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The problem with 'qualia' and 'consciousness' is that these concepts seem to reify something existing separately from their content. The other problem here is t

by aaimnr 10y ago

The problem with 'qualia' and 'consciousness' is that these concepts seem to reify something existing separately from their content. The other problem here is that 'thought' is a complex and compound entity while 'qualia' seems to imply something atomic. So let's not use this concept. Just realised that I seriously intended to argue with you about probably the single most mysterious thing known to humanity. Feels stupid. Anyway, what is a thought in your opinion? Is it just a physical thing? What is 'experience of red'? An illusion? (Again, I feel stupid trying to achieve something here :)

naasking 10y ago
> The other problem here is that 'thought' is a complex and compound entity while 'qualia' seems to imply something atomic. So let's not use this concept. Funny, I see it as exactly the opposite, as would any materialist I'd hazard. "Qualia" is a term describing a vague, poorly defined concept that's inherently intertwined with our complex perceptual systems and with our internal model of the world, and this dizzyingly complex aggregate leads us to falsely conclude we have subjective experience. "Thought" is merely a mentally held belief, a proposition inferred from ones perceptions.
- aaimnr 10y ago
  Well, when you analyse thought as something you experience, you'll come to realise eg. that it can be verbal or visual (check out Temple Grandin) and is always compound. You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia.
  - naasking 10y ago
    > You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Agreed, but this will necessarily be true of any objective, scientific account of consciousness. For instance, subatomic particles are as abstracted from our everyday macroscopic world as possible. > Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia. I don't think we should conflate experience and perception. Materialists of course acknowledge we have perception, they simply deny the subjective experience that non-materialists infer from it. Of course, this fuzzy boundary is where our natural language often fails us, so when I equate a thought with a proposition, I of course don't mean a proposition in English or any other language, I mean some abstract representation that structurally conforms to a proposition in a given mind. The structure this thought takes isn't objective, in the sense that it's the same for every person, because the correspondence of that structure to that proposition is determined by the mind that interprets it, just like a program in x86 machine code isn't the same program when run on an ARM processor -- equivalent semantics have different structures on different CPUs, and equivalent structures have different semantics on different CPUs.

by aaimnr 10y ago

naasking 10y ago

> The other problem here is that 'thought' is a complex and compound entity while 'qualia' seems to imply something atomic. So let's not use this concept. Funny, I see it as exactly the opposite, as would any materialist I'd hazard. "Qualia" is a term describing a vague, poorly defined concept that's inherently intertwined with our complex perceptual systems and with our internal model of the world, and this dizzyingly complex aggregate leads us to falsely conclude we have subjective experience. "Thought" is merely a mentally held belief, a proposition inferred from ones perceptions.

aaimnr 10y ago
Well, when you analyse thought as something you experience, you'll come to realise eg. that it can be verbal or visual (check out Temple Grandin) and is always compound. You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia.
- naasking 10y ago
  > You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Agreed, but this will necessarily be true of any objective, scientific account of consciousness. For instance, subatomic particles are as abstracted from our everyday macroscopic world as possible. > Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia. I don't think we should conflate experience and perception. Materialists of course acknowledge we have perception, they simply deny the subjective experience that non-materialists infer from it. Of course, this fuzzy boundary is where our natural language often fails us, so when I equate a thought with a proposition, I of course don't mean a proposition in English or any other language, I mean some abstract representation that structurally conforms to a proposition in a given mind. The structure this thought takes isn't objective, in the sense that it's the same for every person, because the correspondence of that structure to that proposition is determined by the mind that interprets it, just like a program in x86 machine code isn't the same program when run on an ARM processor -- equivalent semantics have different structures on different CPUs, and equivalent structures have different semantics on different CPUs.