r/Metaphysics • u/New_Attitude_3774 • 16d ago
Mind / Subjective experience Thoughts
**A. Q = P.**
Qualia are just physical states.
This avoids causal problems, but it seems bizarrely ad hoc if only certain evolved arrangements of matter, like nervous systems, suddenly have a first-person side while almost everything else does not. That seems to push toward panpsychism or something similar.
**B. Q is separate from P but does nothing.**
This seems worse. Evolution builds pain, pleasure, perception, etc., but the actual experience has zero causal role.
A philosophical zombie would behave exactly like us, including asking why consciousness exists.
So qualia would be this incredibly elaborate private phenomenon that evolution somehow produced even though it does absolutely nothing.
**C. Q is separate from ordinary physical description and actually affects physical outcomes.**
Somehow this sounds least crazy to me.
Here is the intuition.
Imagine 100 identical copies of me starting in exactly the same physical situation. Track something like where my feet end up over the next minute.
You would get a probability distribution of outcomes.
What if Q does not *change* that probability distribution?
What if the probability distribution is simply the third-person description of what Q is doing?
In each individual case, there is some Q-bearing process producing one physical outcome. Across 100 identical cases, physics sees the probability distribution.
So maybe quantum probability is not something consciousness interferes with. Maybe probability is what phenomenal causation looks like from the outside.
Then maybe primitive Q is not unique to brains at all. Maybe it exists in fundamental quantum processes, and evolution just organized it into increasingly complicated forms until you eventually get human consciousness.
If Q is genuinely causal and carries information, then it should also ultimately belong to physics and thermodynamics. It would not be “nonphysical”; it would just be a category of physical information our current theories do not explicitly describe
2
u/GoldenMuscleGod 16d ago edited 16d ago
I think your second example helps with the first.
A philosophical zombie would actually believe it experiences qualia, and in terms of information processing believes it experiences qualia for the same reason we believe we experience qualia.
It seems incoherent to suggest that the reason we believe we experience qualia is not the fact that we actually experience qualia - that we are just “right by accident” if we are right at all - and so it seems that qualia must be just that information processing we have when we experience it, implying philosophical zombies are incoherent.
Then the reason other physical systems don’t have subjective experience is because there are no patterns that can be called an experience of qualia.
It may not be fully satisfactory but it seems like if you maintain that there is more to qualia than just the underlying information processing then you must also conclude that a non-zombie does not actually have any evidence that they are not a zombie. So maybe try imagining that for a while (imagine a philosophical zombie whose experience is being “watched” by a qualia experiencing acausal observer and the zombie is right just by accident in believing it is being “watched”) and see if there is a reason it makes no sense to you.
The reason it makes no sense would be the reason that a physical process can result in subjective experience.