Personally I think it’s silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience… Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.
I’ve been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism… Maybe I am just tripping idk
Not sure qualia is real or tangible thing
What do you mean you’re not sure qualia is real? Are you a meat automaton acting entirely on instinct with no subjective experiences whatsoever? You’ve never felt pain or pleasure or experienced a flavor?
I don’t hold this view, but it sounds like eliminativism or illusionism
it is something that cannot be defined… like … by definition. That seems like a poor explanatory tool, and it also seems like a non-falsifiable heuristic . I don’t think whether it is real or not means we lack free will, and honestly I think conflating the two is a pretty spurious claim. Qualia is a subjective “thing” that sort of implies a dualism, but does not actually imply free will. You are assuming that free will = subjective experience and I never implied that. The brain is incredibly complex and we don’t really have a consistent understanding of consciousness, so qualia may as well be called “ether” or “impetus” … Its just as likely that the mind itself is something like an incredibly complex set of biological state-machines and consciousness necessarily implies the relationship between that organism and the environment it is situated in. But none of that necessitates a superimposed “what its like” phenomenon that is a particular object that is simultaneously inexplicable and necessary for “being”
Try putting your hand on a hot stove and telling yourself the pain isn’t a real or tangible thing
You should read Wittgenstein instead of being aggro and arguing past people. Specifically Beetle in a Box
what if I felt pleasure? would it be comparable to “what its like to feel pain”?
Yes
So you can feel pain, while in the same scenario it gives me pleasure, and you think that subjective experience is an objective “thing” that both of us are sharing? and we can know that? I am not saying that nothing is occurring, but I don’t think “qualia” is a falsifiable or useful way to describe what is occurring
Not exactly. We’re not sharing anything; we both have our own subjective experiences that are inaccessible to each other. The point is that the subjective experiences happen at all. Compare this to just putting a rock or a printer on a stove.
We can’t know the other person has a subjective experiences for certain. But if you think you can’t know about yourself that’s the point of my comment: try putting your hand on a hot stove and convincing yourself you don’t know if you’re in pain or not.
Again, try putting your hand on a stove and convincing yourself that this is no different than putting a rock on the stove.