Why qualia aren't like unicorns: A defense of phenomenal realism

[C C]

Why qualia aren't like unicorns: A defense of phenomenal realism
https://www.naturalism.org/philosop...like-unicorns-a-defense-of-phenomenal-realism

INTRO: Illusionists say qualia – the sensory qualities that seem to populate our conscious experience – are like unicorns: non-existent intentional objects of beliefs we might have about them. In response, I argue that qualities are real non-conceptual contents of consciousness and that Keith Frankish’s recently proposed reactivity schema theory might help account for them. We should remain metaphysically agnostic when seeking to explain consciousness lest the main explanatory target – phenomenal experience – be prematurely declared unreal... (MORE - details)

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OBLIGATORY COMMENT: I've never quite got where the qualia realism movement is even coming from. When inspecting a living brain, no team is going to discover those private images, voices, and feelings (and the qualitative essences composing them) parading themselves in both extrospective and introspective contexts. Just neural tissue or cells at the microscopic level. Mental experiences are not public.

And the secondary properties (qualia) were removed from the scientific conception of matter going all the way back to Galileo. And consequently the secular view of death is that when the brain ceases functioning, all the manifestations of consciousness (the sensory experiences and personal thoughts) disappear.

Because, again, the abstract or "external relationships" description of matter lacks such internal properties (i.e., how can you develop an explanatory "physics" for attributes that can't even be detected except in the personal domain). The non-conscious universe in general is thus interpreted as being devoid of presentations of itself; it abides in non-experiential darkness (so to speak).

So I'm usually left with having to construe "qualia realism" as some roundabout form of pan-phenomenalism or maybe naïve realism.

But the other possibility is intersubjective realism. It's obvious that the traditional meanings of color and sound, odor, and tactile textures as "shown properties" do globally exist in our manifested representations of the mind-independent world. Only someone with an anomalous clinical condition or an animal of a different biological species might not see leaves as green prior to autumn. That is objectivity grounded in human intersubjectivity (resulting from the same distributed brain operating system). Which is actually the only apprehension of an external environment that we have (its metaphysical rivals fall out of inference and experiment -- are theoretical rather than brutely displaying themselves, including scientific or matter realism).

So in the context of our empirical or intersubjective agreement (the consensus of human sensations), certainly "qualia" indeed do populate that particular brain-outputted version of the outer world (i.e., are "real" in that sense).

Yet the illusionists do have something going if their idea (which seems to boil down to systematic pretending) is utilized for artificial intelligence and robots. If you want the latter to behave as if they are phenomenally conscious, then you program them to apply the concept of a manifested image to their data analysis of visual information. The same with respect to their algorithmic identification of light frequencies -- you give them the concepts of what manifested red, blue, etc are like so that they can summarily apply such to those complicated processes. It doesn't matter whether they literally experience that technological activity as internal phantoms or not, they will still behave and insist that they do, as if such were the case. Machines can be philosophical zombies that just are acting. Or at least until social/moral activism enters the picture in earnest. That's why you wouldn't truly want to pursue implementing that capability in robots (due to the slavery issue).
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[TheVat]

I gather that the question of phenomenal properties as qualia, as "felt," is getting at the meta-science idea that such introspections or inward projections are not really algorithms. All other aspects of perception could in theory be reducible to computational operations, but the felt aspect, the "what it is" lies beyond. You could provide Mary (the plucky heroine of Frank Jackson's famous gedankexperment) with all the data channels and algorithms needed to process seeing and classifying objects as red, but until she leaves the Black and White Room, she really doesn't know what a firetruck looks like. Like the infamous "p-zeds," she could be trained to give utterly convincing accounts of seeing red but would remain a color vision zombie.

I also find a philosophical risk in calling unreal entities unicorns, as if that just swipes them away ontologically. Unicorns do seem to exist in several ways, even if live specimens remain absent.

 

[TheVat]

It doesn't matter whether they literally experience that technological activity as internal phantoms or not, they will still behave and insist that they do, as if such were the case.

This raises a point which teases at my brain. If we design machines that report qualia but in fact lack them, then we've just made machines that are even better liars. And we have already done really well in that achievement category, lol. The particular problem with the phenomenology lie is that it makes the machine harder to legally shut down when it starts seriously misbehaving.

What's a future turing test for faking qualia, one wonders. Read them the poem Red Wheelbarrow by Wm Carlos Wms and evaluate their reaction? Sounds like even the present chatbots can fool some people on such topics.

 

[C C]

[....] The particular problem with the phenomenology lie is that it makes the machine harder to legally shut down when it starts seriously misbehaving.

If the whole of the AI and robotics industry were prescient and disciplined enough to avoid the Pandora's box of implementing even a simulation of consciousness, you can just bet a civil rights and personhood maelstrom will still be brewing somewhere beyond the horizon. Our remote ancestors were animists and pareidolia mongers. All that anthropomorphic projection of the past is like confined behind the thin membrane of a balloon, waiting to be popped by the right sympathy-inducing mechanoid.

[...] Sounds like even the present chatbots can fool some people on such topics.

"What would a human say?" They just need to be trained more on colloquial language responses and everyday reactions to various things instead of mounds of formal text. There are real people on the autism spectrum who face more formidable challenges.
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