Qualia

H Beckman, BY Giang, J Qualia. Preparation and detection of derivatives of temik and its metabolites as residues. J Agric Food Chem 17 70-74, 1969. 

Binding via synchronicity occurs in milliseconds to seconds. Binding via chemical modulation occurs in minutes to hours. We need both, and we must make the best of both until we understand the mother of all questions how does the synchronous and chemically coherent activation of brain cells result in conscious experience in the first place How, after all, is the nervous system involved in subjective experience - what the philosophers call qualia - and what David Chalmers dubs the hard problem Chalmers asserts that neuroscience has not yet, and may never, solve the hard problem. If you love a mystery, and want to avoid the implications of what neuroscience is saying, you have a way out here. Neuroscientists are no more believable than anyone who waves his hands and says And then a miracle happens . The brain is a colony of neurons it thinks and therefore it is. 

I myself believe that even the hard problem, the problem of qualia, and the mind-body problem itself, are effectively solved once we... 

If emotions are induced in subjects by injecting them with procaine, they report "a range of affective experiences, including euphoria, sadness, fear and anxiety. .. (These) procaine-induced experiences seem related to the essential qualia of some emotional states such as euphoria or fear. Subjects are able to unambiguously name their experience, yet, they cannot report cognitions or environmental clues that could have evoked this affect or even justify its experience a posteriori"2 ... 

It does not initially seem that those questions do have positive answers. Phenomenally speaking, a smell is just a modification of our consciousness, a qualitative condition or event in us. Even if we infer the presence of natural gas from the characteristic foul and pungent smell, the smell does not itself present natural gas as its own intentional object. We infer gas only because we already know by induction that that smell is typically produced by ambient natural gas. (We also know that the smell is not always produced by gas—indeed, strictly it is never produced by pure natural gas itself, because it is actually given off by an adulterant manufactured by a chemical company.) A smell is just a quale, whether we take the quale strictly to be a first-order property of a phenomenal individual or an "adverbial" modification of an event or state of sensing. Conventional wisdom has it that qualia merely linger on uselessly in the mind, and do not represent. 

Villareal TA, Hanson S, Qualia S, Jester ELF, Granade HR, Dickey RW. Petroleum production platforms as sites for the expansion of ciguatera in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico. Harmful Algae 253-259, 2006. 

When referring to Kim as a reductionsit, I do not mean to imply that Kim thinks that everything mental can be reduced to the physical. Kim clearly thinks that any mental properties, if they are to be scientifically respectable causal properties, must be functionally reduced to their underlying physical realization base. Kim does, however, seem to have doubts about whether things like qualia can be reduced. Thus, Kim seems to hold that qualia may be real in some sense of the word, but qualia are probably not functionally reducible and therefore caimot be causal. See e.g. Kim 1998 ch. 4 and 2005 ch. 6. 

This trivial sort of definition in terms of causal role could arguably be made for qualia and other qualitative states like pain. For reasons that are beyond the scope of this... 

First of all, I have intentionally left out any sort of discussion of qualia. I have not discussed how either my view or Kim s view can account for qualia I will say briefly that Kim s view is that, like other mental properties, qualia are not context dependent. However, unlike other mental properties, he sees qualia as irreducible and therefore epiphenomenal. I think this is a serious weakness, because it seems to me that the qualitative aspects of our mental states do have a causal role to play. If I want to wear a red shirt today, and I choose this shirt because I like the look of red, then it seems that my qualitative experience of the redness of the shirt has to play some sort of causal role... 

Thus, I think that any successful theory of mind has to try to find a way to make qualia causal. However, I will not argue further for this point, nor will I attempt to show that my theory can succeed in this endeavor. I will say that contrary what Kim and many others hold, my intuition is that qualia can be both context dependent and causal, just like many other mental properties. However, it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to try to develop such a theory, so I leave this project for another time. 

Here is a bit of terminology and some abbreviations that are useful. A mental property, M-property, is any property that corresponds to a mental predicate, that is, an intentional, or a qualia predicate is thinking about soup, feels dizzy. An MG-property is a mental property that is a G-property. A P-property is any property that is picked out by a kind predicate of a natural science. The natural sciences include physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, but not intentional/consciousness psychology. Since a disjunction of kind predicates is not necessarily a kind... 

Chalmers (1996) suggests that qualia are connected by law to physical systems and are epiphenomenal. 

In any case, for present purposes, the point to underscore once again is just that the filler-functionalist implementation of the notion of realization is unavailable to the NRP theorist. For when combined with the claim of psychophysical realization, it entails that there are psychophysical identities. It thus offers no alternative to Kims position. In fact, it is his account of how there could be psychophysical property identities. Kim seems to be a filler-functionalist for all mental properties save qualia. 

Unlike Kim, however, I do not think that the impossibility of either kind of functionalization entails that qualia are not physical properties. I think that if we were to find strict neuroscientific nomological correlates of qualia, then we would be justified in holding that qualia are identical with their neuroscientific correlates by an inference to the best explanation (McLaughlin, 2001, 2010, 2011). Kim (2005) has challenged the idea that identities can be inferred by inference to the best explanation for a response, see McLaughlin (2010, 2011). 

Judging from his (2005), Kim might agree about his earlier view. In the 2005 book, he poses the issue of reducibility starkly, saying, That a property is functionalizable, that is, it can be defined in terms of causal role -is necessary and sufficient for functional reducibility. It is only when we want to claim that the property has been reduced... that we need to have identified its physical realizer (p. 165). He then goes on to pose the question of whether mental properties are functionalizable. The answer... is yes and no. No for qualitative characters of experience, or qualia , and yes, or probably yes, for the rest (p. 165). No for qualitative characters of experience because of inverted-spectrum issues — it is metaphysically possible for functionally identical states to be different in qualitative character. The overall argument is that reductive physicalism fails for qualia — because they don t fit Kim s picture of reductive physicalism. However, there is another picture of reductive physicalism that has some merit, to which I turn in the next section. 

Many suppose that it is conceivable that there be a realization of human functional organization that is mentally different from ours, for example, inverted or absent qualia. The argument just given provides a case for multiple realization of even the lowest level of physics. 

Not all philosophers think this. Some (including myself — see Dretske, 1995) have a representational vievi of sensations that identifies their experienced quality (qualia) with representational (intentional) properties and, thus, just like beliefs, sensations turn out to be extrinsic or relational properties of internal states see Harman (1990), Lycan (1987,1990), Tye (1994,1995)-... 

I will argue for an account of awareness of qualia that promises to bring qualia into the physical fold. More particularly, I will present and defend a version of the view that has come to be called representationalism. 1 will focus on the task of developing a representationalist theory of visual awareness, but it will be evident, I think, that the theory can be generalized so as to apply to experiential awareness of other kinds as well. After explaining this theory of visual awareness, I will urge that it provides a satisfactory answer to the metaphysical problems that qualia pose. 1 will then discuss the question of where exactly qualia are to be located within our catalogue of physical properties. 

In order to charactetize this third category of qualia adequately, it is necessary to distinguish between two senses of the terms that we use to describe appearances. I focus here on looks since I am concerned primarily with visual qualia in the present chapter, but my remarks apply, mutatis mutandis, to seems, appears, and a number of other appearance words. 

Putting the distinction between these two senses of looks to use, we can define visual qualia as characteristics that we are aware of in virtue of the ways that objects lookp to us. (Here and hereafter, I use looksp to represent the phenomenological sense of looks. ) In general, perceptual qualia can be defined as the characteristics we are aware of in virtue of the ways in which objects appear to us, where appear is used in its phenomenological sense. 

These perceptions concerning our awareness of qualia would by themselves provide a sufficient reason for viewing qualia as special, but we are also strongly inclined to suppose that qualia have unusual metaphysical properties independently of our awareness. 

We view qualia as intrinsic properties - as properties that things have independently of their relations to other things. Also, we are inclined to think that there is something metaphysically fundamental about qualia when qualia are not themselves simple and unanalyzable, we are inclined... 

Here, then, is a list of properties that we conceive of qualia as possessing. Now we must ask if qualia really do have these properties, can they be identified with or otherwise reduced to physical properties of any kind Reflection indicates that the answer should be negative. 

Now if there were an appearance/ reality distinction associated with visual qualia, we could simply say that we have trouble locating C in the physical world because the appearance it presents to us fails to reveal its true nature. That is, we could explain away the apparent difference between C and all physical characteristics. Unfortunately, however, it seems inappropriate to distinguish between C as it appears to us and C as it is in itself. C is the ostensibly qualitative characteristic that is affiliated with facts of the form V looksp yellow to y. Since there is no appearance/reality distinction that is associated with these facts, how could there be an appearance/reality distinction that is associated with C ... 

Alas, these reflections seem to lead inexorably to the conclusion that there is an unbridgeable gulf between qualia and the physical world. 

Here, then, is the crux of the problem that qualia present to us. We feel obliged to embrace a form of qualia realism. After all, it seems that we are aware of qualia. But there is nothing in the physical world that answers to our conception of qualia. Hence, qualia cannot be physical characteristics. The physical world does not exhaust reality. In Jaegwon Kim s apt phrase, there is a mental residue (Kim, 2005, p. 170). 

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