Kai
New
I arrive at it by asking someone who is conscious to test whether I am conscious while on the operating table. It is clear that time passes while I am not conscious. It would require some quite baroque explanation to cover how I could have been conscious the entire time. Perhaps we should treat each individual separately, but that smacks of solipsism.
I don't think it's baroque Paul. The fact remains that you (or in this case someone else) processes "symptoms" of a third-party-ontology
character, which they (questionably, in my view) take to be valid for the reporting of something they cannot actually discern in such an ontology (namely, what it is for YOU to be). I would say that they are really just examining phenomena in their own field of experience, derived from their own fact of being, and erroneously applying it to your own fact of being, which they are not (indeed, are never, I suspect) in a position to actually "observe"...because there is no observing it other than being it. Hope I am somewhat clear. I *do* agree that materialism will instinctively want to reply with a "But...but..." (belonging as it does outside of their normal mode of thinking) yet I'm not sure that their "buts" are as secure, philosophically, as they might like to believe.
I know what you mean, but I don't think it's true of qualia. I think you can remove aspects of a quale and still have a quale. Now, there can certainly be "the simplest qualia" from which nothing can be removed without making them non-qualia, but that means that some of the things we call qualia are reducible.
I'd really need to respond to that on a case by case basis, for what you are calling a "quale." I have used the examples of green and pain, which I think I will hold to. I don't think the likes of a "chair" can be considered in the same light, because of its linguistic-ascriptive character, and other problems that erode its parallelism to my stated examples, imo.
Also, as I've said, I think you are using a definition of irreducible that is not standard. But, as I've also said, it's a quagmire.
It doesn't seem quagmire to me. There may well be different definitions folks use for irreducible...which is why I am inclined to hold to the definitions I have used.