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I'm not sure I understand your point? If I feel confused, that's a real physical thing. Sure we say emotions are in my mind but my mind is part of my whole body

I'm not sure I understand your point? If I feel confused, that's a real physical thing. Sure we say emotions are in my mind but my mind is part of my whole body which is a physical thing we can touch and dissect (if not yet fully understand). Similarly my understanding and perception of the colours I see comes from a real physical body that has accumulated a lot of sensory input and experiences and uses that to interpret new sensory input. I can't explain to you how I experience the colour blue but I don't need to grapple with metaphysics to explain, in principle, why I might experience it that way.

westoncb 9y ago
Something that helped me understand why this problem is significant: the things you mention as giving an account of color perception are only accounting for a brain system which evolves through states having structure which is isomorphic to fluctuations of colors in subjective experience[0]. However, the philosophical question isn't about whether you can create such a mapping, it's about reconciling the fact that if you look around your environment it's like something, and what it's like is importantly not a bunch of neurons. And yet when we look inside brains, we only find neurons. So if we want to say that the experience of colors can be explained physically as well, then there should be some physical place where e.g. redness is occurring rather than electro-chemical flux of neuron interaction. [0] Another subtlety here is that the brain states having structure isomorphic to something in subjectivity doesn't necessarily make sense. It would on the assumption that everything is 'structural', but that's not an assumption everyone is willing to make. (You can find demonstrations that mathematics and the sciences can only deal in terms of structure, which is why for their practitioners it makes sense to ignore anything non-structural—but this is very different from a demonstration that everything actually is structural.) In that case, in order to create this mapping, we have to create another structure (for instance, a taxonomy of colors names and relationships between colors), and we can configure that structure in a way which is intended to reflect some moments of subjective experience. Now that structure could be potentially be found isomorphic to some evolving brain states, while to say that the subjective experience itself was isomorphic is likely nonsensical.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  > So if we want to say that the experience of colors can be explained physically as well, then there should be some physical place where e.g. redness is occurring rather than electro-chemical flux of neuron interaction. I am reminded of an essay by Stephen Jay Gould, on the history of preformationism, and the debate over whether the homunculus resided in the sperm or the egg. The idea that a human could be represented by an ordering of simple chemicals was inconceivable at the time. The idea that physicalism requires a specific physical locus for redness is no more sound than the idea that genetic theory requires human-ness to be located in a specific base on a DNA molecule. Emergent phenomena are real, common, and not, in general, particularly mysterious (though the mind certainly is, at least to me.) More prosaically, maybe redness is actually localized, as a memory of a sensation. Is there anything more to redness than a comparison to prior sensations?
  - westoncb 9y ago
    > Emergent phenomena are real, common, and not, in general, particularly mysterious I have no issue with emergent phenomena. It's just that whether the phenomenon is emergent or not is irrelevant to the question at hand. For instance, let's say the brain 'system' responsible for color perception is distributed all throughout the human brain in such a way that it would be impossible to formulate any hierarchical conceptual structure which could account for it. It's just an emergent consequence of a ton of other complex stuff going on. Okay, now if you recall my previous point about reconciling the experience of redness vs clusters of neurons—you can hopefully see that the above makes no difference to the problem. It's just a different mapping of a physical structure onto subjective experience, without accounting for the fundamental difference between the subjective experience and the physical structure. (This answer is less thorough, but I did take my time with what I wrote previously. If you read it more closely I think you'll see the difference in what we're each talking about here.)
    - memebox3v 9y ago
      Matter is a subjective experience. An atom is only an atom because it feels like something to be an atom. Qualia is the basis for all existence. The world is a feeling. No need for duality. Feeling is the a priori element.
danielam 9y ago
A couple points. First, I did not claim that the experience of things or even consciousness require appeals to anything immaterial or non-physical. I merely said that a Cartesian materialism as a metaphysical position cannot explain these things, and this appears to be the way that many contemporary philosophers and physicists _in_their_philosophical_moments_ understand matter. Modern physics actually departs quite a bit from that kind of materialism. This is not a question first and foremost about the experience of color but the nature of color. Cartesians reduce color to an experience and locate that experience in an immaterial mind. Materialism, without reforming the account of matter inherited by Descartes, does away with the material mind and is now left with a desiccated account of reality that cannot even _in_principle_ account for color understood as experience. The solution is not to return to Cartesian dualism but to embrace a different metaphysics that can account for things like color, not as experiences, but as real properties of the world. After that, it is possible to talk about what it means to perceive color. (Indeed, a fatal flaw of modern philosophy is that it prioritizes epistemology over metaphysics, but that’s a topic for another day.) Second -- and this is not the main thrust of what I said, but it is in response to what you wrote -- you are begging the question when you presume that everything can be accounted for physics. Consider the concept of Triangularity. In the world, we have concrete, triangular things that instantiate Triangularity. We perceive them through our senses. One triangle may be an isosceles triangle, another might be equilateral, still another may be a right triangle. Of these, each may be large, small, drawn with thick lines or quickly sketched on the board with a piece of chalk. However, none of these triangular things are themselves Triangularity or else only one triangle could exist. Furthermore, none of these concrete instances are perfect instantiations of Triangularity. The lines composing them are never fully straight. They are only approximations, and yet we still know what Triangularity is, its properties (like the angles summing to 180 degrees), and so on. It exists in our minds, and in the mind it exists, by necessity, completely apart from any particular, concrete instantiations of it (we may have images of triangles in mind, but the images themselves are not Triangularity itself, something all these images share). It follows that because Triangularity isn’t concrete or particular, there exists in the mind something that isn’t concrete or particular, but universal. But because physical things are necessarily instantiations of universals and not universals themselves, then we have in our minds something non-physical.
Double_Cast 9y ago
Suppose I have a coffee machine. I can weigh it, clean it, measure titration. But is the machine edible? No, because the machine isn't coffee per se. Similarly, suppose scientists discover a neural-structure (or chemical-interaction, etc) responsible for blueness. I can dissect it, electrocute it, soak it in LSD. But will the scientists experience blueness? No, because the structure isn't qualia per se. The prevailing ideology is that by studying the mechanical nature of coffee machines, we'll ipso facto understand the biochemistry of the beverage. danielam is arguing that this ideology is probably wrong. This is why the Problem of Qualia is a problem.

westoncb 9y ago

Something that helped me understand why this problem is significant: the things you mention as giving an account of color perception are only accounting for a brain system which evolves through states having structure which is isomorphic to fluctuations of colors in subjective experience[0]. However, the philosophical question isn't about whether you can create such a mapping, it's about reconciling the fact that if you look around your environment it's like something, and what it's like is importantly not a bunch of neurons. And yet when we look inside brains, we only find neurons. So if we want to say that the experience of colors can be explained physically as well, then there should be some physical place where e.g. redness is occurring rather than electro-chemical flux of neuron interaction. [0] Another subtlety here is that the brain states having structure isomorphic to something in subjectivity doesn't necessarily make sense. It would on the assumption that everything is 'structural', but that's not an assumption everyone is willing to make. (You can find demonstrations that mathematics and the sciences can only deal in terms of structure, which is why for their practitioners it makes sense to ignore anything non-structural—but this is very different from a demonstration that everything actually is structural.) In that case, in order to create this mapping, we have to create another structure (for instance, a taxonomy of colors names and relationships between colors), and we can configure that structure in a way which is intended to reflect some moments of subjective experience. Now that structure could be potentially be found isomorphic to some evolving brain states, while to say that the subjective experience itself was isomorphic is likely nonsensical.

mannykannot 9y ago
> So if we want to say that the experience of colors can be explained physically as well, then there should be some physical place where e.g. redness is occurring rather than electro-chemical flux of neuron interaction. I am reminded of an essay by Stephen Jay Gould, on the history of preformationism, and the debate over whether the homunculus resided in the sperm or the egg. The idea that a human could be represented by an ordering of simple chemicals was inconceivable at the time. The idea that physicalism requires a specific physical locus for redness is no more sound than the idea that genetic theory requires human-ness to be located in a specific base on a DNA molecule. Emergent phenomena are real, common, and not, in general, particularly mysterious (though the mind certainly is, at least to me.) More prosaically, maybe redness is actually localized, as a memory of a sensation. Is there anything more to redness than a comparison to prior sensations?
- westoncb 9y ago
  > Emergent phenomena are real, common, and not, in general, particularly mysterious I have no issue with emergent phenomena. It's just that whether the phenomenon is emergent or not is irrelevant to the question at hand. For instance, let's say the brain 'system' responsible for color perception is distributed all throughout the human brain in such a way that it would be impossible to formulate any hierarchical conceptual structure which could account for it. It's just an emergent consequence of a ton of other complex stuff going on. Okay, now if you recall my previous point about reconciling the experience of redness vs clusters of neurons—you can hopefully see that the above makes no difference to the problem. It's just a different mapping of a physical structure onto subjective experience, without accounting for the fundamental difference between the subjective experience and the physical structure. (This answer is less thorough, but I did take my time with what I wrote previously. If you read it more closely I think you'll see the difference in what we're each talking about here.)
  - memebox3v 9y ago
    Matter is a subjective experience. An atom is only an atom because it feels like something to be an atom. Qualia is the basis for all existence. The world is a feeling. No need for duality. Feeling is the a priori element.

danielam 9y ago

A couple points. First, I did not claim that the experience of things or even consciousness require appeals to anything immaterial or non-physical. I merely said that a Cartesian materialism as a metaphysical position cannot explain these things, and this appears to be the way that many contemporary philosophers and physicists _in_their_philosophical_moments_ understand matter. Modern physics actually departs quite a bit from that kind of materialism. This is not a question first and foremost about the experience of color but the nature of color. Cartesians reduce color to an experience and locate that experience in an immaterial mind. Materialism, without reforming the account of matter inherited by Descartes, does away with the material mind and is now left with a desiccated account of reality that cannot even _in_principle_ account for color understood as experience. The solution is not to return to Cartesian dualism but to embrace a different metaphysics that can account for things like color, not as experiences, but as real properties of the world. After that, it is possible to talk about what it means to perceive color. (Indeed, a fatal flaw of modern philosophy is that it prioritizes epistemology over metaphysics, but that’s a topic for another day.) Second -- and this is not the main thrust of what I said, but it is in response to what you wrote -- you are begging the question when you presume that everything can be accounted for physics. Consider the concept of Triangularity. In the world, we have concrete, triangular things that instantiate Triangularity. We perceive them through our senses. One triangle may be an isosceles triangle, another might be equilateral, still another may be a right triangle. Of these, each may be large, small, drawn with thick lines or quickly sketched on the board with a piece of chalk. However, none of these triangular things are themselves Triangularity or else only one triangle could exist. Furthermore, none of these concrete instances are perfect instantiations of Triangularity. The lines composing them are never fully straight. They are only approximations, and yet we still know what Triangularity is, its properties (like the angles summing to 180 degrees), and so on. It exists in our minds, and in the mind it exists, by necessity, completely apart from any particular, concrete instantiations of it (we may have images of triangles in mind, but the images themselves are not Triangularity itself, something all these images share). It follows that because Triangularity isn’t concrete or particular, there exists in the mind something that isn’t concrete or particular, but universal. But because physical things are necessarily instantiations of universals and not universals themselves, then we have in our minds something non-physical.

Double_Cast 9y ago

Suppose I have a coffee machine. I can weigh it, clean it, measure titration. But is the machine edible? No, because the machine isn't coffee per se. Similarly, suppose scientists discover a neural-structure (or chemical-interaction, etc) responsible for blueness. I can dissect it, electrocute it, soak it in LSD. But will the scientists experience blueness? No, because the structure isn't qualia per se. The prevailing ideology is that by studying the mechanical nature of coffee machines, we'll ipso facto understand the biochemistry of the beverage. danielam is arguing that this ideology is probably wrong. This is why the Problem of Qualia is a problem.