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Qualia are the phenomenal qualities of experiences—the raw felt qualities of sensations, emotions, thoughts, or anything else. They are experienced privately, subjectively, and directly; all the content of consciousness states is made of them.

How do you know that you’re conscious?

You probably answer, because you’re experiencing something—thoughts, feelings, sensations, sights, or sounds. But a camera can also have images. Does a photograph or computer screen experience the image? What’s the difference between your experience of an image and an image as an artifact? One answer is, there is something it is like to see an image. There is nothing it is like to be a photograph (as far as we can tell).

There is “something it is like” to hear a guitar, see a sunset, or feel someone’s arm brush against yours. There is something it is like to have a thought or feel an emotion. And this is what a computer doesn’t have. It may record a guitar, even identify the rhythm, timber, and pitches. It can know the shape of the sound-waves. But there is nothing it is like to be the computer experiencing those things (probably).

The qualities of experiences are called qualia – sometimes referred to as “raw feels”— such as the raw sensation of C-sharp, a flash of lightning, or someone’s skin against yours. Or what happiness feels like.

Qualia are central to the questions “what is consciousness” and “how does the brain generate consciousness”? And qualia can be difficult to talk or even think about clearly; some people argue very seriously that they don’t exist. While others have argued that only qualia exist!

Here are some often recognized properties of qualia (all debatable):
That they are ineffable (indescribable)
They are non-physical
They are irreducible (cannot be taken apart into simpler pieces that are not qualia)
They are private; you can never experience someone else’s qualia.
They are experienced directly; you don’t need anything to tell you whether you’re experiencing qualia – if you seem to be, you are!
They are not identical to the physical processes that cause them.
Some of these properties present major questions for philosophy and science:
How can physical brain processes have non-physical properties? This is called “the hard problem” of consciousness.
If they’re not identical to the physical processes, what is the extra something? This is the “knowledge problem” and the “explanatory gap.”
Are they functional? If not, why do we have them?
Are they representational? Conceptual? Intentional? (see section four)
So, qualia take us right to the heart of the most difficult topic in philosophy – consciousness; hang on to your hat!



II. The History of Qualia
The word “qualia” is plural. The singular is “quale” (pronounced ‘KWA-lay’). These are forms of the Latin word for “what sort” or “what kind.”

The first person to use “qualia” in its modern sense was Clarence Irving Lewis, in 1929. And the discussion about qualia really got rolling in the 60s and 70s, especially following Thomas Nagel’s 1974 article “What it is like to be a bat” where he defined consciousness as having a “what it is like” to be something.

The first debates about qualia revolved around the philosophy of functionalism, historically associated with behaviorism in psychology. Functionalism defines cognitive processes in terms of what they do. It is associated with “identity theory,” an assumption of physicalism, which says that mental processes are identical to the neurological events which correspond to them.

Qualia challenge both functionalism and physicalism; historically, this challenge is represented by Frank Jackson’s 1982 “thought experiment” about Mary the neuroscientist (here in my simplified version): Mary is a neuroscientist who has never seen color; she was born that way. Suppose that Mary has the scientific instruments and reference materials necessary to learn everything that can possibly be known about the experience of color in the brain, down to the last detail. Then one day, someone develops a cure for Mary’s color-blindness, and it works. The question is, when Mary sees color for the first time, does she learn anything she didn’t already know? Most people say “yes.” This is known as the “knowledge argument” against physicalism; it supposedly proves that there is something more to qualia than the physical brain processes we can objectively observe.

At the same time, Mary is an argument against functionalism as well, and an argument for what philosophers call “epiphenomenalism” – the idea that qualia have no function—that they cause nothing.

In order to understand why Mary’s experience might imply epiphenomenalism, we can proceed to the next historic thought experiment connected with qualia—David Chalmers’ 1996 “zombies” thought experiment. Which takes us right into “controversies about qualia.”

The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel.” ― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

This quotation from David Chalmers nicely summarizes the mystery of qualia and how it’s framed by contemporary philosophers.

Quotation #2:
“Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, said good old Berkeley; but, according to most philosophers, he was wrong. Yet, obviously, there are things for which the adage holds. Perception, trivially, to begin with. If elements of conscious awareness–pains, tickles, feelings of heat and cold, sensory qualia of colors, sounds, and the like–have any existence, it must consist in their being perceived by a subject…. This shows, of course, that such experiences are epiphenomenal, at least with respect to the physical world.” – Zeno Vendler

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