Qualia
Overview
Qualia (singular quale) are the subjective, qualitative characters of experience: what it is like to see red, taste coffee, or feel pain, as distinct from any functional or behavioural description of those states. The term is used chiefly by those who think there is something here that a physical account leaves out.
Notes
- Qualia are the subject matter of the Hard problem of consciousness and the thing Mary’s Room and Philosophical zombies are meant to isolate. If there are qualia over and above the physical facts, physicalism is false.
- My view (see Consciousness) is that the word names something real, the first-person character of a brain modelling its own states, and then quietly assumes that this something is non-physical. What it is like to see red is what it is like for this brain to process red, and that is new information about the brain, not about a further kind of property.
- Daniel C. Dennett ("Quining Qualia", 1988) argued that the concept is so confused it should be abandoned. I am less sure the word is useless than that the inference drawn from it is.