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Article 4264 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott)
Subject: Re: Functionalist Theory of Qualia
Message-ID: <1992Mar5.035953.2797@cs.yale.edu>
Summary: I think I'm starting to fade
Keywords: functionalism,qualia 
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Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1992 03:59:53 GMT
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  In article <1992Feb28.070228.16926@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
  >Drew McDermott writes:
  >
  >>We're getting down to a basic disagreement about what needs to be
  >>explained.  I think we need to explain what "feeling like" actually is
  >>in the physical world.  I propose a certain theory; it's a trivial
  >>consequence of the proposal that systems fitting the theory would feel
  >>like what the theory says they would feel like.  ....
  >>reality, i.e., fails to make predictions and explain things.  But I
  >>would expect a fully fleshed-out functionalist account to make lots of
  >>specific predictions about the neural organization of the brain, the
  >>behavior of organisms, what subjects report when various parts of
  >>their brains are damaged, etc.

  >Those predictions are nice but irrelevant; I presume we're mostly
  >agreed on the kind of theory it will take to predict/explain our
  >behaviour, our neural organization, our verbal reports, etc.  But
  >the fundamental requirement on a theory of qualia is that it
  >explain *why we feel the way we do*; and you can't do that by
  >redefining "feeling" to be "makes certain verbal reports", any more
  >than you could do it by redefining it to mean "wears striped
  >underwear".

Foul!  I am not proposing that feeling = making verbal reports,
although I concede that I'm proposing that feeling = subpersonal
reports that play a certain causal role in the function of the brain.

  >You might say that this is just reifying the notion of "feeling",
  >as a vitalist would reify the notion of life, or a "massist" might
  >reify the notion of mass, saying "you've explained these object's
  >behaviour, but you still haven't explained their mass/life/whatever".
  >In reply: damn right I am!  Qualia are real properties that we
  >experience directly; in that way they're quite unlike life, mass, or
  >whatever, which are more or less inferences or explanatory
  >constructs from other kinds of observations.  For mass and life,
  >once you've explained the observations -- e.g. reproduction,
  >metabolism, adaptive function for life, or inertia, falling objects,
  >etc, for mass -- you've explained mass and/or life, because there
  >was no reason to believe in mass or life, over and above those
  >observations.  Not so for qualia.  Qualia aren't inferences from
  >observations from behaviour; they're directly experienced properties
  >that are strictly independent of our knowledge of behaviour.  As
  >such they stand in need of independent explanation.

[I could quibble here about whether "life" is actually more directly
experienced than qualia, which seem to have been discovered only in
the last 300 years, but I'll skip it.]

Experiences seem to have direct qualitative content.  But it's always
been suspiciously hard to say what that content amounts to.  It's not
just ineffable; one suspects that there's nothing to "eff."

For example, suppose that I walk through a freshly painted house, and
observe that the red color of the walls in this room is exactly the
same as the red I experienced in the previous room.  It feels to me as
if I am retrieving the memory of a quale and comparing it to the
current quale.  In other words, the qualia are playing a direct causal
role.  But of course, they aren't really.  Because my verbal report
can ultimately be explained (as you will no doubt agree to stipulate)
by reference to signals flowing through my brain, the judgement that
this red equals that one is ultimately explainable by reference to a
comparator somewhere.  (The comparator is comparing the neural
equivalent of floating-point numbers, not qualia at all.)  Indeed,
it's the fact that this comparator says the two reds are the same that
underlies my subjective experience that the two qualia are the same.
No actual comparison of qualia plays any causal role in the chain.
(How could it, unless there's a dualist medium where the comparison
occurs?)

I could imagine an evil neurosurgeon reaching in and fiddling with the
output of the comparator entirely independent of the actual contents
of the color signals from the retina, so that I might say, "This red
has hue H, saturation S, etc. [assuming I'm properly trained]," and
also say with complete sincerity, "It's quite different from that
other red with, even though I know I reported that it also had hue H
and saturation S; I must have been mistaken."

In other words, I certainly have the strong impression that something
is immediately given to consciousness, but even the attempt to pin
down the simplest aspect of what that something might be leads to
vacuousness.  The very idea of qualitative similarity turns out to be
empty, and what is a quale if it is not (as it seems to be) a
representative of a type?  Do quale tokens make sense without the
types they appear to belong to?  This bafflement leads me (and
others) to propose that the whole story is a fiction that the brain
needs for some reason.

Allow me to play around with the vanishing-qualia idea.  You have
suggested that the physical universe could continue to work exactly as
it works now, and yet there could be no qualia.  Very well, suppose
God decided to do away with the qualia this morning at 9 AM.  Has it
made any difference?  Obviously, just as in the fading-qualia case,
no.  Not only will my verbal reports of my experiences be as before,
so will my introspective state.  When the qualia went out, I'm not
even allowed to say, "Hey! Something weird just happened, but I'm not
sure what."  That would require a change to the physics.

I suppose the comeback is that if such an event happened, the world
would switch from containing observing selves to being an unobserved
clockwork.  Verbal reports would be generated by automata, and go into
the ears of other automata, which might be caused to generate replies,
but I wouldn't be aware of any of these events (or the change in the
status of qualia) because there wouldn't be any "I" any more.

Okay, let's suppose that the universe is only like this from 9 to 5
(Eastern Standard Time) every day.  In other words, we only really
have qualia after work.  The rest of the time we don't really exist.
Of course, we don't notice this because all our memories are intact at
5 o'clock; there's no contradiction in supposing that we can have
memories of qualia we never really experienced.  It's enough that when
we retrieve a memory there's a certain qualitative pang.

I'd like this argument to show that qualia are totally vacuous.  But
I'm afraid all it really shows is that qualia are probably
supervenient on the physical world somehow, which everyone but
Chalmers probably already accepts.

[By the way, I endorse the Chalmers moratorium on the Chinese Room,
but my failure to join Daryl McCullough in refuting the CR fans one
more time is due to fatigue more than anything else.]

                                             -- Drew McDermott


