I don't get qualia eliminativism, how far does it go.
The philosophy of mind isn't my thing, so I'm not entirely up to speed. But having said that, I'm probably something of a 'qualia eliminativist' myself.
I'm completely OK with the notion of eliminating folk notions of qualia, things like naïve realism and representationism, dualism, or whatever theoretical properties of qualia.
But can it really be eliminated altogether, without being as nonsensical as to maintain "universe eliminativism"?
I want to steer clear of the kind of ontological representationalism that holds that we don't really perceive the world at all, that what we actually perceive is instead some inner mind-constructed model of the world, a model that's presumably constructed out of qualia. (So if we eliminate qualia, we eliminate the 'phenomenal' world.)
The problem that arises there is justifying our belief in there being any physical world beyond our mental experience at all. Let alone everyone else who populates that physical world and who we can only know from 'outside', so to speak. Solipsism is the iceberg that philosophical idealism's Titanic is always in danger of striking.
By "altogether" I mean eliminating qualia in its most basic sense, "the way things seem to us". Is anyone (such as Dennett) really meaning that "there's no such thing 'as the way things seem to us'"?
Explaining Dennett is above my pay-grade.
If we are talking about qualia, the issue is kind of subtle. To help Sciforums readers who are unfamiliar with the idea --
According to the
'Oxford Guide to Philosophy' (p. 775):
Qualia -- The subjective qualities of conscious experience... Examples are the way sugar tastes, the way vermilion looks, the way coffee smells, the way a cat's purr sounds, the way it feels to stub your toe. Accounting for these features of mental states has been one of the biggest obstacles to materialist solutions of the mind-body problem, because it seems impossible to analyse the subjective character of these phenomena, which are comprehensible only from the point of view of certain types of conscious being, in objective physical terms which are comprehensible to any rational individual independently of his particular sensory faculties.
My own thinking is along these lines: When we perceive states of affairs in the physical world, we acquire information about those events through various sensory modalities and assume various (as yet) little understood neural states, which in turn become involved in all kinds of associative and motivational stuff. Not only can we do all that, we can also represent those states to ourselves as if they were sensory input, and actually imagine 'seeing red', for instance. We can recall past events and imagine counterfactual situations. I expect that most animals capable of planning ahead probably think in images and can do that to some extent.
The arguments about qualia seem to go off the rails here (from the quote above):
because it seems impossible to analyse the subjective character of these phenomena, which are comprehensible only from the point of view of certain types of conscious being, in objective physical terms which are comprehensible to any rational individual independently of his particular sensory faculties.
The difficulty there seems to be a category error. Analyzing subjective experience in scientific terms needn't
reproduce the experience of seeing red, it only needs to be able to explain it. Analyzing in this scientific sense would be a linguistic and conceptual process, very unlike the visual process that occurs when one's retinas are stimulated by red light. That's where Frank Jackson's 'Mary black and white' argument seems to me to go wrong.
But what of the underlying intuition that we can never fully explain the color red to a man who is blind since birth. We can talk about it all day, but he will never know what it looks like.
Qualia theorists want to argue that there's some kind of being, some kind of thing, or quality, or something, that we might call 'a look'. The simple
redness of red. Something that simply can't be captured in words. What red
looks like.
Lined up against them are those of us who question whether ontology actually contains non-physicalistic and essentially mental 'looks' and 'feels' and 'sounds' in that necessarily subjective-experiential sense.
If we try to describe the experience of red in scientific terms, we might generate something like a particular visual state in a neurological wet-ware system, one that's unique and recognizable from instance to instance. The eliminativist will then suggest that maybe
that's all there is to it. There really isn't any mysterious thing in addition, anything distinct from the neural visual state itself.
One philosophical faction wants to say that the 'can't put it into words' indicates the existence of a non-physical and perhaps essentially mental kind of being. The other faction wants to say that the reason why the look of red is immediately recognizable but can't be put into words is because of the difference between actually being in a visual state on ene hand, and the verbal and conceptual description of that visual state on the other. Looking at something and talking about it are distinct neurological activities and it's not realistic for philosophers to expect to be able to equate them.
It's the denial that subjective experiences constitute an entire ontological realm of non-physical being in themselves.
. Is there anyway to prevent that from happening other than typing faster?
