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I also practiced meditation (Vipassana) for several years, and, like you, realised that positing the non-existence of consciousness is a dead-end.

Buddhism seemed to go deeper than many other philosophical frameworkss for this reason. However, I looked into many philosophical systems, and I was extremely surprised to discover that the thinker with the most consistent views on reality and consciousness (both self-consistent and consistent with my own experiences) was drumroll Ayn Rand.

Though she's known for her views on egoism and capitalism, she wrote a ton about consciousness, perception and concept-formation. If you look at my comment history you'll see I talk about her a lot on HN, and that's because I think computer scientists will gain immense value from studying her works. Introdution to Objectivist Epistemology and The Romantic Manifesto contain her deepest writings on consciousness and cognition and are the books I'd recommend. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html is a good taster.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/introduction-to-obj...

http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/the-romantic-manife...

I've met a couple of other Objectivists who have practiced meditation - not many but they exist. I was very surprised to discover the connection between the two areas. Hopefully in a thread like this on a site like this, curious minds will read this comment and be persuaded to investigate further. It's a fascinating journey!

What EXACTLY did you discover during meditation? What steps did you take and what was the resulting experience? Can you be specific?

Same w Ayn Rand. What ideas did you read, can you summarize?

Reading your other comment:

"I am finding that everything we say about consciousness is just an artifact of our language. If we are careful to always include the subject of the sentence as well as the unspoken assumptions then I have not come across any questions that don't have a straightforward answer. Same with morality."

It sounds like you're influenced by Wittgenstein, or at least his ideas. If you assume all these issues are artefacts of language then there's no way I can give you an adequate summary in any amount of writing, and especially not one comment. Human minds can only communicate by exchanging strings of words, after all.

To give you a straight answer, though: in vipasanna meditation you focus on one thing (typically the breath, though I often used ambient sounds) and attempt to break down your experience of that thing into constituent sensations. One thing you learn from this is how frequently your attention wanders, and by really training yourself to focus you learn how your attention is directed from moment to moment. The main thing you are trying to gain, though, is a first-hand experience of the Buddhist view of reality: that solid objects do not exist, and that existence consists only of flickering sensations, with no permanence or independent existence.

I really can't summarise Ayn Rand, since her writing is already extremely well summarised and essentialised. Click around that website if you want to learn her views on any particular topic. The relevant ideas here, though, are her views on concepts. There's been a long-running divide in philosophy between people who thought concepts reflected something intrinsic to the universe (e.g., that all horses contain an essence of horse-ness, or reflect Plato's ideal horse) -- and the people who thought this was nonsense and that language was therefore an arbitrary human construct (this latter view is currently dominant). Rand found a third position: concepts are human constructs, but they serve an objective purpose, and there are objective rules which determine their formation. ITOE is the only place where you will find her full argument.

To compare the two: Buddha takes sensory experience as the gold standard for reality, and concludes that reality exists, but is ultimately transient and lacks identity. Rand takes perceptual experience as the gold standard and concludes that reality exists, that the everyday objects we perceive really exist, and that therefore reality is logical and consistent.

(As for Wittgenstein, he says human language is just an arbitrary game which can never describe true reality, and ends up in a kind of quasi-mysticism (man helpless in the face of an ineffable, incomprehensible universe)).

I predict you will not be satisfied with this answer, because you are following a very misleading philosophical framework, but I wrote it up for the interest of lurkers.

It's kind of interesting, you are the second person recently to tell me that I am espousing Wittgenstein's ideas. I never read the man's works or know much of his philosophy, though I know others.

I would say what we have are beliefs. And we use language to express them and can only legitimately convince each other, ie change someone': beliefs, through exposing a double standard in beliefs. All other methods eg. appeal to emotion could achieve this but are not logically legitimate without the double standard reason for changing beliefs. Knowledge is another word for bias.

From your perspective, do you dispute this?

It's kind of interesting, you are the second person recently to tell me that I am espousing Wittgenstein's ideas. I never read the man's works or know much of his philosophy, though I know others.

Interesting. It's probably that most people who consider the question "what do words really mean?" hit on a very small set of possible answers. There's also the fact that his ideas have influenced many other intellectuals in many fields, and you many have absorbed his way of thinking by osmosis.

can only legitimately convince each other, ie change someone': beliefs, through exposing a double standard in beliefs

The primary legitimate way to convince another person is to point to reality -- the simplest way to do so is to point to something observable. If I want to convince you that eggs break when dropped, I drop a bunch of eggs in front of you.

Knowledge is another word for bias.

I can't really make sense of this statement, but it seems you're implying that all of our knowledge is untrustworthy. I definitely dispute this -- we have to have some certain knowledge or we don't have any knowledge at all. Put it this way -- do you know that "knowledge is another word for bias"? Are you certain? How?

"Also I say that the word 'exists' is meaningless unless it is relative to a conscious observer."

But does the conscious observer then exist? Do they have to exist relative to another conscious observer? Existence has to be absolute or you end up in such paradoxes. Otherwise, I agree that asserting the existence of parallel universes is arbitrary.

"I also think morality is relative to someone with a "sense of morality". Absolute morality is like absolute humor. Humor requires a human with a "sense of humor"."

Rand's view is that morality is objective, which she distinguishes from intrinsic. Intrinsic morality would be what you call absolute morality -- things are inherently good or evil, regardless of their relation to other things. In contrast, Rand says things are good or evil in relation some agent. However, this relationship is an objective fact of reality. (E.g., "sunlight is good for lizards", or "friendships are good for human beings").

The primary legitimate way to convince another person is to point to reality -- the simplest way to do so is to point to something observable. If I want to convince you that eggs break when dropped, I drop a bunch of eggs in front of you.

What you call reality is actually a collection of statements that you believe to be true. You just have a very high confidence that they are true. You can point to something but you also have to make an argument which assumes these statements. If I already believe them, then you can successfully build on that. If I don't, then you have to convince me of X, and the only legitimate way to do that is to show that I would have a double standard if I don't believe X when I already believe Y for much less convincing reasons.

I can't really make sense of this statement, but it seems you're implying that all of our knowledge is untrustworthy. I definitely dispute this -- we have to have some certain knowledge or we don't have any knowledge at all. Put it this way -- do you know that "knowledge is another word for bias"? Are you certain? How?

The statement is defining the word "knowledge". And you can't get me to play the game of "are you certain?" Do you know that "knowledge is another word for bias?" What I said is what I believe. You see you used the word "know" but I already told you how I define that word. You can convince me to change my beliefs, but the only ways you'd do that is by exposing a double standard, as above.

I believe that my position is consistent and the one that most successfully models reality, with the least ad-hoc adjustments.

Rand's view is that morality is objective, which she distinguishes from intrinsic.

But you would have to define the word "objective", probably as "independent of whatever any group of people, no matter how large, thinks". But then you can never prove that an objective morality exists, because you'd just be appealing to what groups of people think, as your premise. Some people, such as moral relativists, simply wouldn't agree.

(There are many more logical philosophical problems with Rand's argument, see this: http://www.owl232.net/rand5.htm )

But does the conscious observer then exist? Do they have to exist relative to another conscious observer? Existence has to be absolute or you end up in such paradoxes. Otherwise, I agree that asserting the existence of parallel universes is arbitrary.

The word "exist" is only relative to a conscious observer. So, as far as the conscious observer is concerned, of course they exist. The light from a distant star exists. The star may no longer exist, but it exists in the past because the observer infers that it had to generate the light. If they are wrong, then the star might never have existed, actually.

It's actually not self contradictory. Observers observe things. Obviously.

Let me make crystal clear what I am saying, using another language: mathematics.

I am saying "A exists" is meaningless. "A exists for B" is a binary relation, and its meaning is "B can observe A" or "B can deduce the existence of A from something that exists for B".

I am saying that "A should do B" is meaningless. Instead, moral statements are ternary relations: "If A wants C, A should do B", which recursively means P: "If A doesn't do B, and C doesn't happen, then A can be blamed", which recursively means "If D wants to be considered rational, B shouldn't blame A if A did B and C didn't happen" etc.

What you are saying when you say "You should do your homework" actually has a hidden premise, "... if you want to do well in school". This relative morality makes reasoning easier without ad-hoc rules. Like, you may want to escape a volcano, and thus you might violate some other "absolute principle" such as failing to respond to a question in a debate, in order to run for your life.

Relativism just makes more sense to me and people like me. As I said at the outset, if you are careful to include all your premises, all these "magical" things become pretty straightforward.

"What you call reality is actually a collection of statements that you believe to be true."

"I believe that my position is consistent and the one that most successfully models reality, with the least ad-hoc adjustments."

If reality is only a set of beliefs, why are you trying to model it with another set of beliefs?

I've studied that Owl link in depth, and (though he appears intellectually honest for the most part) he mis-characterises Rand's views. I'll tap out here, but I want to point out that you definitely seem heavily influenced by Kantian ideas.

What do you have against my binary and ternary definitions of existence and moral obligations though? Don't you see how a) they usefully match your actual experience b) they seem to eliminate any "mysticism" in Rand's words?

To answer your question: because beliefs is what we have. We don't really know things. We believe things. And we use language to communicate our beliefs. If you define knowledge to be "true justified belief" then you'd be stuck as you wouldn't ever be sure of something 100% so you wouldn't "know" anything by that definition.

And before you ask how come we know mathematical truths are true, it's because they are part of the language we have chosen to use, eg logic and math. If we used some sociological mumbojumbo arguments to convince each other eg of institutional oppressio then maybe mathematical theorems underpinning statistical results wouldn't be as certain in that context.

Again, I haven't read Kant beyond the "categorical imperative". I just noticed that people usually face all these difficulties because they fail to precisely DEFINE all their terms. This set of definitions just seems to best match what's really going on.

Also I say that the word "exists" is meaningless unless it is relative to a conscious observer.

To illustrate, if I described a parallel world that you would never encounter, never be able to deduce its existence from any observations in this one etc. then in what way are the sentences "it exists" and "it doesn't exist" meaningful?

I think meaning is only relative to some subject who can comprehend it.

I also think morality is relative to someone with a "sense of morality". Absolute morality is like absolute humor. Humor requires a human with a "sense of humor". A humorless person is like a psychopath. They don't share the same phychological responses as others. Some moral value can be widespread just like a joke can be funny to a lot of people.

So I guess I am a relativist...

Did you mean Dennett, instead of Chalmers? I agree that the Dennett's conclusions seems to be false almost on a logical level. The self is an illusion for sure, the consciousness for sure isn't (EDIT: not saying here that there exists 'pure consciousness without content').

> Don't just read about it. Go ahead and have the experience yourself. It changes a lot of perspectives. You don't even have to go all the way to the highest levels described in the literature - the intermediate stuff is revelatory enough already.

It is indeed. The more you meditate, the more you see that most of the things that you do 'outside' are meaningless, just playing with your representations of the world and pretending they are real. Of course we can't do anything to somehow reach the 'real' world, but at least we can drop the pretending part.

The title of this book may seem both scary and beautiful in this regard: http://www.buddha-heute.de/downloads/treeriver.pdf Not sure I'd recommend it for beginners, but I just love the title.

> Did you mean Dennett, instead of Chalmers?

Argh. Yes. Fixed, thanks.

Need more caffeine.

It's like talking about Ruby and saying "Python" instead.

Dennett's approach is absurd. Consciousness is the only thing in the Universe that is self-evident in the strict sense.

I don't think science should be based to accepting things that are "self-evident", especially things that subjectively self-evident.

The advances of Galileo et al were based on challenging beliefs about the world which seemed self-evident at the time.

The idea that science should begin investigating mental processes based on accepting what is subjectively self-evident seems especially flawed given difficulty that any system has in observing itself.

Consciousness is self evident in the most literal sense. For something to be evident, it must be observed, which means it will be experienced, but consciousness is experience itself. It is self-evident because it is the thing which allows things to be evident.

Heliocentrism was never "self-evident" it was merely obvious, and wrong. (And incidentally, it was actually far more scientific than Galileo until years after his death.)

I think you are conflating conscious as some means to gain experience with consciousness-the-model-of-experience.

I'm not sure exactly what distinction you're making, but I realised after posting that I made a leap from observation to experience. Observation doesn't require experience, in the sense that a p-zombie could take in sensory information, and use them to make scientific inferences, without ever experiencing those observations.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the only way to observe consciousness is to experience it directly, and doing so proves it exists (at least to ourselves). And sure, from the perspective of some kind of science automaton in the material world, consciousness is as ridiculous as invisible unicorns, but we still experience it.

I don't think that meditation is useful evidence for the hard problem. Personally, I don't need further convincing that the hard problem exists, and I'm sympathetic to the usefulness of meditation as an exploratory tool, but it is a practice that requires you to basically accept consciousness as dogma and then spend a lot of time studying it. Its structure is just too cult-like to be useful for convincing others, and you should be worried about letting it reinforce your own beliefs as well.

It's kind of bad PR. Supporting the existence of the hard problem appears awfully woo to begin with (undeservedly but understandably). When people appeal to meditation and psychedelics, which have even stronger woo connotations, it really doesn't help.

> accept consciousness as dogma

I find statements such as this baffling. To me, consciousness is the one thing strictly self-evident, with everything else having a second-hand status. There really is a hard stop here.

> meditation [...] Its structure is just too cult-like

That is a real problem, but not an unavoidable one. Many people practice meditation without joining any cult. It's something you do, like going to the gym. Heck, even the gym requires membership, whereas meditation can be practiced entirely on your own.

After ~30 years of thinking about it, I am beginning to suspect that some people (e.g. Dennett) don't know they are conscious.

Gurdjieff talked about the effort "to remember oneself." Is is possible that some people have never had these moments naturally? Or don't remember them?

It would explain why they abjure the "hard problem" if they literally don't know what it is, even as they talk about it like they do. (Human p-zombies, if I understand the term correctly.)

Can you explain in more detail?

I am finding that everything we say about consciousness is just an artifact of our language. If we are careful to always include the subject of the sentence as well as the unspoken assumptions then I have not come across any questions that don't have a straightforward answer. Same with morality.

Well, I can try. ;-)

If you were to examine the contents of your awareness systematically you would have "subject" after "subject", and you could make sentences about them (there are thoughts and feelings which lack names but these would still be subject to your awareness.)

But there is always this other "thing", the awareness, that can never quite be subject to language. (In other words, if you were not "aware" there is no way I could describe awareness to you. It has no qualities.)

So this is the first aspect of the "Hard Problem of Consciousness": the foundational fact from which flows the veracity of all others is this indescribable "self" that is "aware", what is it?

The second aspect is the puzzle of "why qualia?" What the heck is "red" anyway? The subjective experience of "red" (and all the others) is kind of impossible. Yet there it is.

It's like a paradox. One the one hand, there is no doubting that our organs mediate the contents of awareness. But on the other hand subjective experience seems impossible.

Anyway, all that to say, in order to make sense of people who flat out claim that the brain generates or creates consciousness, I have recently begun to entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, they don't have the experience.

What I mean is that self-awareness is not automatic. You have to notice it, then work at it. So maybe the reason they don't see the hard problem of consciousness is that they don't see the hard problem of consciousness.

> What I mean is that self-awareness is not automatic.

Without regard to the question at hand - I think the lack of self-awareness is fairly evident in western society in general.

To extrapolate, would mean that a large portion of western society is not aware of their own consciousness or the influence it has on their day-to-day lives

"What do you think of Western Civilization, Mr. Gandhi?"

"I think it would be a good idea." ;-)

If you're willing to entertain the idea that some people don't know they're conscious, it's not that far of a leap to say they actually aren't. You might be interested in reading about Julian Jaymes. He put forward a hypothesis that consciousness is a very recent (3000 years or so) phenomenon. This is a rabbit hole I prefer not to go down, because it just seems so absurd and solipist.

I agree that there's an almost eerie inability to grasp the idea of what some of us refer to as consciousness. This word has all kinds of linguistic baggage, so it often feels like thinkers talk past each other when talking about it. I hesitate (perhaps refuse?) to read any more into it than that.

My personal belief (to about 90%) is that there was some sort of Disaster (lit. "sundering from the stars") in the past and we are all, globally, suffering from shock in the aftermath. I don't think current conditions are normal.

You sound like John Searle.

What are you talking about though when you describe meditation? What is it like to peel away layers? What did you find underneath, can you describe it? Links?

If Dennett claims that he's unconscious then it just provides a reason to dismiss his other claims, too.

> To say that consciousness is an illusion is ridiculous

More likely, you simply misunderstand what is meant by "illusion". What is self-evident is that there are thoughts, and some of these thoughts are "I am experiencing X". It's naive to simply infer from that, that true subjective experience actually exists, just like it's naive to infer that water can break pencils simply because you can see it [1].

You should give Dennet more credit. He's almost certainly right, just like science proved in every other case humans thought they were special in the past. The closest analog of consciousness as a pseudo-mystical property that was eventually simply replaced by a scientific concept is "vitalism", which was eventually superceded by biology. Not by any proof that elan vital didn't exist, but by simple recognition that it was special pleading and provided no explanatory power whatsoever.

[1] http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-o...

I'm not sure your argument makes sense. To say there exists conscious experience doesn't add anything ontologically to 'it's self-evident that there are thoughts'. The self-evidence of thoughts and conscious experience are the same thing.

Your statement "There are just thoughts with 'I am experiencing X' content" could be rightly used as a counterargument to "'I' exist" statement. It could also be used against 'there exists pure consciousness without content' statement. But to say that may be used against 'there exists experience of thoughts as opposed to just eg. electrical impulses' doesn't seem to make sense.

The latter doesn't mean that the experience and thoughts are two different things, is it what bothers you?

> To say there exists conscious experience doesn't add anything ontologically to 'it's self-evident that there are thoughts'.

So you consider qualia and thoughts to be identical? Because I'm drawing a distinction between them and saying the former doesn't exist, while the latter do exist. They certainly seem qualitatively distinct since there's so much focus on qualia in the hard problem.

The problem with 'qualia' and 'consciousness' is that these concepts seem to reify something existing separately from their content. The other problem here is that 'thought' is a complex and compound entity while 'qualia' seems to imply something atomic. So let's not use this concept.

Just realised that I seriously intended to argue with you about probably the single most mysterious thing known to humanity. Feels stupid.

Anyway, what is a thought in your opinion? Is it just a physical thing? What is 'experience of red'? An illusion? (Again, I feel stupid trying to achieve something here :)

> The other problem here is that 'thought' is a complex and compound entity while 'qualia' seems to imply something atomic. So let's not use this concept.

Funny, I see it as exactly the opposite, as would any materialist I'd hazard. "Qualia" is a term describing a vague, poorly defined concept that's inherently intertwined with our complex perceptual systems and with our internal model of the world, and this dizzyingly complex aggregate leads us to falsely conclude we have subjective experience.

"Thought" is merely a mentally held belief, a proposition inferred from ones perceptions.

Well, when you analyse thought as something you experience, you'll come to realise eg. that it can be verbal or visual (check out Temple Grandin) and is always compound. You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia.

> You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible.

Agreed, but this will necessarily be true of any objective, scientific account of consciousness. For instance, subatomic particles are as abstracted from our everyday macroscopic world as possible.

> Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia.

I don't think we should conflate experience and perception. Materialists of course acknowledge we have perception, they simply deny the subjective experience that non-materialists infer from it.

Of course, this fuzzy boundary is where our natural language often fails us, so when I equate a thought with a proposition, I of course don't mean a proposition in English or any other language, I mean some abstract representation that structurally conforms to a proposition in a given mind.

The structure this thought takes isn't objective, in the sense that it's the same for every person, because the correspondence of that structure to that proposition is determined by the mind that interprets it, just like a program in x86 machine code isn't the same program when run on an ARM processor -- equivalent semantics have different structures on different CPUs, and equivalent structures have different semantics on different CPUs.

Qualia and thoughts are distinct, but to say the former doesn't exist just seems nonsensical to me. Qualia are self-evident by their very nature. I look at something red and I experience the appearance of red, and I don't know how someone who experiences that can say it doesn't happen. I could believe the red thing doesn't exist, and that the experience is caused by something else, but to say my experience of a red thing doesn't exist is just clearly false.

> Qualia and thoughts are distinct, but to say the former doesn't exist just seems nonsensical to me.

I'm sure it does, just like it probably seems nonsensical to deny that water breaks pencils. I mean, just look at it, you can just see it for yourself. How could you possibly deny the evidence of your own eyes? It's obvious to someone who is ignorant of any broader context, that water simply must break pencils and reconstitute them. We are likewise ignorant of the broader context of what constitutes consciousness, and we're all just flapping our gums making exactly these same fallacious arguments.

Like I initially said, "doesn't exist"/illusion has a specific meaning. It doesn't mean that we don't have perceptions or that perceptions don't convey some kind of knowledge, but merely that perception is not truly subjective, and so qualia don't deserve distinguished ontological status. Their apparent irreducibility is an illusion, a mental trick, like the many optical and auditory illusions to which our brain is susceptible.

I highly recommend reading the paper on the attention schema model of consciousness [1] for an idea of how a real scientific theory might explain this trick.

[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

>I'm sure it does, just like it probably seems nonsensical to deny that water breaks pencils.

But you're not saying that the pencil is not broken, you're saying I can't see a broken pencil.

>but merely that perception is not trulky subjective

I'm not sure what distinction you're making? What would it mean for something to be "truly subjective"?

>I highly recommend reading the paper on the attention schema model of consciousness

Hmm, the paper makes some interesting observations about the nature of awareness as part of the mind model, and it explains how a p-zombie could believe it has a subjective experience of that model.

...but I know I'm not a p-zombie. Even if I can't prove it to you, I know I definitely have subjective experience.

> But you're not saying that the pencil is not broken, you're saying I can't see a broken pencil.

No, I'm saying you're inferring a false conclusion (the pencil is broken/we have subjectivity) from an inherently flawed perception (I see a broken pencil sitting in water/I perceive subjectivity).

For the sake of argument, let's assume the mental model of the paper I linked to. Our pseudo-perception of our own subjectivity is really a false conclusion we infer from a differential between the signal we receive from our perceptions of the outside world, with the signal from our internal model of ourselves perceiving the outside world. The constant switching back and forth as these signals consecutively dominate each other, combined with our slow perceptual response time relative to this switching, yields the illusion of subjectivity, similar to how a uniprocessor computer yields the illusion of real parallelism by context switching processes thousands of times per second. It's still just an illusion though.

> I'm not sure what distinction you're making? What would it mean for something to be "truly subjective"?

Subjective in the ontological sense, in that it cannot be reduced to an account consisting purely of third-person objective facts.

Certainly we perceive a type of "epistemic subjectivity" that's inherent to our distinct perspectives, but that's not true subjectivity in the ontological sense, like qualia.

> ...but I know I'm not a p-zombie. Even if I can't prove it to you, I know I definitely have subjective experience.

Materialistic theories of consciousness necessarily deny the conceivability of p-zombies, so you have nothing to prove. Any system with the same information processing structure as the model described in the paper (or whatever the "correct" model may be) would necessarily have consciousness. There is no non-functional "secret sauce" by which you can construct a p-zombie.

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."

Max Planck, and nothing significant has changed since then.

> What is self-evident is that there are thoughts, and some of these thoughts are "I am experiencing X".

Therein the problem lies. Equating consciousness with thoughts. It's vastly different. It can exist independently of "thoughts". It can exist independently of an "I". This can be verified as an experience.

At most it could be a very, very special kind of "thought", radically different from the rest.

> Therein the problem lies. Equating consciousness with thoughts. It's vastly different.

Just because qualia seem "vastly different" to thoughts doesn't mean they aren't reducible to thoughts. This would make the qualitative distinction of qualia from thoughts an illusion, a false conclusion inferred from an incorrect perception.

There's a very distinct experience of being conscious and having completely no thoughts in the mind. To treat thoughts as some kind of basic element is a mistake that neither neuroscientist nor meditator would ever make. Look up default network mode and how it can be 'turned off'.

I think you're mistaking the utility of epistemically treating qualia on their own terms, with their fundamental ontological status. Just because reducibility may not be useful in most cases of analyzing qualia as a phenomena reducible to thoughts, doesn't make it untrue that they are reducible to thoughts.