(Sep 24, 2017 02:01 PM)confused2 Wrote: I get the distinct impression qualia were invented for the express purpose of generating argument about whether or not they exist. Unfertile ground IMHO.
I'm never exactly sure whether philosophers and the scientists who venture into such intend "qualia" to also concern the capacity of manifestation itself or it is purely quibbling over the content of experience (the specific qualitative characteristics and whether or not they are being "properly" conceived). If it is the latter, then from the late 20th century onward qualia probably have become a distraction from the broader issue of the former. When backed into a corner, the average physicalist or materialist will readily admit that after a brain returns to being non-alive or is non-functioning slash poorly organized matter once again, then the "stuff" composing it natively and universally lacks any empirical and intellectual evidence of itself even existing. Just absence of everything -- not even the presence and cognition of nothing, or even random nonsensical "noise" flaring up intermittently. (Exceptions are Galen Strawson's version of materialism.)
There are at least three "explanations" of experience (the visual, aural, tactile, etc manifestations we're confronted in consciousness with, whether in extrospective or introspective context):
1.
Incremental development. Which equates to pan-proto-experientialism (a milder subcategory of panpsychism). Since it entails by meaning a primitive precursor for experience which is gradually manipulated by evolution into a greater or higher degree of complexity.
2.
Denialism. Denial that we even have experiences (i.e., we're all philosophical zombies suffering from a verbal, conceptual, or language based hallucination; a re-defining of what hallucination means or what it would otherwise be dependent upon in the first place).
3.
Brute emergence. Where a process or pattern of activity simply conjures experience as a brute add-on to the physical sciences. IOW, it does not incrementally fall out of accepted and recognized properties of matter, but magically yet predictably appears according to an as yet undiscovered natural principle. The vulnerability of this "conjuring" view is obvious, since it leaves the door open to dualism via lack of explaining experience to a deeper substrate. Experience is "summoned" rather than incrementally produced from fundamental / simpler characteristics of the universe already in play.(Compare with everything else about the biological level not floating on it own, but arising from and dependent upon the chemist's and physicist's levels of interest).
All three choices are crazy from some rival group's perspective or specific restrictive dogma about materialism / physicalism. Thus the reason why curious people otherwise eager to solve anything suddenly become dullards when it comes to the "hard problem of consciousness". Just dodge around it, make excuses, whistle and distract attention elsewhere, bait and switch, etc.
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