[extropy-chat] Qualia bet with Eliezer

[gts]

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:55:23 -0500, Harvey Newstrom  
<mail at harveynewstrom.com> wrote:

>
> On Nov 29, 2005, at 11:59 AM, Brent Allsop wrote:
>
>> If I defined quale to be a property or piece of information that could  
>> not be adequately described or communicated by abstract communication  
>> based only on the physics of cause and effect?  Then would you say that  
>> qualia - as
>> I've defined it here, do not exist?
>
> This is not a definition.  You describe what properties the quale lacks  
> (the ability to be adequately described or communicated by abstract  
> communications based only on the physics of cause and effect).  You  
> don't define any qualities for the quale.  The fact that it cannot be  
> communicated must be due to some proposed property of the quale.  Yet  
> this definition does not attempt to describe it.
>
> In other words, you are describing attribute or lacks of attributes, but  
> you are not giving a definition.

I think Brent is making a distinction, correctly imo, between phenomenal  
information or knowledge and intellectual or abstract information or  
knowledge. (I prefer the word "knowledge" over "information" here but the  
difference in meanings is not critical.)

The fact that he cannot give a positive definition of phenomenal  
information is due to the fact that definitions are intellectual and  
abstract.  Qualia are not. They are the content of immediate sense  
experience, and are present in the mind before the mind forms abstractions  
and definitions about them.

The purple quale is "what it is like" for you to see purple. We can talk  
about the neuroscience of seeing purple, but the experience itself defies  
any attempt at definition or communication, and will until Brent's vision  
of effable qualia comes true.

Qualia are ineffable (ah, that's where the word "effing" came from).

-gts