> Rob responds:
> Whether it's "true by definition" or whatever else is not relevant to my
> point.
As you say. In that case, I fully concede that qualia
fuckingexistsandso'syourmother. Now. Does science have anything to tell
us about this predicate? Now that we've all come into agreement that all
qualia have this property, have we agreed to anything other than a name to
call it?
Sorry, I'm being a little glib here. The problem is this. If the
predicate holds by definition, then I can't contest it, but it's also very
restricted in terms of its effect. Definitions can't change facts, they
just change the words we use to refer to the world. I could say that all
unicorns beautifulexist and that God exfaithists, and so long as I
restricted my claims to definitions, then I can't make a false claim: all
unicorns DO beautifulexist, since "beautifulexist" just means whatever
property it is that fits of unicorns.
Definitions are a call for translational charity (in the Quinean sense);
by making a definition, I'm necessarily right about whatever it is I'm
talking about, because I'm changing the meaning of my words to be whatever
it is they're true about.
So if qualia existmotherfucker by definition, then I can agree to it
without weakening my claim in the slightest that qualia don't exist.
More to the point, if this is your move to attempt to demonstrate how
qualia are debatable after all, I take it to have failed.
> I'm merely pointing out that someone somewhere observed what is known
> as qualia, and labelled it such. If IT doesn't compute according to the
> current paradigm, that's just tough, the paradigm will have to shift. The
> originally noted effect will never go away, regardless of any attempts to
> get the fly out of the ointment.
What if the effect is just "people saying they have qualia?" How does
this argument differ from the "Well, I Appear to have qualia..." argument,
which is totally undebatable? (Not that it's uncontroversial, or even
right, just undebatable.)
> I do realise that effects such as consciousness are extraordinary from
> the perspective of empirical science, but this method is not the only
> one available - sometimes one just has to accept that it's just a tool
> - the true discoveries, that is, the ideas that guide the
> implementation of the empirical method, come from good old fashioned
> philosophising.
Yeah! Go team! Now, where do we begin?
Hmmm...
What were we looking for, again?
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:17 MDT