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Qualia and consciousness (the other sense, not the awake or asleep sense) are made up and can be done away with.
If I say 'oh everyone has a soul and it's a marvellous important spiritual distinction that separates us from animals and rocks we tricked into thinking' people look askance. They ask where the soul is, what properties it might have, what would happen if we removed it from someone. I have to give evasive answers like 'we can't find the soul, it might not be material like literally every other property and object' and 'properties of the soul - uhhh... it lets you feel things'.
For all intents and purposes we might as well not have souls - the concept isn't useful. You can't do anything with the knowledge of souls.
But if you call it qualia, everyone just accepts it as valid! Qualia and souls are effectively the same idea. The whole notion of 'philosophical zombies' is a joke. If there's no way to objectively determine the difference between a philosophical zombie and a 'normal' person with a soul - sorry with qualia... then what's the point of the idea? They are both the same. Just remove the distinction, remove qualia and let's get on with our business. People can feel things like pleasure or pain, we can isolate how those things work and use them to get results. Heroin, anesthetics and so on all hit at those discrete, real concepts. There's no doubt about them. As you say, the capabilities of humans and machines are wildly different in the physical, actual world. But there's no need to make up further separating distinctions in some non-material world.
Qualia is totally unnecessary. How can anyone expect materialism grapple with a concept that isn't even real? And how can a soul appear when the human brain is basically a scaled up monkey brain with some bells and whistles?
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Qualia isn’t soul. It’s something experienced in the brain. It’s very real because every human experiences it.
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I can observe my own qualia right now, thereby refuting this. And it doesn't require the existence of a soul or any strictly dualist framework (I'm a realist myself). I know that I'm experiencing this interaction. And you can't really explain why or how I feel like I am.
This is enough of a mystery that I don't feel you're equipped to make any of the inferences you're making given you can't explain it.
Of course I can't offer any evidence of this observation by construction. But I know I'm right insofar as it's not the sort of observation that can be falsified (c.f. Descartes).
You think that thinking is an example of qualia. So you think that if you are thinking then you have qualia.
Say I thought that qualia and thinking were themselves included in remsajev. That doesn't make remsajev real. Things don't become real just by defining it such that it includes other things. Qualia isn't real either. There's no mystery at all, not of remsajev or qualia.
Who is the „you” here.
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Call this experience of reality "thinking" if you will. Insofar as you can't explain it it's really no different.
Refuge in semantics won't save you from making claims about things you don't understand being epistemologically indigent.
Explain it? It just is.
Why do positive and negative charges attract? They just do. There's nothing to understand or explain, it just is. I don't need to explain qualia because it's nonsense with zero value, except to philosophers who need some make-work.
Quite. But I'm not the one extrapolating that onto objects that share no relation to humans when we have no knowledge of how it works.
Somehow I feel like "we don't know anything about this" is not the position that requires substantiation.
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The idea that qualia is "made up" or "not real" seems difficult to defend. You can verify for yourself right now as you're reading this that you are directly experiencing qualia at this very moment. It is not a speculative thing like a soul that may or may not exist. Qualia is the one thing you can be quite sure exists. "I think therefore I am."
Maybe qualia is not important or is not a useful distinction, but that's different from saying it's not real. And in practice most people seem to think that qualia is very important indeed, so you would need to do some serious heavy lifting to prove otherwise. For example, the moral difference between killing someone in a video game and killing someone in real life primarily comes down to the differences in the qualitative experiences the two acts produce; the video game death produces no negative qualia, the real death produces large amounts of negative qualia in the victim and their friends and relatives.
Where is the qualia? I am reading, my eyes are moving, information is being processed. All of those are real things. Existence is real. But where does qualia come in? If you use qualia to mean the 'experience of reading and thinking' then it has zero value. The experience of reading is inherent when you read. If you define qualia as having experiences, then why can't I define a soul as that which is necessary to have experiences? It's nonsense.
People in real life are not simulations running on a few hundred lines of code and some textures! There's a huge actual difference between a bandit in Skyrim and a bandit in the real world.
This seems like an admission that qualia in fact exist, which would refute your claim that it's "not real." Whether it has value is a different question.
What is your evidence for this claim? If I ask a human to read and summarize some text, the human will have the experience of reading. If I ask Chat GPT to read and summarize some text, it's unclear whether it will have any experience at all, and I think most people assume it does not. A cleaner example: a human has the experience of adding numbers whereas a simple digital calculator does not.
If the video game NPC had the subjective experience of being shot and dying, it would be immoral to kill the NPC. The moral weight of killing the NPC does not depend on how many lines of code are involved, but rather whether qualia are involved. This refutes your claim that qualia has "zero value."
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Maybe your interlocutor is a philosophical zombie.
Every time this subject comes up I wonder if zombies are the main life form in existence or if modernity has somehow created them. Who the hell comes up with the thought experiment of a “philosophical zombie” who is identical in every way but lacks consciousness and forgets to consider the possibility of p-zombie 2.0, one that seems identical until you ask them about consciousness?
And who but a zombie hears their interlocutor denying the existence of qualia and then tells them, “you lie!” without imagining that they might be accurately reporting on their own inner experience?
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They are not the same thing at all. Start here.
That link doesn't have meaning. They're just inventing nonsense based upon assumptions of ideas that don't exist. It has no relation to the real world, no potential uses and no falsification. This is just make-work for philosophers.
Would a brain made up of Chinese people acting as molecules have emotions? Providing they mapped out all the hormones and so on, of course. Emotions are real things that can be observed. They then take a step further into the feeling of emotions, as though that's separate from emotions themselves. That sense of the word 'experience' from their philosophical zombie idea doesn't work, it's not a real thing.
Would that woman who's read about red but not seen it truly understand what red is? They assume there is an 'experience' of seeing red inherent in the question. She simply hasn't seen red, she's read a lot of documents and knows a lot about red. There's no confusion here other than what confusion the philosophers bring with them.
Do you know what it feels like to feel pain?
Do you agree that when you touch a hot stove, you experience a feeling of pain which accompanies your other behavioral indicators of pain (saying “ow”, pulling your hand away, etc)?
If the answer is yes, then you understand what qualia are.
Your desire to dunk on philosophers is distracting you from the fact that this is a very simple concept that every person is intimately familiar with.
The vast majority of contemporary philosophers are materialists about qualia anyway, so I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up over.
I feel pain and irritation with this whole debate.
This is a very simple (and wrong) concept. When you feel pain, you are feeling pain. Not qualia! The feeling of pain is just pain. You can't have pain without a feeling of pain, they're one and the same.
(Probably!) not true. Fish act as if they feel pain, but study of their neurology indicates they probably don't. Call them "p-fish-zombies".
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