alt Hacker NewsWe don't know what's inside a neutrino, and it's really hard to experiment with them, but we kind of know why and how they interact with different things. We're able to form theories, research programs, and sometimes even discovered honest-to-god facts, due to our inclusion of such fields in the scope of research, even though we don't know all there is to know about particles/fields or quantum mechanics.
Similarly, qualia is ill-defined, but we can't even start talking about it or refining it until we've at least given it a label and drawn a large circle on the map showing where it might be. Criticisms extending past that must also consider that "life" and "intelligence" are just as ill-defined, and that throwing all of those definitions out leaves us with very little to talk about or probe.
This is 100% backwards, and exposes exactly the nonsense I'm trying to call out!
A "neutrino" isn't a name given to something initially to try to define it later. The neutrino started as an experimental result. There was missing spin in some particle interactions. Stuff came out with a different angular momentum than what went in, and this was easily reproducible and clearly a real effect. But it didn't make sense, as it was a violation of a core conservation law that held everywhere else in the universe that we could observe.
So theorists (Wolfgang Pauli, specifically) sat down to try to describe what kind of thing would be needed. And then, and only then, did it get a name. And it turned out the theory predicted other stuff, like the neutrino carrying momentum and energy in a certain way, and interacting through only the weak force and not electromagnatism or the strong force, and later experiments confirmed that this was basically the way it worked. Later still it was shown that the mass is actually non-zero but extremely small, etc...
So sure: "neutrino" is a well-deserved label[2] for an abstraction we should understand and study. But it got its name after we started studying it, not before!
Philosophers want us to just drop and genuflect to this "qualia" notion long before[1] it's actually shown to be useful for describing anything at all.
[1] Infinitely, possibly. The fact that it predicts nothing testable is pretty good evidence IMHO that it doesn't actually exist at all, at least in the form philosophers want to talk about. Their failure to present any analysis of AI systems based it stands to that point too.
[2] Coined by Fermi, actually, not Pauli. Hilariously the neutrino was originally called "neutron" and its discovery predates the understanding of the structure of the atomic nucleus!