Not according to Zombie Feynman it isn't[1] (someone else can dig up the link). Case in point:
> Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't
It's a meaningless word. It's a word that gives some clean construction around closely-held opinions about how life/consciousness/intelligence/furffle/whatever works. So it's a valuable word within the jargon of the subculture that invented it.
But it's not "science", which isn't about words at all except as shorthand for abstractions that are confirmed by testable results.
"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.
[1] Of course. You can recursively solve this problem by redefining "science" to mean something else. But that remains very solidly in the "not science" category of discourse.
Have you considered the possibility that you're the one who's really committed to an outcome, and are desperately trying to discredit anything that contradicts it?
I have! But the lack of a testable procedure tells me that's not a question worth asking. Look, if "qualia" can tell me something practical about the behavior of AI, I am here for it. Lay it on me, man. Let's see some of that "science" being promised.
It can't, because it's a meaningless word. It's not "discrediting" an idea to point out that (by its own admission) it's unfalsifiable.
"Qualia" is not totally meaningless - it means the inner experience of something, and can bring up the real question say of is my inner experience of the colour green the same as your experience of the colour red? Probably not but hard to tell with current tech. I asked Google if it has qualia and got "No, as an AI, Google Search does not have qualia." So Google search seemed to know what it means.
Hmmm... I think it's still stricter to consider Science a philosophy than the other way around. It's the belief (and an extremely useful and successful one) that the nature of the world can be understood through observation, experiment and deducing mathematical relationships between things. There branches of philosophy that are not strictly scientific, but nothing in Science that is doesn't rely on the fundamental philosophical principle of empiricism.
But we use the scientific method via philosophical inquiry, so I think it comes down to how we decide to strictly define these things. I definitely agree that certain definitions lead to the same logic you've presented.
> Aristotle pioneered scientific method in ancient Greece alongside his empirical biology and his work on logic, rejecting a purely deductive framework in favour of generalisations made from observations of nature.
Aristotle, the famous philosopher and mathematician.
If you cannot understand the very nature of where our modern scientific frameworks came from, how it relates to rationalism, itself a philosophical concept, then you cannot see that philosophy underpins every bit of science we have today. Philosophy gives us the tools to decide when to reasonably trust or distrust observations and intuitions. It is the foundational science that allows the rest of humanity's scientific research to be taken seriously.
>"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.
This is so dumb. Qualia is just the name for a specific thing which we all (appear) to phenomenologically experience. You can deny it exists or deny its utility as a concept, but fundamentally its just an idea that philosophers (and scientists, I have to add) have found useful to pose certain other questions about the human condition, minds, brains, etc.
Your XKCD actually seems to make the opposite point. I can do a non-rigorous experiment with just one subject (me) that suggests Qualia exists. Finding ways to make this rigorous is difficult, of course, but its an observation about the nature of the world that it feels like something to experience things.
My point isn't that qualia is a good concept. I tend to be somewhat deflationary about it myself, but its not an ideology.
Not according to Zombie Feynman it isn't[1] (someone else can dig up the link). Case in point:
> Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't
It's a meaningless word. It's a word that gives some clean construction around closely-held opinions about how life/consciousness/intelligence/furffle/whatever works. So it's a valuable word within the jargon of the subculture that invented it.
But it's not "science", which isn't about words at all except as shorthand for abstractions that are confirmed by testable results.
"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.
[1] Of course. You can recursively solve this problem by redefining "science" to mean something else. But that remains very solidly in the "not science" category of discourse.