Qualia

Qualia -- "raw feels", the redness of red, the taste of the world -- have been the real basis for the idea of "mind" through the whole of the modern era (as opposed to the conceptually easier notion of intelligence). It's qualia that philosophers have repeatedly either foundered upon or clung to as irreducible evidence of the radical, ontological split between the mental and the physical. It's not hard to imagine, for example, even something as simple as a worm having some sort of "feeling", however rudimentary -- but it's nearly impossible to imagine even the most sophisticated silicon-based machine having any more feeling than a brick.

Notice, though, that the problem isn't just with machines, but with neuronal implementations of mind as well: just as we can't find smell or sound as we examine circuits and logic-gates, so we seem to miss colours or textures as we dissect the axons and dendrites of the brain. It's as though there's a whole other level that we seem unable to access, and this has lead to weak, puzzled notions of some sort of superfluous, "epiphenomenal" parallel functioning, whereby mental events simply run in tandem with brain events. (And then into further mystifications surrounding the "self" as some sort of purely mental entity trapped inside a causal mechanism, and able to exercise "free will", if at all, only by taking advantage of some quantum loophole, etc.)

Looked at in another way, though, it's difficult to know what we really expected to find -- some kind of personal theater in the brain? How, other than through access to qualitative difference, would the phenomenon of attention be possible at all? Any system in which this phenomenon can be manifested, regardless of how it's made or what it's made of, necessarily must have access to such differences, or "qualia".

So the intuition that a worm may have feeling but a super-computer may not isn't necessarily wrong, though it is in the end misleading. The point, simply, is that "feeling" doesn't arise from complexity per se (and even less from some mysterious properties of carbon chemistry or quantum physics), but from the particular two-part structure of world and actor outlined above -- a worm may very well possess such a structure, a computer may very well not. But for any such structure, regardless of substrate, qualia are an inescapable feature. In this sense, qualia are functional, not epiphenomenal, and a part of the same physical world as bricks, neurons, and transistors. The "mental" is simply a structural level within a particular kind of physical structure.

UPDATE Jan 20/04:

This section is not well explained. See the entry above, on "Qualia: primordial information tokens" for a more fleshed-out argument for the logical necessity of qualia to a system like consciousness.

Further UPDATE Feb 4/04:

Still more explanation of the "hard problem", the central mystery, that everyday enigma -- qualia: Qualia again ("blue is not a number"), The privacy of consciousness, and Bracketing qualia. But really much of the blog so far is taken up with this stubbornly resistant issue, in one way or another.