> I would argue that qualia are in fact the only thing we can be certain does exist. I won't though, because now that you've brought us back into thought-terminating cliche territory, there's little point.

As I said, there's nothing thought-terminating about eliminative materialism, and I provided a link demonstrating active work in neuroscience to account for consciousness based on that premise. If it were thought-terminating, why are people developing more thoughts based on it?

The only thoughts that are terminated are the attribution of mystical and non-scientific properties to consciousness, which is exactly what you'd expect from actual science.

> I assume this means you will give equal weight to his point of view.

I have but ultimately didn't find his position persuasive. What I wouldn't do is dismiss his entire position as a thought-terminating cliche though, or assume a deep thinker like Dennett didn't consider an objection as trivial as all of our knowledge being built from qualitative experience. You started this thread by stating that you've never understood the argument behind eliminative materialism, and with the way you've described it so far, I suggest it's because you haven't given it a serious effort.

I read your link. To borrow your phrase, I didn't find it persuasive. The paper promises in several places to address the issue of qualia, but never quite gets around to it. Instead it plays the standard linguistic trick that I hear so often: The things we perceive are illusory (though the paper shies away from using that specific word), therefore qualia are an illusion. Once again, this conflates the content of qualia with the existence of qualia.

I find it bizarre that so much energy is devoted to arguing that the content of consciousness is inaccurate, when I've never met a single person who thinks otherwise. Even children understand that their minds can conjure up things that don't exist, and can easily be made to understand that even their day-to-day perceptions are inaccurate. But the vigor with which this argument is pushed makes sense when you realize that the actual goal is to use the ambiguity of the claim "qualia aren't real" (which may refer to either content or existence) to appear to have proven that qualia do not exist while only having to do the work of proving that they are not accurate.

Frankly, I find these conversations immensely frustrating for this exact reason. I go back and forth with someone on the only real issue, which is the existence of qualia. They talk in circles and use this semantic sleight of hand to claim that qualia don't even exist and therefore require no explanation, even as they experience them at that exact moment. When I insist on the issue, they claim that I need to try harder to understand their position, even as they actively avoid honestly engaging with my own. Occasionally I am gullible enough to think "you know, maybe there really is something I just don't get" and I cave in and read their proposed literature, only to be met with the same linguistic trickery.

This is why I use the phrase "thought-terminating cliche". This entire line of argument doesn't even attempt to answer the real question. It makes a big show out of beating a different but similar-sounding question to death, then quickly dodges around the real one while you're dazzled and hopes you don't notice. And this "explanation" is always bookended with a smug "consciousness is just an illusion (you non-materialist simpleton)".

I expect no less going forward, so this conversation has outlived its productivity. Feel free to have the last word if you like.

> They talk in circles and use this semantic sleight of hand to claim that qualia don't even exist and therefore require no explanation, even as they experience them at that exact moment.

Let's flip the script then: demonstrate that qualia are real if you think it's so obvious. Every thought experiment that purports to show something meaningful has been fatally flawed and ends up proving nothing. Do you not see how the position that qualia really exist is the one on shaky empirical ground and playing semantic games trying to claim that something non-demonstrable exists? It's Russell's teapot.

I literally have no reason to accept your claim that qualia are self-evident, and further, considering the remarkable success of materialist science and that the only "evidence" that qualia exist is a subjective perception from an apparatus that is known to have fatal perceptual flaws, how can you expect anyone who's given this serious thought to take you seriously?

I agree the link I gave is not the full story, I said it was the start. It establishes the foundation tackling subjective awareness first, and will be building to qualia in subsequent work. It will take a few decades to root out this mystical nonsense around consciousness, but it will happen just like elan vital before it.

Edit: to be clear, I don't think any eliminativist will seriously claim that qualia don't require any explanation. We still need to understand how the illusion works and so why we come to believe we have qualia, we just don't need to explain what qualia are because that's already done by classifying them as an illusion. It's like you're insisting that a psychologist explain what demonic possession is when we now know it's mental illness. We don't need to explain demonic possession, we need to explain mental illness. Similarly, we don't need to explain what qualia are, because they don't exist, but we do need to explain the mechanics of the brain that lead to perceptual illusions of various kinds, like the perception of subjective experience.

But, and this is the key, this will happen in the normal course of explaining how the brain works. Nothing special or extra needs to be done. The hard problem is reduced to the easy problem. The paper I linked is a starting point on that path.

You seem to be arguing intensely that qualia are not physical truth. No one is claiming that it is. You're assuming materialism then saying "of course qualia is nothing more than material". Well sure, I agree that logically follows.

I mean, forget the term "real" here for a second. Illusion or whatever you want to think of it, qualia in one form or another, exists within the mind. I am alive, I can see, hear, smell, and feel things. These things are as real to me as is seeing two objects hit eachother and deflect, or whatever other test of material reality you purpose. How do I, without already first believing in eliminativism, reject one but not the other? Or rather, on the basis that I sometimes feel pain but do not always feel pain, I assert definitely, that the subjective experience of pain exists. I am not making any claim as to what "pain" is, merely that subjective experiences (which we call qualia) exist within the mind.

How does this illusion come to be achieved when there is nothing remotely similar in any attribute of physical systems? How is it possible that one can explain all the physical properties of a system, but yet not explain the experience of "pain" or "seeing red"? That we can build a robot that physically registers, and reacts to pain as we do, but have no way of knowing whether that robot experienced some subjective experience of "pain" similar to how we do.

That is in essence why its called the hard problem of consciousness. If you have any interesting thoughts to share as to how this is possible, Im all ears, but so far all you've appeared to have said (and I apologize if Im missing something) is "everything has been explained materially, and I believe in material science and thus it is certainly material, end of discussion". I don't find this interesting at all.

Hell lets agree qualia is just physical. But how is it physically possible?

This isnt the eliminativism take though (or at least that of Dennett) its "there is no problem to solve at all because we reject subjective experiences exist at all". The only way I can imagine this of even being true is that I didn't actually feel pain at all, I just made up a thought that says that I did. But this is simply not my experience and simply saying "its in fact what happened" is not exactly convincing. By that same token I dont see why I ought to believe in material reality at all. Did I experience seeing the table in front of me? No I just believed I had. If you believe this fine Im not going to argue.

>how can you expect anyone who's given this serious thought to take you seriously?

Consciousness is an illusion isn't some agreed upon philosophical view, so I don't know why you're speaking as if this is a solved problem and that someones an idiot for considering otherwise.

Of all the surveyed philosophical positions, eliminativism has the highest rejection https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation...

Even within physicalists, about 50% of those surveyed accept there is a hard problem of consciousness.

> You seem to be arguing intensely that qualia are not physical truth. No one is claiming that it is.

I'm not sure what you mean by "no one", but the central claim behind asserting the existence of qualia is the rejection of physicalism. Maybe you're not making that claim, but p-zombies and the Knowledge Argument were intended to but failed to show that qualia exist and physicalism is false.

> How do I, without already first believing in eliminativism, reject one but not the other?

I find this kind of question confusing because it's just so obvious. You've done this millions of times throughout your life, both consciously and unconsciously. This is knowledge synthesis at the level of perception. You're constantly taking your perceptions and comparing them to your internalized worldview, seeing if they fit, and if not, checking if your perception was faulty or your understanding of the world is faulty.

You're even trying to do it now, but you're prioritizing your personal perceptions which are known to be faulty rather than the far more robust, systematic scientific knowledge we've built.

Why is it so easy for you to perceive that water appears to magically break and reconstitute a pencil (https://etc.usf.edu/clippix/picture/refraction-of-pencil-in-...), and discount that perception as a fact, but you can't do so for qualia? Because you've already done the work to internalize a model of the world that can explain what you perceive without the magic, via optics and refraction.

I agree that a full accounting of this sort for our belief in qualia would be nice, but it's not strictly necessary to conclude that we should not prioritize our flawed perceptions over robust systematic knowledge, and further that, we have no evidence or argument that qualia actually exist besides these flawed perceptions. If you agree with these two claims, then I argue that you should take an eliminativist position until such evidence arises, ala Russell's teapot.

My argument is not just "durr, obviously materialism", it's the simple epistemic argument that you probably apply to literally everything else, but you for some reason can't bring yourself to apply to these specific perceptions. The illusion is just too compelling and "obvious", just like demonic possession was obvious to people before modern psychology.

> How does this illusion come to be achieved when there is nothing remotely similar in any attribute of physical systems? How is it possible that one can explain all the physical properties of a system, but yet not explain the experience of "pain" or "seeing red"?

No such thing has been proved, only asserted. This is why eliminativism can dismiss the hard problem: there is no proof that there is a problem to solve, therefore the premise is rejected.

> Hell lets agree qualia is just physical. But how is it physically possible?

I think the paper I linked already hinted at it: the process of integrating signals from our senses also routes through an internal representation which looks up associated context but throws away information about the original perception, thus making it seemingly disconnected from anything. This establishes a separation between our direct perception of "outside" and the labels and other context, like redness, and so we attribute them to "inside".

Depending on how signals are integrated or switched or whatever into our "conscious awareness", this yields a persistent inference of ephemeral internal properties separate from external perceived properties at the conscious level, similar to how a single CPU multitasking gives the impression of parallelism, but which is simply the product of it's fast switching speed compared to our conscious perceptual speed.

If you've ever done cannabis you might have experienced consistent deja vu, caused by subtle timing changes in the signals from our memory vs. direct perceptions. Direct perception appears to be processed into our memory before the direct perception appears in our conscious awareness, so then it seems to us as if we remembered it.

I agree this isn't a fully precise accounting, but as I said, it's a solid working theory that doesn't require any magic and could plausibly explain the weird properties people attribute to qualia. It doesn't mean we stop talking about "experiencing pain", it just means that what "experiencing pain" means changes to something non-magical.

> This isnt the eliminativism take though (or at least that of Dennett) its "there is no problem to solve at all because we reject subjective experiences exist at all".

The hard problem doesn't exist in this framework, so yes, there is no hard problem to solve, there is only the "easy" problem of explaining how the mechanics of the brain work, and the behaviours associated with the illusion will become clear.

This was exactly the same situation with vitalism: there was a hard problem of explaining how life could arise from inert matter that wasn't alive, and those who dismissed the problem and continued to elaborate the mechanics of the cell shrunk the god of the gaps until nothing remained. That's what I predict will happen here, again.

> Even within physicalists, about 50% of those surveyed accept there is a hard problem of consciousness.

I agree, there's still a lot of unfortunate mysticism around this topic. Some philosophers also took vitalism seriously.

My point was that there is no solid epistemic argument for accepting that qualia are real, which is why I asked you to prove they're real. You said you didn't like arguments from authority but then you reverted to one here, which I will take as an acknowledgement that there is no known proof.

Until some solid evidence or proof, I operate on the minimal assumptions needed to explain observations. This requires that I acknowledge the deeply flawed nature of our perceptions, and so I refuse to trust them, particularly since taking them at face value would mean they are directly perceiving some aspect of reality that cannot otherwise be detected or measured.

> You said you didn't like arguments from authority but then you reverted to one here

You're talking to someone else now. Read the usernames.

And they were quite obviously refuting yours by pointing out that the authority you're appealing to doesn't even exist. Another example of your twisting of words that caused me to stop participating in this conversation days ago.