Comment by stevenhuang
12 hours ago
No disagreements with what you said in your first paragraph.
> I'm sure qualia is created not by consciousness
Whether or not qualia is created by consciousness, I don't see how we necessarily can tell one way or the other. We don't exactly have great introspective tools to do such self analysis, not to mention what we think we feel is often illusory/not reflective of reality.
Yeah, I think you are right. "The content of consciousness" and "consciousness" are different things, and I mixed them up, when writing that sentence. I can watch the content, but not other parts that may be producing it.
Moreover, thinking about it, I come to a conclusion, that if I cannot reflect on qualia creation, then it is a (weak) evidence for qualia created by consciousness. I suppose the consciousness is harder to reflect on than other things, hard to map it into states of the content of consciousness. Like, I can reflect on my vision and see some hints on how I get these wonderful pictures, despite it being definitely not consciousness, I can reflect on how I produce or decode language. And to my mind it is because consciousness was devised to reflect on these things, so I could report on my observations to others. But to reflect on itself is a wholly different matter.
We can't even meaningfully prove that human beings have qualia
We can't even meaningfully define the concept.
We can’t meaningfully deny humans have qualia, there would be too much baby and not enough bathwater.