What are "qualia"?

Question

The SEP article about qualia defines "qualia" in a "broad" sense using the following description:

Qualia as phenomenal character. Consider your visual experience as you stare at a bright turquoise color patch in a paint store. There is something it is like for you subjectively to undergo that experience. What it is like to undergo the experience is very different from what it is like for you to experience a dull brown color patch. This difference is a difference in what is often called ‘phenomenal character’. The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience. If you are told to focus your attention upon the phenomenal character of your experience, you will find that in doing so you are aware of certain qualities. These qualities — ones that are accessible to you when you introspect and that together make up the phenomenal character of the experience are sometimes called ‘qualia’.

I have a terribly hard time making sense of that. I do not see that

There is something it is like for you subjectively to undergo that experience.

since in the (imagined) example, the subject ("I") is attending to something and perceiving something; the subject is not "having an experience"; there is nothing that I can introspectively 'see' (in my own perceptions or -- using more pompous language -- in my perceptual experiences) that corresponds to "something that it is like for me" to have.

Seeing a turquoise dot or a brown dot surely are different perceptions - the subject ("I") sees different things, reports seeing different things, has different mental states. I grant all that. But saying that the subject has different mental states amounts to and seems totally equivalent to saying that the subject perceives different colors. So, I don't understand what this "phenomenal character" is supposed to refer to apart from referring to (in this case) the perception/the mental state itself.

I also don't understand what is meant by "focus your attention upon the phenomenal character" and then becoming "aware of certain qualities". Of course, people ("I" again) can report what they are seeing (if they are not blind, and it's not dark, etc). They "have" perceptions. And we know that there are different perceptual modalities (seeing, hearing, smelling); and know that seeing a turquoise spot is not the same as seeing a brown spot (assuming "we" do see a difference, which is not at all a universal "given"), but there doesn't seem to be something 'extra' there as the talk of 'phenomenal character' seems to suggest. So, I cannot get rid of the suspicion that this talk about 'phenomenal character' which supposedly is accessible in introspection (and which I -- that is the person who is writing this question -- really am not aware of in any of my introspections) is somehow illusory.

Am I misreading the quoted passage? Can someone explain what it means in other terms, without introducing new obscure terms like "phenomenal character", or provide a more understandable description of what the word "qualia" (in the broadest sense) is supposed to refer to?

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Please note that the phrase "there is something that it like to be you (or me)" also makes no sense to me. I happen to be an introvert and very introspective person, I can tell all kinds of things about myself, and compare myself to others -- I even like reading Proust --, but I really have no idea what that phrase is supposed to mean. (Is my "being like me" different from your "being like you"? Am I able to "inspect" "my being like me"? "My being like me was a bit off today, it changed a bit compared to how it was yesterday" is that supposed to make sense?)

Answer 1

It is understandable that one can get confused about this, since qualia is often used as an indirect way to point to that which is the most direct. So it's reasonable to ask why not just use sense, feel, perceive, instead of saying it's "qualia" or phenomenal character. But speaking crudely, it really is a catch-all term to capture what we perceive, introspect. Often, the focus on is on singling out "primitives", so examples of having the perception of red, of feeling a sharp pain are mentioned.

I don't think it's a particularly useful term as it's become a bit loaded and appears in a lot of somewhat confused discussion. But often the motivation is just to point to experience itself. It's not some magical "extra" that we find in experience. You say you introspect a lot, and that's enough! It means you're not "deficient" in qualia already.

Qualia often comes up in discussion of mind when addressing materialistic/mechanistic beliefs, as a way to point away from descriptions of perceiving/thinking/... in terms of dynamics of physical systems. If you're enjoying ice-cream on a hot day, and someone came to you "explaining" that what's going on is that some chemicals are dissolving in your palate, causing a signal to travel to your brain, causing some other chemicals to be released, causing yourself to declare "I'm enjoying ice cream", you would be right to tell them off: I don't care about that! Let me enjoy in peace.

Today we tend to get in a very reductive bent of "boiling things down" to some underlying (often physical) processes, i.e. we tend to equate the fact of describing our model of something with getting to know that something. Often, we don't even need to have a model! It's enough that "in principle", there is a model which, had I access to, I would be able to predict all sorts of things about the thing in question. But models are useful for predicting things in the world. And in principle models are good for predicting things in the world in principle.

Asserting qualia is really just a way of noting that what's in question isn't my power, in principle, to talk about feelings/perceptions/... in the context of models which will allows me to predict or simulate certain observations. What's in question are the feelings/perceptions themselves, as you attend to and become aware of them.

So suppose I told you to close your eyes and note how your body is right now. You'll find that there's many shifting sensations and feelings that come and go. Some of them are transient, some quite persistent. You wouldn't necessarily have a word to describe every facet of what you can attend to, though you would be able to come with some general terms (e.g. there's a feeling of pressure/solidity where I meet the floor, a small chill running down my spine, my torso feels warm, etc.)

What you did there was attune yourself to a certain part of your experience (your internal sensations, as opposed to sights or sounds), and observed its characteristics. Some of those characteristics you might have words for, while some would be subtle enough that they escape a clear naming, though you were aware of them.

If you want, you might call anything you are singling out during such an exercise as "qualia" and you wouldn't be wrong.

There, that's the "mystery".

Answer 2

If we hooked up a webcam and computer software that measured the color of something placed in front of it, used a RGB-to-color-name lookup, and then reported the name of a color, we could have something that outputs the color of the object in front of it.

If in the adjacent room, we had a human look at an object and then type the color that they see, the closed-door behaviour of both rooms would be essentially identical.

If we admit that there is some kind of difference between the human-box and the computer-box, it is not necessarily in how they report what they are seeing (they output the same text, after all), but how they experience what they are seeing.

Why talk about "qualia", why not just talk about experiences, perceptions, etc?

The goal is to clarify the ambiguity between a perception as an experience and perception as a neural process--that way, we can hopefully speak about how the qualia of perception relates to the process of perception.

It's perfectly possible, once we've defined those two, to argue that it's a distinction-without-a-difference or that e.g. the qualia are inseparable from the process, or a secondary side-effect of the process that doesn't cause the nerve-firings that fire to say the words 'I see the color orange', etc. But I think the goal of defining qualia that way is to be able to speak as clearly as possible about what that relationship might be.

Answer 3

The text you are struggling with is trying to emphasize the difference between perception and experience.

The difference can be clarified by how humans can do functional processing of perception differences, without actually having experiences.

The example was of paint strips in a hardware store. IF one is trying to select a paint for some project, THEN the details of the experience of that paint, are something one will focus on. One will have experiences of the paint strip, while processing the paint strip, and the experience of a turquoise vs a dull brown paint chip will be very salient.

BUT -- much of human processing is actually unconscious, and lacks experience. To apply an example to paint strips, picture having a pile of 1000 paint strips, that one has been given a task of sorting into two piles. All the strips are either brown, or turquoise. Further, imagine that this is a timed task, so one is trying to do it as quickly as possible. When one starts the task, turquoise and brown are SO different, that the difference between the chips will likely be accompanied by an experience of qualia differences. But by several hundred strips into the sorting process, one will have made this sorting an unconscious function, and one will no longer be experiencing qualia of color while doing the functional processing of sorting strips into the two piles.

The definition, and this example, are intended to show how the qualia of experience, and the function of processing, are intrinsically different.