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> That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias

The overwhelming majority of human beings both now and historically are dualists, so this isn't surprising to me at all.

Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs.

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There is no "mechanism for how [ ... ] emergence occurs". Emergence is the mechanism. This is even more true of qualia, which are definitionally subjective, and thus do not exist as phenomena in the world.

We could talk a bit about the mechanism behind the process where aggregating sufficient water molecules creates a liquid. But we can't talk at all about how that same process could ever be responsible for the experience of "wet", because the experience of wet is wholly subjective.

Similarly, even if we were to be able to fully describe the materialist processes taking place in a system that has qualia, nothing in the description can ever explain the experience of having experiences, beyond saying "well look here - see all this stuff going on? that's how qualia are possible", which is not tautological, but not a mechanism for qualia.

Speaking of "thinking" more generally is even worse than focusing on qualia. It's not hard to agree on what qualia are - that it is like something to be something, in Nagel's words - but agreeing on what would count as "thinking" and what wouldn't is not likely to see any agreement at all.

The argument breaks down for me here:

> because the experience of wet is wholly subjective.

I can't distinguish this from "wetness is a quale." In which case the analogy water : wetness :: brain : qualia reduces to water : qualia :: brain : qualia.

Also:

> the experience of having experiences

The fact that we sometimes slip up and use recursive language like this is a suggestive sign to me. We intuit that experience is somehow "already present," or fundamental, as idealism claims. If idealism is true, then you _are_ consciousness, and already know it at some level.

> the experience of having experiences

this is not recursive, really. It is not written to imply that experience is universal, in fact quite the opposite. Most of us generally posit that rocks do not have experiences. Most of us posit that humans do, and likewise (famously) so do bats. But what the experiences that a bat has? It's not unreasonable to assume that they are quite different from the ones a human has.

Ergo, we cannot really compare the experiences of a bat with those of a human. But we can note that they both have experiences, and that is the magical part. I was just being flowery by using "experience" twice in a row, but in another sense I was trying to differentiate between the questions of "why are our experiences as they are?" and "why do we have any experience at all?" This is something that I think Dennett in particular fails spectacularly at (and he agreed with me, once :)

As for the "wetness is a qualia" point, yes, that is good summary of my point, but I am sorry, I do not understand the notation you are using after that.

Sorry, didn't realize it's not standard notation. In English:

"Water is to wetness as brains are to qualia" reduces to "water is to qualia as brains are to qualia."

I agree that people have experiences, but I don't understand why they must be magical or non-existent in the physical world. Why can't the word "experience" simply be referring to the physical processes that happen when our mind/body is in some particular environment?

Certainly physically ingesting a small amount of certain psychedelic chemicals can have profound effects on subjective experience, so it can't be too disconnected from physical processes.

The whole issue of qualia / experiences seems like it is an extension of the dualist/materialist perspectives rather than something that sheds light on it one way or another - dualists will view qualia as something non-material and so something that materialism can't explain, and materialists will view qualia as something material along with consciousness itself.

Maybe you experience qualia, but I’m just a configuration of matter. I can’t know what it’s like to experience qualia, because I don’t experience them. Instead, my configurations change according to input and internal processes. I am purely phenomenological.

No worries. You're not part of the discussion, then.

Who is included in the discussion? Is there anyone we can agree has subjective experiences which are not phenomenological?

We can agree that anyone who reports having no subjective experience is not a part of the discussion, i think.

That’s a profoundly unsatisfying answer. I really am interested in who you consider to be a part of the discussion. If qualia are not phenomena, how can we talk about them besides in the hypothetical, since conversations are phenomena? If someone claims to not experience qualia, why would you take that claim any more or less seriously than the claim that someone does experience qualia, or the claim that qualia exist at all?

…or is it possible that qualia are phenomenological?

I say this in all sincerity: thank you for providing a much better example of the kind of hand-waving flim-flam I was referring to than I was able to.

I imagine that you are making some kind of point here, but this is just exactly what loses me every time. Is that some kind of mental deficiency on my part? I suppose it could be, but if it is then I don't think it's one I want to correct.

This sounds like you might be able to gain something from the “Do chairs exist?” video by vsauce.[1] Basically, he goes through the different philosophical reasonings of the past and then explores where each one of those fall apart. He goes explicitly into how small things can create something larger but why philosophers have struggled to make the leaps to change definition. He ends on the latest philosophical reasoning, which I think thoroughly explains your conundrum.

I’ll try to explain even if it seems less profound here than in the video. Basically, all concepts are emergent behavior of “stuff.” There really isn’t a chair, but “stuff” arranged chair-wise. And humans decide what that boundary is for both chairs and consciousness as they are concepts we apply to stuff that is “chairing” or “being conscious.” A collection of neurons may or may not be conscious by defining how they behave. And the details on where we draw the line for consciousness is no different than where we draw the line for how many atoms we can scrape away from a chair and it still be a chair.

[1] https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE

> Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs

This seems pretty bad faith, I'd imagine you're getting lost for other reasons.

For one, inanimate matter probably needs to be animate before it can think.

Secondly, perhaps the difficulty in explaining the mechanism comes from the fact that materialists are honest about the uncertainties of this (extremely difficult) problem and are burdened with an epistemology that requires evidence from the actual world, unlike other approaches.

There are a lot of levels of "thinking" across the animal / insect / even plant kingdoms. The simplest levels of stimulus response (like a venus fly trap closing its mouth) don't seem to require a metaphysical explanation. But insect behavior is more complex and mammal and human behavior even more so.

At which level do the existing rules of the material world start to seem less plausible to you than a second unseen world with different rules, that interacts with this one under specific circumstances (if that's what you mean by dualism)?

As we can presently see with computers and machine learning, pretty complex behavior is possible through systems that operate via known physical processes.

> Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking.

Define "thinking." Is an ecoli deciding to move towards or away from a chemical signal "thinking?"

> I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order.

How much have you read from people researching consciousness, vs reading half-baked layman ideas about materialism on web forums?

Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism? Because if not, I have a lot of questions about souls that I'd love you to answer. Here are a few.

- when you were a wee child, was your soul also unable to think sophisticated thoughts and was also afraid of monsters under the bed?

- does your soul sleep when you are asleep, or is it just waiting for you to wake up?

- how does a soul manifest its influence on the physical body? Do you posit that it violates physical laws to make the material body do something other than follow the physical laws, or is there some undiscovered force of nature that allows a soul to "tunnel" into the physical world?

- at what point does the soul attach itself to the physical body? That is, does a blastomere have a soul? If so, what happens when a blastomere cleves fully in two, making identical twins -- does another soul pop into existence? Does the original soul split into two as well?

- when a person develops dementia, does the soul suffer from it too? or does the soul get frustrated that it can no longer communicate with its associated body?

- is there one soul that everyone taps into, or does each person have their own soul?

- do souls get one "life", or do they get recycled? if they are recycled, do souls specialize in one type of creature, or can a soul be a worm in one life and a physicist in the next?

> Define "thinking." Is an ecoli deciding to move towards or away from a chemical signal "thinking?"

Define "defining". Is a definition the thing that is being defined?

> How much have you read from people researching consciousness, vs reading half-baked layman ideas about materialism on web forums?

Will I not learn anything from dialog with you because it's on a web forum?

> Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism?

Do you find "materialism" to require less handwaving than dualism?

> Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism? Because if not, I have a lot of questions about souls that I'd love you to answer. Here are a few.

Did I somehow give you the impression that I'm an apologist? I'm here to talk about how conscious intelligence could arise from dumb matter, not about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and other such nonsense.

>Do you find "materialism" to require less handwaving than dualism?

The upside to materialism is that the gap in our knowledge, namely why networks of neurons cause consciousness, is something we can acknowledge we don't know and try to understand. Resorting to an explaination relying on objects we can't observse seems... inelegant.

> Resorting to an explaination relying on objects we can't observse seems... inelegant.

Does your objection hold for dark matter and dark energy too?

Dark Matter and Dark Energy are just catchall terms for "the force that causes more gravitation than we'd expect" and "the force that causes the universe to accelerate in expansion" respectively. Those two phenomena definitely exist, and physicists are obviously not content with concluding our understanding at that, which is why hypothesis about what they are abound.

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