GENIUS FORUMS

It sounds like Qualia are very closely related to what I call "henids".

Not henids, no.
I've always thought of Qualia as another name for A=A. Everything observed and felt can be named but not fully described, so what you see/feel is what is.

vicdan wrote:Qualia are not henids as you define them.

I disagree. So long as they remain unclarified they are in the category of "henids".

That's why you find that the people who are particularly attracted to the idea of qualia are more unconscious and vague than normal. Their "consciousness" is mostly composed of henids.

In that paper, Dennett provides some very convincing arguments in favor of an idea that our introspective knowledge is not qualitatively better than interpersonal knowledge

If he did, then he did it in such a way that it's impossible to find them.

If you're just saying that if I experience that something is red, while everyone else experiences that it is blue, then I might be mistaken, then that's really nothing. I'm not interested in guesswork.

In any case, there is no such thing as "interpersonal knowledge". Knowledge is an individual thing, as previously explained.

-- and your whole schtick seems to hinge on the assumption that introspection does indeed offer us qualitatively better knowledge than is interpersonally obtainable.

One doen't "interpersonally" arrive at the idea that A=A, or that all things are causally connected. Thinking is always personal.

You truly do not see how much anyone could benefit by understanding the many lives' worth of thought of the people who came before us.

If that were true, then we wouldn't bother studying people like Weininger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the Buddha, Hakuin, etc. And I wouldn't have bothered getting a science degree.

Now go back to QQ, re-read it, and understand what Dennett is saying.

That article reads like a woman's diary. It goes on for day after day, but nothing significant really happens.

If there is a particular argument in it that you think is important, then you should be able to put it in your own words in a sentence or two at the most.

Your refering people to these long, vague, boring and jargon-filled articles is no different to a Christian saying, "Just read the Bible from cover to cover. It has some irrefutable arguments in it . . . somewhere in there."

Jamesh wrote:

It sounds like Qualia are very closely related to what I call "henids".

Not henids, no.
I've always thought of Qualia as another name for A=A. Everything observed and felt can be named but not fully described, so what you see/feel is what is.

So long as they are clarified they would not be henids. But so long as they are vague "feelings", and tending to merge or confuse with other feelings, then they remain within the henid category.

This clarification is a sort of "describing" in the sense of "scribing" clear boundaries around them - even though there may be much about them that we do not know.

For example, I have clearly "scribed" what it is that I call "the Totality", even though it is a black box, the inner workings of which I cannot describe.