Evolving Thoughts

The principle of charity, qualia, and philosophy

I’ve hurt my back, so I aim to rant a little.

When I teach critical reasoning just about the first thing I teach is the principle of charity. It has many formulations:

This policy calls on us to fit our own propositions (or our own sentences) to the other person’s words and attitudes in such a way as to render their speech and other behavior intelligible. This necessarily requires us to see others as much like ourselves in point of overall coherence and correctness—that we see them as more or less rational creatures mentally inhabiting a world much like our own. [Donald Davidson]

In its simplest form, it holds that (other things being equal) one’s interpretation of another speaker’s words should minimize the ascription of false beliefs to that speaker. [The Oxford Companion to Philosophy]

This [P of C] says that if interpreting as reasoning a passage which is not obviously reasoning yields only bad arguments, assume it is not reasoning. (The rationale for this approach is that we are interested in finding out the truth about things rather than in scoring points off people.) [Alec Fisher]

There are many other quotations, for which I am indebted to Neil Thomason. However, the general point is that, when arguing with somebody, and they say something that seems on the face of it silly, try to reframe the statement so it makes the maximum amount of reasonable sense – that is, if the person’s statement can be reasonably interpreted in a coherent manner, do so.

We often interpret people as saying something that is truly silly in order to deprecate the arguments they make (this is called erecting a straw man, on the grounds that it is easy to knock a straw man down*). Consider what that implies about you: you do not use reason to find out try things, you use it to win arguments and reassure yourself. It isn’t knowledge that you seek but comfort and smugness.

Argument is supposed to give you a true conclusion if the premises are true and the argument is valid (technically, this is called a sound argument – but the term “sound” has, like so many other good terms, been hijacked by propagandists for rhetorical rather than rational purposes). This means that it is a way to work out what believing in true statements commits you to further believing, if you are a reasonable person. When you take the premises of observation that biological things vary more or less randomly in heritable ways, for example, it is a short but sound argument to the conclusion that, unless something intervenes to prevent it, all populations of living things are evolving. A rational person should believe that conclusion, because if the facts are true, the conclusion must be.

But if you try to leap onto missing premises or steps in the argument (an argument missing parts that are implied of assumed and which would be needed to make it truly sound or valid, is called an enthymeme, a term used by Aristotle, of course), just to score a point, you are not seeking truth, nor wanting to be rational.

What triggered this elementary introduction to reasoning is the way some (well meaning) commenters on this blog addressed my claim that there are no qualia. A quale, in philosophy of mind, is a feeling or experience, the “what it is to be like”, that cannot be reduced to a physical description. For example, Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What it is like to be a bat” argues that we can know everything about the sensorium of bats, but not what it is like to be a bat with sonar. Likewise, Frank Jackson’s paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia” argues that a super scientist Mary in her room, which does not have any red light or colour, can know everything there is to know about light, vision and neurology associated with seeing red, and yet, when she is finally released and sees red for the first time, she experiences something she did not know.

This amounts to the claim that there is an ontological difference between the objective world, and the subjective world, a view that has deep roots, but is mostly associated with Kant and his heirs and successors. The term qualia (the plural of quale) indicates that we have experiential or phenomenological properties that are simply not reducible to factual statements (usually of physics, but you can take it in other ways, so long as the facts are objective).

For someone who thinks the world comprises one domain of being like me (I am an out and out physicalist), this presents a problem. David Chalmers dubbed this (inadvertently, I think) the Hard Problem (as opposed to the hard problems of building or simulating brains): how to account for consciousness in a physical universe. Qualia, phenomena, self-awareness, and so forth form a cluster of concepts that a monist/physicalist like me has to account for. They are assumed by many as truisms. Jackson and others give what I consider are question begging arguments for them, but at least they give arguments.

So, when I deny the existence of qualia and/or consciousness/the self, how should I be read? Assume I am not an idiot, just for argument’s sake. How might you read my claim? Well you might apply the Principle of Charity here and try to figure out what I am doing. You might ask “Where does Wilkins do a logical dance to get to this conclusion?” instead of saying “Wilkins is an idiot and a fool to deny what we all know to be true.” What we all know is in general terms a very good indicator to what is false.

You might think: “Wilkins must either have an argument that experience does not lead to the conclusion there are qualia or there is a self, or he must deny the premises that there are raw feels, or both”. And you would be right. I do both. On the one hand I assert that contrary to the widely held view, there is only a purely verbal existence of raw experience. In short, we have these words “feeling”, “experience” and “awareness”, and so we just sort of assume there are feelings, experiences and awareness in these special ways. Instead, I think that we can use the words without committing ourselves to the folk ontology† as we do things that “feel”, “experience” and “aware” refer to. These are, of course, objective processes, even if we can’t directly inspect them without killing the subject.

On the other hand I deny that having an experience is itself a reason to believe in qualia/consciousness. Instead I think we are all P-zombies anyway. Remember, a P-Zombie is just like you and me in every physical and behavioural respect, only without qualia or consciousness. You cannot tell, nor can they, that they lack these. They report pain and every other experience under the right circumstances.

So qualia are not objective, right enough. Now suppose that it happens that in this world, we are all P-zombies, but do not know it. Instead we all only think we have qualia (why? because language often leads us to think things that aren’t true, as Wittgenstein often said). We cannot tell that we do not. This is a thought experiment, but it has a sting: I am not merely giving it as a hypothetical, I am saying that we have no reason not to think it is the case.

Everybody has experiences, and because everybody is in a unique situation, both bodily, location wise, and circumstances, every experience is unique to the timeline of that individual. So I must assert that experiences are unique. There is only a “what it is like to be Wilkins” available to Wilkins, except in terms of general classes of experience (suffering pain from pulled lower backs comes immediate to mind right now), which are quite addressable as objective phenomena.

But this doesn’t license the ontological claim of the separate reality of the subjective. To be a subject in my view of the world is just to have a perspective, as I argued before. It is to be this thing, here, now. I’m not denying that you have these experiences, only that they mean there is a subjective world separate from and irreducible to the physical objective measurable world.

To return for a second to the Principle of Charity, one commentator exhibited a common response, often seen when scientists criticise philosophy: attacking the fact that there is a term of art in philosophy that means what the non-philosopher thinks is contrary to intuition or “common knowledge”. Qualia was defined as a term of philosophy to mean irreducible experience. By denying that experience is irreducible I must, perforce, deny that qualia exist. I could redefine it to mean “experience” but we already have a word for that: “experience”.

Philosophers often seem to the outside as if they are quibbling over meanings and splitting hairs. Meanings, of course, matter, and calling something “mere semantics” to a linguist will get you a well deserved rap on the knuckles, but philosophers do a fair bit more than that. They also reconstruct the arguments necessary to make usages of words rational, or try to show that the arguments fail to do this. We do it in the name of truth, even if a certain number just enjoy playing the game the way a tennis star plays tennis, by stretching the rules as far as they will go for competitive advantage.

And finally, here’s a thing: scientists, skeptics, religious believers, politicians, economists and every other group of people also do precisely this, although they usually do it poorly. Consider how bad reasoning led to the Iraq invasion. Imagine how much better the world would be, if the intelligence analysts to a person had used good reasoning skills. Deprecate philosophy at your peril, oh smug ones!

Okay, the pain killers have kicked in and my back is no longer driving my expression of bile and bitterness, so I will sign off for now. As Craig Ferguson says, I look forward to your letters.

* Straw men are not sexist, or if they are, it is insulting to my own gender, and so I am entitled to use it. I reject straw persons. There are no straw women.

† Another point that I made in comments is that I don’t think this is a folk ontology. Instead I think it is a cultural construct, and we find “instances” of it elsewhere because that’s how we read prior cultural history. I think the default ontology is monistic. For example, the pre-Hellenic Jews thought there was only bodily existence, and no soul. I would think that the notion there is “consciousness” in a self-standing fashion is a construct of late medieval and early modern philosophy that has found its way into broader culture. I don’t even think that this view exists in the Vedic tradition, although I am not expert enough to show this.

Epistemology Logic and philosophy Metaphysics Rant Truisms

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Comments (75)

  1. Frank Jackson gave a recent interview to Philosophy Bites (http://www.philosophybites.com/2011/08/frank-jackson-on-what-mary-knew.html) in which he explains what he thinks was wrong with his “What Mary Didn’t Know” argument. Paul Churchland analyzed the logic of the argument in “Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson,” in _On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997_, 1998, MIT Press (originally published in _A Neurocomputational Perspective_, 1989, MIT Press), showing that it either has a false premise, engages in an invalid inference step, or is question-begging, depending on how you interpret the premises.

  2. I find that the incredulous reaction is pretty common, being a qualia skeptic myself, although on rather different principles.

  3. John S. Wilkins:
    So what you’re saying is that I am only 20+ years out of date?

    I’m not sure what Jim was saying. However, I follow the principle of charity, so I am not drawing any conclusions on whether you are out of date.

    I did listen to that same Frank Jackson interview, and found it interesting. But then I was never persuaded by his original argument.

  4. When I teach critical reasoning just about the first thing I teach is the principle of charity.

    It seems to me, based on observation, that for Internet debates people follow the principle of uncharity. That says that we should interpret our opponents statements in ways that make them look as stupid and ignorant as is possible.

    1. “the principle of uncharity”

      Sad … and all too true, Neil. The same thing is going on in “meat-space” all the time too, imo, it’s just that it shows up even more grossly in black and white on a screen.

      It seems to me that most people aren’t interested in truth or fact or objectivity, but only in repeating our own mantra and trying to force any interlocutors to repeat that same one too.

      Has it always been this bad?

      Nurse your back well, John, sympathy to you. I’ve recently been through the back strain and am on now to a new experience – the frozen shoulder. Trials of age.

    2. The problem is that the Internet contains “trolls,” and the application of the principle of charity to an internet troll is a waste of time, at least in terms of engaging in meaningful discourse with that troll.

      1. If you apply the PoC and find you have a troll, you are under no obligation to engage with them. But calling somebody a troll before you apply the PoC is strawmanning, maybe.

  5. The term qualia (the plural of quale) indicates that we have experiential or phenomenological properties that are simply not reducible to factual statements (usually of physics, but you can take it in other ways, so long as the facts are objective).

    I think one of us has the wrong meaning for “qualia.”

    Based on what I have read, and the discussions that I have participated in, the question of reducibility is not part of the meaning of qualia (or of quale). If Frank Jackson’s Mary had been able to describe experience, that would not show that qualia don’t exist. It would only show that they are reducible to physics. Likewise, if the Chalmers hard problem were solved, that would show reducibility but it would not show that qualia don’t exist.

    At least some of the discussion of qualia has to do with whether perception is direct. A proponent of Gibson’s direct perception would presumably deny that there are qualia. A proponent of indirect or representational perception would say that we do not perceive the world, but that we instead perceive an internal representation (or image), and that the quales are the elements that compose the internal representation.

    1. You’re partially right: the issue of whether qualia exist is separate from whether they are reducible to physical states. That said, if one is an eliminativist like the Churchlands, and like Wilkins appears to be in this post at least, then they don’t exist because they are radically reducible – radically in the sense that once you start reducing them, you see that there was nothing to reduce in the first place.
      A whole host of people deny the existence of qualia, for a variety of reasons. The Churchlands because all of that mental vocabulary is scientifically and philosophically spurious, Dennett (as he argues here, and elsewhere) because he sees the very idea of qualia as self-undermining, and Michael Tye argues that the separation of qualia from the experience is essentially an illusion (linguistic or otherwise mental). In fact, whether qualia exist has been a central component of the discussion of qualia since the start.

      1. You are both right in a way, but so am I. Since I think that the meaning of a term is its usage, Wittgensteinian that I am, I was retroactively defining it by how it is used. The field is divided into those who think there are qualia (substance dualists and epiphenomenalists) and those who think there aren’t (eliminative materialists and physicalists). Nobody holds the view, so far as I have seen, that there are qualia but they are reducible. Had I seen someone do precisely that, I should have not added “and are irreducible”. Some hold that brain states correlate with qualia, but are not identical to them, but that supports my definition.

        Now this is part of a wider and deeper philosophical debate: the distinction made since Aristotle between quantity and quality. Qualia are the qualitatively different experiences we have. I am in opposition to quality. I think the notion is purely relative and semantic, and is ultimately incoherent. One day I shall discuss that.

        1. Nobody holds the view, so far as I have seen, that there are qualia but they are reducible.

          That’s surely true. However, people are often making an argument that claims to prove irreducibility, and it would not do to make such an argument if one were assuming irreducibility as part of the meaning.

          My personal objection to qualia, is that the assumption that there are such things licenses people to make nonsensical statements.

          Now this is part of a wider and deeper philosophical debate: the distinction made since Aristotle between quantity and quality.

          I haven’t studied Aristotle. I always assumed that talk of qualities most mostly such things a “roses are red, violets are blue”, while talk of quantities was such as “the temperature is 30 degrees.” I never thought that distinction very important, though Kuhn seemed to think it important (around p. 28 of “Structure …”). I’ll be looking forward to what you eventually post on the distinction.

        2. John, you’re right, I can’t think of anyone who holds that view, in large part because qualia, as they are generally defined in philosophy of mind, preclude reduction, either to physical brain states or to the sorts of properties of things that direct realists talk about. I think Putnam has a section in The Threefold Cord about this, actually.

          Still, your view does look a bit to me like Churchlands, which is to say, the eliminativist position. For him, qualia make sense in folk descriptions of our experience, but as a philosophical or scientific term, it is perhaps not incoherent, but ultimately without reference or extension.

        3. But the funny thing is, words don’t have to have an objective reference to have utility, which is why I find John’s statements in need of further justification. Unless you are putting the cart before the horse with blanket statements of “objectively measurable physical world” which, funnily enough, lack an objective reference!

          This is real problem I think philosophical materialism. Big assumptions are made and because everyone is thinking alike these assumptions are never challenged.

  6. What makes you think that DJC’s naming of the problem “the hard problem” was inadvertent? I’m not a qualia sceptic, but I don’t think there is a hard problem (or if there is, I don’t see it a genuine possibility). Failures of imagination litter the history of psychology. Prior to around 1960, it was often said that though that it was clear the brain was physical, it was beyond comprehension, an ineffable mystery, how a physical mechanism could process information rationally. Now people don’t have any problem getting their head around it. Prediction: in 50 years people will scratch their heads and wonder why it was ever supposed to be mysterious that a physical system could have the property of being conscious.

    1. Chalmers has said that he didn’t deliberately come up with the label “The Hard Problem”; rather the hard/easy distinction just seemed an obvious way of phrasing the point at some conference.

  7. “So what you’re saying is that I am only 20+ years out of date?”

    The only bells it rings with me are in the late 17th century. It reminds me of questions asked in relation to feral/ wild children at this time. 20 years out of date sounds rather good, I am very often 1400 to 1500 years out of date with the subject.

    I really must ignore modern philosophy for a time, not out of smugness, it gets rather interesting and utterly sidetracks me with something new.

  8. Will this be a five minute argument or the full half-hour?

    The principle of charity I would have to agree with. I wish those who are wise in the ways of science on other sites would take heed. Yes, I will admit that I can still be prodded into competition, but that tendency is hopefully disappearing with age. When one passes 45, the search for meaning begins to overwhelm ambition.

    Still have to disagree on qualia. I don’t think qualia necessarily means irreducible experience. Unexplained is better word, for reasons which I have stated previously. Qualia is simply a word used to define a subset of experience useful for arguing (Chalmers arguments mainly, it seems). The distinction between Qualia and Self is one of focus, I think. It is difficult to conceive of Qualia or subjective experience without there being a single Self to experience them, or contain them. I do think that consciousness is a mystery that will remain unsolved via science. You can’t explain subjectivity via objective means.

    Vedic texts go back a long way. The Upanishads go back to the 4th or 5th century BCE, and influenced guys like Shopenhauer and Kant. Some of the early quantum physicists also liked them. But the concept of Spirits is endemic to many early cultures around the world. A disembodied spirit seems hard to imagine without the concept of a separate spirit in one’s own body serving as an example. Along these lines, I don’t think it is wise to simply ignore common knowledge or intuition. Certainly precise scientific thinking has demonstrated advantages, but so does intuition.

    There are holocaust deniers, climate change deniers, and consciousness deniers. If it makes you feel any better, I think the latter are the best of the three.

  9. I’ll take your word for it that contemporary philosophers or at least the contemporary philosophers you care about define qualia as irreducible, but that’s not the way that I think of qualia and I suspect that it’s not the way many others do either, though obviously a lot depends about what counts as reducing one thing to another. For example, I presume an adequate physical explanation of pain doesn’t have to hurt but does have to account for the fact that what it explains does hurt.

    From my point of view, there’s a difference between believing that qualia are or at least may be reducible to physics and believing that qualia have been reduced to physics. I’m also a monist, but I figure I’m buying that opinion on credit since so much remains to be explained, including, for example, not only how pain came to be painful but how and why it hurts in the present.

  10. A not inconsiderable fraction of our fellows are bichromats (color blind, as it were) and it seems inescapable that they experience colors differently than the rest of us trichromats. There is often a some disagreement in the neighborhood of green. However impossible it may be to decide exactly how we experience our perceptions, it’s entirely straightforward to note that most of us can agree that a certain shade is pea-green, while a disadvantaged fraction disagree.

    1. It’s worse than that. Some of our fellows are quadchromats, with extra colour receptors, and they see colours even the best graphic artist cannot.

      Me, I’d like to have the colour receptors of a mantis shrimp, with 12 evenly spaced kinds across the spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. And that supersonic claw thingy.

  11. Hi John. Firstly, I’m not out to disagree for the sake of disagreeing. Or to score points. I am a little annoyed at the level of debate going on in the philosophy of mind, in particular materialist conceptions thereof. Honestly, I found scant argumentation in your post, and mostly blunt assertions that give little clue where you are coming from. That being said, I know at least partly why you reason the way you do. As you made clear, you are an unapologetic physicalist, but not only that, you say you must deny anything that cannot be reduced to a “physical objective measurable world”. Now, it is clear that we have some fundamental differences here about the utility of language. For you it must serve some eventual conception of a “physical” world (whatever that must mean, and I don’t know how you would define that without appealing to “raw feels” at some level of communicative discourse). But for me the utility of language and communication is to resolve things in the here and now, regardless of where they take us.

    This means words like qualia have use insofar as they are involved with some kind of problematisation in philosophical discussion. That is pretty ordinary. I don’t know why you feel the need to make qualia a point of disagreement when really it is just a germ word. You could substitute experience for qualia and I don’t see how it would affect the substance of this debate either (you seem to think it would, but you offer no argument).

    I think you are creating a straw-man from qualia (by objectivising it – something you feel you must do as per your physicalism) and by objectively denying qualia this somehow adds to your materialist viewpoint. But it’s a convoluted setup and you want to deny basic word meanings (and you accuse me of going against standard use!). I don’t think this is wise or necessary. You have to think about how language came into use. Was it an attempt at objectivity gone awry? or something more basically utilitarian? I am very much for the latter position.

    I am not a dualist. The subjective/objective are for me one, but not yet in language. You want to claim that the subjective is really the objective. This strikes me as a kind of fundamentalism. I hope you will see that my comments are sincere, and I apologise if I sounded abrasive before.

    1. 1. This is a blog, not a research paper or book.

      2. I’m sorry you find challenging comfortable certainties unpleasant.

      3. I often do give arguments on this blog. Sometimes I repeat them, but I try hard not to unless I have something else to say. I’ve been doing this for eight years now.

      4. You are entitled to your own opinions, but one of the tasks of philosophy is to ensure that we are not ruled by opinion alone.

      1. The only comfortable certainty here is your belief that you can reduce everything to a “physical objective measurable world”. What basis do you have for the claim that the whole of nature lends itself to your intellect?

        1. Why should I need to justify my belief in the physical world? Surely the onus is on those who think there is something else to justify that added ontology?

        2. You are putting the cart before the horse again. Feelings/Pain/Qualitative experience have been with us since the beginnings of language. What you are espousing is a relatively new belief in a “physical objective measurable world”. The onus is on you to prove that such a world exists.

  12. You’re going to absolutely hate me, but I’m going to do the annoying philosopher-thing, here: Davidson isn’t talking about argumentative ethics. His principle applies to basic interpretation of speakers: the problem of radical translation (Quine) requires that we assume a set of true beliefs that we and the speaker share in order to interpret what they are saying. We may subsequently disagree with what they are saying and call them idiots, but the very idea of recieving what they say presupposes the principle of charity.

    I think that you’re doing something just as improtant in this post, but I don’t think it requires Davidson. You’re saying that philosophy in particular requires a kind of argumentative charity, which is absolutely true, and the internet is a totally horrible place to look for it in action. Thanks for getting it down, though… nuts to Davidson, let’s all start citing “Wilkins’ Principle of Charity” 🙂

    1. I can’t take the slightest credit for the PoC; it’s in the literature and it was handed to me.

      You are probably right about Davidson’s piece – I recall reading him on this in the late 80s against the radical translation stuff. However, it doesn’t mean it is not relevant here. It seems to me that a precondition for evaluating arguments is to communicate, and we reconstruct the intension of statements from context and some basic rules for our language community. [It always seemed to me if radical translation and underdetermination was true, then we could never rationally disagree, or agree. So I disagreed with Quine. Rationally.]

  13. I am sorry for your aches and pains John Wilkins, I can say this as I’ve been there, as the saying goes nobody knows till it happens to them.

  15. “But I don’t deny that we should use the language. Just that we do not need the superadded ontology. The onus is yours.”

    I have in no way argued for a superadded ontology! You are pushing bold claims of an objective measurable physical without any reasoning!

    1. If I know anything, I know there is a physical quantifiable world (having long ago rejected idealism of the Berkleyan version – the reason being the problem of explaining why things have consistency otherwise). So the claim that in addition there is a realm of being that is not quantifiable is superadded, if not incoherent. So the onus is on you, unless you are, indeed, a Berkleyan idealist, in which case we have nothing much to say to each other.

      1. Why do you have to know something? The onus is on YOU to prove you know something. Your trying to say, accept my physicalism or I won’t talk to you, and btw, I’m denying the meaning of basic words because of my lock-box belief. It’s quite astounding.

        1. Actually perhaps I should say, utility of basic words. That’s more what this is about. The point still stands.

      2. I have previously stated that if someone says they have no self or subjectivity, it is not for me to judge, and I believe that. Principle of Charity. But I would also add that if someone else tells me that I have no self or subjectivity, then it IS for me to judge. Forget about onus, let’s make a deal. It you don’t tell me that I don’t have feelings, I won’t tell you that you do.

        1. I never said you don’t have feelings. In fact I expressly said that you did. I just said they do not mean what qualia enthusiasts and consciousness exceptionalists think they do.

        2. And what would meaning be, in your mind? (not the objective world)?

          Meaning. What is that? Can it be reduced physically? Can the concept of reductionism itself be reduced to a physical concept?

  16. It need not be an either/or. Different subjectivities make an objective of the subjective. Again, utility of language. But you want to go beyond consistency, you want constancy. I don’t think the universe is static like that.

    1. I agree with John here, when we are looking at words we are looking at use. But I don’t think he is being consistent because he will deny the use of certain words in preference for, say, the scientific method. So for him, presumably because he is dazzled by the wonders of modern medical science, physics theories (which I look at as going against his perspective), and I would say fantasies related to a sci-fi conception of the future (such as belief in machine intelligence), he will pass over the utility of words like pain/qualia/quality because he is unwilling to investigate them on their own terms anymore. This I find sad.

      1. You know what? I have followed John for a long time, but I find that I just don’t need him anymore. Physically or spiritually. I’ve outgrown him. I just don’t buy him anymore, and maybe that’s a good thing for both me and him. He just doesn’t offer me anything worthwhile any more. You were right in your assessment of his scant evidence. So Goodbye, and I’m sure it’s mutual.

        I don’t see how meaning is reducible in any sense including the concept of reductionism itself. Language is not an issue, and never was. It is better for me to just leave and recommend to his readers that there just might be a world beyond John’s limited conception, as it has been for me. They will eventually draw there own conclusions.

        1. It is better for me to just leave and recommend to his readers that there just might be a world beyond John’s limited conception, as it has been for me.

          But that’s where the principle of charity comes in. You should consider the possibility that what he meant might be different from what you have taken him to mean.

          As for “I just don’t buy him anymore,” well I don’t buy him either and I never have. I think John would agree with me that he doesn’t expect readers to buy him. I find his posts stimulating, though I often disagree on particulars and I occasionally comment on that disagreement.

        2. I am not an Authority. Philosophy is not authoritative, but argumentative (although one need not give an argument more than once, necessarily). Jeff can read me or not as it pleases him. I’m sorry this became rancorous, but I did say I was in pain.

  19. When I saw this post I thought of it immediately as a salvo in a renewed empiricist versus rationalist war. Of course, given that qualia are based on the thinking of the man who brought a temporary truce in this war, this isn’t surprising.

    John, you do add a twist by turning it into an argument on which is reducible to the either. A perfectly fine case can be made for reducing various qualia to physical experience. But while Descartes is out of fashion these days, his foundation for all knowledge on what was for all intents and purposes, qualia, was convincing for plenty of smart people for plenty of time.

    I guess I’m a bit surprised that you’re drawing such a hard line at physicalism. I guess it’s your bottom line, and if one has to accept it to engage in discussion on this subject, well then language isn’t going to do much good. Rob is offering an approach that is far better aligned with human concerns, which are essentially based on qualia. Technical arguments can be made for whether the physical or qualia are primary. But both are words, so as we try to hash out which is correct, we become more an more technical, and thus less relevant.

    John S. Wilkins:
    So it’s true: we have nothing much to say to each other.

    1. This comes from my own personal journey. When I lost my belief in religion I had to decide what I needed to accept as a bare minimum. I decided that I needed to believe in the physical world. I never found the slightest reason to accept the existence of anything else. To this day I am a physicalist only because I never found the need to be anything else.

      The principle of parsimony suggests that one should not believe in more than one needs to. Even if it does make you feel comfortable.

      1. And that’s perfectly acceptable to me. I started at a physicalism, and moved towards a place where I can accept that while I can’t put any good reason for the existence of qualia, there are many pragmatic and socially productive reasons for just getting on with it. We are social and cultural creatures and qualia are essential for living out quite a rich part of the human experience.

        I haven’t articulated my position fully yet. But a recent article in the New Yorker about one of the authors learning to draw captured it fairly well. He was learning from a guy who was trying to replicate the classical style, and utterly hated Manet. The teacher said the best he could say for his style was “traditional realism revivalism.” It is summed up in that, “You can’t go back, but you can look back.”

      2. yes, I accept your comment. Why we need religion?, why we need other explication of our world, univers, etc? why we think about paralel univers?. Only you need to earth the sond of live, only to be a person, only to feel anyone, only to look nature, only to see the sea. If you look very well probably you understand all and never again you will be alone and never again you will think about a god. The live is with you and when your live pass, your baby will be you in the future, or your brother, or your sister.

    2. Hmmm, and “tennis players” makes me think we’re on the verge of bringing up Socrates versus the Sophists again. Maybe physicalism is necessary to stop this play, it’s the ultimate system of accounting against the rhetoricians. But David Foster Wallace is pretty sympathetic to the tennis player view of the world, as am I. Accounting systems can always be gamed, we don’t throw them away, but we best accept it. A good performance should be admired, though we are stuck with the problem of whether the performer is Good.

    3. When I saw this post I thought of it immediately as a salvo in a renewed empiricist versus rationalist war.

      Interesting. I am now wondering which side you see John as taking. Whatever it is that you are seeing, it must be invisible to me.

      Rob is offering an approach that is far better aligned with human concerns, which are essentially based on qualia.

      That’s a strange thing to say.

      I am not a reductionist, nor a materialist nor a physicalist. I deny computationalism (that the brain is a computer). I would say that my position is well aligned with human concerns. Nevertheless, I deny that there are qualia and I deny Cartesian dualism. So, sorry, but I just don’t see that human concerns are based on qualia.

      1. I’d tentatively place John as a neo-Empiricist for these purposes. He’s holding the appropriate reference for truth to be an objective reality, the existence of which he posits is self evident.

        My take is human concerns are based on qualia, because they are “concerns.” I’d separate these from human needs, which have a physical basis. Humans qua humans have concerns, humans qua biological entities have needs. There’s a good deal of overlap, but the distinction is clear when they run orthogonal to each other, for example practices such as religious fasting or flogging or abstinence. Once can make up a reductionist story to explain these, probably premised on irrationality or malfunction. But I think privileging qualia with existence will lead for more interesting and insightful investigation 90% of the time.

        1. My take is human concerns are based on qualia, because they are “concerns.”

          But that does not tell me anything. Sure, human concerns are related to experience. But if I deny that there are qualia, I am not denying that there is experience.

          If I say that qualia exist, then I can ask questions such as “Are your qualia similar to my qualia?” and “Are my qualia today the same as or similar to my qualia yesterday?” But these are nonsense questions. They have no meaning. The world in which my qualia are similar to your qualia is identical to the world in which my qualia are completely different from your qualia. There is no possibility of testing such statements, because they do not connect to anything testable.

          How can human concerns be based on something so meaningless, so completely nebulous, as qualia?

          Let me put it differently. It turns out that fires burn without phlogiston, and likewise human concerns exist without qualia. At one time, phlogiston was part of a theory of combustion. We now know that we can do without it and that our current theories of combustion are all the better for us having dumped phlogiston. You apparently are making qualia a term in your theory of mind. I am saying that you can do without qualia, though that might require that you look for a different theory of mind.

        2. Whether qualia exist no doubt depends very precisely on how we define ‘qualia’ and ‘exist’. But appealing to the old positivist doctrine equating testability and meaning to discredit talk of qualitative aspects of experience seems like an unwise move, and unhelpful to your case.

        3. Not so nonsense. I can ask “You feelin’ what I’m feelin’?” And we do all the time. And it’s very useful. Or:

          “If we feel tomorrow, like we feel today, we’ll take what we want and give the rest away.” –The Kinks

          Actually, there are plenty of tests of qualia, but they’re usually based on other qualia. I’d argue that a lot of art, culture, and religion is about coordinating or expressing nuances of qualia. Why else would we go through the trouble?

          And sure, I could do physics without reference to gravity, but it sure helps. I’ve never seen gravity, am not sophisticated enough to prove there isn’t some weird demon coordinating everything, but gravity is a good enough for me. And I’d say qualia have a lot more intuitive plausibility than a bunch of P-Zombies. In fact, I don’t think it would be that hard to spot a P-Zombie. How would they respond to personal attacks?

  20. “I’d tentatively place John as a neo-Empiricist”

    He sounds distinctively like an anthropologist to me . But then I think like one so I may be imposing my own understanding on a subject I know little about.

    I think if I was observing Chris’s human concerns and his qualia I would want to reduce them to a range of different cultural activities.

    I think it would be entirely acceptable for me as an observer to view them in this manner and Chris as a participant experiencing such things to insist that I am wrong and qualia exists.

    Its normally how these things play out in ethnographic field work. I would have no difficult using it as folk term .

    1. Jeb,

      I think would be a perfectly appropriate structuralist way to go about things. If I were feeling dyspeptic I would then reduce your cultural activities to qualia in good individualist fashion. Then John would reduce it all to something “physical.”

      We’re doing this all wrong. So many reductions, but so far, haven’t produced a single nice pan gravy.

  21. I like Chomsky’s critique of physicalism best: that it’s redundant, given that we already have naturalism, to add additional criteria to what is or isn’t investigable. If a phenomenon displays regularity that we can quantify, who cares whether or not it’s “physical”? (I think Rorty takes a similar tack.)

    I think the argument people are asking you (John) to make here is the one that would justify equating ontologically real entities with res extensa. What is it about money, dactylic hexameter, Valentine’s Day, buyer’s remorse, justice, or the “self” that makes them uniquely “unreal?” It’s true that through analysis we can see they are made up of constituent phenomena, but so is a lobster, a lump of coal, or a radio wave. Isn’t the body every bit as much an “illusion” as the mind, given that it appears to us as a solid, stable, persistent thing, when in fact it is constantly exchanging matter and energy with its environment (while still alive anyway), and that at the atomic and subatomic level it is mostly empty space. In fact almost every commonsense statement we could make about a body is going to be found false if we analyze it deeply enough that its “middle world” properties vanish.

    Why, then, privilege “physical” illusions over social or conceptual ones?

    1. I don’t think money, dactylic hexameter, Valentine’s Day, buyer’s remorse, justice, or the “self” are not physical. In fact I think they all are if they are not mistakes. But a separate, self-subsistent, unitary self that is not physical (identical with the body and its behaviours and context) is unreal because it is a mistake of language. IMO.

      1. I know what you mean here. (PoC.) Concepts like “justice” supervene on physical substrates (brain states, endocrine states). And that’s fine. (Though I would prefer you don’t go so far to say that justice itself is physical. It’s not, just as money is not.)

        What I’m not clear on is why, if your benchmark for an illusion is that something be “dynamic, fractured, and transitory,” that you don’t apply the word equally to physical phenomena, such as neurons. It is one thing to say that social and conceptual entities (as well as qualia) arise from the “physical” world. It is another to say that they are thereby less “real.” Are there other grounds that distinguish the real and the illusory that haven’t yet entered the discussion?

        Put another way, how do we properly deal with “misplaced concreteness,” when there is nothing which is not subject to analytic dissolution? (Unless the only “real” entities are quarks.)

  22. p.s I have never heard of the laws of charity before but I do not see how you could engage in fieldwork without observing them. So I see a very strong Anthropological theme running through this aspect of philosophy. The language is odd but the thought certainly appears very clear.

    It is a privilege to be allowed into peoples lives and observe them at such an intimate level. It demands considerable trust. particularly in matters relating to belief, to have people open up in such a way to an outsider and expose a deeply held part of what they are to a very different perspective. They are offering you a gift and you see the extent to which reciprocity is such a part of these very human concerns.

    1. I think that human beings are social animals and that all our significations are therefore constructed socially, yes. One might call that anthropology, but I think honouring my asseverations with such a lofty term is doing me too much credit.

      1. I always see potential in things and can run far away with them.

        I spent a highly enjoyable few hours after reading this, ended thinking of a very rare thing from a very far away time and place.

        “pleasant to me the sunshine for the way it glitters on these margins”

  23. John S. Wilkins:
    But a separate, self-subsistent, unitary self that is not physical (identical with the body and its behaviours and context) is unreal because it is a mistake of language. IMO.

    Change “mistake” to “product” and I’m basically with you. I say product, because I think there is a great deal of utility to the concept of self-subsistent unitary self. But, you’ll have to take my word for it.

  24. I find the general arguments for physicialism convincing, but I must admit I’m at a loss when it comes to reconciling that with experience. To say qualia in the irreducible sense doesn’t exist, to me, just changes the framing of the question rather than dissolving the problem. Experience as reducible to brain activity leaves out just what that experience is. I’m happy to say I don’t know and leave it is a mystery to be worked on, but I do feel susceptible to arguments to dualism that focus on experience as their starting point. If I’m to apply the principle of charity to their arguments, as I try to do, is there merit in reductio ad absurdum between experience and physicialism?

  25. I just want to be clear that I don’t think qualia “are” “real”. I think qualia “is” “real” for physicalism. The whole idea of qualia arose in the philosophy of mind under physical assumptions. It is essentially a “problem” or “excess” for physicalists. I do not reify that excess in order to deny it – (some) physicalists do that.

    Qualia as “actual” like physicalism as “actual” is a symptom of a self-conceptualisation that believes in some totality of itself (the timeless aspect), being actual in the un-resolution of time (belief in the reality of the temporal signification). That is the basic confusion. It all comes back to language. Does language ever denote something timeless? I have no reason at all to expect that. Language is only a tool for a greater expansion of the overall mystery until it achieves the proper dimensionality for some type of culmination/collective resolution.

  26. Now the problem of non-existence of “self” may be connected with the deep influence of English language upon the unconciousness and the thinking itself.

    Consider “Cogito, ergo sum” – do you see there any explicit reference to self, or better Ego? Actually the subject is hidden (ego cogito/are). The same for other synthetical languages, like Slovakian: “Myslím, teda som”. Now we have analytical languages like German „Ich denke, also bin ich“ where the “Ich” seems to be central, as it stresses or focus our attention to the meaning of the sentence.

    And now English : “I think, therefore I am.” Here “I” seems to have only syntactical meaning and actually doesn´t evoke any other ideas or “neben-vorstellungen”. Kantian philosopher Anton Marty put it clearly in his treatise on the sentences where subjects are missing – Ueber subjektlose satzes:

    “Dadurch geschähe es, dass neben der Vorstellung des Zeichens sich eine Nebenvorstellung von der Position desselben im System bildete, und diese Vor stellung wurde oft die erste vermitteln. Aber es wäre dies nur
    ein Schatten der inneren Sprachform, wie sie die Volkssprache
    aufweist.”

  27. What about Issac Asimov positronic thinking? Ages since I read any but I discovered another way of thinking here.

  28. /Rant begin/

    It’s as if I have hit a brick wall that is absurd.

    That philosophers are very skilled and effective at being ‘objective’ is fine. It’s great. The advantages and desirable consequences derived though meticulous care at being objective has amply demonstrated itself. I gladly accept and defer to those who far more skilled and knowledgeable with regard to objectivity than myself.

    In a similar manner, there shouldn’t be any shame disrespect of however one puts it in considering or suggesting that those who are very capable at objective reasoning aren’t automatically skillful, nor experienced, nor even especially interested in ‘subjective experience’.

    It is probably OK to suppose that those who are very capable at objective experience might not be so good with ‘subjective experience’ or rather ‘cognitive science’

    A lot of very intelligent experienced and skillful objective thinkers have made their way into ‘cognitive science’. That is a good thing! Objectivity is very desirable and effective in .. in let’s suppose every topic

    Yet what seems to have been taking place in ‘psychology’ … (if it has indeed taken place …) is absurd and tragic.

    Psychology seems to have moved strongly in the direction of insisting that it be extremely ‘objective’.

    That means that there is overwhelming representation of the ‘objective’ viewpoint and experience. That means that there is an intense overbearing insistence that the study of ‘subjective experience’ must be performed and reported from a fastidiously ‘objective’ viewpoint.

    ‘Subjective experience’ has been disenfranchised of representation and stripped of all credibility.

    ‘Subjective experience’ is pure illusion
    ‘Subjective experience’ is certain and absolute fallacy.

    The non-existential status of ‘Subjective experience’ has been made into dogma.

    I am utterly flabbergasted at this decrepit state of science.

    Of course, psychology might not be that way at all … I have become extremely poorly connected. Yet notwithstanding as much, the message that ‘subjectivity’ is worthless and the question has been settled … comes at me from multiple directions with increasing occurrence as time passes.

    Ok Philosophers cannot handle ‘subjective experience’. They have done magnificently with objective concerns. I will accommodate their limitation.

    Now that psychologists show the same absolute intransigence … and also show harder and more severe intolerance.

    Well, maybe it’s time to call them stupid.

    I feel very sorry, very dismayed and very sad and somewhat annoyed. People who make it their profession to study psychology ought to know better than they seem to be doing.

    With caveats that I don’t know the first thing about psychology … I admit that … but if psychologists cannot accept a certain primacy to subjective experience .. then to heck with them. They are of no use to me.

    /Rant finished/

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