Questions tagged [qualia]
Qualia refers to the phenomenal character of subjective experience.
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Along the lines of the concept of the inverted spectrum, can it be that musical pitch perception varies as well in an analogous fashion?
Imagine hearing your favorite song from the point of view of a dog. Dogs perceive all sounds as being at a far lower pitch than we do. If you could hear what you sound like to a dog you'd find that ...
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How serious are believers in the private language argument?
From time to time I come across people who endorse Wittgenstein's notion that language is a fundamentally public activity, and that a private language would be meaningless.
I always feel somewhat ...
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How exactly does representational theory of mind help resolve the materialist problem of a qualia without physical origin?
I was reading this stanford entry and I can't understand how representationalism helps overcome the problem of a sensory quality without external origin that otherwise undermines belief in materialism....
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Philosophy of time and intuitions about qualia being dependent on a distinguished present moment
When I’ve attempted to research philosophy of time I find that a lot of the discussion seems to be about how to give a logical analysis of tenses in language, but relatively little of it seems to pay ...
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Inverted spatial qualia: a detectable example?
The SEP article on inverted qualia discusses this mostly as follows:
One of [Frege's] theses in The Foundations of Arithmetic is that arithmetic is “objective”, which he explains as follows:
What is ...
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What if vagueness were non-conceptual?
Thus the classical picture, informed by a connection between concepts and sets present in the very word “classify”, sees the theoretical resources of set theory as the proper instruments for ...
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Assuming philosophical zombies are possible, could one zombie have an inverted spectrum while the rest do not?
Philosophical zombies by definition (See Chalmers: https://consc.net/zombies-on-the-web/) lack qualia, while being normal human beings in every other way. Like normal humans, zombies make utterances ...
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Would the alleged nonexistence of qualia imply that it is meaningless to say that what I call "red" could be what you call "blue"?
This question is similar to (and following on from) but significantly different from this question: Who, if anyone did say it, was the first to say that because no qualia exist it is meaningless to ...
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Are sensations mind dependent?
Since Galileo, and continuing through Descartes and Locke, is the assertion that sense qualities only exist in the mind or the soul of perceivers and are not really out in the world. Berkeley also ...
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Why do people hide the assumption contained in the philosophical zombies question/idea?
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article called "Zombies" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ makes no mention of an assumption that seems to be hidden in the famous ...
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Who, if anyone did say it, was the first to say that because no qualia exist it is meaningless to say what I call "red" could be what you call "blue"?
There's a famous question that asks whether two people who agree that they are seeing a red object might be seeing (in their respective subjective experiences) different colors. For example, one is ...
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Can a Philosophical Zombie realize that itself has no Qualia?
So, ok, it's by definition impossible for an outsider to spot a philosophical zombie, but could a philosophical zombie introspectively look inside itself and realize that it has no qualia?
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Is Mathematics a form of experience?
When someone experiences the mental clarity of 2 + 2 = 4, is this a form of experience similar to let's say, seeing red, or the sour taste of a pickle.
On the one hand it seems like it is a form of ...
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How can visual and other sensory information be transmitted by genes?
As we learned from those viral videos –look up “cat cucumber” if you haven’t seen them–, cats seem to be hard-wired to be scared of cucumbers and other objects that resemble snakes.
Behavioural ...
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‘Libet’s delay’ and the philosophy of mind and free will
If you are not familiar with Libet delay and the neuroscience of free will, you can read it below. It seems philosophers are interested in the topic since it relates to the philosophical notions of ...
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