Qualia

I feel that the word “consciousness” is overloaded with too many different meanings.

I think this causes difficulties when talking about the hard problem, when discussing competing theories of consciousness, or when considering consciousness in digital computers.

In order to give you a sense of what I mean when I use the word consciousness, take a moment to acknowledge your visual field. Try to do so with a beginner’s mind. To me, the visual field is like a movie screen.

Ask yourself: what is the visual field made of?

You could consider many things at this point. Firstly, you could wonder whether that question makes sense. Does it make sense to ask whether the visual field is made of anything? Is qualia really a substance?

Whatever strong intuitions you have about such questions, consider that your visual field - when taken together with your thoughts, sounds, and sensations - is the only thing you’ve ever known directly. Everything else, from atoms to other minds, is inference. Yet our materialist models of reality consist exclusively of such inferences, while omitting the one thing we started with - qualia. This preference for third-person descriptions of reality is what summons the hard problem into being.

The redness of red cannot be found in the wavelength.

I’m not making any bold anti-materialist claims here, I don’t feel well equipped to offer an explanation. Nor am I being solispstic.

I’m doing two things:

• acknowledging that all human epistemology starts with qualia
• pointing out that our models of reality don’t mention qualia at all