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Physicalists typically reject free will on grounds of causal closure: if every physical event has a sufficient physical cause, there’s no room for an additional “will” to intervene. The mental either reduces to the physical or is epiphenomenal, and either way libertarian free will doesn’t survive.

But many of the same physicalists accept qualia: the felt, “what it is like” character of experience. And yet qualia face exactly the same problem. If causal closure is true, there’s no room for a non-physical “what it’s like” to exist over and above the physical processes in the brain. Qualia, like free will, would either reduce to something physical or float epiphenomenally with no causal purchase on the world.

So why is illusionism about qualia: the view that phenomenal experience is a kind of representational “mistake” the brain makes about itself, so much rarer than illusionism about free will? The argumentative pressure seems identical in both cases. If you’re willing to say free will is something we’re systematically wrong about despite its claimed experiential obviousness (almost everyone feels like they’re free), why not make the same move for qualia?

There’s also a related puzzle: qualia are typically characterized as non-physical and non-spatial: they don’t seem to have a location. But it’s hard to understand how something with no spatial definition could causally interact with, or even exist alongside, a physical world defined in terms of locations and quantities. Free will faces the same objection and we typically conclude it doesn’t exist as described. Why doesn’t the same reasoning apply to qualia?

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    Who? Your question is about the position of "some physicalists" but you don't name them. Commented yesterday
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    @BrianZ you can see from this survey (survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all) that many more people reject libertarian freedom than rejecting qualia (which can be classified under eliminativism) Commented yesterday
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    See past questions tagged "qualia". Many people explicitly define the term in a way that is incompatible with physicalism, and seem to believe they have proven something by doing so. Physicalists would say that by that definition qualia don't exist, and recommend instead defining them simply as "subjective experience", which does not conflict with the physical model. Past discussion has gone into depth about why. Commented 23 hours ago
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    @Syed What is "non-physical"? There's no contradiction in rejecting something poorly defined and poorly justified, even if that leaves a gap in our knowledge. It's more reasonable to admit that there is a gap in our knowledge than to assert that the gap is filled by one's speculation. But more than that, every piece of evidence points to consciousness reducing to brain activity, and no indication points to it existing anywhere else. Commented 6 hours ago
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    @Syed If you define qualia as something non-physical, then physicalists would reject that (as some do). But many physicalists instead define it merely as conscious experience, which they accept the existence of, and consider to be physical. I personally neither accept nor reject the existence of qualia by default, as I have no internal definition for that (I'd merely address other people's definitions). As noted in comments above, the term "qualia" confuses the issue given starkly different definitions people use, and many non-physicalists try to play gotcha by exploiting that ambiguity. Commented 5 hours ago

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You can more plausibly argue against the existence of libertarian free will because we can't be sure we have it- the case against it is not in conflict with experimental evidence. I find it easy to believe I don't have libertarian free will, since at least one other type of free will seems to be entirely compatible with what I experience. You cannot say the same about the experience of seeing red, say.

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  • But does it not seem to you like you have it instinctually? Does almost all of mankind not operate and act in a way as if free will is real, even though any rational analysis of it seems to point to its incoherence and non existence? I suspect the same is true of phenomenal (and this is a key word) experience Commented 15 hours ago
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    Regarding your first point, definitely not. I believe I have programmed my brain over my life through a mix of sensory inputs and self-reflection. If I am presented with some decision, my neurons make it presumably based on the way they have been wired. That all seems perfectly compatible with what I experience as autonomous choice. Commented 14 hours ago
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    So I can accept I don't have libertarian free will, and I can see that there is a plausible physical explanation for the lesser sort of personal autonomy that falls short of libertarian free while still accounting for human behaviour. Commented 14 hours ago
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    Guys is there a Phil SE chat room that covers these topics? If so, might it make sense to pool some brain power to try to clarify some of this? Commented 7 hours ago
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    Once we come out of @ProfessorSushing's Room, after learning all there is to learn about this, will we be able to see true colors? :| Commented 5 hours ago
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I (a physicalist) agree with the OP's starting point that qualia and free will are similar in the relevant way - they are both stemming from experiences, but both are in a sense "wrong" in the context of a physicalist universe.

The distinction comes from a difference in character between the two: qualia are defined solely in terms of experience, but "free will" is usually understood as a stronger statement than that. That is, we're generally understood to not "have free will" purely because we have the experience of the possibility that we might have chosen differently, we need to "actually be able" to have chosen differently in some more objective sense. The OP mentions that, "Qualia, like free will, would either reduce to something physical..." but free will is not a process within the brain in this way, it is a statement about the physical causality of the brain as an object. It does not disappear as a feature of the map alone in the way that qualia is expected to be only a label on a map describing a territory that contains only physical objects.

Conversely, qualia are solely experiences. In some sense, for them to be illusionary is an oxymoron, because any sort of "illusion" is still an experience - in the same way that "a video game lightbulb consumes real electricity," any sort of simulation or emulation of qualia counts as qualia in itself. In this way, it is difficult to imagine how it is possible to produce from scratch the thought process of a being that is experiencing things without there being an actual experience involved.

The actuality of free will - as opposed to the experience - is rejected because the stronger statement is probably not true because it would require causal closure to somehow fail. Conversely, experiences are defined in a self-contained "functional" sense that does not raise any contradictions against the understanding of physics if we assume they are embodied by neural processes.

qualia are typically characterized as non-physical and non-spatial: they don’t seem to have a location.

If the physicalist assertion is true that experiences are encoded in the processes within the brain, then they acquire causal power from that embodiment - experiences "cause" things (i.e. outward behaviour of the person, using words to talk about experiences, etc) because the neural processes making them up cause things. While we'd expect these processes to be distributed across space (leading to pragmatic neurological questions of how different information is shared, etc) this fits in neatly with the rest of physics where any "individual" part of the neurology interacts with its neighbours.

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  • qualia is not the same as experiences if you define them in a “functional” sense as stated in your answer. Qualia is the phenomenal, ineffable, non physical “quality” of experience. Experiences can exist in functional ways without involving any notion of qualia. Free will is claimed to be phenomenally felt by many yet it doesn’t exist. Even astute meditators claim to not even phenomenally experience it. In other words, this claim to a phenomenal experience of free will must be false. The same I think applies to all phenomenal experiences. Commented 8 hours ago
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    @Syed I think there's a critical difference between an "experience of free will," as in an experience that we use as a basis to suspect we have free will, and an experience of "free will," as an in experience caused by free will. Even if the latter doesn't exist because FW doesn't exist (and so can't cause anything) that doesn't mean that the former don't exist or are somehow not experiences and/or qualia. By experience in the above post, I mean phenomenal "what its like," not just unaware information processing. Commented 8 hours ago
  • sure, but then your explanation seems inconsistent. You say “experiences are defined in a self-contained "functional" sense that does not raise any contradictions against the understanding of physics if we assume they are embodied by neural processes.” except that if we’re talking about phenomenal experience, there is no sense in which something that seems to exist without a location (I.e. the “what it is like” nature of consciousness) ends up still being embedded to a physical location. In a purely functionalist sphere, experience cannot have phenomenality. Commented 8 hours ago
  • I wonder if solutions to these kinds of questions can be clarified by the notions of belief. The “illusion” in illusionism may be simply the idea that one confuses the functional, cognitive disposition to believe in phenomenality with an actual, phenomenal experience. Proponents that argue this is incoherent may be presuming that belief must be phenomenal. But why should it? If believing P is just being disposed to act as if P, it’s a standing fact about how a system would behave. “The glass is fragile” doesn’t require the glass to feel anything. Commented 7 hours ago

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