Are qualia real?

StatusX

I know we don't see eye to eye on qualia, but I think you are underestimating the problem here. Imagine it is done this way. First, an exact copy of you is created, but you aren't told. For all you know, this could have already happened; there is no reason to believe it would affect your experience in any way. Now you are destroyed. What happens? You die. There is no teleportation. There is a copy that goes on to live your life, and you just die. You would really have no problem with this?

This, reincarnation, the "Why am I me and not someone else?" problem. They are all very similar. They refer to the existence of an inner experiencing being that could logically (ie, it is a priori conceivable) inhabit different bodies. Basically a soul, without the religious connotations. Do you find any of these ideas coherent? I'm not sure if this is the same as the qualia problem. Maybe someone who knows more about this can offer a better explanation of what I'm talking about.

Steve Esser

Sorry for the late response to the original question. I'll try to catch up the recent posts soon. But, FWIW:

With regard to qualia: I vote no, but for a different reason than others. After all, I believe first person experience is a fundamental part of nature, which is not completely reducible to a third-person account of the concurrent brain states. However, describing the contents of experience as qualia only seems to lead to confusion. It continues a long tradition of separating thing into the ways they seem to us and the way they really are, implicitly adopting a Cartesian split into two substances. It inappropriately implies a static notion of what is actually an activity. Our experience is a process of direct engagement as a system embedded in its environment. While humans have developed a cognitive capacity to reflect on our experiences, this often leads to a misleading account of them (other examples abound, including the Libet experiments in the other thread).

learningphysics

Is there a being having an experience? After the split, where is this being?

Bodies can split into two... matter can split into two... but the experiencing being... how can it split into two? It appears to me that if neither of the two beings after the split is the original being, then the original is dead.

Les Sleeth

I don't see your point at all about the Caresian split. How are two substances implied? It seems to me that a process and a quality are implied: the process of simple detection (the easy problem), and then a more internal qualitative sense/awareness of what was detected (the hard problem). Because both detection and qualitative experience are aspects of human sensitivty, it therefore does not suggest substance dualism but rather the specialization of consciousness.

Les Sleeth

Qualia are absolutely private, period. If you can make one an external thing, please do so and show it to us. And who cares who’s hands it plays into. Is the consciousness question a game or are we after the truth. Let consciousnes be whatever it turns out to be, whether it’s Dennett’s version or Chalmers’ or something entirely different.


There’s nothing homuncular in suggesting a subject is present. Why else have we labelled the experience “subjective”? It is because a subject is present. And by the way, just because functionalists have decided to “dismiss” the homuncular model doesn’t mean it doesn’t have relevance.

I don’t know about you, but as for me I am quite certain there is a “me” in here using my intellect, imagination, emotions. Of course, if one doesn’t have enough control of those functions to bring them to rest, then one might just believe that his make up is some combination and activity of those things. I will explain more below.


I wasn’t trying to say “thoughts and ideas are barriers to awareness,” I was saying that if one cannot stop the thinking process, then one hasn’t full control of the mind, nor can one fully know what consciousness is. Thoughts and ideas are not all we have to work with, but you may know nothing about this particular human potential. More below.


If you cannot make your mind be still, then how do you know if it has a nature that only shows up when it isn’t moving? An analogy I’ve used before is to imagine consciousness is a barrel of water in the back of a pickup truck that is rolling along a rough country road. If all that conscious water had ever known was the sloshing, bouncing, vibrating, etc., that occurs on its surface, it might come to believe its nature is all that surface movement. But once the water becomes perfectly still, it sees it actually has depth, and that water, rather than movement, is its “essence.”

Of course, since you can’t stop your mind, then you can’t know if what I say is true or not. Even if I tell you that for thousands of years people have known about his human potential, and have spent their lives developing it, you still won’t know until you experience it yourself.

So my objection to all these debates about the nature of consciousness is that no one is even looking at what it IS; they keep looking at what it does, and that is characterized by activity in the non-stop thinking mind. In case you might be interested, I developed this idea in an earlier thread here where I created an imaginary debate between Dennett and the Buddha.

Steve Esser

I’m giving a different account than yours to try to make a point. Let me know if it gets any clearer.

I say the process itself gives rise to the raw qualitative what-it-is-like of experience which in turn constitutes the hard problem. This is a pre-reflective experience. But when we enter what I call the introspective or reflective mode (your “qualitative sense/awareness") and cogitate on our experiences, we end up creating new categories of things: sense-data, representations, qualia. These things are misleading: experience is an activity, not a collection of things – it is a direct engagement with the world.

Looking at your last post, Les, I guess I might have a very different view than yours, given that I think the activity of experience is what is primary, and introspection is derivative. I think process or event ontologies do a better job. On the other hand, we may be considered closer in views, if you allow that if we could dissolve our higher cognitive functions (including the construction of the higher-order self) we would still be left embedded in the network of activity in the world – an activity which necessarily gives rise to experience.

learningphysics

Yes, but "what" is engaging with the world?

learningphysics

That was fun to read!

But I think many Buddhists would strongly disagree with the position that you attribute to Buddha. They'd call it more Hindu than buddhist, particularly the reference to a "foundation".

Good stuff.

Les Sleeth

Yes we do have different views, but you should know that mine is being taken from the sort of experience I cherish. You say experience is "a direct engagement with the world," but I know for a fact that experience does not require engagement with the world.

Because I have practiced mediation daily for 30 years, I can speak of what it is like to still the mind. In my practice, one withdraws from the senses, turns one attention around 180 degrees, and learns to "merge" with something utterly still inside. In that there is no external world necessary to be absorbed into a deep experience . . . one needs nothing but one's self.

Now when after practicing I open my eyes and engage the world, just as I did this morning, for awhile at least I am able to keep my mind still. If "experience" is the result of activity, I cannot see what that activity is. Whether info from the "world" strikes my consciousness or not, I am still experiencing my self in that stillness; in fact, the stillness creates the most powerful experience of self I know.

You spoke of the ability to "dissolve our higher cognitive functions," but I am not so sure that cognitive functions are "higher" than the pure experience of consciousness (i.e., still, inactive, but fully present). I seem to perceive and understand more when my mind is still than when the damn thing refuses to shut up.

So like the link to one of my earlier threads I referenced in my last post, I don't believe as many functionalists do that consciousness arises from activity, but rather consciousness is diminished by it when one cannot control that activity enough to stop it and view reality, and oneself, without the filters incessant mentality creates.

Les Sleeth

Thanks LP. I'm glad you appreciated it.

Just a note though. You are probably right that many "Buddhists" might disagree with the foundational concept, but I quoted the Buddha himself (the long discourses found in the Digha Nikaya) when I said, “There is, monks, that plane where there is neither extension nor motion. . . there is no coming or going or remaining or deceasing or uprising. . . . There is, monks, an unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded . . . [and] because [that exists] . . . an escape can be shown for what is born, has become, is made, is compounded.” If that's not a "foundation," I don't know what is!

Steve Esser

I didn't mean to be unclear, and was referring to a human. The idea is that a human is a natural system whose interaction with its environment gives rise (necessarily) to experience.

Moving into my speculative panexperientialist mode, I would extend this to say what defines distinct systems throughout nature is a (heretofore unacknowledged) aspect of causality which provides a coordinating or binding function. In us, this aspect is felt as experience.

Steve Esser

Thanks Les. I'll think about what this implies about the way I've been approaching things. Off the top of my head, I would think that a person's engagement with the rest of the world could be seen as continuing in meditation - but only at a micro-level.

learningphysics

And by human, are you referring to the matter that composes the human body? The physical atoms themselves? Just want to get as specific as possible, as to what exactly is having the experience.

Tournesol

But I can tell what qualia you are having by examing their neural correlates,
and I can tell what they are like on analogy with my own.

Your qualia are already external to me.

But you yourself are dead against Denett's version. Is that becuae you
think it is untrue, or what ?

There is nothing homuncular in suggesting you, Les are present
in a room. There is something very homuncular about suggesting there
is a mini-Les inside Les's head, watching the world on a kind of TV.

A subject or a subject-in-a-subject ?

Just about everybody has dismissed it , and for good reasons.

So in addition to Les's intellect, imagination, emotions, there is a little Les
using them all ? But how could little Les use them without thoughts and desires of his own. Wouldn't it be simpler to say that your intellect, imagination, emotions are interacting with each other, and the total
process constitutes "you".

You still haven't made it clear whether this knowledge of "what consciousness
IS" is supposed to be able to answer the Hard Problem.

Tournesol

So you say. But one of the ways one would tell a real pond from a fake
pond made of glass, is that the real pond can slosh.

The people you call functionalists think consc. is all sloshing -- behavior. They cannot see the Hard Problem, because behaviour is readily explaiend physically.

I think the sloshing and stillness -- behaviour and experience are both
part of consc. so for me there is a Hard Problem.

You think consc. is all stillness and no sloshing. Does that mean you can solve the HP, or that for you there is no HP because consc. has nothing to do
with matter or the physical implementation ?

Steve Esser

Hello learningphysics (my name could be "neverlearnedenoughphysics").

I definitely wouldn't use the terms matter or material (what are they, anyway, given what we know of physics?). Atoms come and go from our bodies. An individual human is a system or a network of interactions. To make sense of such a system being distinguishable within the larger network of the world, we must supplement our usual notion of micro-level physical causality (one billiard ball effecting the next) with another aspect of causation -- a binding or coordinating aspect. With this new fuller concept of causality in place, I then speculate that to the human system in question, this coordinating aspect of causality is felt as experience.
(Am I far out enough on a limb now?).

learningphysics

Hi Steve. Yes, I think my name should also be "neverlearnedenoughphysics".

I have a problem with saying that a "system of interactions" is having an experience. An "interaction" is not a substance of any kind. It is a relationship between a cause and an effect. There is no "thing" that is an interaction, it is purely informational. For example, if I push a table forward... there are two substances involved (we could get into the details of what happens on an atomic level... but I won't go there). The one substance is myself. The other is the table. The "push" is not a substance. Would it make sense to say that the "push" is having an experience?

A system of interactions, is just a system of relationships. There is no substance anywhere here either. There is no "thing".

It would be like saying the "arrangement" of books on a shelf is having an experience, whereas none of the books themselves are experiencing anything.

Am I a substance? Am I a thing of some kind? Yes, I'm certain of that. Every experience shows that I'm some "thing".