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Synesthesia
Published in Alexander R. Toftness, Incredible Consequences of Brain Injury, 2023
Before we can talk about synesthesia, we need to discuss qualia. Qualia are conscious experiences that a person has, such as seeing the color red, or feeling the rough texture of sandpaper on their fingertips. To someone who experiences them, they are familiar and obvious, but they are utterly impossible to describe to someone who cannot experience them. For example, imagine trying to describe the qualia of seeing the colors red and blue to someone who has never been able to see. You literally cannot do it because colors are concepts in your brain that you generate as part of your conscious experience of the world—nobody has access to your specific experience of colors except for you (see Achromatopsia). In people with synesthesia, the qualia that their brains create are even more unique because they contain extra information.
Syntax, Semantics and Qualia in Consciousness
Published in Max R. Bennett, The Idea of Consciousness, 2020
Neuroscience may have something to say about qualia. The neocortex contains different areas each specialized for dealing with different senses such as vision, audition and touch, as well as with distinguishing the sounds for different words (Wernicke’s area) and with many other processes. There is some evidence to suggest that memories associated with a particular sensory modality are eventually stored in areas of the neocortex that are closely associated with that modality. For example, memory for a particular face is stored in the inferior temporal lobe, the area of the neocortex concerned with visually identifying objects. The possibility arises then that the qualia associated with your mother, such as her complexion, the sound of her voice and the smell of her perfume, are stored respectively in the visual cortex, the auditory cortex and the olfactory cortex. The many other qualia with which you identify your mother would likewise be stored in the appropriate part of the cortex, depending on the modality involved. In this way different components of the immense number of experiences you have participated in with her would be maintained in a distributed set of modules throughout the cortex. Your feelings and sensations about your mother would then require that these modules be activated in parallel. What the mechanism is for such activation and, more importantly, how such a distributed system could give rise to the holistic experience of a set of ‘mother’ qualia, is considered in the next chapter.
Painfulness, suffering, and consciousness
Published in David Bain, Michael Brady, Jennifer Corns, Philosophy of Suffering, 2019
When pain is conscious one normally knows one is in pain, and this knowledge comes from ‘introspection’, a form of attention to one’s experiential state as such, providing non-inferential knowledge. That is why the default view is that s-pain and painfulness are qualia: for what we feel and what we attend to in introspection are kinds and configurations of qualitative character. By ‘qualia’, or ‘qualitative character’, I mean those properties that underwrite the resemblances and differences among conscious experiences, and which supply ‘what it is like’ to have such experiences. When asked what an experience is like we advert to the qualia of which we are aware. For instance, tasting black tea on its own is a type-different experience to tasting it mixed with bergamot. Feeling anger is a type-different experience to feeling desire. Arguably, consciously thinking Mick Jagger is still cool is a type-different experience to thinking that the Eiffel tower stands in Paris (see Pitt’s argument below). In each case, the qualia are different. The last two cases, of emotions and thoughts, are important: it is often taken, and this seems especially so in the debate around pain, that qualia are ‘blank’ feels, contentless in a certain sense. But in the case of emotions it seems quite obvious that: (i) emotional states have content, e.g. they represent the subject or world as thus-and-so (empty and washed out, in depression); and (ii) emotional states carry this content by means of their qualitative feel. It is with this enriched—I would say realistic—notion of qualia that I operate.
An Exploration of Moral Relevance and the Prospect of Artificial Consciousness
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2023
The second level of qualia is perception, or the ability to apply varying forms of analysis or rules to the data which allows it to be sensibly interpreted. This transition from sense to perception occurs when we see certain visual patterns and infer that there is a certain three-dimensional object. However, perceptions do not necessarily equate to reality. A person may think they are looking at a physical object when in fact they may be observing an optical illusion. When an AI system uses rules or principles to draw conclusions from data, it can be said to perceive that data, by virtue of whatever heuristic has been applied. This process of being able to radically simplify huge amounts of information by sorting into groups known as clusters functions in a similar way to that in which humans minds conceptually seem to work when seeking to make sense of the world.
The Prospects of Artificial Consciousness: Ethical Dimensions and Concerns
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2023
There has been a complex and multifaceted philosophical discussion around consciousness, particularly around the question of what makes a mental state a conscious mental state. In this debate, various components have been stressed: Accordingly, being conscious is having subjective experiences, or feeling emotions. Conscious mental states involve an internal perspective. They have been characterized as having qualitative properties or “qualia,” i.e., experienced properties of conscious states. Phenomenal consciousness relates to the subjective qualities of experiences, sensations, or emotions. It has been characterized as what it is like to be in a conscious mental state. In contrast to phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness relates to the extent to which information is available to and accessible by the organism. In the philosophical debate on consciousness, several authors have stressed the co-called “Hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers 1996), i.e., the currently unresolved question of how physical systems can have phenomenal experiences (Nagel 1974; Block 1995; Dennett 1991, 1996; Chalmers 1996, 2010).
Gender Is a Complex Number and the Case for Trans Phantoms
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2022
Others can perceive our gender in only two of its three manifestations: the shape of the body (the doctor declares the gender of a newborn) and the embodiment of that body (the person’s behavior). The third and possibly the most important manifestation is the qualia of gender. Qualia is the essence of subjective experience of sense perception, a concept borrowed from philosophy. The qualia of gender are personal and unknowable exteroceptively by another person. They are the subjective elements of what make up gender identity: foundational, preverbal, and essential. These include perceptions from every level of consciousness.