Hey Mark Hampton thanks so much for your thoughtful response. It is refreshing to hear your perspective and tone. So many people who disagree with me (and trust me there are plenty) from the philosophical camp end up presenting “you are just wrong” kind of arguments that reek of insecurity and a surface reading of the great legends who have come before us. I figure you are familiar with these types.;)…. anyway, let’s engage! (and apologies for delay i was moving amongst other things and have been off the grid).
Panpsychism has no appeal to me, the idea that a rock is conscious, or the thoughts of these quantum consciousness folks that consciousness is like a particle or something that all matter has… these seem just loopy. (not to mention bereft of evidence).
But I am not averse to characterizing some things that happen inside a single cell as qualia. This is all anchored in my weird view on subjectivity, which is that subjectivity is simply stuff that no other mind knows. As technology progresses — with fMRIs and whatever comes next, we will eventually be able to see more and more of what the mind does. We can *know* that you’re feeling a certain emotion, have an internal doubt, that you don’t see something in the corner of your eye, etc. Core to my thinking these days is the kind of line between subjective and objective, with better sensors and as tech progresses the space of true subjectivity in humans will get smaller.
The counter-argument to this is “well what about the internal homunculus perceiving it all”, aka the Cartesian theater. No matter how much information we gather, we won’t know what it’s like to be inside that mind — this is the distinction between quale-as-experience and quale-as-data that you highlight. Core to my way of thinking is that the Cartesian theater doesn’t exist. Personally I see the Cartesian theater as some kind of cultural myth, a bias on the way we self-report how we experience, rooted in religion and soul and our desire to have some “self” inside of everything. My personal experience, when I introspect, is not a Cartesian theater, my feelings on the matter are rooted (like all arguments on the matter are) in my own introspection. If you want a good detailed argument, well there’s Dennett.
As for the example of the single-cell, I see a paramecium as having qualia, when food brushes up against its cilia, information is transferred from the cilia into its body. There is no brain, but a system of chemicals in the cell coordinate this behavior. I found this nice article explaining it, which says “Paramecia momentarily retain traces of experience.” In my view, the combination of the information gained by the cilia, in conjunction with the state-change in the organism is the “experience” aka the “quale” that’s going on in this moment. There is no Cartesian theater, but there is subjective experience.
As for your wine-tasting example, you and the sommelier do indeed have different experience. Although your nerves may transmit very similar information in the initial stages of perception, at later stages of classification the information produced is quite different. The sommelier has a much richer ability to perform higher-level classifications (that in turn produce information in the sommelier’s brain) because their brain is different than yours. I draw a line around the information that appears in each person’s brain and say “this is the quale”.
When it comes to the machine, we can similarly expose it to things, which causes changes in its system. One machine encodes color as RGB, the other BGR. One machine has a classifier which detects a face and stores the coordinates of that face in its memory… there is more information in this second machine, it has a richer quale.
So my claim is not that “the measurable information” is qualia but rather something like “all the information produced by a perception, whether or not it is measured” is qualia. How this relates to the term “subjectivity” is a bit complex but I have the tendency to say subjectivity is mental information which is not, or cannot be measured, without running into contradictions that I can detect.
I do find this topic fun and hope to hear your further thoughts on the matter. Cheers!
