FWIW, I wonder if the way you frame the challenge for illusionists may beg the question against them somewhat? Maybe I'm wrong, but as I understand Keith Frankish, for example (perhaps most clearly in his Quining Diet Qualia paper but also in his 2016 JCS and later articles), the illusion ultimately comes down to a false judgment that intentional states have some added element of intrinsic subjectivity, ineffability, indubitability, etc. So if you stipulate that what you have in mind is a definition of phenomenal properties/states that excludes those, then perhaps the illusionist would respond that you are incorrect in thinking your definition really is so innocent, as for example François Kammerer did (https://philpapers.org/rec/KAMDCA-2) in a recent paper.
Of course realists, including Eric Schwitzgebel (https://substack.com/@eschwitz/p-158531817) as well as David Chalmers (e.g. this from his paper on The Meta-Problem of Consciousness: "To generate the hard problem of consciousness, all we need is the basic fact that there is something it is like to be us. We do not need further claims about intrinsicness, non-physicality, and so on.") etc. will hold - as you do - that those extra claims are not necessary and not what they mean by phenomenal / qualia / what it's like, leading to an impasse on finding a neutral explanandum (and potentially some motivation for quietism?)
Thanks for the comment. So, I’d like to think I’m not begging any questions. I’m aiming to synthesise and take what’s valuable form their view, grant that they’re right to exclude certain characteristics, then ask “did we really just dispense with phenomenal properties altogether?” to which I’d answer “no.” But this all stems from talking about them in different ways. I tend to think phenomenality is the phenomenon that needs explaining, not some theoretical commitment sitting on top of it.
Thank you for the reply and I think begging the question was an unfair way for me to put it. Definitely there’s lots of dialog back and forth between realists and illusionists on whether there is something left to phenomenality after the problematic elements are removed. Arguing for one side is not the same as begging the question so sorry for that!
I just read Quining Diet Qualia. There are moments when I think what I'm saying is compatible with Keith's illusionism, but moments when I don't. He talks about the confusion about how very different such qualities would be if they're in the mind vs on the surface of objects, for example. He seems to hint at the idea that we can't mean something which could be interpreted so differently. I think that's exactly what we mean... thats the datum to be explained.
I'm inclined to say that what we mean when we're talking about phenomenal properties is just what-it's-like-ness. But I think what mental states are like (at least perceptual ones) can be explained in terms of the macro-physical qualities/properties of external objects. We can say things like, "this perceptual state is like this—it has the qualitative feel it has—because I am being causally connected to real qualities "out there."
So what it's like needn't involve an inner cartesian world. The inner part is the illusion, or lack existence, but the feel has been preserved.
Thanks - I guess the part I'm still not totally clear about is how you would get from a causal connection to properties in the external world to a qualitative 'feel'? (as opposed to a judgment e.g. "there's a red thing out there.")
As I understand Frankish he's saying there is nothing 'feely' and no what-it's likeness in that sense, but we just judge that to be the case (though I admit that's where I run into trouble really getting a handle on the illusionist view and what it means to *judge* that there are phenomenal properties, especially after reading Mandik on qualia quietism.)
I think you’re asking the key question. The view I’m currently flirting with could be classed as a kind of panqualityism (not to be confused with Panpsychism). The taught being that the world consists of instantiated qualities. Some claim that physics dispenses with such qualities but I think this might be a confusion between how physics is *expressed* (i.e. mathematically/quantitatively) on the one hand and what *physicality is in itself* on the other. I don’t think it’s incumbent on physicalists to conclude on that basis that the world is void of qualities.
Okay, so those qualities are the things or properties that stand in causal relations. So on this direct realist view, we shouldn’t confuse what we are perceiving with the way we are perceiving it. What we are perceiving is a bunch of complex polyadic properties instantiated by physical objects, and external world qualities that mediate those experiences. What our sense organs and brain are doing on the other hand is enabling us to perceive such things. So on this view, a conscious visual state involves, surfaces of external objects, light as a mediator that brings some of its own qualities. That’s all outside the scull. Then what happens on the eye is analogous to the hardware of a camera, and what happens in the brain has more to do with judgments about the world (rather than the creation of an inner mental world).
It will be harder to say what’s going on in the case of non-perceptual states like dreams/imaginings/hallucinations etc. so this is something I need to think though more. It will likely involve memories of qualities which we have learned about empirically, and that firing up certain neural pathways that were present in the actual perceptual state will produce something that feels similar just by virtue of it utilises similar machinery.
Of course, this might all be madness, but it’s one of my working hypotheses.
Had time to finish this , and I tentatively agree with nearly all of it; that wasn't the case for your previous piece, and I suspect that the attempt to draw in Kant does not help your argument.
Most of what you are suggesting could be mapped, with some terminological changes, to what I have been arguing. We can be sort-of realist about appearances themselves, because they come with so few ontological commitments, but we can be eliminatiivists about many of the things posited to be behind those appearances.
I don't think "illusion" is a very good term for this, because an illusion often involves making faulty assumptions (usually involuntary ones) about what is behind the appearance. My preferred term, virtualism, covers the possibility that, in many cases, there is nothing at all behind the appearance, just the appearance machinery doings its own thing without external input. Or, in some cases, adding embellishments that are orthogonal to the externalities. Not so much misrepresenting wavelength as colour or creating an illusion, but adding a whole new colour logic and semantic significance to wavelength ratios.
In addition to my recent posts on triplism, I posted earlier on the idea of a likoscope, which is a hypothetical device that does its best to retrieve perceptual content from brains. I think a likoscope can retrieve content that fits the bill for a rough mapping to "qualia", without their being any real entity being retrieved, because the device itself performs the representational twist that confuses our ontological intuitions.
In "The Blue Square", second in the likoscope series, I have a zombie in the first room of the lab, asked to imagine a blue square. Nothing blue there, no square there. I have a likoscope in the second room, displaying the extracted blue square, or what you would call the "appearance". The capacity to extract the blueness is a real feature of the first room, despite their being nothing blue there, and it is made real in a new, somewhat spurious-but-useful way in the second room. I have the third room sealed; it holds the intentional target of the imaginary effort, covering the externalist dimension. The contents of the third room make no difference to anything. This is imagination, not perception.
The extracted blue square is not "like" the thing it is extracted from (a physical brain), in most senses of "like", but it is exactly "like" what the zombie imagined (a blue square), in another sense, and it will tell you so. It is not necessarily like anything in the third room, as there might not be any intentional target in the usual sense.
Of course, it makes no difference if we substitute a human in the first room, because zombies and humans have exactly the same appearance being extracted. The zombie only differs in lacking some incoherent fiction that makes the blue-square appearance "phenomenally real" in some way that does no real work (like changing the contents of the third room)
The blueness being extracted can feel very precise, but almost certainly isn't, because a range of matches could all be considered acceptable. It doesn't rise to the level of being "indutible". But it is "intrinsic", because the "likeness" only really works for the subject in the first room, not for outside observers. It is "ineffable", because it doesn't really exist except in a representational sense, and nothing blue would be found if we searched the first room. It could be "irreducible", in the weak sense of resisting Jacksonian derivation; the same would not be true of the square shape, so subjective colours do indeed pose epistemic challenges. It is non-physical, in the sense that nothing in the first room is physically blue (reflecting or emitting photons or the required wavelength), and nothing is blue at all in the entire set-up if we switch off the likoscope. The blueness consists of a natural interpretation of the relevant neural activity from one perspective, and is non-physical and private in that sense. It is not non-physical in any sense that need bother a physicalist.
In other words, this real property in the first room, which we might vaguely call an imaginary blue square, has most of the properties of a quale, but without contradicting physicalism. What stops us from being happier with the match to "qualia" has more to do with the mess that has gone before than any real problem with accounting for real, intrinsic, ineffable, irreducible, sort-of non-physical appearances.
I agree that, while my Kantian musings sent me down a particular avenue, they might only be helpful in a thin sense. Though in some moods, I think there could be a framework here that could put a fresh spin on some of his ideas.
Only halfway through - got to go to work. But I'm sympathetic to what you're trying to do here.
I have been arguing in many of my own posts that most of the key terms in this debate are hopelessly underspecified, and in that sense I agree with Mandik. But I think we need to be careful to distinguish between rejection of a conceptual mess with rejection of phenomena that have given rise to the conceptual mess. I'd be on board with a program of tossing out all "qualia" talk, but I also think that the qualia talk has come from an epistemic situation that is at least a little bit puzzling. There is something real, and instead of just copping out and saying there is nothing behind the qualia concept to explain, which is (arguably) the quietist approach, we should take arms against a sea of confusion.
"The both option is a disjunctivist account whereby the qualitative character of a non-conceptual, perceptual experience is explained in terms of external qualities that feature in experiences, but where the qualitative character of a conceptual, non-perceptual experience is explained in terms of exercising various concepts."
I think this has to be correct. Redness, to my mind, has external referents and also has embellishments added during the perceptual process. Objective science is poorly equipped to account for the embellishments under their own terms.
You might want to add a paragraph spelling out what you mean by doxastic content.
I see no problem at all with separating propositional belief from perceptual representation. These are different brain processes; they can be in direct conflict, and often are. The idea that physicalists can only find "judgments" in the head, like the belief that the sky is blue, instead of anything mapping to the blue quale, is unnecessarily deflationary. We don't have to buy the bad metaphysical assumptions that often lie behind talk of the blue quale, but we do need to account for more than the propositional content.
I am both an illusionist and a realist on these matters, because I think the key terms are so vague they straddle real epistemic phenomena in need of explanation as well as faulty ontological interpretations inspired by those phenomena.
Nice article, and shout out to DJ Im-Rock!
FWIW, I wonder if the way you frame the challenge for illusionists may beg the question against them somewhat? Maybe I'm wrong, but as I understand Keith Frankish, for example (perhaps most clearly in his Quining Diet Qualia paper but also in his 2016 JCS and later articles), the illusion ultimately comes down to a false judgment that intentional states have some added element of intrinsic subjectivity, ineffability, indubitability, etc. So if you stipulate that what you have in mind is a definition of phenomenal properties/states that excludes those, then perhaps the illusionist would respond that you are incorrect in thinking your definition really is so innocent, as for example François Kammerer did (https://philpapers.org/rec/KAMDCA-2) in a recent paper.
Of course realists, including Eric Schwitzgebel (https://substack.com/@eschwitz/p-158531817) as well as David Chalmers (e.g. this from his paper on The Meta-Problem of Consciousness: "To generate the hard problem of consciousness, all we need is the basic fact that there is something it is like to be us. We do not need further claims about intrinsicness, non-physicality, and so on.") etc. will hold - as you do - that those extra claims are not necessary and not what they mean by phenomenal / qualia / what it's like, leading to an impasse on finding a neutral explanandum (and potentially some motivation for quietism?)
Thanks for the comment. So, I’d like to think I’m not begging any questions. I’m aiming to synthesise and take what’s valuable form their view, grant that they’re right to exclude certain characteristics, then ask “did we really just dispense with phenomenal properties altogether?” to which I’d answer “no.” But this all stems from talking about them in different ways. I tend to think phenomenality is the phenomenon that needs explaining, not some theoretical commitment sitting on top of it.
Thank you for the reply and I think begging the question was an unfair way for me to put it. Definitely there’s lots of dialog back and forth between realists and illusionists on whether there is something left to phenomenality after the problematic elements are removed. Arguing for one side is not the same as begging the question so sorry for that!
I just read Quining Diet Qualia. There are moments when I think what I'm saying is compatible with Keith's illusionism, but moments when I don't. He talks about the confusion about how very different such qualities would be if they're in the mind vs on the surface of objects, for example. He seems to hint at the idea that we can't mean something which could be interpreted so differently. I think that's exactly what we mean... thats the datum to be explained.
I'm inclined to say that what we mean when we're talking about phenomenal properties is just what-it's-like-ness. But I think what mental states are like (at least perceptual ones) can be explained in terms of the macro-physical qualities/properties of external objects. We can say things like, "this perceptual state is like this—it has the qualitative feel it has—because I am being causally connected to real qualities "out there."
So what it's like needn't involve an inner cartesian world. The inner part is the illusion, or lack existence, but the feel has been preserved.
Thanks - I guess the part I'm still not totally clear about is how you would get from a causal connection to properties in the external world to a qualitative 'feel'? (as opposed to a judgment e.g. "there's a red thing out there.")
As I understand Frankish he's saying there is nothing 'feely' and no what-it's likeness in that sense, but we just judge that to be the case (though I admit that's where I run into trouble really getting a handle on the illusionist view and what it means to *judge* that there are phenomenal properties, especially after reading Mandik on qualia quietism.)
I think you’re asking the key question. The view I’m currently flirting with could be classed as a kind of panqualityism (not to be confused with Panpsychism). The taught being that the world consists of instantiated qualities. Some claim that physics dispenses with such qualities but I think this might be a confusion between how physics is *expressed* (i.e. mathematically/quantitatively) on the one hand and what *physicality is in itself* on the other. I don’t think it’s incumbent on physicalists to conclude on that basis that the world is void of qualities.
Okay, so those qualities are the things or properties that stand in causal relations. So on this direct realist view, we shouldn’t confuse what we are perceiving with the way we are perceiving it. What we are perceiving is a bunch of complex polyadic properties instantiated by physical objects, and external world qualities that mediate those experiences. What our sense organs and brain are doing on the other hand is enabling us to perceive such things. So on this view, a conscious visual state involves, surfaces of external objects, light as a mediator that brings some of its own qualities. That’s all outside the scull. Then what happens on the eye is analogous to the hardware of a camera, and what happens in the brain has more to do with judgments about the world (rather than the creation of an inner mental world).
It will be harder to say what’s going on in the case of non-perceptual states like dreams/imaginings/hallucinations etc. so this is something I need to think though more. It will likely involve memories of qualities which we have learned about empirically, and that firing up certain neural pathways that were present in the actual perceptual state will produce something that feels similar just by virtue of it utilises similar machinery.
Of course, this might all be madness, but it’s one of my working hypotheses.
Had time to finish this , and I tentatively agree with nearly all of it; that wasn't the case for your previous piece, and I suspect that the attempt to draw in Kant does not help your argument.
Most of what you are suggesting could be mapped, with some terminological changes, to what I have been arguing. We can be sort-of realist about appearances themselves, because they come with so few ontological commitments, but we can be eliminatiivists about many of the things posited to be behind those appearances.
I don't think "illusion" is a very good term for this, because an illusion often involves making faulty assumptions (usually involuntary ones) about what is behind the appearance. My preferred term, virtualism, covers the possibility that, in many cases, there is nothing at all behind the appearance, just the appearance machinery doings its own thing without external input. Or, in some cases, adding embellishments that are orthogonal to the externalities. Not so much misrepresenting wavelength as colour or creating an illusion, but adding a whole new colour logic and semantic significance to wavelength ratios.
In addition to my recent posts on triplism, I posted earlier on the idea of a likoscope, which is a hypothetical device that does its best to retrieve perceptual content from brains. I think a likoscope can retrieve content that fits the bill for a rough mapping to "qualia", without their being any real entity being retrieved, because the device itself performs the representational twist that confuses our ontological intuitions.
In "The Blue Square", second in the likoscope series, I have a zombie in the first room of the lab, asked to imagine a blue square. Nothing blue there, no square there. I have a likoscope in the second room, displaying the extracted blue square, or what you would call the "appearance". The capacity to extract the blueness is a real feature of the first room, despite their being nothing blue there, and it is made real in a new, somewhat spurious-but-useful way in the second room. I have the third room sealed; it holds the intentional target of the imaginary effort, covering the externalist dimension. The contents of the third room make no difference to anything. This is imagination, not perception.
The extracted blue square is not "like" the thing it is extracted from (a physical brain), in most senses of "like", but it is exactly "like" what the zombie imagined (a blue square), in another sense, and it will tell you so. It is not necessarily like anything in the third room, as there might not be any intentional target in the usual sense.
Of course, it makes no difference if we substitute a human in the first room, because zombies and humans have exactly the same appearance being extracted. The zombie only differs in lacking some incoherent fiction that makes the blue-square appearance "phenomenally real" in some way that does no real work (like changing the contents of the third room)
The blueness being extracted can feel very precise, but almost certainly isn't, because a range of matches could all be considered acceptable. It doesn't rise to the level of being "indutible". But it is "intrinsic", because the "likeness" only really works for the subject in the first room, not for outside observers. It is "ineffable", because it doesn't really exist except in a representational sense, and nothing blue would be found if we searched the first room. It could be "irreducible", in the weak sense of resisting Jacksonian derivation; the same would not be true of the square shape, so subjective colours do indeed pose epistemic challenges. It is non-physical, in the sense that nothing in the first room is physically blue (reflecting or emitting photons or the required wavelength), and nothing is blue at all in the entire set-up if we switch off the likoscope. The blueness consists of a natural interpretation of the relevant neural activity from one perspective, and is non-physical and private in that sense. It is not non-physical in any sense that need bother a physicalist.
In other words, this real property in the first room, which we might vaguely call an imaginary blue square, has most of the properties of a quale, but without contradicting physicalism. What stops us from being happier with the match to "qualia" has more to do with the mess that has gone before than any real problem with accounting for real, intrinsic, ineffable, irreducible, sort-of non-physical appearances.
https://zinbiel.substack.com/p/a-blue-square?r=2ep5a0
I agree that, while my Kantian musings sent me down a particular avenue, they might only be helpful in a thin sense. Though in some moods, I think there could be a framework here that could put a fresh spin on some of his ideas.
I’ll look forward to reading The Blue Square 👍🏻
Pete’s working on a response to my latest post, don’t distract him!!! ;)
Your piece seems interesting tho, saved for later reading!
Only halfway through - got to go to work. But I'm sympathetic to what you're trying to do here.
I have been arguing in many of my own posts that most of the key terms in this debate are hopelessly underspecified, and in that sense I agree with Mandik. But I think we need to be careful to distinguish between rejection of a conceptual mess with rejection of phenomena that have given rise to the conceptual mess. I'd be on board with a program of tossing out all "qualia" talk, but I also think that the qualia talk has come from an epistemic situation that is at least a little bit puzzling. There is something real, and instead of just copping out and saying there is nothing behind the qualia concept to explain, which is (arguably) the quietist approach, we should take arms against a sea of confusion.
"The both option is a disjunctivist account whereby the qualitative character of a non-conceptual, perceptual experience is explained in terms of external qualities that feature in experiences, but where the qualitative character of a conceptual, non-perceptual experience is explained in terms of exercising various concepts."
I think this has to be correct. Redness, to my mind, has external referents and also has embellishments added during the perceptual process. Objective science is poorly equipped to account for the embellishments under their own terms.
You might want to add a paragraph spelling out what you mean by doxastic content.
I see no problem at all with separating propositional belief from perceptual representation. These are different brain processes; they can be in direct conflict, and often are. The idea that physicalists can only find "judgments" in the head, like the belief that the sky is blue, instead of anything mapping to the blue quale, is unnecessarily deflationary. We don't have to buy the bad metaphysical assumptions that often lie behind talk of the blue quale, but we do need to account for more than the propositional content.
I am both an illusionist and a realist on these matters, because I think the key terms are so vague they straddle real epistemic phenomena in need of explanation as well as faulty ontological interpretations inspired by those phenomena.