[ExI] Fwd: Paper on "Detecting Qualia" presentation at 2015 MTA conference

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Sat Jan 31 14:37:56 UTC 2015


On Saturday, 31 January 2015, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at canonizer.com>
wrote:

>
> On 1/30/2015 7:43 AM, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
>
>  One side of this debate says that subjective experiences are
> metaphysical.  So I have two comments:
>
>  1 - How does one go about proving the existence of something
> metaphysical?
>  By proving that physical causes don't exist for that experience?  Isn't
> that trying to prove a negative?
>
>  2 - Since nothing has ever been shown to be metaphysical (no way to
> measure it), why would one ever start from that as an assumption?  Why, in
> fact, believe in anything at all metaphysical, in the most literal sense?
> Demons and angels?  Ghosts?  (It does seem that many people will believe in
> these things rather than what science says.  If anyone has any doubt that
> we are an intellectually flawed species, just look at that fact.)
>
>  In short, there seems to me to be no way to establish that metaphysical
> causes exists for anything.  At least, no scientific way.  Playing with
> words, thought experiments, and just sheer sophistry don't do the job.
>
>
> Either you didn't read the paper entitled "Detecting Qualia" (
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vxfbgfm8XIqkmC5Vus7wBb982JMOA8XMrTZQ4smkiyI/edit?usp=sharing)
> or you didn't understand any of it.   You must have at least read the
> title: "Detecting Qualia", but evidently you refuse to understand what most
> people understand such to mean, as proof by you asserting that there is "no
> way to measure it".  Since you don't seem to get it, I guess I'll have to
> explain it to you:  Detecting, is the same as measuring, and if it is
> detectable, it is physical, and experimentally demonstrably to all to be
> physical, just like all physics.
>
> Brent Allsop
>

Dear Brent,

I've read the paper. Maybe I haven't understood it properly, but it seems
to me that the main thing you have in mind when talking about "effing the
ineffable" is the neural correlates of consciousness, and this will never
be able to tell you if the subject being studied really is conscious, let
alone what the actual conscious experience is like.

Suppose, for example, you hypothesise that CMOS sensors in digital cameras
have colour qualia. You could show experimentally the necessary and
sufficient conditions for certain colour outputs, but how would this help
you understand what, if anything, the sensor was experiencing? If you tried
connecting it to your own brain and saw nothing, how would you know if that
was because the sensor lacked qualia or because it doesn't interface
properly with your brain?

The other point I would like to make is that (it seems to me) you have
misunderstood the neural substitution thought experiment you describe near
the end of the paper. Suppose glutamate is responsible for redness qualia,
and you replace the glutamate with an analogue that functions just like
glutamate in every observable way, except it lacks the qualia. The subject
will then accurately describe red objects, say he sees red, and honestly
believe that he sees red. How would you show that he does not actually see
red? How would you know that your own red qualia were not eliminated last
night while you slept by installing such a mechanism?


Stathis


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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