Questions tagged [qualia]
Qualia refers to the phenomenal character of subjective experience.
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Are there any philosophers who clearly define the word "consciousness" in their arguments?
My view of consciousness lies somewhere in the illusionist camp, i.e. more or less with the likes of Daniel Dennett. However, while reading through the literature, I am frustrated by the fact that it ...
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Does color mixing happen in the phenomenal mind or in the noumenal mind?
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I have been thinking about Qualia (in terms of "color") and the inverted color spectrum, and trying to figure out what mathematical functions are possible for shuffling the color ...
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Are there philosophers who argue that mental states are in a many-to-one relationship to physical states?
The following is a philosophical position that I find quite appealing, and I'm wondering if there are any philosophers who actively argue for it, i.e. does the following view have a name?
We start by ...
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Are Frege's "ideas" just qualia?
By Frege, there's a reference, sense and idea. I understand about reference and sense, but not about idea. Is it something like a quale?
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Location of Soul
Colloquially, we often have a notion that souls are like some sort of ghosts or "cloud inside a bottle" that leave body after death.
I feel the notion of soul in a bit different way. I feel ...
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Exploring Methods for Articulating the Ineffable Nature of Emotions: Philosophical Insights Needed
In the realm of human experience, both emotions and colors possess an ineffable quality, challenging our ability to fully articulate them through language. This resemblance highlights a fundamental ...
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Under reductive materialism, could the same brain state evoke distinct conscious experiences (qualia) in two universes within a multiverse?
For the sake of discussion, let's grant the validity of reductive materialism. Moreover, let's entertain the notion that our universe is just one among an infinite (or significantly vast) number of ...
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Does chat-gpt have an unconscious? [closed]
Does chat-gpt have an unconscious? Do you need qualia (which I feel chat-gpt lacks, though in reality I don't know what it is, rather than what it outputs) to have an unconscious, or just the capacity ...
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What is It Like to Be a Bat?
This year half a century has passed since Thomas Nagel published his paper “What is It Like to Be a Bat?”, see here.
This is a seminal paper. It reaches out far beyond most discussions on the problem ...
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Illusionists about qualia: how?
I understand that the belief in qualia may be based on a sensual illusion, but I can't get my head around illusionism. Obviously, illusionists deny that we experience any illusion, we just believe (or ...
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How aren't Qualia and Experience the same thing (examples.)
I'm both, trying to find if this thought process is valid (reach correct conclusions in the questions) and also how are the standard interpretations different (which it seems they are.)
Definitions
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How do we know if our interpretation of our raw conscious experiences is accurate?
X is a conscious agent. X has the ability to have raw subjective conscious experiences, aka qualia. But beyond merely experiencing qualia, X also has the ability to interpret their qualia, by ...
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Do qualia cause effects, and if so, do these effects offer survival advantages from an evolutionary standpoint?
Can consciousness (qualia) cause detectable and measurable effects? For example, would we able to tell the difference between a robot that experiences qualia vs. a robot that doesn't, by detecting the ...
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Are qualia state variables of the mind, or input variables to the mind?
Qualia - the elements of conscious experience - are associated with sensory information, most identifiably with what we see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. This is information "coming in" to ...
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How plausible is it that every decohered entity has qualia, which merge into functional units?
I only say decohered because the quantum realm doesn't seem to have the local reality to have locally functional qualia, but maybe it has more diffuse probabilistic qualia? Then again in our macro ...
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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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