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I'm not sure I understand your point? If I feel confused, that's a real physical thing. Sure we say emotions are in my mind but my mind is part of my whole body which is a physical thing we can touch and dissect (if not yet fully understand).

Similarly my understanding and perception of the colours I see comes from a real physical body that has accumulated a lot of sensory input and experiences and uses that to interpret new sensory input.

I can't explain to you how I experience the colour blue but I don't need to grapple with metaphysics to explain, in principle, why I might experience it that way.

Something that helped me understand why this problem is significant: the things you mention as giving an account of color perception are only accounting for a brain system which evolves through states having structure which is isomorphic to fluctuations of colors in subjective experience[0]. However, the philosophical question isn't about whether you can create such a mapping, it's about reconciling the fact that if you look around your environment it's like something, and what it's like is importantly not a bunch of neurons. And yet when we look inside brains, we only find neurons. So if we want to say that the experience of colors can be explained physically as well, then there should be some physical place where e.g. redness is occurring rather than electro-chemical flux of neuron interaction.

[0] Another subtlety here is that the brain states having structure isomorphic to something in subjectivity doesn't necessarily make sense. It would on the assumption that everything is 'structural', but that's not an assumption everyone is willing to make. (You can find demonstrations that mathematics and the sciences can only deal in terms of structure, which is why for their practitioners it makes sense to ignore anything non-structural—but this is very different from a demonstration that everything actually is structural.) In that case, in order to create this mapping, we have to create another structure (for instance, a taxonomy of colors names and relationships between colors), and we can configure that structure in a way which is intended to reflect some moments of subjective experience. Now that structure could be potentially be found isomorphic to some evolving brain states, while to say that the subjective experience itself was isomorphic is likely nonsensical.

> So if we want to say that the experience of colors can be explained physically as well, then there should be some physical place where e.g. redness is occurring rather than electro-chemical flux of neuron interaction.

I am reminded of an essay by Stephen Jay Gould, on the history of preformationism, and the debate over whether the homunculus resided in the sperm or the egg. The idea that a human could be represented by an ordering of simple chemicals was inconceivable at the time.

The idea that physicalism requires a specific physical locus for redness is no more sound than the idea that genetic theory requires human-ness to be located in a specific base on a DNA molecule. Emergent phenomena are real, common, and not, in general, particularly mysterious (though the mind certainly is, at least to me.)

More prosaically, maybe redness is actually localized, as a memory of a sensation. Is there anything more to redness than a comparison to prior sensations?

> Emergent phenomena are real, common, and not, in general, particularly mysterious

I have no issue with emergent phenomena. It's just that whether the phenomenon is emergent or not is irrelevant to the question at hand.

For instance, let's say the brain 'system' responsible for color perception is distributed all throughout the human brain in such a way that it would be impossible to formulate any hierarchical conceptual structure which could account for it. It's just an emergent consequence of a ton of other complex stuff going on.

Okay, now if you recall my previous point about reconciling the experience of redness vs clusters of neurons—you can hopefully see that the above makes no difference to the problem. It's just a different mapping of a physical structure onto subjective experience, without accounting for the fundamental difference between the subjective experience and the physical structure.

(This answer is less thorough, but I did take my time with what I wrote previously. If you read it more closely I think you'll see the difference in what we're each talking about here.)

If the issue at hand is the denial of physicality, then the issue of emergence is significant, because arguments that claim qualia cannot be physically localized can quickly be dismissed as naive. Much more significantly, if you are actually attempting to understand consciousness, then you are ill-equipped to do that if you are unaware of the nature of emergence.

If you insist that there is no difference, then it goes both ways. I think you are actually right in a way you did not intend: more sophisticated versions of the qualia argument are ultimately no better, as at some point, it always comes down to what you are prepared to believe - that there is a fundamental difference that cannot be bridged.

There was a time when humanity found it impossible to believe that life could arise from matter alone, yet dualism in this regard has effectively been abandoned, at least scientifically and philosophically. While this does not, of course, prove anything about the mind, it does show how arguments from the fundamental difference between matter and information-like things are really appeals to plausibility. As an observation that there is a gap in our understanding, that is fine; as a claim that the difference can never be resolved, they are just opinions.

And as I briefly speculated in my last paragraph, the physical basis for color as a quale might be surprisingly localized...

Matter is a subjective experience. An atom is only an atom because it feels like something to be an atom. Qualia is the basis for all existence. The world is a feeling. No need for duality. Feeling is the a priori element.

But is the collective experience of matter a subjective experience?

This including any kind of scientific hardware we use to measure it?

How many people believing otherwise would it take to change the experience of matter in general public, if it is subjective? (Because if it is subjective, it must be malleable.)

Well the whole universe believes that matter behaves the way it does. A few billion lumps of gooey brain tissue isnt going to change it. But cut that matter off from the experience of the rest of the universe and it's free to do anything it damn well pleases. Until you look at it again and then it becomes something that fits with what its supposed to be doing wrt the universe at this moment

That's how I think things most likely are too.

:) philosophy brothers :)

My teen self would call me a hippy - but you have to follow the logic!

A priori means derived from logic rather than perceptions and experience. Not "more fundamental".

Well according to wikipedia it means knowledge independent of experience not "dependent on logic". In this sense it is similar to saying that something is axiomatic. Besides I'm not at all sure there is a difference between knowledge gained from logic or from experience: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xO3Gw0zlmWM

> Well according to wikipedia it means knowledge independent of experience not "dependent on logic".

wikipedia:

> Thus, the two kinds of knowledge, justification, or argument, may be glossed:

> A priori knowledge or justification is independent of experience, as with mathematics (3 + 2 = 5), tautologies ("All bachelors are unmarried"), and deduction from pure reason (e.g., ontological proofs).[3]

> A posteriori knowledge or justification depends on experience or empirical evidence, as with most aspects of science and personal knowledge.

There's nothing wrong or controversial about my definition. Non-Experiental Knowledge is Logical Knowledge by exhaustion. "Feeling" is exactly the kind of thing "a priori" was intended to exclude.

> In this sense it is similar to saying that something is axiomatic.

In no sense of the word, colloquial or academic, does "a priori" mean "axiomatic". They are different beasts.

> Besides I'm not at all sure there is a difference between knowledge gained from logic or from experience: <skims youtube video>

The video redefines the Problem of Infinite Regress as "Modus Morons". I've read What the Tortoise said to Achilles myself. Yes, the truth of modus ponens is arguably derived from induction. But that's a topic I'm not going to get into right now. At the very least, the terms are useful to label their disparate track-records.

If you want to dig further, your general position is called Idealism.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2ZHmCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA23&lpg...

You have an argumentative style which implies that you are more interested in winning than seeking the truth. As such I am dissinclined to take you too seriously.

Because this isn't about truth. This is about diction. You are using "a priori" in a non-standard way.

Also. Maybe meditate on the irony of citing wikipedia articles without reading them and then criticizing polemics.

Suppose I have a coffee machine. I can weigh it, clean it, measure titration. But is the machine edible? No, because the machine isn't coffee per se.

Similarly, suppose scientists discover a neural-structure (or chemical-interaction, etc) responsible for blueness. I can dissect it, electrocute it, soak it in LSD. But will the scientists experience blueness? No, because the structure isn't qualia per se.

The prevailing ideology is that by studying the mechanical nature of coffee machines, we'll ipso facto understand the biochemistry of the beverage. danielam is arguing that this ideology is probably wrong. This is why the Problem of Qualia is a problem.

A couple points. First, I did not claim that the experience of things or even consciousness require appeals to anything immaterial or non-physical. I merely said that a Cartesian materialism as a metaphysical position cannot explain these things, and this appears to be the way that many contemporary philosophers and physicists _in_their_philosophical_moments_ understand matter. Modern physics actually departs quite a bit from that kind of materialism. This is not a question first and foremost about the experience of color but the nature of color. Cartesians reduce color to an experience and locate that experience in an immaterial mind. Materialism, without reforming the account of matter inherited by Descartes, does away with the material mind and is now left with a desiccated account of reality that cannot even _in_principle_ account for color understood as experience. The solution is not to return to Cartesian dualism but to embrace a different metaphysics that can account for things like color, not as experiences, but as real properties of the world. After that, it is possible to talk about what it means to perceive color. (Indeed, a fatal flaw of modern philosophy is that it prioritizes epistemology over metaphysics, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Second -- and this is not the main thrust of what I said, but it is in response to what you wrote -- you are begging the question when you presume that everything can be accounted for physics. Consider the concept of Triangularity. In the world, we have concrete, triangular things that instantiate Triangularity. We perceive them through our senses. One triangle may be an isosceles triangle, another might be equilateral, still another may be a right triangle. Of these, each may be large, small, drawn with thick lines or quickly sketched on the board with a piece of chalk. However, none of these triangular things are themselves Triangularity or else only one triangle could exist. Furthermore, none of these concrete instances are perfect instantiations of Triangularity. The lines composing them are never fully straight. They are only approximations, and yet we still know what Triangularity is, its properties (like the angles summing to 180 degrees), and so on. It exists in our minds, and in the mind it exists, by necessity, completely apart from any particular, concrete instantiations of it (we may have images of triangles in mind, but the images themselves are not Triangularity itself, something all these images share). It follows that because Triangularity isn’t concrete or particular, there exists in the mind something that isn’t concrete or particular, but universal. But because physical things are necessarily instantiations of universals and not universals themselves, then we have in our minds something non-physical.

The kicker is, of course, that you can't, at least not without radically reforming how you understand matter.

What reformation is required here? Given how simulated neural networks tend to end up with particular neurons representing concepts, it should not be surprising if one could find neurons in the brain for colors. The experience of color is the combined effect of activation of those neurons.

... therefore, neural networks consciously experience color. QED

The experience of color isn't a concept.

The problem of qualia comes into play most especially when a materialist metaphysical position is accepted of the kind where the immaterial res cogitans is denied. The materialist is then faced with the task of explaining how all of that which was attributed to minds (e.g., color) -- and indeed minds themselves -- is really something that can be attributed to res extensa.

This doesn't seem all that bad to me. I'm faced with the task of explaining lots of things that I don't understand for a variety of reasons. Sometimes I'm motivated to participate in the exploration, sometimes I'm willing to let it be delegated to others. This would seem to be true regardless of whether I think that the mind is material or immaterial. We may develop an elaborate theory of the immaterial mind, yet end up concluding that we still don't understand color.

I wouldn't trust myself to conduct research into the inner workings of an immaterial mind, without perhaps building up from a successful inquiry into simpler immaterial systems.

It sounds like it's just an exploration of the history of color perception and philosophy of it. Scientists don't really have any problem; they all understand color is light emitted interacting with light reflected interacting with our light sensors (eyeballs). They're pretty good at measuring and recreating those elements.

My guess though is, to your point about qualia, while we've scientifically categorized animals, plants, and minerals food is fairly subjective but many preferences are shared between people. We've also developed a rough language around food (sweet, sour, umami), and food scientists have studied it and tried recreating characteristics.

Where does information fit into the Cartesian dichotomy?