APA NEWSLETTER | PHILOSOPHY AND COMPUTERS PAGE 2 FALL 2016 | VOLUME 16 | NUMBER 1 NP: There is nothing that has (or: Nothing could have) all the properties that qualia realists take to be essential to qualia. NE is then thought to follow from NP so obviously that the step is rarely, if ever, explicitly mentioned or justified. Some of Daniel Dennett’s arguments against the reality of qualia can be seen as taking this form. “Quining Qualia” (1988), for example, employs such a strategy, the properties operative in the NP step being intrinsicness, ineffability, privacy, and immediacy. (In what follows, we will be assuming that these properties, as elucidated by Dennett, are indeed what qualia realists take to be constitutive of qualia. Much of what we have to say does not depend on this assumption.) Revisionists, on the other hand, accept many or all of the arguments against there being features of conscious experience that are intrinsic, ineffable, private, and immediate, but depart from the eliminativists by not denying that qualia exist—with the proviso that qualia may not be what many people, (other) qualia realists and eliminativists alike, think they are. That is, revisionists hold NP but deny (or at least remain agnostic about) NE. (For ease of exposition, we will initially assume revisionists are qualia realists, but will return to the agnostic option in section 2.3.3.) In particular, revisionists deny that the NE follows from the NP. (How can that be so? We say more about that in section 2.1.) Another way of expressing the difference between qualia revisionism and qualia eliminativism is in terms of the distinction between illusion and hallucination. Standardly, illusion is “any perceptual situation in which a physical object is actually perceived, but in which that object perceptually appears other than it really is,” 2 while the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines a hallucination to “an experience which seems exactly like a veridical perception of an ordinary object but where there is no such object there to be perceived.” 3 Thus, Blackmore: “To say that consciousness is an illusion is not to say that it doesn’t exist, but that it is not what it seems to be more like a mirage or a visual illusion.” So a reasonable alternative name for revisionism would be “illusionism.” However, despite this widely accepted distinction between illusion and hallucination, some use the term “illusion” to include cases where, they claim, there is no object being perceived. For example, Frankish proposes “illusionism” as a name for the position “which holds that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion and aims to explain why it seems to exist.” 4 According to the standard distinction, “hallucinationism” might be a more accurate (although perhaps less catchy) name for the position Frankish is advocating. Some more examples of qualia revisionists may be helpful. Many (but not all) of those who embrace the “Grand Illusion” view of consciousness 5 are revisionists about consciousness in general, and some may be revisionists about qualia in particular. A particularly clear-cut case of a revisionist about qualia is Derk Pereboom; cf. his “qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis”: “[I]ntrospection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, and it may be that these properties actually lack such features.” 6 Another clear qualia revisionist is Drew The APA has requested that the committee examine its charge or mission, so we will be reflecting on how we might modify our official charge. As the pages of our newsletter reveal, the community we serve has interests in the philosophy of artificial intelligence and computational cognitive science, the philosophy of information, issues in the philosophy of computer assisted pedagogy, and various ethical issues pertaining to the development and uses of computers, the Internet, robotic technology, and much more. There is some concern that the varied content of our newsletter might not be adequately reflected in the committee’s current charge. For this reason, we will be examining how we might update our charge (mission statement), which currently reads as follows: The committee collects and disseminates information on the use of computers in the profession, including their use in instruction, research, writing, and publication, and it makes recommendations for appropriate actions of the board or programs of the association. I encourage everyone who has suggestions about the charge of the committee to send them to me: mguarini@ uwindsor.ca. Whether you think the charge should stay the same or be modified, we would like to hear from you. We also solicit any comments people might have about the name of the committee. Much appreciated if the comments could be submitted no later than December 31, 2016. I look forward to working with my colleagues on the committee—Colin Allen, William Barry, Gary Mar, Fritz J. McDonald, Susan Schneider, Dylan E. Wittkower, and Piotr Boltuc—to serve the community of scholars interested in bringing philosophical reflection to bear on the wide range of issues involving computing and information sciences and technologies. MIND ROBOTICS Functionalism, Revisionism, and Qualia Ron Chrisley UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX Aaron Sloman 1 UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM 1. REVISIONISM ABOUT QUALIA Eliminativists about qualia (e.g., Dennett; Frankish, forthcoming) make this claim: NE: Qualia do not exist. (For those that consider that wording paradoxical, NE can be glossed as “The term ‘qualia’ does not refer to anything.”) Some eliminativist arguments for NE proceed by first arguing for NP: