In the last ~week I've kept thinking about this philosophical point which seems to me to be to super important. Like probably the most important conceptual step since understanding how dual-aspect theory works. Yet I've never seen anyone else make it. In the last three days I've finally written down a first version.
Basically, people like Dennett keep making this move where they say that because qualia doesn't exist, there are certain phenomena you don't need to explain. Dennett even says this explicitly at some point, when he discusses the visual blindspot:
And no figment gets used up in rendering the seeming [of the color in the neon-colorspreading illusion], for the seeming isn't rendered at all, not even as a bit-map.
The thing that seems extremely important to me is that
THIS DOES NOT WORK. The reason it doesn't work is that the seeming is causally relevant (if it didn't seem like x to you, you wouldn't say "it seems like x to me", which is a physical effect) and hence must be explained, whether the qualia itself exists or not.
I think this is one of those things where if Dennett read this, he'd nod a long and say "yeah of course, I knew that", but I'm convinced that he hasn't realized the implications of this. Those being that, if every seeming must be explained -- and it does -- then asserting that qualia doesn't exist doesn't reduce the amount of detail in the apparent qualia *at all*.
So if you seem to see an image, the amount of detail in this image is unchanged whether the image actually exists in experience or not. After all, if the image is real, and there is a part that is there but has no causal effect, then while it theoretically must be explained, in practice this is a completely moot point because we can never verify whether it was explained
because we can't notice it. If we did, it would have causal effect. So in both cases, the sets of things that exist in the real or apparent image are exactly the set of things we can notice about the image. So ultimately illlusionism isn't even a crux! It doesn't matter whether there is qualia or not! (Which is very nice because I don't want to rely on talking people out of it.)
And the reason I think this is so very important is something I think I've said before -- because of how digital processing works, it's possible to conclude just from the existence of a spatial visual field alone that the brain is doing nonventional computing in some form. You don't need anything else! Which if true is just such an amazing fact because it means everyone had enough information to settle this super important question about neuroscience for decades, but only Steven Lehar was smart enough to make the logical step. Which is sort of similar to the claim I've once heard, which is that you could have guessed quantum physics from chemistry if you were smart enough, but it took 50 years or something for someone to make that step. Anyway because of this, it's crucial to argue that you can't get around the spatial properties of the visual field even if you claim that there is no visual field at all.
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Topic: The Necro Wars (Read 352040 times)