Are all subjective impressions qualia?

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In other words, is it possible to claim that sentiments, emotions, and experiences

influence people to have different subjective impressions of a picture without affirming
the existence of qualia?

epistemology philosophy-of-mind qualia

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asked Jul 20 '15 at 3:58

Jay

361

Basically this question comes down to asking What is the definition of the word
qualia? Qualia isnt a thing, it is a concept, and thus whatever qualia is or isnt is
solely influenced by how you define the word. If emotion is a qualia or not doesnt
change anything about the concept of emotion. Marcus Blttermann Jul 20 '15 at 10:41

Yes, all impressions are qualia. ANY distinguishable mind=body phenomena is qualia or
their collection. Simple. But not for Marcus. Asphir Dom Jul 21 '15 at 13:38

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2 Answers

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I think you've unwittingly asked two different questions with two different answers. I'll
explain, but first, let's talk definitions.
"Qualia" is a technical term, so you'd think it'd have a clear, agreed-upon definition
(that's usually the point of technical terminology). Unfortunately, it's actually used to
mean several slightly different things. The following definitions capture the
uncontroversial basics of what most people are talking about when they talk about
qualia, but keep in mind that sometimes there's more built into the word's definition.
When different assumptions are built into the term, it leads to all sorts of semantic
debates. Ned Block, a well-known philosophy of mind specialist, wrote this short but
useful paper on relevant controversies.

Common definitions of "qualia" include:

The properties or characteristics of sense-data. As a philosophic term, "qualia" was first

used by C. I. Lewis to refer to properties of sense-data (via IEP), so this is the original
definition.

Amy Kind defines qualia as "subjective or qualitative properties of experiences," what

gives an experience its characteristic "feel" and what distinguishes them from each
other. Examples include the sensations of pain, hunger, and itching, as well as what it
feels like to be angry or anxious (IEP).

Daniel Dennett (a famous philosopher who writes about qualia) once defined qualia as
"the ways things seem to us" (via Wikipedia) but has used other definitions at other
times (SEP).

Ned Block gives the following basic/initial definition: "Qualia include the ways things
look, sound and smell, the way it feels to have a pain, and more generally, what it's like
to have experiential mental states"

Michael Tye defines "qualia" as "the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of

our mental lives" (SEP). Tye gives a useful breakdown of 4 more specific uses of "qualia"
in his SEP article, including a helpful explanation of the different definitions that Lewis,
Dennett, and Block use (SEP).

The following basic definition emerges: "the subjective characteristics of experiences"

captures most of what people mean when they talk about qualia.

Now that we have a basic understanding of how "qualia" is used, let's try to answer your
2 questions:

- "Are all subjective impressions qualia?"

That depends entirely on what you mean by "subjective impressions" because this
phrase, like "qualia," is open to multiple interpretations. If by "subjective impressions"
you mean "experiences" then the answer to this question is "no" -- properties of
subjective impressions are qualia, not the subjective impressions themselves. Qualia are
the characteristics of experiences, the way things feel or look or smell etc., not the
experiences or sensory inputs themselves.

- "Is it possible to claim that sentiments, emotions, and experiences influence people to
have different subjective impressions of a picture without affirming the existence of
qualia?"

This strikes me as a different question from what you put in the title. You seem to be
asking about causality. You're asking if the following conditional is true: IF people have
different experiences of a picture as a result of their different sentiments, emotions and
experience THEN qualia exist.

This condition is true on the basic definition of "qualia" as the subjective characteristics
of experiences. If qualia don't exist as defined above, then a person's experience of a
picture has no subjective characteristics. If a person's experience of a picture has no
subjective characteristics -- i.e. if there's nothing in particular that it's like for a person to
experience the picture -- then experiences of a picture cannot have different subjective
characteristics. Having subjectively different experiences implies the existence of qualia.
Therefore, we can conclude that IF people have different experiences of a picture as a
result of their different sentiments, emotions and experience THEN qualia exist. The
answer to this question is "yes" (if I've interpreted you correctly).

Qualia without consciousness or sense

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Similar to this question I wondered whether affect was a qualia, and if so whether it can
be shown to depend on other aspects of experience (consciousness, tactile feelings).

Perhaps there is nothing it is like to feel love we just learn to relabel out sensations.

consciousness qualia love

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edited Apr 13 at 12:42

Community

asked Apr 10 '15 at 12:25

user6917

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I believe we can have qualia of "internal" sensations.

Qualia is of our internal brain activity, and therefore there is no reason in principle why it
should be restricted to senses corresponding to external phenomena.

that is, when you are looking at your monitor, you are having qualia of the activity of
neurons in your brain, not of an external monitor.

therefore, there isn't really a difference between having qualia of color, and having
qualia of sexual desire; these are two phenomena occurring in your brain for which you
can have qualia.
so yes, you can have qualia of emotional sensations, such as affection, or anger, etc...

As for love, this is a bit more complicated since it depends on how you define love, or
being in love, or feeling love.

I do not believe we have qualia of abstract concepts, such as justice, etc... so if you
define love an abstract concept, then the answer is no.

if you identify love with a combination of anger, sexual desire, strongly wanting to make
sure someone else is safe or happy, etc..., then the answer is yes.

and if you do not know how to define love, then the answer is who knows...

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edited Apr 10 '15 at 13:14

answered Apr 10 '15 at 12:52

nir

2,876515

i was hoping for shared assumption RE defining terms user6917 Apr 10 '15 at 13:01

@MATHEMATICIAN the trick with defining terms is that we can define them any way we
please, but generally draw the lines where they are most helpful to us. It may be most
helpful for one person to define love as its own qualia and another person to define it in
terms of relabeling sensations. However, neither side will convince the other to take their
viewpoint unless they can demonstrate that the value of their viewpoint outweighs the
value of other viewpoint in the mind of the other individual. It's a tricky task indeed, that
definition. Cort Ammon Apr 10 '15 at 15:33

hay MATH, what banal truism of @CortAmmon do you refer to? didn't seem so banal to
me. robert bristow-johnson Apr 12 '15 at 3:12
some of us, who are not pure materialists, might not limit qualia to only what is "internal
brain activity". we might see some metaphysical character to our consciousness and
qualia within it. if i were a pure materialist, i would agree that "qualia is of our internal
brain activity". but i think it is more than that. robert bristow-johnson Apr 12 '15 at 3:18

@MATHEMATICIAN You had mentioned hoping for "shared assumption regarding defining
terms." That's why I mentioned the truism. If you're looking for a general meaning of
qualia which you can expect everyone to hold to, it will be a difficult search. Cort
Ammon Apr 12 '15 at 5:10

Qualia and the Myth of the Given

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I have a problem understanding Sellar's opinion about Qualia. On the one hand he denies
the existence of the given in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" but on the other
hand he speaks about the given while describing a pink ice cube in Philosophy and the
Scientific Image of Man, and takes the existence of the feeling of color as a reason for
the conflict between the scientific image and the manifest image of man.

According to this - Does Sellars believe that Qualia exist or they are only a myth for him?
qualia

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edited Apr 27 '15 at 5:12

virmaior

17.8k32672

asked Apr 26 '15 at 17:00

Amit Hagin

409310

Hello. What is PSIM? Ram Tobolski Apr 26 '15 at 23:02

Are you sure you want to say he denies the existence of the given? I take the point to be
denying the special status accorded the given as unmediated truth. virmaior Apr 27 '15
at 5:15

So are the two following points corrects? : 1. The given exists but we don't notice or
conceptualize it before we learn the language. 2. the images still clash, concerning the
given, because the ultimate homogeneity of the color (as brought up in "Philosophy and
the Scientific Image of Man"), cannot be described in discrete scientific term. Amit
Hagin Apr 27 '15 at 6:16

@AmitHagin "the given" is a epistemic rather than metaphysical notion. It's the idea
there's something out there we can know directly without the intervention of our own
knowing apparatus. That seems wholly compatible with believing we bring a concept of
man to our perception of man and that we segment colors using our apparatus
differently than a scientific instrument would. virmaior Apr 27 '15 at 12:09

But the feeling of colors occurs even before we use our apparatus of knowledge. Babies
see pink before they know a word, but they can't use it as knowledge - it's not a fact for
them. As it seems to me, I can rewrite my question like that: Is the given only a
privileged vocabulary that relates directly to perceptions of the world or it is the
perception itself - what the baby feels before knowing something. Amit Hagin Apr 27
'15 at 15:56
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I think it will be well to distinguish between (a) qualitative experience, (b) qualia, and (c)
the given.

I doubt that anyone denies qualitative experience. Sellars, anyway, did not. It seems to
be a pre- philosophical fact, not a matter of controversy. In Philosophy and the Scientific
Image of Man (PSIM) Sellars contrasts the scientific world image with the "manifest"
world image, which includes qualitative experience. Sellars's emphasis in that work is to
reconcile the two "world images", to give a place to each, within a single "synoptic"
world image.

'Qualia' is a metaphysical term. Qualitative experience is explained by positing non-

physical entities: the qualia. Sellars does not acknowledge qualia. In both Empiricism and
the Philosophy of Mind (EPM) and PSIM Sellars puts it by arguing that only science, not
sense experience, is sovereign to decide what exists and what does not exist. And since
present science is materialistic, there is no place for non- material entities like qualia.
Here is how Sellars formulates that principle in EPM, paraphrasing Protagoras:

In the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all
things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not. (EPM 41)

'The given' is an epistemological term. It refers to a perceptual judgement which is

certain, indubitable, by its very act. Sellars argues at length against the given in EPM. He
suggests there that the very idea of the given is incoherent, because every judgement is
a choice between alternatives. An indubitable judgement is therefore a contradiction in
terms. So, while Sellars does not deny qualitative experience, he does deny that the
basic perceptual judgments, the bases of empirical knowledge, are judgments about
"given" qualitative experience. In fact, because of his principle that scientific theory, not
perception, determines existence, Sellars denies the very fact of perceptual judgments,
because judgments imply ontological commitments. He posits instead perceptual
reports. Perceptual reports, a la Sellars, are like judgments in being fallible, yet are unlike
judgments in not carrying with them ontological commitments.

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answered Apr 27 '15 at 23:09

Ram Tobolski

5,3411516

Thanks a lot for the detailed answer. But I still can't understand how Sellars explains
qualitative experiences. On the one hand he cannot define them in scientific terms
(PSIM, pink ice cube), but on the other hand he claims that science decides what exists.
When we notice pink - can we, according to Sellars, explain the whole process
scientifically? How then? How can we not make a judgement about the given
experience? It's a fact that we sense it, and a fact that we can speak about it - so in
between raw feels must become knowledge, somehow. Amit Hagin Apr 28 '15 at 7:39

@AmitHagin That's a good question. I agree that the mystery of qualitative experience
remains. Sellars has solved (at best) only a certain aspect of it. Ram Tobolski Apr 28 '15
at 10:46

similarity between logical indiscernibles and qualia

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There are some similarities between qualia (red vs blue) and logical indiscernibles.
Basically, that qualia has properties that cannot be described in our language. Has
anybody tried to exploit this similarity with any useful results? Thanks!

logic qualia

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asked Dec 26 '14 at 14:45

julian fernandez

1115

What sort of results might be interesting to you here? What exactly does an answer to
this question look like in your mind? (In passing, exploring a little bit of the motivation
here may help -- is there anything in particular you might have been reading that has
made this an important problem in your study of philosophy?) Joseph Weissman Dec
26 '14 at 16:12

@JosephWeissman thanks for the tip, I will update my question soon! julian fernandez
Dec 27 '14 at 20:42

Interesting question; on the face of it there seems little connection; qualia are signified
by their affectivity; and logic by being indiscernable; however, I think some
mathematicians 'see' numbers, some writers have a 'feeling' for words; so I do think
there is some overlap... Mozibur Ullah Jan 3 '15 at 20:17

What are convincing examples of mistaken qualia?

up vote

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What is the strongest example that we can be mistaken about the experience of our
qualia?

The reasoning for the infallibility of the experience of qualia is based on the
immediateness of qualia. There is nothing between the subject and qualia, because
qualia are part of subjective experience. This experience is direct, there is no
interpretation involved. So how can we possibly be wrong about what qualia we
experience?

Example:

An optical illusion, but nothing fancy, so that the argument works: enter image
description here

The left red disk has objectively exactly the same color as right red disk (HTML color
#FF0000). But the left one seems brighter than the red one.

And another one:

enter image description here

The lower spot seems brighter than the upper spot, but they have objectively exactly the
same color (HTML color #D38402).

The obvious analysis would be that we are mistaken about the objective colors, because
we experience different qualia. But we are not mistaken, that we experience different
qualia.

Still, might it not be a possibility that we experience the same qualia, but we are indeed
mistaken about it? What would it even mean to be "mistaken" about the qualia we
experience? How can this be reconciled with the immediateness of qualia? If qualia
immediately present themselves to me, without any mediating step, what I experiencing
simply are the qualia. How can the notion of a mistaken quale be made coherent?

"Sadly", in most people these examples do not induce doubt, often for the above
reasons. They dismiss the latter possibility (that we experience the same red, but are
mistaken about it) out of hand.

Is there a stronger example? One that makes clearer how we can be mistaken about
qualia?

epistemology philosophy-of-mind consciousness qualia perception

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edited Aug 1 '16 at 18:28

commando

5,69442564

asked Aug 1 '16 at 7:46

wolf-revo-cats

1,039523

Would you be so kind as to explain as coherently as possible and in detail what could
"being mistaken about qualia" possibly mean? nir Aug 1 '16 at 10:15

@nir. I would like to see a stronger example in any sense that would make the argument
seem plausible. How about whatever sense that Dennett might have been referring to
when he said the following: "The idea that people might be mistaken about their own
qualia is at the heart of the ongoing confusion..." Is there any way to make any of
Dennett's arguments seem convincing? P de Leo Aug 1 '16 at 14:22

@PdeLeo: Hey, that's my question! ;-) But I concur with you. wolf-revo-cats Aug 1 '16
at 14:41

1
@AlexanderSKing: I added a second one. Does the shade of the spots seem the same to
you, too? Sadly, the most extreme color shade illusions, like this one (blue and red are
the same on both sides) use dirty tricks, which complicate any argument. wolf-revo-
cats Aug 1 '16 at 17:22

@wolf-revo-cats the second example is clearer, but I still don't get the point being
illustrated? A 30C temperature outside is going to feel different after I exit a 50C Sauna
than the way it is going to feel after I exit a refrigerated room at 10C, how does this
make me "mistaken" about the qualia of heat? Alexander S King Aug 1 '16 at 19:17

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I think the sticking point here is, as you point out, the immediateness of qualia. But
that's not actually taken for granted in the literature.

In the physicalism vs. anti-materialism debate in philosophy of mind, there's a proposal

called the Qualitative Inaccuracy Hypothesis (QI), essentially that we are mistaken about
our own qualia (for example, we're wrong about how we represent our experience of
"red" when we see an apple). This is a pretty robust position (I was swayed despite
vehement resistance at first), though it's admittedly abstract.

In brief, the hypothesis relies in most incarnations on a non-immediacy of qualia. That is,
consider that whenever we form beliefs about our qualia, we undergo an introspective
process: we have to introspect to decide what it is we're feeling. The skeptic about our
qualia-beliefs suggests that this introspective faculty can, in some instances, be wrong.
Here's a rough (and not entirely successful, I know) example attributed by Christopher
Hill in Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism to a seminar of Rogers Albritton's:

The case involves a college student who is being initiated into a fraternity. He is shown a
razor, and is then blindfolded and told that the razor will be drawn across his throat.
When he feels a sensation he cries out: he believes for a split second that he is in pain.
However, after contemplating the sensation for a moment, he comes to feel that it is
actually an experience of some other kind. It is, he decides, a sensation of cold. And this
belief is confirmed when, a bit later, the blindfold is removed and he is shown that his
throat is in contact with an icicle rather than a razor.
Of course, one can object that nonetheless the experience of cold was not mistaken, only
mistakenly identified - but then there's an entire literature on whether we can really be
said to experience things of which we aren't aware. Ian Philips and Ned Block take, as I
recall, roughly opposing sides in a debate on whether or not our consciousness overflows
- whether what we experience is more than what we can fit in our active awareness.

I can't faithfully replicate all of that debate, nor the argument for QI, but hopefully these
are decent pointers. For more on QI I strongly recommend the first chapter or two of
Derk Pereboom's Consciousness and the Proespects of Physicalism.

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answered Aug 1 '16 at 16:22

commando

5,69442564

I like Rogers Albritton's example hellyale Aug 1 '16 at 16:37

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The fact that we can be mistaken about Qualia can actually be a good argument against
the existence of subjective experiences. We can't know, for example, if in two different
cases we experience different Qualia or interpret one Quale differently. Some very strong
examples are given in Daniel Dennett's "Quining Qualia" . As always with Dennett, it's
nicely written, and supplies some strong arguments.

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answered Aug 1 '16 at 18:41

Amit Hagin

409310
I ask as above, what does it mean to be mistaken about qualia? for example, since
philosophers have many different and non compatible opinions about qualia it probably
means that some of them are mistaken about qualia. is that what you mean? if so, then
this is trivial, but is this the sense which you mean? I ask again, what does it mean to be
mistaken about qualia? for me, qualia is a thing that generally cannot be described by
words. this means that the whole idea of comparing qualia temporally like Dennett loves
to do, is nonsensical. nir Aug 1 '16 at 18:50

it may make sense to say that today's blue of the sky is different than yesterday's, but it
makes no sense at all to say that my qualia of the blue of the sky today is different than
the one I had yesterday, to the extent that I am talking about an aspect of it that I
cannot describe in anyway. but that does not mean at all that qualia does not exist. it
only means that we are very limited in what we can say about it. nir Aug 1 '16 at 18:50

Wittgenstein says Its not a Something, but not a Nothing either! The conclusion was
only that a Nothing would render the same service as a Something about which nothing
could be said. (PI, 304) but philosophers would not listen and so they write enormous
piles of confused books. nir Aug 1 '16 at 18:53

@nir, I'm actually never sure what Wittgenstein's conclusion about Qualia is. Even if we
can't talk about it - or in other words - can't reduce it to objective terms only, it obviously
exists. Dennett tries to show, I believe, that there is a way to speak about Qualia, or at
list to Dismiss this term by replacing our vocabulary with a new one that is not
problematic. Amit Hagin Aug 1 '16 at 18:56

I don't remember now the whole argument in Quining Qualia, but shortly, when he says
that ew are "mistaken" actually he says the following: Philosophical arguments for the
existence of subjectivity ascribe Qualia 4 different characteristics that make them so
mysterious. As he writes, Qualia are ineffable, intrinsic, private, direct (see the paper for
a full explanation). The examples he gives for being "mistaken" about Qualia try to show
that these 4 characteristics cannot exist at the same time, and therefore that our so
called "given", or fundamental understanding of Qualia is an illusion. Amit Hagin Aug 1
'16 at 19:05

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"The idea that people might be mistaken about their own qualia is at the heart of the
ongoing confusion..."

Ah qualia, a source of much controversy in the field of philosophy of mind, some deny it
entirely (What really?) others argue about what exactly it is...
Before we talk more about it, let us loosely define what it is exactly :

enter image description here

Or more simply stated, qualia is what a conscious mind experiences.

So why should we doubt our qualia? This is the age old debate between the rationalist
and the empiricist, the hard-line empiricist stating all we can trust is our experiences,
and the hard-line rationalist saying only trust reason. This being of course a very shallow
summary of the debate.

There are many hypothetical arguments on why to doubt qualia, the inverted qualia
thought experiment for example... however I believe you are looking for something more
concrete.

In that case we can go to something that everyone has experience with...

Dreams, dreams are the strongest example that we can in fact be mistaken about our
qualia. We can tweak some of the ideas in Descartes' Meditations to derive a convincing
argument that we cannot always trust our qualia. There might be people who deny that
they have ever been immersed in a realistic dream, only to awake and realize their
experiences for the past few hours do not exist in the objective world, but we doubt their
sincerity in such maters.

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answered Aug 1 '16 at 15:14

hellyale

550521

please do try to derive a convincing argument employing dreams because I cannot

conceive how such an argument might go nir Aug 1 '16 at 15:44
@nir I had qualia in a dream, i woke up, theq qualia was illusory. hellyale Aug 1 '16 at
16:04

The question is not illusory qualia - it's illusory experiences of qualia. You may have been
mistaken that the dream was reality, but you weren't mistaken about having the dream.
commando Aug 1 '16 at 16:05

Again, that isn't the point of the question; mistaken qualia are trivial to find. Mistaken
experiences of qualia, less so. commando Aug 1 '16 at 16:09

As someone who has studied philosophy of mind closely under multiple figures who work
on exactly this issue, I can assure you that's simply false. I can dream about a red apple
and be right that I experienced seeing red, while being incorrect that this red
corresponds to some physical item. I can also dream about a green apple and (strange
as it sounds) believe that I experienced red, in which case I'm simply wrong about my
own qualia. We can continue this in chat, if you would like, but this is enough for
comments. commando Aug 1 '16 at 16:14

Massive Modularity and Qualia

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I read Pinker's How the Mind Works a few years back, and a thought occurred to me that
I couldn't find in the two serious reviews (Fodor and somebody else, I forget)I dredged up
afterwards.

If one's brain is made up of modules- substructures specialised by evolution

to process different data, does that imply that certain of one's experiences are

ineffable indivisibles?
My rationale, very roughly, is that if processing is, so to speak, a series of monologues in
diverse and disjoint tongues, this would be consistent with (imply?) the qualia
hypothesis. For me this is the reason why massive modularity is untenable, as for various
reasons I would not touch any qualia-driven theory of the mind with a barge pole.

Is my hunch in any way tenable? Has anyone put forward such a contention seriously?

philosophy-of-mind qualia

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asked Mar 8 '12 at 22:36

Tom Boardman

1,027518

It strikes me what's perhaps missing about this explanation is the hierarchy involved in
neural architecture; it's certainly modular, but these modules aren't all at the same
'level' -- there are 'more' and 'less' high-level or abstract functional regions of the brain
involved in any particular act of cognition. Joseph Weissman Mar 8 '12 at 23:11

In passing, so far as Pinker is more perhaps more of a cognitive scientist than a

philosopher per se, this may be more appropriate for the Cognitive Sciences SE (it
sounds like you may be interested to know about its existence either way, but let me
know if you'd like me to facilitate migrating this that way -- if of course the core concern
is more properly cogsci than philosophy) Joseph Weissman Mar 8 '12 at 23:14

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Your postulate is not a tautology: whether or not one's brain is made up of modules, if
the module computes both some aspect of an experience and a verbalization thereof,
then the experience would be effable. There is nothing about the concept of specialized
modules that prevent this kind of dual structure. Thus, one must refer to additional
evidence to confirm or deny your postulate.
If you want to know whether the brain actually is made up of modules, we don't yet
know enough to say for certain, but see books by Oliver Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran
for extensive evidence that there are very specific functions executed by certain portions
of the brain. There isn't much evidence for verbalization distributed on a per-module
basis; lesions in Broca's area suggest the opposite, actually.

If you want to know whether certain experiences are ineffable, that will depend on what
you count as experiences. Given that your behavior can be altered by things you are not
aware of, the answer is presumably "yes".

I'm not sure where that leaves your hunch, though an apt summary might be, "Cognitive
science is messy, and details matter."

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The main reasons for qualia being a problem?

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What is the main problem behind secondary qualities/qualia?

Because the length of a geometrical object, for example, is a visual sensation just like
the redness of a rose; at this point, one might argue that "my redness is not your
redness", whereas "the length of 1 meter is the same for me and you". On the other
hand, people usually only argue about color shades, various degrees of redness, but not
about redness as such.

Then, there is the problem that for example pain is subjective. A third peson cannot
observe a person being in pain directly. But just as much, a person cannot observe
another person's process of observing.
Can anyone shed light on the whole matter? And a last question: Are there philosophers
that regard qualia a pseudo problem?

epistemology qualia

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asked Mar 12 '16 at 17:14

usario

1111

For the purposes of this problem there is no difference between primary and secondary
qualities (the distinction is long obsolete anyway), one can equally wonder if the quale of
1m length is the "same" for all people. Colors are used because they illustrate the point
more vividly, and Jackson's influential 1982 knowledge argument used color as the
example. plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/#2 Conifold Mar 12 '16 at 22:38

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For those that hold that qualia exist, the problem it poses is that of one hand being
something whose existence is certain, and the other hand being something that can't
submit to any empirical (and therefore scientific) analysis. Qualia are non-amenable to
empirical investigation because a scientist can never adopt the first person perspective
of different person. Thomas Nagel describes the problem in his paper "What's it like to be
a bat" (Nagel, Thomas (1974). The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435450.):

We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the
familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically
compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of
functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or
automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.
He then goes on to provide an extreme example to support his position: We can never
know what a it is "like" to be bat. Bats are highly evolved mammals with complex brains,
and therefore must have subjective experience. But instead of vision, they use
echolocation, so their subjective experience will be radically different from ours. We can
conceptually understand how a bat moves using sonar, and we can try to imagine
ourselves as bats, but we are still using our own subjective experience to "translate" the
bat's sense experience in to ours. Ultimately, no matter how hard we try to imagine
ourselves as bats, we inevitably imagine the cave they navigate and the insects they
catch as visual perceptions, not sonar echoes. Navigating the world through sonar
instead of vision is something that is forever inaccessible to us. To quote Nagel's paper
again:

It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one
to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor
vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency
sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an
attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would
be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know
what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the
resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot
perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining
segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions,
subtractions, and modifications.

David Chalmers described this as the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" (Chalmers, David
(1995). "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness". Journal of Consciousness Studies 2
(3): 200219.):

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how
it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our
cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual
or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we
explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an
emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no
good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise
to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it
does.

To answer your second question, Daniel Dennett attempts to prove that qualia are a
pseudo-problem in his paper "Quining Qualia" (Dennett, Daniel C., In "Consciousness in
Modern Science" Anthony J. Marcel & E. Bisiach (eds.), [Book Chapter]. Oxford University
Press (1988)) and later in his book "Consciousness Explained".

Supporters say that qualia's special epistemic status comes from the infallibility of our
direct knowledge of them, and that they are intrinsic absolute truths: after Descartes,
when I see red, I am certain that I see red, the cause of my seeing red is subject to all
sorts of doubt (is it reality? illusion? neural damage? etc...), but that I see red is an
indisputable fact. But per Dennett, our knowledge of qualia is just as fallible as our
knowledge of everything else. Through a series of what he calls intuition pumps, he
challenges the infallibility of our knowledge of qualia, and the idea that they are intrinsic
experiences that are independent of our memories of past experience and our responses
and beliefs to them. From the paper:

I reply: it all depends on what "qualitative or phenomenal" comes to. Shoemaker

contrasts qualitative similarity and difference with "intentional" similarity and
difference-- similarity and difference of the properties an experience repre sents or is
"of". That is clear enough, but what then of "phenomenal"? Among the non-intentional
(and hence qualitative?) properties of my visual states are their physiological properties.
Might these very properties be the qualia Shoemaker speaks of? It is supposed to be
obvious, I take it, that these sorts of features are ruled out, because they are not
"accessible to introspection" (Shoemaker, private correspondence). These are features of
my visual state, perhaps, but not of my visual experience. They are not phenomenal
properties.

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edited Apr 13 '16 at 19:58

answered Mar 12 '16 at 20:36

Alexander S King

15.2k21676

Can you please elaborate on your statement "(...) something that can't submit to any
empirical (and therefore scientific) analysis". Do you mean it cannot be empirically
analysed because it is only accessible from the first-person perspective? I am only
learning about qualia, but from my point of view, qualia seem to pose a methodological
problem as far as qualitative and quantitative research is concerned. As for various
sensations of "red" (for example), I think the visual sense can be sharpened/trained just
as one can develop a understand of higher mathematics by rigorous study. usario Mar
12 '16 at 21:34

@usario see edits. Alexander S King Mar 13 '16 at 19:18

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up vote

down vote
Are you sure we never disagree about redness? How about blueness? Is that any
different?

enter image description here

The issue with qualia is how hard (potentially impossible) it is to objectively define a
specific qualia. In philosophy one cannot jusitfy "I know nobody who disagrees that this is
red, thus it is objectively red." A strong consensus is not the same thing as an objective
truth.

Also, consider red/green colorblind people, who absolutely disagree with the majority as
to what "red" is.

As for your second propblem, just because something else is a problem doesn't mean
qualia isn't a problem. Just because we can't directly observe someone observing doesn't
mean that there's no issue with the fact that we can't observe someone else's qualia of
pain directly.

The problem is only a problem when combined with a philosophy that tries to argue
something along the lines of "everything important can be observed," which is a popular
way of thinking. Without it, you have to consider the Cartesian Demon argument that
everything we sense may be a lie, and it is popular for people to not want to think that
way.

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answered Mar 12 '16 at 19:27

Cort Ammon

9,925625

The two examples you gave (The Dress, colorblindness) are the result of measurable
physiological differences between individuals. In the case of The Dress the difference
occurs in the brain, and in the case of colorblindness it's (usually) in the eyes. Different
people having different qualia as a result of physical differences is philosophically
uninteresting and has nothing to do with the problem at hand. In short: Yes, if I wear red
glasses and you wear blue glasses, we will see the same painting differently. Era Mar
13 '16 at 23:05
@Era The purpose of the dress argument was specifically to counter the quesitonable
argument, "On the other hand, people usually only argue about color shades, various
degrees of redness, but not about redness as such." Such arguments certainly need to
be controlled before a deeper discussion of qualia can occur. There are ways to avoid
needing to counter such incorrect claims first, but they are hard to do in a Q&A format
like stack exchange, so the easiest way to go is to challenge misconceptions first. Cort
Ammon Mar 13 '16 at 23:26