# Qualia **Domain:** Philosophy of Mind / Consciousness **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Classification:** Phenomenal-Evidence Problem **Maturity:** Foundational Debate **Related:** [[wiki/Consciousness|Consciousness]], [[wiki/Hard Problem of Consciousness|Hard Problem of Consciousness]], [[wiki/Biological Naturalism|Biological Naturalism]] --- ## Definition **Qualia** are the phenomenal characteristics of experience: what pain feels like, what red looks like or how an emotion presents from the first-person point of view. Philosophers disagree about whether qualia are irreducible properties, representational contents, functional states or misleading products of folk introspection. ## Continuity Problem A continuant can report the correct memories, discriminate stimuli and reproduce the source's language about experience without proving that it has any experience—or the same phenomenal character. This is not evidence that qualia are absent. It is an epistemic limit on what behavioral equivalence establishes. ## Decision Consequence The architecture should separate tests of capability, self-report, causal organization and moral-risk indicators. Where suffering is plausible, uncertainty supports precautionary protections. Where identity is claimed, matching reports of qualia strengthen psychological evidence but do not settle numerical continuity. ## Relationships - **Edge Annual Question source relationship:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] preserves the annual-question source corpus from which a proposition-specific quotation is connected to this entry. - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "Conscious machines. Intelligent machines are inevitable — by some measures they are already here. Synthetic consciousness would be a much greater breakthrough, in some ways a more profound one than finding life on other planets. One problem: We don't understand how consciousness works, so recreating it will require learning a lot more about what it means to be both smart and self-aware. Another problem: We don't understand what consciousness is, so it's not clear what "smart" and "self-aware" mean, exactly. Gerald Edelman's brain-based devices are a promising solution. Rather than trying to deconstruct the brain as a computer, they construct neural processing from the bottom up, mimicking the workings of actual neurons. Odds: 50-50." > **— Corey S. Powell**, *2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Synthetic Consciousness Could Surpass Finding Alien Life by Corey S. Powell|Synthetic Consciousness Could Surpass Finding Alien Life by Corey S. Powell]] > "I've been arguing for decades that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways. This leads to a radical idea that I really like: If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it's only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!" > **— Max Tegmark**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Consciousness May Be Substrate-Independent Twice Over by Max Tegmark|Consciousness May Be Substrate-Independent Twice Over by Max Tegmark]] > "Note that panpsychism needn't say that universe is just one mind. We can also say that each object has an individual mind. One way to visualize the distinction between the many minds and the one mind is to think of the world as a stained glass window with light shining through each pane. The world's physical structures break the undivided cosmic mind into a myriad of small minds, one in each object." > **— Rudy Rucker**, *2006, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Every Object May Have a Mind by Rudy Rucker|Every Object May Have a Mind by Rudy Rucker]] > "Sorting is the sort of thing digital computers do. Now imagine sorting a bigger & bigger & bigger deck; can you see consciousness emerging at some point, when you sort a large enough batch? Nope. (And the inevitable answer to the inevitable first objection: but neurons only do simple signal transmission; can you imagine consciousness emerging out of that? An irrelevant question. The fact that lots of neurons make a mind has no bearing on the question of whether lots of anything else make a mind. I can't imagine being a neuron, but I can imagine executing machine instructions. No mind emerges no matter how many of those instructions I carry out.)" > **— David Gelernter**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Software Alone Cannot Make a Mind by David Gelernter|Software Alone Cannot Make a Mind by David Gelernter]] > "The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can't see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind—much like the visible aspect of the universe—is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable." > **— Joel Gold**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/The Unconscious Has the Greatest Psychic Gravity by Joel Gold|The Unconscious Has the Greatest Psychic Gravity by Joel Gold]] > "A self-model is the inner representation some information-processing systems have of themselves as a whole. A representation is phenomenally transparent, if it a) is conscious and b) cannot be experienced as a representation. Therefore, transparent representations create the phenomenology of naïve realism, the robust and irrevocable sense that you are directly and immediately perceiving something which must be real. Now apply the second concept to the first: A "transparent self-model", necessarily, creates the realistic conscious experience of selfhood, of being directly and immediately in touch with oneself as a whole." > **— Thomas Metzinger**, *2011, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?”* [[reminders/Identity/The Self May Be a Transparent Model by Thomas Metzinger|The Self May Be a Transparent Model by Thomas Metzinger]] > “Why is our western civilization so reluctant to accept subjective, first-hand experience as fundamental data? In close association: why the reluctance to consider one's experience as a realm to be explored with a discipline just as rigorous as the one invented by science for material phenomena?” > **— Francisco Varela**, *1998, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT QUESTIONS ARE YOU ASKING YOURSELF?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Subjective Experience Should Be Treated as Fundamental Data by Francisco Varela|Subjective Experience Should Be Treated as Fundamental Data by Francisco Varela]] > “Is there a way for humans to directly experience what it’s like to be another entity?” > **— Ian Bogost**, *2018 Edge Annual Question, question* [[reminders/Consciousness/Can We Directly Experience the Mind of Another Entity by Ian Bogost|Can We Directly Experience the Mind of Another Entity by Ian Bogost]] > “Are the ways qualia relate to computation, creativity to free will, risk to probability, morality to epistemology, all the same question?” > **— David Deutsch**, *2018 Edge Annual Question, question* [[reminders/Consciousness/Do Qualia Computation Creativity and Free Will Share a Problem by David Deutsch|Do Qualia Computation Creativity and Free Will Share a Problem by David Deutsch]] ## Sources - [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Qualia](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/) - Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” *Philosophical Review* 83 (1974). ## See Also [[wiki/Substrate-Neutral Moral Patienthood|Substrate-Neutral Moral Patienthood]] · [[wiki/State Sufficiency Problem|State Sufficiency Problem]] · [[wiki/Verification of Continuity Claims|Verification of Continuity Claims]]