What is qualia you ask? Well, let us explain with this thought experiment (known as Mary's room) as qualia can only seem to be described in analogy (yet it's so intuitive, like breathing):
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?
She will learn to make emotional connections to these things. Its like what if you or I were able to go into space? we all know the basic physics and everything, but how would it effect us emotionally, and how would it make us think different about the way we see space. It would give us a sense of it feeling so real, becasue for all we know, space could just be some propoganda given to us by the govt, we havent experienced it yet haha.
But she probably wouldnt learn any factual information.
Knowledge of color is different from experience of color. You could read about Disney World your entire life and it still won't be anything compared to the experience of actually being there. Factoids and tidbits of information may or may not be acquired experience, but a different perspective certainly is.
You all gave good answers, especially the one about experience. But the most appropriate answer is that Mary learned what color "looked like". Yes, this would be factual information. You can know all you want about the visible EM spectrum but how do frequencies correlate to the "looks" of color? Qualia isn't just in color by the way. It's in all experiences. Smell, taste, sound, touch, emotion, intuition, ect. The qualities of experience (hence "qualia"). These things don't seem to be qualitative and computable while everything that we know about the world does. How can this be? Where does this qualia come from?
EDIT: Also, quantity is a type of quality. But qualia does not refer to the quantity subset. It refers to everything outside of this subset but still within the quality set.
This thought experiment is something everyone can relate to. Much of our thinking is done metaphorically - I smell something bad and say "it smells like shit" but it doesn't actually smell just like shit. There is no way to describe the smell of something in words, or to transmit my experience of it to you, so you would have to experience the smell for yourself and think "that's what such-and-such smells like". Our way of communicating, through metaphor and symbolism that represents the actual qualia is indicative of the limitations of "knowledge of" as opposed to "experience of". Things must be compared to our experiences of other things in order to really get a sense of them.
I find it interesting that the experience of color (and I'm sure any other qualia) is very much influenced by non-experiential thought. There was a study done about nail polish color that Sheena Iyengar talks about that I thought was amusing:
Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Sheena, there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book. But by now it's evident to everyone in this room. You're blind. And I guess one of the questions on everybody's mind is: How does that influence your study of choosing, because that's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on?
Sheena Iyengar: Well, it's funny that you should ask that, because one of the things that's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices. And as you just mentioned, there's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days. Yeah, I -- as you would expect -- get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on, because I have to rely on what other people suggest. And I can't decide. And so one time I was in a beauty salon, and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink. And one was called "Ballet Slippers." And the other one was "Adorable." (Laughter) And so I asked these two ladies. And the one lady told me, "Well, you should definitely wear 'Ballet Slippers.'" "Well, what does it look like?" "Well, it's a very elegant shade of pink." "Okay, great." The other lady tells me to wear "Adorable." "What does it look like?" "It's a glamorous shade of pink." And so I asked them, "Well, how do I tell them apart? What's different about them?" And they said, "Well, one is elegant, the other one's glamorous." Okay, we got that. And the only thing they had consensus on: well, if I could see them, I would clearly be able to tell them apart.
(Laughter)
And what I wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the contents of the color. So I decided to do a little experiment. So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory, and I stripped the labels off. And I brought women into the laboratory, and I asked them, "Which one would you pick?" 50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick, of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles. (Laughter) (Applause) At which point you start to wonder who the trick's really played on. Now of the women that could tell them apart, when the labels were off, they picked "Adorable," and when the labels were on they picked "Ballet Slippers." So as far as I can tell, a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different
Like in a lot of cognitive and neuroscience, we have to learn about it from people who lack something - in this case, someone who is blind (or in the original thought experiment, someone who has been kept from experiencing these things). To sighted people we would think that a blind person is missing a very fundamental aspect of reality - and it often makes me wonder what a dream would be like for someone who is born blind. Perhaps us sighted people are missing a fundamental aspect of what the world's qualia would be without the influence of vision - there is no way to really know what a dream would be like for a person born blind, or what the experience of a room would be like for someone who can't and never has seen it.
It also raises the question, for me, of what sort of reality we could be missing. Are there things in this reality that are able to be sensed, yet we do not have the 'tools' for sensing them? Imagine acquiring another way to sense our universe beyond the five that we have, and how that might change our experience of reality (there's really no way to imagine it without actually experiencing it).
But, to answer the OP "where does qualia come from?" I think the question is rather Mu. I would say qualia is a necessary aspect of an awareness of our surroundings. The human brain is not a computer, it's not computing data and storing it as information about the measurements and parameters of an object (we don't experience red as being '750 nanometer wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation'). Qualia is how we are aware of a phenomenon - I would argue that if a computer were able to become aware, it would gain qualia of it's surroundings, because knowledge or information about a phenomenon is not an awareness of it.
This thought experiment is something everyone can relate to. Much of our thinking is done metaphorically - I smell something bad and say "it smells like shit" but it doesn't actually smell just like shit. There is no way to describe the smell of something in words, or to transmit my experience of it to you, so you would have to experience the smell for yourself and think "that's what such-and-such smells like". Our way of communicating, through metaphor and symbolism that represents the actual qualia is indicative of the limitations of "knowledge of" as opposed to "experience of". Things must be compared to our experiences of other things in order to really get a sense of them.
I find it interesting that the experience of color (and I'm sure any other qualia) is very much influenced by non-experiential thought. There was a study done about nail polish color that Sheena Iyengar talks about that I thought was amusing:
Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Sheena, there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book. But by now it's evident to everyone in this room. You're blind. And I guess one of the questions on everybody's mind is: How does that influence your study of choosing, because that's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on?
Sheena Iyengar: Well, it's funny that you should ask that, because one of the things that's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices. And as you just mentioned, there's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days. Yeah, I -- as you would expect -- get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on, because I have to rely on what other people suggest. And I can't decide. And so one time I was in a beauty salon, and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink. And one was called "Ballet Slippers." And the other one was "Adorable." (Laughter) And so I asked these two ladies. And the one lady told me, "Well, you should definitely wear 'Ballet Slippers.'" "Well, what does it look like?" "Well, it's a very elegant shade of pink." "Okay, great." The other lady tells me to wear "Adorable." "What does it look like?" "It's a glamorous shade of pink." And so I asked them, "Well, how do I tell them apart? What's different about them?" And they said, "Well, one is elegant, the other one's glamorous." Okay, we got that. And the only thing they had consensus on: well, if I could see them, I would clearly be able to tell them apart.
(Laughter)
And what I wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the contents of the color. So I decided to do a little experiment. So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory, and I stripped the labels off. And I brought women into the laboratory, and I asked them, "Which one would you pick?" 50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick, of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles. (Laughter) (Applause) At which point you start to wonder who the trick's really played on. Now of the women that could tell them apart, when the labels were off, they picked "Adorable," and when the labels were on they picked "Ballet Slippers." So as far as I can tell, a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different
Like in a lot of cognitive and neuroscience, we have to learn about it from people who lack something - in this case, someone who is blind (or in the original thought experiment, someone who has been kept from experiencing these things). To sighted people we would think that a blind person is missing a very fundamental aspect of reality - and it often makes me wonder what a dream would be like for someone who is born blind. Perhaps us sighted people are missing a fundamental aspect of what the world's qualia would be without the influence of vision - there is no way to really know what a dream would be like for a person born blind, or what the experience of a room would be like for someone who can't and never has seen it.
It also raises the question, for me, of what sort of reality we could be missing. Are there things in this reality that are able to be sensed, yet we do not have the 'tools' for sensing them? Imagine acquiring another way to sense our universe beyond the five that we have, and how that might change our experience of reality (there's really no way to imagine it without actually experiencing it).
But, to answer the OP "where does qualia come from?" I think the question is rather Mu. I would say qualia is a necessary aspect of an awareness of our surroundings. The human brain is not a computer, it's not computing data and storing it as information about the measurements and parameters of an object (we don't experience red as being '750 nanometer wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation'). Qualia is how we are aware of a phenomenon - I would argue that if a computer were able to become aware, it would gain qualia of it's surroundings, because knowledge or information about a phenomenon is not an awareness of it.
How can the question be Mu just because qualia is a necessary aspect of awareness? Why is redness red rather than blue? True, we don't experience red asbeing'750 nanometer wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. But that doesn't mean that we couldn't experience it as such. Why should we experience it at all? Wavelength gives us plenty information to distinguish a certain type of light. I somewhat agree with you in that I think qualia are emergent properties of the brain (though I don't know how specifically) but I don't think qualia are necessary (and especially that our qualia be the way they be). Even if qualia is just an illusion: how is it encoded into our electrochemical signals? How can I get the smell of a rose out of it?
Because qualia is awareness. Different qualia are how we distinguish this as being different from that. Red is red rather than blue because if the experience of blue represented what red represents for us now, we'd call it red. As far as I can tell, what the actual experience of 'electromagnetic ratiation at 750 nanometers' is arbitrary. All it needs to do is distinguish it from electromagnetic radiation of other wavelengths.
True, we don't experience red asbeing'750 nanometer wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. But that doesn't mean that we couldn't experience it as such.
Information is not experience. I don't think that something could be experienced as the actual phenomena of the thing that it is without you actually becoming the phenomenon that it is which would necessarily cause you to cease being aware. Awareness is the 'ability' to represent phenomena in a symbolic, experiential way. Our sentient experience is an experience of being a singularity of sorts - we see things from one single point in space at one single point in time. It would be impossible to experience phenomena as the totality that they are from an objective point of view.
Why should we experience? That's sort of a loaded question. As an absurdist, I think why is a useless question in metaphysics, as it implies purpose or intent. I can ask why I do certain things, because there are reasons. How can I ask why things are the way they are if I don't think there is any specific reason for it, that there was no intention for things to be this way?
Wavelength gives us plenty information to distinguish a certain type of light.
How would you see wavelength as wavelength? We can't see waves of light in the first place (and even if we could, we are not at the correct size scale for most of them). We would have to see electromagnetic radiation as some sort of epiphenomenon of their waves (the way an object doesn't look like a collection of electrons, protons, and neutrons, but as the epiphenomenon of the object we perceive). Then, we would need to distinguish this epiphenomenon from the epiphenomenon of a different wavelength. That we experience as color.
The same could be said for why this molecule smells like this and that molecule smells like that. Or why this frequency of atmospheric vibration sounds like this and that frequency of vibration sounds like that. etc.
I somewhat agree with you in that I think qualia are emergent properties of the brain (though I don't know how specifically) but I don't think qualia are necessary (and especially that our qualia be the way they be).
I agree, I don't think qualia would have to be the way that we experience it now. I think evolution, the sloppy, opportunistic process that it is has given us the qualia that our ancestors needed to survive. Our experience of qualia is because that's what worked best. It's too bad we can't change that around (yet) to experience how things could be if we experienced things differently, but that's the cards we were dealt.
As far as qualia being emergent properties, I don't have time to go into that adequately. I often wonder, though, if a bee colony or ant swarm has any sort of emergent 'experience' as an epiphenomenon. They use similar signaling to a brain (pheromone chemicals as opposed to neurotransmitter chemicals). In a way, a bee colony or ant colony is a simplified version of a brain, and can act as a single unit the way a brain can. With enough complexity, would experience emerge out of that?
Even if qualia is just an illusion: how is it encoded into our electrochemical signals? How can I get the smell of a rose out of it?
The electrochemical signals are not encoded with any qualia. The interactions of a complex recursive network is where qualia 'arise'. I recommend Godel, Escher, Bach to learn more about this, but I have to go to class now and don't have time to get much into it.
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. Mary will have fun.
