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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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That she thing though. You are one good pill away from scrambling all your qualia. They can induce the feeling of God with an electromagnet. We can observe people who clearly lack that quality you are tlaking about. I am saying I don't see the justifications for treating it as a separate category of sense
Again, you're completely missing my point. It's not about how coherent the qualia feel or how well they map onto the physical world, it's the fact that they feel like something at all and that they're the only thing we can directly know no matter our current mental state. I'm talking about all and any qualia.
All people that aren't in a unconscious state or dead experience qualia in some form. It doesn't matter how coherent these qualia are or how healthy their mental state is, they still directly experience them and live their lives through them. It doesn't matter if they can get scrambled, it's still the only thing a person has in any case.
The justification is that it's the one and only category we know directly and it's the only category through which we know all others. I think that's justification enough. Also senses as we experience them are qualia too, I'm talking about those too.
You could also say what I'm missing in physicalism is a good answer to the "philosophical zombie" problem. Right now the party line is basically "well it just do be like that" which is entirely unsatisfactory to me.
I guess it is a fundamental misunderstanding between us. My understanding was that qualia had some atomic quality. That they are the parts of emotion or experience that are irreducible or inviolable.
However like atoms they have been proven to reduce able to even more fundamental and less meaningful parts. So I don't at all understand the way you mean it.
I don't know how to explain this differently but I'll try one more time.
The difference between knowing our consciousness (which includes all our senses, subjective sense of self, thoughts, feelings etc...) and knowing anything outside of it (other people, the physical world etc.) is we know the former directly and innately and we don't need any justification for explaining its existence because it just so inexplicably appears to exist to us.
All the knowledge about the other stuff is filtered through our consciousness that we experience directly and innately so that means the existence of the other stuff also hinges on the base truth of our own consciousness existing.
For this reason alone I believe it is justifiable to treat knowledge of consciousness differently than knowledge of things outside of consciousness. This is also why I'm skeptical of reductionist physicalism because despite the overwhelming importance of consciousness they relegate it as just another material thing to be studied in the same manner as rocks and metals while also kinda ignoring the fact that all data they gather and models they produce are also merely contents of a particular scientists subjective mind and also on top of that while being nowhere near a coherent mathematical account of how consciousness arises.
Basically I think scientists jumped the gun on deciding that they've figured out the metaphysics of the universe, I think there are too many gaps in our knowledge to claim such a thing with such certainty. And yes physicalism is a metaphysic like any other, if you hear a scientists say "I'm not doing metaphysics" when talking about consciousness it's the same as a lib saying "I'm not ideological" while talking about how they want to let poor people die.