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Do the personal experiences of qualia, such as what it is like to smell a flower, bring about issues for functionalism?

Geoffrey Thomas
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BillyBob
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  • Welcome to phil stack exchange. Please visit the help center: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/help to get an understanding of how this site works, and how to ask good questions. You may have researched this question yourself, but as posted your question is not sufficiently detailed, nor does it show your own work or thinking, and it may well be closed unless you add more details to it. This is because we want the answers to actually answer the question, and very general questions are too open to get on-target answers. – Dcleve Nov 24 '20 at 16:51
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  • I would suggest you try editing this question to describe what are meant by 'issues'. What metaphysical presuppositions are you making? A dualism broadly accepts that the material function and subjective experience are independent, for instance. Also try running searches here for functionalism. – J D Nov 25 '20 at 15:02
  • Here's an example: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/29319/what-is-the-difference-between-functionalism-and-property-dualism – J D Nov 25 '20 at 15:03
  • It also helps to read an article like SEP: functionalism before forming a specific question. – J D Nov 25 '20 at 15:04

1 Answers1

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Yes, qualia very much pose a problem for functionalism -- that is what they were articulated to point out. Mary can functionally do vision science, but EXPERIENCING vision adds something to her consciousness that functionalism does not capture at all. Also, explicitly 99% of human mental processing is unconscious -- IE it has no qualia, but that processing is FUNCTIONAL. Once more -- function =/= consciousness.

Chalmers Zombie thought problem also notes zombies can do functions, but don't have qualia, and that the experiences of qualia is what makes us conscious.

Dcleve
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  • That something is unconscious does not imply that it has no qualia. All we can say is that we don't know whether our own unconscious thoughts have qualia or not. This in fact applies to anything at all we are are not conscious of. Do a stone has qualia? We don't know. Do other people have qualia? We don't know. – Speakpigeon Nov 25 '20 at 10:38
  • @Speakpigeon -- You pose the rationalist "but you can't prove it" objection which applies to ALL empiricism. Theory is always under-determined by evidence, so our criteria for what we "know" has to be based on pragmatic effectiveness, not theoretic certainty. With qualia, we know that we have qualia with all consciousness, and that we do massive amounts of processing unconsciously, with no qualia we can discern, and that rocks show no signs of being conscious. The "but we can't prove otherwise" is irrelevant to a pragmatic empiricist, inference that conscious == qualia is still valid. – Dcleve Nov 25 '20 at 20:59
  • "so our criteria for what we "know" has to be based on pragmatic effectivenes" No, doesn't follow. We all make a fundamental distinction between knowing and believing, and we say we believe X when we don't know that X. And where would be the problem? We can be pragmatic and effective using our best beliefs, so to speak. It is sure very tempting to say that I know that p even when I don't, but this is for convenience and self-gratification, not to speak of hard-cash economic interests. Still, you do as you please. – Speakpigeon Nov 26 '20 at 10:33
  • @Speakpigeon -- a careful examination of how we perceive, both logically and neurologically, shows that "know" is an unconscious process of empirical inference, performed unconsciously by our neural net processes, and it is as logically subject to empirical error as our conscious beliefs are. One can, and does, "know" things like the answer to a math problem, or that there was not a stop sign at that last corner where you had that fender bender, when that answer or lack is wrong. – Dcleve Nov 26 '20 at 18:07
  • I was talking about our notions that we know or believe things, not whether it is actually true that we know things like whether the Eiffel Tower is 300 metres tall. Further, here you are mixing up belief and knowledge. We would know whether we believe there is a stop sign. We never actually know that we know there is a stop sign. We have to live with that and it is good enough to live our lives. Trying to go beyond this wil inevitably be metaphysical speculation. – Speakpigeon Nov 27 '20 at 10:46
  • @Speakpigeon -- I DID distinguish belief from knowledge -- I identified knowledge as the beliefs that are arrived at by our unconscious neural net inferences, and presented without their accompanying error bars or probability rates to our conscious mind. Accepting them credulously is a choice. – Dcleve Nov 27 '20 at 18:21
  • Redefining knowledge as some species of belief is where the confusion is. We know that we believe but we may believe that we know. – Speakpigeon Nov 28 '20 at 10:33
  • @Speakpigeon The willingness to accept that what we "know" may not be true, and questioning the walls of the boxes our "knowledge" lives within, is for me the essence of the philosophic mindset. – Dcleve Nov 28 '20 at 17:45
  • Good for you but redefining knowledge as a species of belief requalifies any number of beliefs as knowledge, so you sure have of job on your hands. As I see it, this comes from philosophers trying to articulate a rational theory of knowledge as a species of belief, and this seems to have been initially motivated by ideology, essentially to separate out religious belief from rational belief, only the latter qualifying as knowledge. This also fits with our basic behaviour whereby we routinely claim to know things we don't and have to admit that we didn't know it after all. – Speakpigeon Nov 28 '20 at 17:58
  • @Speakpigeon -- I don't know what philosophers you are reacting against. Socrates showed that our mistaken ideas of what we "know" are often false. I am adapting Descartes foundationalism -- our base "knowledge" is only our intuitions of basic reasoning, and our experiences. Everything else, including perceptions, and more formal reasoning, is built up in successive tiers of pragmatically accepted assumptions, much of this process being unconscious. Zombies don't have those base experiences, and would have to do something related but without qualia to start with. – Dcleve Nov 28 '20 at 18:52
  • "I don't know what philosophers you are reacting against". Justified True belief? Wikipedia: "Justified true belief is a definition of knowledge that gained approval during the Enlightenment, "justified" standing in contrast to "revealed". There have been attempts to trace it back to Plato and his dialogues, more specifically in the Theaetetus" – Speakpigeon Nov 29 '20 at 10:26
  • "I am adapting Descartes foundationalism -- our base "knowledge" is only our intuitions of basic reasoning, and our experiences" I would say myself that we know our qualia and only our qualia, qualia we may see as the contents of our mind, and that's it. Qualia include everything we are conscious of, including our reasonings, our memories, our intuitions, our perceptions etc. I'm not sure if this is what you mean. – Speakpigeon Nov 29 '20 at 10:34
  • @Speakpigeon -- I agree that the experience of reasoning, or of thinking, is also "qualia" although of a different type than the phenomenologic sensory qualia that are more commonly referenced. The problem with identifying qulaia with knowledge, is that we are often mistaken. I think I see a friends face in a crowd, then look more closely, and it is a stranger. Even worse for qualia as knowledge are retroactive confabulations, where I convince myself I DID see a green light before the accident, and can picture it clearly (along with its component qualia), but those qualia are confabulated. – Dcleve Nov 30 '20 at 19:19
  • @Speakpigeon -- "knowledge" is not certain, be it perceptual, reasoned, inferred, or experienced. All knowledge is a postulation constructed by our unconscious, and arrives at System 2 with its error bars hidden. I discuss the approaches to treat knowledge as belief here: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/67662/ontological-foundations-of-epistemology-perspectives-on-entities-regarding-know/77231#77231 As you appear to be a fellow spiritual dualist, you may find many of my answers of interest to browse through. – Dcleve Nov 30 '20 at 19:23
  • ""knowledge" is not certain" I disagree. You are confusing our belief that we know with knowledge. Certainty applies to beliefs. Knowledge is what we mean by the word "knowledge". If I know p, then I am correct that p. And if x is either certain or not certain, then x is a belief. We may believe we know p, and be wrong because by definition beliefs can be wrong. This is why we make the distinction between knowledge and beliefs to begin with. This is why we can correct ourselves to admit we didn't know p after all while we never correct ourselves as to belief. – Speakpigeon Dec 01 '20 at 11:06
  • @Speakpigeon -- By your definition one can never have knowledge. I have knowledge, despite its lack of certainty, and find this distinction to be highly useful. Hence I reject your definition as pragmatically useless. – Dcleve Dec 01 '20 at 15:58
  • "By your definition one can never have knowledge". False. And you can move the goalpost and redact the definition, but you cannot change the notion of knowledge people have. Nobody could. The notion of knowledge is fundamental to our relation to the world. Humans are very consistent in this. Given your definition, for you to say that you know p will make it the same as saying that you believe p, So this is delusion and confusion. People often pretend they know this or that, only later to admit themselves that they had been wrong and in fact didn't know it. – Speakpigeon Dec 01 '20 at 16:24
  • @Speakpigeon -- we don't have certainty on anything. That people commonly and mistakenly think they do, does not make the bad definition that most people use any more useful. Yes "People often pretend they know this or that, only later to admit themselves that they had been wrong and in fact didn't know it." This is true of all claimed knowledge per your definition. – Dcleve Dec 01 '20 at 17:13
  • "we don't have certainty on anything" You may not, I do. "bad definition that most people use" Nobody needs any definition. We all know intuitively what "know" means. "This is true of all claimed knowledge per your definition" I didn't offer any definition. My conditional "If I know p, then I am correct that p" is not a definition. It may be thought of as a property. And it does not imply that all claims of knowledge are false. – Speakpigeon Dec 01 '20 at 17:44
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – Dcleve Dec 01 '20 at 17:54