What are convincing examples of “mistaken” qualia?

Question

What is the strongest example that we can be mistaken about the experience of our qualia?

The reasoning for the infallibility of the experience of qualia is based on the immediateness of qualia. There is nothing between the subject and qualia, because qualia are part of subjective experience. This experience is direct, there is no interpretation involved. So how can we possibly be wrong about what qualia we experience?

Example:
An optical illusion, but nothing fancy, so that the argument works:

The left red disk has objectively exactly the same color as right red disk (HTML color #FF0000). But the left one seems brighter than the red one.

And another one:

The lower spot seems brighter than the upper spot, but they have objectively exactly the same color (HTML color #D38402).

The obvious analysis would be that we are mistaken about the objective colors, because we experience different qualia. But we are not mistaken, that we experience different qualia.

Still, might it not be a possibility that we experience the same qualia, but we are indeed mistaken about it? What would it even mean to be "mistaken" about the qualia we experience? How can this be reconciled with the immediateness of qualia? If qualia immediately present themselves to me, without any mediating step, what I experiencing simply are the qualia. How can the notion of a mistaken quale be made coherent?

"Sadly", in most people these examples do not induce doubt, often for the above reasons. They dismiss the latter possibility (that we experience the same red, but are mistaken about it) out of hand.

Is there a stronger example? One that makes clearer how we can be mistaken about qualia?

Answer 1

I think the sticking point here is, as you point out, the immediateness of qualia. But that's not actually taken for granted in the literature.

In the physicalism vs. anti-materialism debate in philosophy of mind, there's a proposal called the Qualitative Inaccuracy Hypothesis (QI), essentially that we are mistaken about our own qualia (for example, we're wrong about how we represent our experience of "red" when we see an apple). This is a pretty robust position (I was swayed despite vehement resistance at first), though it's admittedly abstract.

In brief, the hypothesis relies in most incarnations on a non-immediacy of qualia. That is, consider that whenever we form beliefs about our qualia, we undergo an introspective process: we have to introspect to decide what it is we're feeling. The skeptic about our qualia-beliefs suggests that this introspective faculty can, in some instances, be wrong. Here's a rough (and not entirely successful, I know) example attributed by Christopher Hill in Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism to a seminar of Rogers Albritton's:

The case involves a college student who is being initiated into a fraternity. He is shown a razor, and is then blindfolded and told that the razor will be drawn across his throat. When he feels a sensation he cries out: he believes for a split second that he is in pain. However, after contemplating the sensation for a moment, he comes to feel that it is actually an experience of some other kind. It is, he decides, a sensation of cold. And this belief is confirmed when, a bit later, the blindfold is removed and he is shown that his throat is in contact with an icicle rather than a razor.

Of course, one can object that nonetheless the experience of cold was not mistaken, only mistakenly identified - but then there's an entire literature on whether we can really be said to experience things of which we aren't aware. Ian Philips and Ned Block take, as I recall, roughly opposing sides in a debate on whether or not our consciousness overflows - whether what we experience is more than what we can fit in our active awareness.

I can't faithfully replicate all of that debate, nor the argument for QI, but hopefully these are decent pointers. For more on QI I strongly recommend the first chapter or two of Derk Pereboom's Consciousness and the Proespects of Physicalism.

Answer 2

The fact that we can be mistaken about Qualia can actually be a good argument against the existence of subjective experiences. We can't know, for example, if in two different cases we experience different Qualia or interpret one Quale differently. Some very strong examples are given in Daniel Dennett's "Quining Qualia" . As always with Dennett, it's nicely written, and supplies some strong arguments.

Answer 3

"The idea that people might be mistaken about their own qualia is at the heart of the ongoing confusion..."

Ah qualia, a source of much controversy in the field of philosophy of mind, some deny it entirely (What really?) others argue about what exactly it is...

Before we talk more about it, let us loosely define what it is exactly :

Or more simply stated, qualia is what a conscious mind experiences.

So why should we doubt our qualia? This is the age old debate between the rationalist and the empiricist, the hard-line empiricist stating all we can trust is our experiences, and the hard-line rationalist saying only trust reason. This being of course a very shallow summary of the debate.

There are many hypothetical arguments on why to doubt qualia, the inverted qualia thought experiment for example... however I believe you are looking for something more concrete.

In that case we can go to something that everyone has experience with...

Dreams, dreams are the strongest example that we can in fact be mistaken about our qualia. We can tweak some of the ideas in Descartes' Meditations to derive a convincing argument that we cannot always trust our qualia. There might be people who deny that they have ever been immersed in a realistic dream, only to awake and realize their experiences for the past few hours do not exist in the objective world, but we doubt their sincerity in such maters.