4 ms·
No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in yo
by fssys 5mo ago
No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.
- trick-or-treat 5mo agoNot fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness. Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoThis is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.
- fssys 5mo agoyou think qualia are the soul then!
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoI don't know what you mean by the word soul. I associate it with dualist religious thought. But maybe you mean something else?
- trick-or-treat 5mo agoExcept that you don't know LLMs don't. For all we know we're torturing them.
- fssys 5mo agoMy argument is that qualia are actually cognitive artefacts bound up with language, not the base elements of "what it is to be" you or me, which is how people often speak of them, so the p-zombie concept is a bit nonsensical to me.
- trick-or-treat 5mo agoThey are what they are (its a subjective phenomenon). I'm not claiming to know where they come from.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo agoYou really don't need a concept of a colour or a shape, and it's a fairly typical academic fallacy to assume you do. That's directly confusing experience with categorisation and labelling of experience. If you touch a very hot object your nervous system will pull your hand away before your brain registers what's happening. The qualia of pain are pre-conceptual, preverbal, and precranial, and your consciousness only catches up later.
- ravenical 5mo agoSurely this implies exactly the opposite - you don't register the pain, don't feel it, until after you pull your hand away. It's a reflex action in response to heat. Qualia require a brain to process sensory input.
- fssys 5mo agoyes
- fssys 5mo agoreflexes have nothing to do with qualia. you can differentiate objects without knowing what is a triangle and what is a square, or that this colour is red. but I think qualia as commonly understood involve concepts in a way that means they are not immediate experience in some kind of cartesian sense. We speak of them as categorised. certainly the way people commonly speak about them they are very carefree about invoking "the qualia of a horse" or some other specific object.