[Serious Phil] Rejecting the Hypothesis of Phenomenal Information

[walto]

I think maybe I should have explained why I think the move from ineffable to non-physical is question-begging, because a physicalist might say "To whatever extent some event is physical it can't be ineffable--the language of physics is available to everybody and descriptions in the language of physics don't require reference to anything that can't (in principle) be grasped by everyone."

The point is that response is nothing but a restatement of one of the knowledge argument premises in slightly different form.  You just need to add something like, "Upon leaving her room, Mary grasps some event that cannot be grasped by everyone" to conclude that what Mary has new access to is a non-physical event.  

W

--- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "walto" <Philscimind at ...> wrote:
>
> I appreciate your attempts to flesh out what physical and non-physical information might be, T.H., but, in the end you seem to be saying if it's a beetle in my box, it's qualial, but if there's something conveyable there, it's physical.  In other words, if we're talking about something which is taken to be ineffable, you infer from that that this something is a quale and that it's therefore non-physical. I agree with you that part of the meaning of "quale" is ineffable character of experience. (I used to try to get Polanik to understand that point, but I've given up.)  But to go from any such ineffability to non-physicality seems to me question-begging.  
> 
> Furthermore, the stuff you wrote below about "The red light looks to me as it looks to you" obviously would require information I don't have even if my experiences WERE entirely effable.  Or, at least, my access to evidence for one choice or the other would be fundamentally different.  So I don't think it's a good example of what you're trying to get at.  Red v Looking *red* is the usual suspect for that.  See Sellars.
> 
> W
> 
> 
>  
> --- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "truthhunter55" <Philscimind@> wrote:
> >
> > > I think we need to distinguish between two claims of phenomenal
> > > information:
> > > 1) Qualia carry information
> > > 2) Phenomenal informaton is a special kind of information, even if
> > > you can get equivalent information in other ways.
> > 
> > Yes. I think that this is correct. The issue of whether qualia carry information can be demonstrated. They do. Its obvious. The question on whether qualia carry information is some kind of red herring though. There is some another issue.
> > 
> > Specialness? Ok here's a blind stab. If you allow me to form the word Qualial from Quale then qualial information is information that cannot be placed in a message.
> > 
> > If I say select from this set { "The light is red", "The light is not red" } and then flash a light you will be able to select the correct message. But if I say select from this set { "The red light looks to me as it looks to you", "The red light does not look to me as it looks to you" } then you will not be able to select the correct message. The latter would be qualial information and the former not.
> > 
> > Now how would I define a message that contains how the red looks to me. I cannot form even the possible messages. Perhaps this is the un-sayable. But it is also un-showable. Therefore we would say that how the red looks to me does not contain information for there is no way to define the set of messages from which to select. 
> > 
> > It seems to be different from the previous example because the candidate answers can be created for the whether it looks the same to us but the candidate answers cannot be created to communicate how it looks to me.  
> > 
> > Its wrong to say it does not look some way. In fact we know it does because we can use the difference to pass information of any kind. I can use red and blue qualia instead of one and zero. If there was not some difference you could not use it that way. We know it has content.
> > 
> > It would also mean that the term "red" when used in a message would have nothing to do with how it looks. We might even say that all physical information is non-qualial and that Mary would learn no non-qualial information when she leaves the room. That would mean by definition that Mary could not communicate what she learned via a message with information.
> > 
> > This might be a basis for the specialness. Eventually edges will have to be dealt with. They are the key. I have learned something here. Difference. It is more important than I thought. Edges are important because they are creatures that depend only on difference. And there are different differences. The difference between red and blue can form an edge but the difference between how you see red and how I do cannot. It may be that edges are the key geometric construct needed to show that objective material claims are just real geometric patterns in qualia. If one could the one could separate what could be known or called "physical" from what we also know. The way red looks may emerge as "non-physical" from such an analysis because it cannot produce alone an edge. I don't know.
> > 
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