Qualia Are Reducible
Qualia Are ReducibleMoved from WhyDoesTheUniverseExist
Yet are not human minds part of the Universe?
You and I might believe this but most philosophers believe otherwise, and most scientists act as if they believe otherwise. Because if human minds are part of the universe, then it's a far different universe than the mere geometric / mathematical picture given us by scientists.
That doesn't follow. The complexity of interaction in thinking systems is so many orders of magnitude higher than in the average system physicists look at, it wouldn't be surprising if different effects emerged, without the basic elements being any different. And I'm not sure it's true that dualism is really the main stream for philosophers.
By "believe otherwise" I was referring to eliminative materialism or other notions about reality which reduce down to it. Dualism, even of the Cartesian kind, is fairly harmless compared to eliminative materialism. And if you talk about property dualism then it all begins to make sense.
The problem with your argument is that qualia aren't simply a more complex or more abstract form of neural structure. They aren't abstract at all, they are fundamental. In fact, qualia aren't even structure. There is structure between qualia, and eventually that structure will be described mathematically, but qualia themselves aren't structure, aren't geometry, and so are beyond mathematics.
The best you can hope to achieve is a complete mathematical description of the structure between qualia, augmented with a few fundamental ... things ... that represent the qualia themselves. At that point you'll have a complete description of everything. Of course, if you ever explained this to a modern day physicist, they would go into convulsions.
I'm afraid I don't get it. As I understand it, a qualium is basically a particular sort of mental state, as perceived by the mind exhibiting it, and so should work just like any other emergent property. Such can't be considered without an underlying structure, and a description of that structure doesn't actually describe the property, but the property can always be retrieved from such a description by viewing it in a particular way. For stupid little things like clumps or waves or distributions, all it takes to discern them is a simple function or algorithm; qualia are incredibly more sophisticated, so an incredibly more complicated process is needed, and that process is basically what constitutes a mind. Or so I would have said; please tell me what you think is wrong with this (probably on a separate page).
The key about qualia is in "by the mind exhibiting it". Emergent properties in other systems are never perceived by the system possessing them, but always by an outside entity, the same entity that (may) also perceive the subvenient properties. For this reason, qualia are special.
Further, it must be noted that all properties of a mathematical system, no matter how abstract, are always mathematical (that is, structural and geometric) whereas qualia are neither structural nor geometric. From a purely mathematical system like a neural net (or a contemporary theory of physics) you can't derive a non-mathematical property.
You may be right though. Your argument has a certain appeal to it which bland calls to "scientific progress" lack utterly. Thanks for the insight.
The argument against a purely physical description of qualia involves dualities in physical systems. It's simplest to see in the case of logic. If you were to try to teach the meaning of our logic symbols to aliens, you'd have a 50% chance of succeeding. Because nothing you could say using mere logic would enable you to convey that t means true and f means false. If you tried to say that t and t = t, they might understand this as f or f = f. Yet t means true and f means false. Why? Because of things extraneous to logic.
[Not correct, t and f could be defined as follows: t = (t == t), t = (f == f), f = (t == f), f = (f == t)] [Only if you manage to communicate that == isn't an inequality.]
(Note, I think the above is wrong but I'm too tired to explain right now. Basically, people do adjust to up/down sensory inversion, suggesting that they have no intrinsic meaning. OTOH, up and down are pretty abstract anyways.)
Hmm. What exactly, in simple terms, are your main gripes against EliminativeMaterialism?
EliminativeMaterialism says that phenomenal (philosophical) consciousness does not exist (see WhatIsConsciousness). Since phenomenal consciousness is the prime candidate of "things that exist" and is used as a yard-stick in order to define "things that physically exist" .... Well, EliminativeMaterialism makes as much sense as denying that the integers are real numbers. And why does eliminative materialism do this? Because consciousness (the integers) have special properties which do not fit in a naive theory of physical reality (the reals).
Does epiphenomenalism really reduce to (imply) such non-existence? -- vk
My mistake. I removed the reference.
DavidChalmer?'s paper on the different philosophical positions wrt the problem of consciousness is worth reading (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/nature.html).
Even if it turns out that qualia are reducible, and contrary to David Chalmer's ideas, only Type B or C Materialism would be true. EliminativeMaterialism would still be false because 1) people will never stop talking in terms of qualia, 2) qualia are real whether or not they can be reduced; they are more concrete than the abstractions they would be reduced to. -- RichardKulisz
I'm gonna regret this ...
If there are disinctions between qualia apart from their relative positions within some oriented structure, then those distinctions are reducible to relative positions within some oriented structure.
Therefore qualia need not be regarded as distinct. This leads by way of monadism into taoism.
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