Can a Catholic not believe in qualia

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Qualia are subjective experiences. My position is that Catholicism is impossible without personal experience.
Many thinkers who do not believe in qualia do indeed believe in subjective experience. These terms are not interchangeable. Your point regarding qualia, subjective experience, and Catholicism is a semantic construct of the type Wittgenstein addressed. I know what you are shooting for, I think. But the nature of human language words and concepts as applied to something as metaphysical as faith does tend toward reduction. Just my :twocents:
 
This is a bit of an old topic, but I want to throw in my two cents.

The answer is: Of course. I think it’s actually hard to extricate, from the predominant theorists (Johnson, Chalmers) at least, a doctrine of qualia that is very palatable to Catholics at all. The requirement that qualia are non-causal seems to me to be basically self-undermining; for if we believe that we have qualia, then that believe could not be caused by our qualia. We might be in circumstances that are just “as good” epistemologically but not, in fact, have any qualia. So how could I possibly believe that I have qualia?

That said, that’s pretty strict property dualism/epiphenominalism. One could have a different position on qualia that’s not so odd. One could reject the “causal closure” of the physical, or one could interpret the term “cause” more broadly than do materialists (and property dualists are, basically, materialists). One also can “push” the qualia out from subjective experience into the real world. That is what Nagel and Feser propose. That, I think, is consistent with Catholicism. Whether that’s a position on qualia or something else, I will leave for someone else to determine.

But Catholic philosophical psychology is mainly Thomistic and Aristotelian. It therefore leaves open the problem of qualia, which is a characteristically modern problem.
 
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