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- David J. Chalmers (1995). Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia. In Thomas Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience. Ferdinand Schoningh.It is widely accepted that conscious experience has a physical basis. That is, the properties of experience (phenomenal properties, or qualia) systematically depend on physical properties according to some lawful relation. There are two key questions about this relation. The first concerns the strength of the laws: are they logically or metaphysically necessary, so that consciousness is nothing "over and above" the underlying physical process, or are they merely contingent laws like the law of gravity? This question about the strength of the psychophysical link is the basis for debates over physicalism and property dualism. The second question concerns the shape of the laws: precisely how do phenomenal properties depend on physical properties? What sort of physical properties enter into the laws' antecedents, for instance; consequently, what sort of physical systems can give rise to conscious experience? It is this second question that I address in this paper.Reading list | Discussion (1) | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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If zombies were conceivable in the sense relevant to the ‘conceivability argument’ against physicalism, a certain epiphenomenalistic conception of consciousness—the ‘e-qualia story’—would also be conceivable. But (it is argued) the e-qualia story is not conceivable because it involves a contradiction. The non-physical ‘e-qualia’ supposedly involved could not perform cognitive processing, which would therefore have to be performed by physical processes; and these could not put anyone into ‘epistemic contact’ with e-qualia, contrary to the e-qualia story. Interactionism does not enable zombists to escape these conclusions.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Qualia and Physicalism. It is assumed that the following three relations exhaust the possibilities for a physicalist account of qualia: 1. determination, 2. identity, 3. realization. The first relation is immediately rejected because it does not exclude property dualism. The second faces the problem that it is probably impossible to discriminate empirically between the identity thesis and the epiphenomenalist position. The third cannot handle qualia adequately, for qualia are not functional properties and the realization relation is only plausible as a relation between physical realizers and functional properties. Finally, if one attempts to replace multiple realization by multiple identities it is shown that the notion of multiple property identities is unintelligible. The upshot is that if these three relations exhaust the possibilities of a physicalist construal of qualia then physicalism is wrong.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In his classic paper, "Some Remarks about the Senses," H. P. Grice argues that our intuitive distinction among perceptual modalities requires that the modalities be characterized in terms of the introspectible character of experience. I first show that Grice's argument provides support for the claim that perceptual experiences have qualia, namely, mental qualitative properties of experience which are what it's like to be conscious of perceived properties such as color. I then defend intentionalism about experience, which rejects qualia, by showing that we need not appeal to differences in qualia in order to distinguish the senses. Rather, I claim that we can appeal to, among other factors, differences in the physical properties of physical objects which experience represents.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A physicalist view of qualia labelled non-eliminative reductionism is outlined. If it is true, qualia and physicalism can co-exist without difficulty. First, qualia present no particular problem for reductionist physicalism - they are entirely physical, can be studied and explained using the standard scientific approach, and present no problem any harder than any other scientists face. Second, reductionist physicalism presents no particular problem for qualia – they can be encompassed within an entirely physicalist position without any necessity, either to reduce them to non-existence, or to treat them as new fundamental properties. It is suggested that the position also has sufficient explanatory power to successfully deal with the 'why like anything – why does experience exist at all' question and to counter both Chalmers' Conceivability Argument and Jackson's Knowledge Argument.
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| | Other links: cogprints.org | Scholar | More options ... Representational theorists identify experiences’ phenomenal properties with their representational properties. Qualia theorists reject this identity, insisting that experiences’ phenomenal properties can come apart from and completely outrun their representational properties. Qualia theorists account for phenomenal properties in terms of “qualia,” intrinsic mental properties they allege experiences to instantiate. The debate between representational theorists and qualia theorists has focused on whether phenomenal properties really can come apart from and completely outrun representational properties. As a result, qualia theorists have failed (1) to explain how experiences owe their phenomenal properties to their instantiation of qualia and (2) to clarify the nature of subjects’ epistemic access to qualia. I survey qualia theorists’ options for dealing with each issue and find them all wanting.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... David Chalmers' dancing qualia argument is intended to show that phenomenal experiences, or qualia, are organizational invariants. The dancing qualia argument is a reductio ad absurdum, attempting to demonstrate that holding an alternative position, such as the famous inverted spectrum argument, leads one to an implausible position about the relation between consciousness and cognition. In this paper, we argue that Chalmers' dancing qualia argument fails to establish the plausibility of qualia being organizational invariants. Even stronger, we will argue that the gap in the argument cannot be closed.
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| | Other links: csa.com springerlink.com ingentaconnect.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Certain recent philosophical theories offer the prospect that zombies are possible. These theories argue that experiential contents, or qualia, are nonphysical properties. The arguments are based on the conceivability of alternate worlds in which physical laws and properties remain the same, but in which qualia either differ or are absent altogether. This article maintains that qualia are, on the contrary, physical properties in the world. It is shown how, under the burden of the a posteriori identification of qualia with physical properties, a reasoned choice can be made between the two types of theories which ultimately favors materialism and rejects zombies.
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| | Other links: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov linkinghub.elsevier.com ingentaconnect.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of David J. Chalmers, Absent qualia, fading qualia, dancing qualia
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What is the role of memory in the dancing qualia scenario?
It strikes me that i cannot perform direct comparisons between my conscious experiences at different points in time - no more than i can directly compare my experiences to those of others. In claiming that my experience of a red apple has remained the same "redness" over time, i must be comparing a perceptual experience *now* against the experience *now* of a memory of a previous experience. The reductio asks us to imagine there being a difference in experience just due to differences in the material substrate of cognition. It seems plausible to me that when an experience is serialized while running on one substrate and deserialized while on another, the difference should go unnoticed. For example, the red experience of a neural system could be remembered as a blue experience when invoked on a silicon circuit, so that the comparison always succeeds. Put differently, i wonder in what way the following scenario is not analogous to da ... (read more)
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