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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32579 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia.

Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.

I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.

I'm not sure I understand what would it mean exactly for qualia to be physical. Isn't it like...obviously something fundamentally distinct?
Mainstream secular stance of "conscious states trace material configurations" feels more like soft-dualism where the mind part plays the junior role, but it's still there

Well, the problem is that some people have the exact opposite intuition! They can’t see why qualia should pose a problem for physicalism at all. Thus the debate carries on interminably.

Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.

A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.

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