How Useful is the Concept of Qualia?

[JackDaydream]

I have been reading Daniel Dennett on the concept of qualia. He suggests that 'philosophers have tied themselves into knots over qualia. They started where anyone would start: with the clearest intuitions about their own minds. Those intuitions, alas, form a mutually self-supporting circle of doctrines, imprisoning their imaginations in the Cartesian Theater. Even though philosophers have discovered the paradoxes inherent in this closed circle of ideas_ that is why the literature gets more and more convoluted, instead of convuluting agreement.'


The idea of qualia was first introduced in philosophy by
CI Lewis in 1929. However, it is a complex area, so I raise it for consideration. To what extent is it useful, or does it blur and fuzz over issues to do with perception and what constitutes reality?

[Faustus5]

However, it is a complex area, so I raise it for consideration. To what extent is it useful, or does it blur and fuzz over issues to do with perception and what constitutes reality?

I think that the introduction of "qualia" into the discourse was one of the worst blunders in philosophy of mind that has ever occurred.

If you are going to make a concept central to discussions of a topic, then at least establish benchmarks that everyone can agree upon as to what the term actually means. This never happened with qualia. People who stridently assert that qualia exist don't even agree with each other on what it refers to.

Dennett himself did a wonderfully revealing presentation on change blindness to a large audience, in which images were flashed to them over and over with changes from one to the other that were not easy to notice right away, most people requiring several tries before they were conscious of the difference.

He then did a poll: when did your qualia change as you watched the images? Was it changing every time the altered imaged was flashed onscreen, or did it only change when you became conscious of the change?

There was no consensus. The term is just meaningless.

[JackDaydream]

@Faustus5

Thanks for your reply and it does seem a very good idea that I should include some kind of definition, especially as I can remember when I first came across the term and was extremely puzzled by what it meant.

So, according to the 'Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 'Qualia are the subjective or qualitative properties of experience...Qualia have traditionally been thought to be intrinsic qualities of experience that are directly available to introspection. However, some philosophers offer theories that deny one or both of these features.'

On 'philosophyterms com.' site the definition is,
'Qualia are the phenomenal qualities of experiences_ the raw felt qualities of sensations, emotions, thoughts , or anything else. They are experienced privately: all the content of consciousness states is made of them.' In addition, 'Qualia are central to the questions 'what is consciousness' and 'how does brain generate consciousness. And qualia can be difficult to to talk about and even think about clearly; some people argue very seriously that they don't exist while others have argued that only qualia exist.'

[GE Morton]

However, it is a complex area, so I raise it for consideration. To what extent is it useful, or does it blur and fuzz over issues to do with perception and what constitutes reality?

I think that the introduction of "qualia" into the discourse was one of the worst blunders in philosophy of mind that has ever occurred.

If you are going to make a concept central to discussions of a topic, then at least establish benchmarks that everyone can agree upon as to what the term actually means. This never happened with qualia.

Of course it has. "Qualia" are the distinctive qualities which allow us to distinguish between signals delivered over the various sensory channels. E.g., to distinguish between green and blue, the smell of ammonia from the smell of roses, the taste of salt from the taste of sugar, the sensation of warmth from that of cold, etc. There is nothing mysterious or abstruse about that. If we can make such distinctions then qualia exist, perforce.

On the other hand, there has indeed been much nonsense written about qualia, such as Chalmers' insistence that qualia possess an ontological independence from the perceiving subject. Qualia are inherently subjective --- there is no means of comparing one person's experience of "redness" with another's. Whatever impression you experience when perceiving a red object which allows you to distinguish it from a green or yellow one, is your "quale" for that sensory signal. Whether your quale for redness is the same as mine is an unanswerable question, one that ignores the inherent subjectivity of qualia.

Dennett himself did a wonderfully revealing presentation on change blindness to a large audience, in which images were flashed to them over and over with changes from one to the other that were not easy to notice right away, most people requiring several tries before they were conscious of the difference.

He then did a poll: when did your qualia change as you watched the images? Was it changing every time the altered imaged was flashed onscreen, or did it only change when you became conscious of the change?

A misguided question. There are no qualia produced or associated with phenomena not noticed.

[Sculptor1]

I have been reading Daniel Dennett on the concept of qualia. He suggests that 'philosophers have tied themselves into knots over qualia. They started where anyone would start: with the clearest intuitions about their own minds. Those intuitions, alas, form a mutually self-supporting circle of doctrines, imprisoning their imaginations in the Cartesian Theater. Even though philosophers have discovered the paradoxes inherent in this closed circle of ideas_ that is why the literature gets more and more convoluted, instead of convuluting agreement.'


The idea of qualia was first introduced in philosophy by
CI Lewis in 1929. However, it is a complex area, so I raise it for consideration. To what extent is it useful, or does it blur and fuzz over issues to do with perception and what constitutes reality?

I would imagine that DD has a clever and thoughtful critique, though I have to say, from memory that having seen a YouTUbe of him speking on the matter I was not convinced.
I have seen many on Philosophy discussion pages who mobilise DD to agree with their lack of understanding on the matter but miss his subtlety.
Most concepts tend to get overworked far too much but unless you are specific I can't comment on whether people are "in knots".

One thing positive I can say for sure. The idea that colour is not a quality of reality but a quality of perception is an important lesson that everyone should learn, and take their oh too human perceptions with humility to understand that we cannot truly know the world.

[Sy Borg]

My understanding is that Dennett does not actually believe that qualia is illusory, at least not these days, rather the aim was to stress test the idea.

[Tegularius]

Qualia is nothing more than how one experiences and perceives the variety of things encountered. It's a combination of both inflection, reflection and intellection colluding with each other to create a distinct response as rendered by one's particular mental circuitry. Qualia is simply the sum of our perceptions. The real mystery resides in the process or brain chemistry which creates it.

[GE Morton]

My understanding is that Dennett does not actually believe that qualia is illusory, at least not these days, rather the aim was to stress test the idea.

Yes, he's been ambivalent about that over the course of his career.

[JackDaydream]

@Sculptor1
My own view is that it is likely that each of us perceives the world a little differently. I know that I notice some differences in perception of music or in vision, especially colour brightness according to my mood. When I am low in mood it does seem that my own perception is flatter and dimmer.

I also think that art reveals this too. Of course, people have different degrees of skill in being able to depict people and objects. But it does seem that people have unique perspectives. For example, what may make people gravitate to the pictures of Seurat or Van Gogh may be the way that such artists lead the viewer into a specific way of seeing.

[GE Morton]

Qualia is simply the sum of our perceptions. The real mystery resides in the process or brain chemistry which creates it.

Well, not the sum of our perceptions. The term is a plural, the purpose of which is to put tags on those properties which permit us to distinguish among percepts.

You have to be careful conceiving qualia as "properties," however, for that inevitably provokes the question, "Properties of what?", and thus invites speculations as the substance to which these properties attach. Which then leads to dualism. It is safer to conceive of qualia, not as properties of anything, but as the modes by which percepts are expressed and differentiated in consciousness.

[JackDaydream]

@Sy Borg
The book on Dennett which I quoted from was one of his earliest ones, 'Consciousness Explained'(1991). I was actually more impressed by his writing than I imagined I would be. However, I do plan to try and find out his more recent thinking about qualia too.

[Sy Borg]

@Sy Borg
The book on Dennett which I quoted from was one of his earliest ones, 'Consciousness Explained'(1991). I was actually more impressed by his writing than I imagined I would be. However, I do plan to try and find out his more recent thinking about qualia too.

DD's ideas here may be of interest: https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Qualia

Daniel Dennett identifies four properties which are commonly ascribed to qualia. According to these, qualia are:

- ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.
- intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.
- private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
- directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.

[Tegularius]

Qualia is simply the sum of our perceptions. The real mystery resides in the process or brain chemistry which creates it.

Well, not the sum of our perceptions. The term is a plural, the purpose of which is to put tags on those properties which permit us to distinguish among percepts.

You have to be careful conceiving qualia as "properties," however, for that inevitably provokes the question, "Properties of what?", and thus invites speculations as the substance to which these properties attach. Which then leads to dualism. It is safer to conceive of qualia, not as properties of anything, but as the modes by which percepts are expressed and differentiated in consciousness.

I didn't mention "properties" nor would I describe it as such. I'm also well aware of qualia being plural and meant it as such as the sum of our perceptions, which in this case, has nothing to do with "precepts". In addition, mode, among its many meanings, expresses a way of doing something, in this case how brain chemistry creates the experience of qualia which a malfunctioning one can radically distort.

[GE Morton]

I didn't mention "properties" nor would I describe it as such.

I know; I did in the sentence previous to that. Hence a caution on understanding my own use of that term.

I'm also well aware of qualia being plural and meant it as such as the sum of our perceptions, which in this case, has nothing to do with "precepts".

Percepts, not "precepts." Qualia is a collective term, denoting the plurality of distinguishable qualities of percepts, but I'm not sure in what sense it is a sum of anything. "Sum" has numerical implications which aren't applicable.

In addition, mode, among its many meanings, expresses a way of doing something, in this case how brain chemistry creates the experience of qualia which a malfunctioning one can radically distort.

Yes, "mode" has various meanings. But we can't infer any particular brain processes from qualia or from the differences among them. Perhaps a better term would be "manner" --- qualia are the manner in which sensory signals are manifested in consciousness. They are the forms those signals take when they present themselves to consciousness.

[GE Morton]

@Sy Borg
The book on Dennett which I quoted from was one of his earliest ones, 'Consciousness Explained'(1991). I was actually more impressed by his writing than I imagined I would be. However, I do plan to try and find out his more recent thinking about qualia too.

DD's ideas here may be of interest: https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Qualia

Daniel Dennett identifies four properties which are commonly ascribed to qualia. According to these, qualia are:

- ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.
- intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.
- private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
- directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.

Your link gives a decent summary of Dennett's views. Dennett, however, holds that the properties he (accurately, in my view) lists render the concept useless:

"In a series of thought experiments, which he calls "intuition pumps", he brings qualia into the world of neurosurgery, clinical psychology, and psychological experimentation. His argument attempts to show that, once the concept of qualia is so imported, it turns out that we can either make no use of it in the situation in question, or that the questions posed by the introduction of qualia are unanswerable precisely because of the special properties defined for qualia." (From your link)

And it is probably true that the concept will not be of much use to neurophysiologists, and it is certainly true that many of the questions one may be tempted to ask about qualia will be unanswerable. But that doesn't mean it has NO use, and neither of those failings entail that qualia don't exist.

Dennett makes another mistake when denying that Mary the Color Scientist learns anything new when leaving her black-and-white room:

"He argues that Mary would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the color red. Dennett asserts that if she already truly knew 'everything about color', that knowledge would include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the 'quale' of color. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red, before ever leaving the room."

No, she would NOT know "exactly" what to expect. She would expect, as Dennett says, to experience SOME quale upon seeing red, but not WHAT quale. She couldn't know that, because that knowledge can only be acquired (per Dennett's own definition) by actually experiencing that stimulus. After first seeing something red, she will know how SHE perceives that wavelength of light --- how her brain presents that stimulus to her consciousness.