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Article 3682 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Functionalist Theory of Qualia
Message-ID: <6170@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 12 Feb 92 20:17:05 GMT
References: <jbaxter.697533284@adelphi> <1992Feb10.192310.2777@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Feb12.073418.10497@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
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In article <1992Feb12.073418.10497@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1992Feb10.192310.2777@aisb.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>>He has?  Where?  The argument I get from him is that if I say there
>>aren't qualia in such things I must be suffering from a failure of
>>the imagination.  That may be an argument, but it's not a very
>>convincing one.
>
>You're imagining things (insert smiley here).

Not really:

>"Most people find the claim that not-P completely obvious and
>when I assert P they give me an incredulous stare.  But the fact
>that they find not-P obvious is no argument that it is true; and I
>do not know how to refute an incredulous stare."  --David Lewis.

This is not, of course, an argument that P is true, and given
some of the things Lewis has argued for (real existence of possible
worlds), the "obviously not-P" folk may have a point.

In any case, can it really be that qualia are just a matter of
some trivial information processing?  Maybe so, but if so, qualia
turn out to be uninteresting (unless you find trivial information
processing interesting).  So, either (1) the thermostat qualia
are not qualia in the strong sense, contrary to DC's claims, or
(2) qualia aren't part of the interesting distinction between
the mental life of humans and maybe animals on the one hand
and rocks, trees, and atoms (or susbsystems thereof) on the
other.  (I say "interesting distinction" because there are lots
of trivial distinctions, and not because I can spell out in
full detail what the interesting distinction is.)

I'm inclined to go for (1):

DC has the same position on awareness and consciousness that he
has on qualia: thermostats have it (them).

But, if there's a state change, there can be awareness of the change
or not.  This requires at least one additional state.  (Reflective
awareness, ie awareness of awareness, requires more.)  All of the
thermostat's states are devoted to reacting to temperature changes,
with nothing left over for having awareness or not of the change.

Or consider someone who's asleep.  Open their eyes and show them
a green object, though they're still asleep.  The person has no
awareness of green, no green qualia, etc.  In DC's view, it may
be that some _subsystems_ of the person have qualia in this case.
But I think a more substantial argument than any presented so
far is required to show that we should take seriously the suggestion
that such subsystem qualia are the same kind of thing as person
qualia.

(But if they are the same, it must be something else about a person's
awareness (ie, not just the presence of qualia) that we sould be
looking at.)

I am, of course, assuming that there is some interesting difference
between, say, humans and rocks / rock subsystems.  DC seems to be
saying that, if so, it's just a difference of complexity.  People
have complex qualia, thermostats have simple qualia, but it's all
qualia in the strong sense.

Well, you can adopt a point of view that makes almost anything a
difference in complexity.  If A has property P and B lacks P, we
might say "B is simpler than A -- see it's like A but lacks P".
For instance, when I said some awareness/no-awareness states
were needed, DC might say "not having them is just simpler, not
really different".

To some extent it's pointless to have a debate that's just about
how we should talk about something.  Does it really matter if
I can't refer to an interesting distiction by saying "qualia /
no-qualia" but have to say "complex qualia / simple qualia"
(independent of whether it really is a matter of degree)?

I think it does.  It makes it much harder for my side of the
argument, because then I have to try to show how a distinction
that we're talking about as merely a difference in degree
is nonetheless an important difference.  I think such arguments
can be made (a snowstorm vs a few flakes is a matter of degree,
in a sense; so is a fatal does of poison vs a non-fatal one;
and so on). 

But I think it's better not to be in that position.  By the same
token, it's a good strategy for DC to get control of the word qualia,
so that I can't use qualia / no-qualia for the distinction.  It's
also a good strategy to try to put more of the burden of proof on
me, by such things as the Lewis quote.  But I hope that, in a
"friendly" discussion, we can factor such things out.

-- jd


