You Can't be Both a Qualia Realist & a Moral Anti-Realist
I have an imaginary friend called Inverted Ian. Ian lives in a strange parallel universe in which pleasure causes avoidance behaviour and pain causes attraction behaviour. When Ian eats, drinks, or has sex, he feels terrible pain; but his pain causes him to keep doing these things (not because he has some greater goal, just because in his world pain causes attraction behaviour). When Ian’s body is damaged, e.g. by being stabbed, he feels great pleasure; but this causes him to avoid getting his body damaged. The upshot is that he behaves just like a normal human being in our world.
When I talk about Inverted Ian, I often get the response that an organism like Ian is somehow ruled by evolution. But this makes no sense when you think about it for five minutes. If we lived in Ian’s world, where pleasure causes avoidance and pain causes attraction, we would have evolved like him.
Having said that, I think there is something absurd about Ian (although don’t tell him that, because he’s quite sensitive). But the crucial question is: What is the nature of the absurdity? I want to invite the reader join me in thinking very carefully about this.
There seem to me two possibilities:
A logical absurdity – The idea of pairing together conscious experience and behaviour in the way I’ve just described involves a contradiction. It’s like talk of square circles or married bachelors.
A rational absurdity – The way Ian behaves is rationally absurd, in the sense that he’s doing the polar opposite of what he objective reason to do. He feels pain, that gives him a reason to avoid, but he responds by pursuing the object of his pain. He feels pleasure, that gives him a reason to pursue, but he responds by avoiding the objective of his pleasure.
Why the hell are we talking about this? Because which way you explain the absurdity reveals your philosophical commitments.
If you think Inverted Ian is a logical absurdity, then you’re an analytic functionalist, Analytic functionalism is the controversial viewpoint that feelings and experiences are defined in purely behavioural terms. When we say Sara is “feeling pain,” we’re making a claim about her behaviour or the behaviour of her inner parts.
If you think Inverted Ian is a rational absurdity, then you’re a value objectivist. You believe that pain gives one an objective reason to avoid the thing that hurts, and pleasure gives one an objective reason to pursue the thing that feels good. Of course, these reasons might be counterbalanced by other considerations, e.g. if my pleasure is going to hurt somebody else, or if my pain is going to made me fitter, but by stipulation this is not what’s going on in the case of Inverted Ian.
It follows that if you reject both analytic functionalism and value objectivism, then you can’t explain what’s absurd about Inverted Ian in either of the two ways outlined above. And, whilst there certainly is something absurd about Inverted Ian, I can’t see another way to explain what that absurdity is.
In other words, the following three propositions form an inconsistent triad: they can’t all be true.
Analytic functionalism is false (which is another way of saying qualia realism is true).
Value objectivism is false.
Inverted Ian is absurd.
Assuming Inverted Ian is absurd, one cannot be both a value anti-realist and a qualia realist. You have to choose.
This was the basis of the long debate I had on my channel with my fellow YouTuber Alex O’Connor. I’m trying to push Alex to choose between his correct views of consciousness and his (in my humble opinion) incorrect views in meta-ethics. Of course, there’s a danger here…he may end up with incorrect views on both! Time will tell.
Or is there a third way of understanding what’s absurd about Inverted Ian?
Or maybe there’s nothing absurd about Inverted Ian?
Let me know what you think in the comments.
If you don’t have time to watch the full discussion, here’s a two minute summary.
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I am fully on board with qualia realism and value objectivism, but if I were to look for a way to challenge this argument, perhaps I'd say "a lot turns on the notion of absurdity - but perhaps absurdity can be taken to just mean utter empirical unfamiliarity? If I see a tree with blue leaves, perhaps I would say 'how absurd', because this is utterly unfamiliar to me, but this neither implies logical nor rational absurdity, just 'empirical absurdity' if you can call it that. And because I have never seen someone strive for pain and avoid pleasure, this seems 'empirically absurd' to me".
I think the way to defend that Inverted Ian is absurd from Alex's viewpoint would be to deny that there are objective stance-independent facts about what is absurd or rational. Inverted Ian is absurd in the way that torturing babies is immoral -- stance-dependently.