic, directly apprehensible way] for you to be looking with your peripheral vision.
I'm only self-defeating if I am saying "You don't have private, ineffable, etc. qualia, it only seems to you *in a private, ineffable, etc. way* that you do." But nobody holds that position, not even the illusionists!
I'm not going to sit and argue for or against every single adjective you've got bundled here (it could turn out that any given conceptualisation of qualia is wrong about some specific aspect)– but the basic standpoint is that there is a character to our experiences, there is something it's like to be that person looking at a card. That's what you're describing in your examples, and that's what an illusionist is denying if they're saying there is no such thing as qualia.
But then why couldn't that character be a functional character, a representational character, a dispositional character, or something like that? If you don't specify what it is that is distinct about this character from other kinds of properties, then your stance is perfectly compatible with illusionism!
Again, if you can't specify a property, then all that you're really saying is that when you think about functional states vs. mental states, you have a really strong inclination to judge that they can't be the same thing, that there's some missing "character." I am arguing that that *judgment* could be wrong.
It's not that I can't specify properties, I was just trying to avoid getting lost in the weeds. But sure, the "function" of functionalism does seem to me to be hopelessly vague. Does a camera see? Does a thermometer feel the temperature? Does a computer have memories? You can give a functionalist account for why these are like humans experiencing, but there's nothing its like to be a camera, thermometer or computer.
My sense when it comes to the illusionists is that Frankish just reinvents phenomena when he talks about pseudo-phenomena, and Dennett invents a restricted version of qualia to beat up, leaving the hard problem untouched.
I mean, again, you're just relying on the same judgment to say that (a) experience cannot be a vague phenomenon, and (b) there is no sense in which a camera has an experience.
Ironically, I think it's harder to say there's nothing its like to be a camera if you're a qualia realist. If qualia are private, then how could you know that there's nothing it's like to be a camera?
Meanwhile, if there are only functional/representational/dispositional/etc. states, an illusionist can answer honestly: a camera has a kind of "perception," which is like human perception in some ways (light & color receptive) but very unlike it in other ways (no embodiment, no object recognition, no motion detection, no attention mechanism, no introspection or reasoning capabilities, etc.). Whether you want to call these both "experiences" or not comes down to definitions, but the illusionist can maintain that they aren't ontologically different *and* they are really different in many ways.
There's only a metaphorical sense in which a camera has an experience. We know that because there's no reason to think that a camera has consciousness. Accepting that consciousness emerges from recognisable physical processes (e.g. having bodies with brains) isn't the same as saying consciousness is identical to a third-person account of those processes, any more than the narrative of War and Peace is reducible to the atoms that make up copies of the book.
I better stop here. After much engagement with position over the last year, it's still not really clear to me what the llusionist position is really affirming or denying.
German movie story reminds me of the Chinese room experiment
Nice article!
It's hard for me to empathize with your experience because I can't put myself in the perspective of experiencing indeterminate colors, and I don't have a deck of cards at home to try it out. But I don't think we need to go that far to show that we sometimes don't have direct acquaintance with all the properties of our subjective experiences 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺. Imagine these situations:
* You go to the doctor and he asks you to rate your pain between 0 and 10. It's not far from reality to imagine someone rating their pain as a 4 when it is actually closer to a 3.
* Upon seeing this color https://colorkit.co/color/ff4500/ you might be unsure whether it is orange, red, or a mix of the two.
* People often have a set of preferred dishes like lasagna bolognese, fettuccine alfredo, and tiramisu but they can't tell the exact ranking among them.
This demonstrates that even though these experiences are presented to us, we may still be unable to grasp all their properties with perfect accuracy. That might refute a strong version of phenomenal realism (PR), but it seems to me like we could instead stipulate a weaker version of PR rather than accepting illusionism.
another fantastic one
you make these ideas quite pleasant to read
I think you’re on the right path to free us from endless puzzlement about phenomenal consciousness, qualia, etc. You hit on the crux when you asked: “How can it seem to you that it seems to you that p, if it does not seem to you that p? “.
Not that I know the answer, only that the answer lies beyond the door of that paradox.