I HAD NEVER HEARD OF QUALIA until I started reading contemporary analytic philosophers. For the longest time I just assumed ‘qualia’ meant ‘qualities’, an impression I got from ‘what it’s like’ descriptions—what it’s like to feel pain, to see the color yellow, to smell a rose—as well as from those who describe qualia as ‘phenomenal’ experience, which I just assumed was an unintentionally loaded way of saying ‘experience’. I did wonder, albeit vaguely, why their thought experiments were nearly all maniacally focused on some particular color or instance of pain rather than qualitative experience in general. It wasn’t until I heard qualia described as “ineffable, infallible, private, intrinsic”1 that the warning bells started ringing.
WHAT ARE QUALIA?
“IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience…Another way of defining qualia is as "raw feels". A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition.”2
But I don’t experience qualitative instances, if that’s what “raw feels” are. Free-floating phenomena don’t reflect “what it’s like” to be me. To characterize experience as ‘raw feels’ reduces it to isolated bits of sensory perception. Indeed, it turns out the word qualia does originate in sense data theory.3 But many philosophers have pointed out the problems with this conception of experience long ago. So why are we still talking about sensory data?!
To talk of ‘raw feels’ in isolation from behavior betrays a Cartesian outlook which all sides of the qualia debate claim to deny. But it’s too late. They’ve already set the foundation—behavior vs. experience casts everything in terms of inside vs. outside.
AN IMPASSABLE CHASM
TO EVOKE QUALIA is to presuppose a fundamental divide between what we experience and the way things really are, ‘out there’. This run in the pantyhose of our lived reality began with the sense data theories of the traditional rationalist-empiricist divide. We can see this exemplified in the philosophy of David Hume, who thought the external world stamped itself on our minds. Sensory impressions were, for him, the source of all knowledge. Whereas ideas were but ‘faint images’ or copies of these sensory impressions.
Immanuel Kant took Hume’s sense-data theory a step further. Rather than imagining our minds are like blocks of wax on which reality stamps itself, our minds actively organize and structure the manifold of reality. But because our minds are always structuring reality, we can’t separate what our minds do to reality from reality as it is in itself, apart from our minds. This means not even sense perception can tell us what reality itself is really like. In fact, nothing can. Our minds are always already there, getting in the way of the underlying reality we try to access. Which means we can never know reality itself. It’s not that we never completely know it. It’s that we can’t know it at all. Not even the most rigorous science or the purest mathematics can cross over to the realm of things in themselves. To even suppose such a realm exists is a matter of faith. Kant puts reality forever out of reason’s reach.4
But if we can’t know what minds organize, why assume our minds organize anything at all? In other words, what makes him so sure our minds are representational? Doesn’t the very meaning of ‘representation’ require that something be represented? On this issue, Kant waffles and contradicts himself. Without quite crossing over to the realm of things in themselves, he nevertheless reintroduces sense data theory in a strange, quasi-phenomenal form, reflected in his famous dictum, “Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” As
(whom I interviewed in my last post) puts it:“Whitehead laments Kant’s partial adoption of Hume’s over-intellectualized account of perception, an account Whitehead refers to as the “sensationalist doctrine”. According to this doctrine, the human sensory organs initially encounter reality as a patchwork of disconnected and unruly sensory impressions. ‘My senses convey to me only the impressions of colored points,’ says Hume, ‘If the eye is sensible of anything further, I desire that it may be pointed out to me.’ For Kant, the raw immediacy of these sensa must be mediated by the formal structure of reflective consciousness in order to mean anything…Prior to the mind’s imposition of its transcendental order onto our otherwise chaotic sensorial encounter with reality, there simply is no perceivable “Nature”, no conceivable “Cosmos” or world-system, there is only a disjoint manifold of unprocessed sense atoms (disconnected colors, sounds, etc.).”5
The Hume quote is revealing: “My senses convey to me only the impressions of colored points.”
Really? Because the only time I see colored points is when I rub my eyes or stand too close to a pointillist painting. Indeed, I’m grateful that the vast majority of my experiences don’t involve colored points or dots or spots! Hume seems to be confusing his abstract theory about experience with lived experience, which is to commit what Whitehead would call the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But we shouldn’t be too hard on Hume. It is immensely difficult, if not impossible, to describe lived experience in a pre-theoretical way.
It might help to explicitly acknowledge the theoretical nature of qualia.6 A quale is an abstract sense object that “somehow mediates the subject’s perception of mind-independent physical objects”.7 Qualia theory reflects the residual belief that our minds represent a discombobulated reality of disparate entities. We’re back to a rather dubious division between primary and secondary qualities, back to a time when a materialistic conception of the world reigned supreme, a view that sees the world as the sum of its little bits of stuff. Sense data are like that—atomic phenomena.
IS KNOWLEDGE OF EXPERIENCE EVEN POSSIBLE?
MAYBE WHAT KANT SAID about the impossibility of knowing the self in itself is true for lived experience as well. Maybe all attempts at describing experience are colored by our theoretical assumptions. Or…maybe this theory vs. experience dichotomy is itself another theory that needs to be questioned?
Before we go down this road, we should consider whether it’s really experience that’s hidden from us or whether it’s our description of it that comes up short. I suspect the latter. Dammit, I know experience—I’m swimming in it, all right? I’m up to my eyeballs in it! Geez!—even though I can’t accurately or objectively describe it.
I think this is what all the qualia freaks are trying to say, but can’t.
This is what qualia skeptics are trying to deny, but can’t.
Qualia is a theoretical assumption about experience, and it’s a fairly flimsy and confusing one at that. Not everyone who talks of qualia has the same assumption in mind, since “ineffable, private, etc.” is not necessarily “what it’s like” (a phrase which seems to me more accurate because of its broadness and vagueness). This state of affairs is convenient for those who wish to talk past one another—and let’s face it, talking past one another is sometimes the point. Which is why we end up with a lot of ink spilled over what it means to “know” something. What pettiness of mind to revel in such technicalities! Call it another name then, if it makes you feel better! But to think we can pin down a moving thought with our feeble words in the absence of any genuine interest in understanding one another is a waste of everyone’s time. If this is merely a technical problem, it shouldn’t be that hard to resolve, not when both parties are being genuinely generous with one another. But if you insist on a narrow understanding of what knowledge is—that it must be mathematical or scientific, 3rd person or predictive, logically formal or verbally explicit—well, I don’t believe you. I think you “know” better. But I guess I have to take you at your word.
Anyone with a modicum of sense would do well to run screaming from such philosophical debates. And I can’t blame them for running away from philosophy altogether, if this is “what it’s like” to be a philosopher these days. What has happened to philosophy? Where is our love of wisdom?
IS EXPERIENCE PRIVATE?
WHILE IT’S TRUE no one can experience the world from my perspective (they would have to be me!), it would be a huge mistake to characterize experience as fundamentally private. Skepticism is the current on which private qualia float. Oddly, both sides of the qualia debate seem not to realize this current is sweeping them toward an epistemological cliff.
One side sees experience as blind representations, free-floating phenomena, a hard problem. This side accepts the reductive-mechanistic-deterministic tenets of physicalism, and for this reason their view of qualitative experience must be extremely limited, causally inefficacious. Experience takes a big blow in order to accommodate the physicalist framework, and epiphenomenalism is the byproduct (haha). But this is an olive branch. It may not be pretty, but it’s an attempt at compromise.
The other side slaps away the olive branch.
Both sides place reality outside our reach altogether—without realizing this is what they’re doing. As Kant and many others have made clear, there is no access to a mind-independent reality. You want objectivity? You can only get that through “subjective” experience, which is glued to your face. Take it or…take it.
There is a third option, but one must swim against the current to get to its shore. Here, experience is not fundamentally private. Experience is not a roadblock to itself as a thing in itself. Experience is not a conjecture, but a trampoline with plenty of room for all of us to jump and play. And if we knock into each other, so what. That’s the point.
What is the smell of a rose? I don't normally experience the smell of a rose apart from an actual rose or rosy perfume, nor do I experience it as mine. Without giving it a second thought, I might hold out a rose to a friend (who is not allergic) and say, "Smell that. Isn’t that amazing?" I have two varieties growing in my garden. Both have the delicate scent of all roses—the Platonic scent of a rose—and yet each rose is distinct from others. Interesting! Their scents might even change from day to day, moment to moment. Still, I can talk about those differences with my friend, even if only vaguely. We might both struggle to articulate “what it’s like”. We might fail with our words and laugh about it. But at no point do I feel the need to crawl outside of the vat of my brain or the shell of my skin, nor do I have to figure out the chemical makeup of roses, in order to share a meaningful appreciation of their poignant particularities with my friend.
A great fuss is made over whether we can describe a quale to someone who has never experienced it before. But that’s looking at things from the wrong end. Meaning lives in the air we breathe and in the experiences we share—that’s what makes any discussion (of our differences or otherwise) possible.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
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—Tina
Daniel Dennett, for instance, in his paper “Quining Qualia”.
The term “qualia” (singular: quale and pronounced “kwol-ay”) was introduced into the philosophical literature in its contemporary sense in 1929 by C. I. Lewis in a discussion of sense-data theory.
Kant contradicts himself quite a bit. In some places in the Critique of Pure Reason, he seems to say reality causes our experiences of it. But if he’s to rescue causality from Hume’s skepticism, he’ll need causality to be a necessary a priori category of the mind and not applicable to things in themselves (reality).
Matthew David Segall, Crossing the Threshold, Chiasmus: Descendental Aesthetic in Shelling and Whitehead, p 121.
As do some proponents of Russellian monism. “On one interesting version of this view (panqualityism), these properties are not genuinely phenomenal since they are unexperienced but they are nonetheless of the same kind as the phenomenal qualities present in our experiences of pain or color.” Qualia SEP.
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