How would I explain qualia in simple terms? This is the perfect question for me, in that my explanation is relatively simple and nontechnical:

Let’s say that the neural correlate of a pain, a neural impulse, appears on the screen of a brain monitor. Well, obviously there is something that appears in sense perception as that neural impulse. That something, which appears as the neural impulse, is the pain as one usually conceives of a pain, in mentalistic terms.

Here is the explanation:

The subject (in the sense of a psychological experiment) registers the neural impulse, but he does not perceive it in any way whatever. It stands to reason that he can register it, in that it occurs in his brain in the course of normal neurological functioning. And of course he does not perceive it. He does not look at it, for example. In his case, as opposed to that of the neuroscientist at the screen of the brain monitor, no perceptual processing of the neural impulse takes place.

The subject, then, registers the neural impulse but does not perceive it in any way, and he conceives of it as a pain, for he learned in childhood to call such things pains.

He feels the pain in that he registers it, then, not in that he perceives it, for he does not perceive it. This, perhaps, is the major sticking point: It is very difficult to believe that you do not perceive your own toothache. But the truth is that you do not. You feel it, yes, all too convincingly, but absolutely, you do not perceive it in any way. If you did perceive it, you would perceive it as a neural impulse, for that is what it is.

The neural impulse, then, is the pain as the pain appears in sense perception. But that is to say, it is the pain, period.

A pain, then, is a neural impulse, and, to generalize, consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon.

To answer your question, the quale painfulness is a physical aspect of the neural impulse which quite literally constitutes the pain.

I wish that someone would try to show me why this doesn’t work.

Welcome to the explanatory gap.

Qualia at its essence are the phenomena of a subjective experience. When photons hit our eyes, and our brain processes it, we eventually see red, or when someone hits us and our C fibers fire, we feel pain. These are all what we refer to as subjective experiences. But we don’t actually know what causes these subjective experiences: are they a property emergent of things, something entirely material that our scientific understanding does not explain yet, or something possibly immaterial? These questions are what bolsters different proposed solutions to the explanatory gap, such as dualism, physicalism, panphyscism and so on.

The issue that distinguishes qualia from other scientific phenomnena is their reducibility. We can reduce a rock falling to its potential energy being converted into kinetic energy and empirically know that to be causal of the rock falling. There is no explanatory gap there.

For qualia? We can associate qualia, our ability to think and experience things, with some neural pathway, or fibers firing, or some cortex, but we can’t reduce them to that associated physicality causally. In other words, we don’t actually know why our consciousness emerges or how our subjective experiences arise.

If we were to replicate and stimulate these associated physicalities, would consciousness emerge? If that is so (it’s unverifiable), then it is so that the physicalist interpretation of qulia is correct. If not, then possibly the other interpretations or some interpretation we’ve not come up with yet.

Neuroscientists have come up with IIT to account for qualia

(A) Qualia space for a system of 4 elements is 16-dimensional (with an axis for each of the 24 possible states of the complex); the axes are flattened onto the page.
(B) Adding additional connections further sharpens the actual repertoire, specifying new points in Q-space and the corresponding q-arrows. The figure shows 16 out of the 399 points in the quale; those generated by combinations of the 4 submechanisms progressively engaged in the insets.

Personally, while IIT at its current state does not bridge the explanatory gap, I do not rule it out from ever being able to in the future and I think it is still too early to look at the qualia solution as metaphysically impossible to solve in a physical way.

Footnotes

Qualia are the distinctive elementary qualities of different conscious experiences, such as the redness of perceived red objects or the painfulness of a stubbed toe. We could also call them raw sensations of every type. They are how things look, sound, and feel to us sensorially, regardless of what we make of them conceptually.

Charles Pierce introduced the term in the 1860s. He was careful to point out that qualia are not objective properties of the objects that we perceive. Rather, they are properties of the subjective experience of perceiving. The redness we perceive in a rose isn’t an attribute of the rose itself. It’s just that redness is how we experience light of a certain wavelength. That’s not to say that colour is illusory or imaginary, but it is a function of our sensory and mental apparatus. Wavelength is a property of light; colour is a property of conscious experience in relation to light, a quale.

It’s impossible to define experience without going in circles. Experience is an aspect of consciousness, and consciousness is that which consists of experiences. It’s the self-evident fact that we experience our own existence, moment by moment, so long as we are awake.

We can at least distinguish experience from other aspects of consciousness. Experience corresponds to what philosophers refer to as ‘phenomenal consciousness’: the constant flow of raw sensations and feelings in our stream of consciousness. This is different from ‘access consciousness’, the awareness of information which we draw from experiences and make explicitly available to other mental processes. In other words, experience is fundamental, awareness is built upon experience.

Qualia refers to things which cannot be defined using human language unless the person on the other side of the conversation already has some conception or manifestation of that idea in his or her mind.
Take colour for example. To describe a colour to someone, there needs to be some pre-existing mental imagery of colours in the other person's mind. Even when you mention a colour the other person knows about, there is no way to know if the colour he imagined is exactly the same as you did.
In broader terms, qualia is a term used to describe all subjective conscious experiences that are created by our brain as a representation of the external physical world. By its very nature, qualia cannot be described using any language without relying on the listener's own qualia. Imagine trying to describe a colour, say 'red' to a blind persson who has never experienced any colour.
This is a great video which talks about qualia, that I would recommenced watching :

Qualia (singular form quale) are a philosophical idea. The philosophers tends to talk about subjective versus objective forms so that subjective means that they are bound to the person experiencing them which is reasonable . To be objective we would need a common experience so that they were definable for all.

I see qualia as brain created representation (which is bound to that specific brain ie subjective). This representation is internally observable (thinkable) that means they can be used to discriminate between other similar sources of input from senses … and here lies the problem we assume, for example, that when we see a red rose (it looks red to all of us (suggests objective but still subjective because of how we see). We do not see the colour red or the boundaries of the flower we see because a pathway in the brain has become active. It does not carry the image into our brain it just triggers a path making it active (it generates an action-potential spike of charge (which is measured as a voltage ) this propagates along an axon of cell and then discharges neuro-transmitters across synapses on dendrites to effectively causes the spike to be recreated along other axon/synapse routes. No data is transmitted so no redness nor any boundaries for the flower. It is the route taken that encodes our experiences and this means that it must become a temporary state and this can be treated as input and so we see that representation (state) as the discriminator of a cone (in fovea of eye) which is in a frequency band in the red visual spectrum where red is sensitive to 430 terahertz frequency (ie redpart of the spectrum) the brain creates the experience of seeing red as a colour (for discrimination purposes) (ie different from blue or green frequencies). So you see red and a rose shape (again the shape by routing it to different visual regions of the brain) . But that red is yours … only you know what it is like to see it. You assume others see it the same way but there no proof possible for that (ie it is subjective) . It just so happens that it becomes a labelling problem (your red occurs where someone elses red occurs so both are called red but perhaps are different representations both of which will never be known to the other person. I like to say that a quale is an internal representation constructed by a brain to be used as a perception (percept).

It is because we can see and recall into our mind these representations that we appear to see the world but these are representations of the sense and it position and are there to discriminate from other properties (eg colours) and so they need this special label “quale” to indicate their origin. Consciousness sets up the ability to reflect on our experiences and the brain creates the representation that carries sufficient analogous information for us to resolve and discriminate about the exterior real world relationships. We all have this but the actual representations may be always peculiar to one owner.

When you and I look at a strawberry, in my brain this perception occurs -

​
which I call red.

But how do I know that in your brain a perception like this -

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does not occur? - which you, of course, learned to call red.
We both call it red and walk away never knowing how different each of our experiences really were.
We can 'try to' explain each other which colours we perceived but again, that'd be futile. (the explanatory gap of qualia)
Colour, after all, is an illusion. It only exists inside our head and has no existence in the outside world, like gravity or electrons do. We perceive different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum as different colours. Now, I can measure the wavelength of a specific colour but not the experience inside your mind! Thus there is no way of knowing if my red and your red are the same! These ineffable, raw feelings are qualia.

Qualia is a term used to describe all subjective, conscious experiences that are created by our brain as a representation of the external physical world. (pain of a headache, the taste of chocolate, or the perceived redness of an evening sky are some examples)
Qualia are ineffable. They cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.
You cannot understand qualia unless you have experienced it before. Imagine trying to explain concepts like colour to a blind person! You can check out this video by Tommy Edison. It is really interesting. Describing Colors To Blind People: https://youtu.be/59YN8_lg6-U

I hope this gives you a fair idea about the concept!

A qualium is an experience. We like to talk and think about our experiences so we need terms to describe them. The term can never convey the actual experience being referred to, of course, but we can say that simply by using the word qualium (pl. qualia). An example is the experience of eating something, say chocolate. There are no words that can convey that experience unless you have eaten chocolate so you already know what it tastes like, feels like. You don’t need words to convey the sense of that experience. But if you never had chocolate, the most lurid and vivid descriptions will not bridge that gap. That is why we call these experiences, many which defy description, as qualia.

I would suggest it can be defined as an internal perception. We receive all of our nowledge using sensors which means they are external perceptions (They sample signals fron the “real” world). So an internal perception is a signal from within the mind (the mind here being a consequence of the active brain)

So perceiving something that is internal can only be known to that which is perceiving. We use a phrase from the philosophers (eg Frank Jackson): “What it is like” when talking about qualia because it is entirely your experince of what it is like or it is entirely my experience as to what it is like. These two cases are uncomparable, unsharable. Yet linguistically we can reference them and assume that they tell us the same thing and the more we talk about it the more we agree that they are the same. It just a fact that they are not knowably the same.

We can view this as the brain’s attempt to create an experience of the perception by representing it is a consistent way every time it occurs. For example the discriminator “red” allow us to view the qualia representation of red that belongs in that mind. It always characterised in that manner. So my observed red always looks like red to me . And your red looks red to you. If we could find a mind reader who could look at my mind and then your mind and judge us then it might same well your red (to me) looks like blue to me and his red looks like green to me. I actually does not matter in absolute terms as long as we label it with the correct label my blue tomato is your green tomato but we both say its red.

The images of the real world are all representations because they are all qualia. Yet our interactions are consistent and we are all able to interact. What ever we don’t receive from sensors has no apparent existence and so we can safely ignore it.

How the brain creates these internal repreesntations is not yet clear and when you consider other examples such as pain - it become difficult to accept. The pain is generated in the mind and the mind works out where the receptor was and represent the solution as unpleaseness located where the cause of the pain should be. No pain message sent to brain. The brain sends you the message as a perception which it locates for you. (separately it may auto-trigger muscle contractions to remove the affected area faster than you can know about it. )

The other key word is know … you know that you are experiencing the qualia - you see it for example or feel it as pain. This is is essence part of consciousness and it is created as feedback - knowing and learning are part of feedback mechanisms. Qualia is a consequence of feedback which is within the brain. Qualia and Consciousness are bound up with each other.

You could say it means that knowledge is mind-dependent, but not precisely because knowledge of the truth, when there is such a thing, suggests some knowledge of externals outside the mind.

If you are a realist, qualias tell you that there is some psychology involved in experience.

If you are an idealist like Berkeley, qualia tells you that the mind interacts—either with itself, or with a media, or some combination.

If psychology is like art, then the two are saying something similar.

It does not say much, but it might say those things. Or other things to an alien.

An alien for example, might think qualia means they can walk to their living room, or something along those lines.

If you imagine a blue glass, does the glass exist? Can you drink out of it? No. Does the experience of your imaginary blue glass exist? Sure, to you. If you make a blue glass just like you imagined, with the exact tone and shade of blue, you could say that it was inspired by your ideal blue glass.

Subjective content such as qualia, experience, memory, and meaning are phenomena which could be said to 'insist' rather than 'exist'. Existence implies a concrete, tangible phenomena which is localized and specific or universal and pervasive. Insistence is abstract, intangible and can be multiplied and interpreted in different ways by audiences of an infinite size, almost simultaneously.

A truly objective explanation of a qualia like the color red would have to be able to predict the visible nature of a color which is deeper than infrared or higher than ultraviolet. It would have to be able to demonstrate the qualia of that color's existence without the use of subjective vision. I think that there is no way to do this, and in fact, color unexperienced is not color.

Visual qualia is unique because it's probably the most object-like subjective experience. Red seems like it exists. It doesn't seem like a red feeling that's being interpreted visually, but other feelings seem less object like. Emotions and images can be ambiguous and esoteric. There is a continuum there of more or less subjective, it's not just a binary distinction of existence or non-existence. Just as on the other extreme, at the quantum level, probabilities and entanglements test the limits of what exists in the other direction. Qualia make sense of the world for us but cannot be proved externally, quantum can be proved externally but make no sense to our experience of the world.

I am not a fan of the “Q-word”. Because people get all excited and think it’s spooky or the basis for a crushing argument.

The “q-word”, as far as I can tell, is a shorthand for a handful of relatively non-spooky phenomena.

• The ability to classify related things/ideas together. Let’s call this “classification”.
• The ability to recognise an instance from this category when we can detect it. Let’s call this “recognition”.
• The ability to build up associations with the idea, allowing its significance and utility to be attached as meta-data. “association”
• And perhaps the ability to represent this category beneath some kind of internal token or symbol or word. We could call this “naming”.

So equipped an agent might step out into the world. Spot patterns based on commonalities, and put them into these mental bins (categories).

React to sensory input of familiar patterns when we are able to recognise them again. (recognition). Building up maps of common-ness.

As time goes on the categories become more detailed and the cross linking and meta-data become richer. (association)

And have the internal name which acts like a lever enabling us to bring up the internal representation and the ability to evoke and manipulate the concept without the need for direct experience.

Those abilities seem to be utterly essential in order to have a meaningful interaction with the world. So I would regard these abilities as indispensable for any entity demonstrating awareness and agency. Consciousness seems to be awareness, but from the point of view of the entity doing the awareness. What it feels like to respond, where that response is assigned significance , the triggering of emotional association, the prediction of what this might mean next, the memory of a prior encounter and so forth.

I think that is what people mean when they talk about “qualia”.

But the “q-word”, should be avoided because it carries with it burdens of pre-fought arguments, which the listener might not share.

Q: “What does it objectively mean for qualia to be similar to one another?”

Keeping in mind that at this point all discussion of qualia resides in the domain of philosophy, not neuroscience, I will provide a useful answer that I can’t prove and nobody can disprove.

Most memory is relational, that is, memories are stored in the brain as variations on previous memories. When I see a new object, I see it as an association with similar objects that I have seen before. The brain forms circuits that essentially say “this new object A looks like previous objects Q, R, and S, with variations related to object W.”

Objects have qualia, which are often thought of as properties, but I prefer to think of as objects similar to any other object, subject to multiple levels of qualification that we learn over time.

The picture of our memories being many layers of references brings up the question of where the references end, and that is the key to answering this question. They typically end in the very first memories, laid down in the first months when our brains still had vast tracts of uncommitted neurons. They are often memories of being held and suckled. They are memories that we can’t recall consciously because they were laid down before we had any language to lay down with them.

I believe most qualia resolve to these early memories that we only access unconsciously.

As for the question itself, the relations among qualia have nothing to do with the nature of the qualia but instead the nature of the memories they resolve to. For example, the qualia of blue and the qualia of yellow typically resolve to completely different early memories. The similarity of blue and yellow as colors comes later as we learn about colors.

For qualia to be similar, they must resolve to related memories. For example, if blue and yellow both resolve to memories of suckling at your mother’s breast, they will be experienced as related memories for you but not for others, the similarities will be based on similarities of those memories, not on anything to do with visual or artistic characteristics of the two colors.

I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but it explains the deeply affective nature of qualia in a way that no other theory does.

A “qualia” is, as far as I understand, an experience which is impossible to verbally describe accurately - and hence impossible to fully understand without experiencing it.

Examples include the concept of sight (how do you describe colour to a blind man?), the pain of a headache or the smell of fresh cut grass.

These things are all impossible to describe to someone who has never experienced them themselves - but also impossible to confirm if our experiences match other people's - how do I know that we both see the same colour blue when we look at the sea - maybe my blue looks red to you!

Anyway. Physics has very little to say about this - this is something much, much harder than physics.

This is biology.

Most scientists are of the opinion that human consciousness is an emergent property of matter - that there is no individual “soul” - we are all just biological machines which look like we have a soul. Thus, human life, and indeed, human consciousness, should obey the basic laws of physics.

So why don't we understand it? Why does the field of biology exist at all - if it's just physics?

The answer is that the human body is complicated. Really complicated. I read somewhere that to properly simulate an object the size of a cat, using all of quantum field theory, it would take every atom in the universe computing every second for the lifetime of the universe to simulate a single second of real-world activity.

So we can't use physics to describe the human brain yet - because to do so is computationally prohibitive (or it may be totally impossible if it's not an emergent phenomena).

Therefore you are asking the wrong people. Physics can't answer this - and it doesn't need to. Physics doesn't study the human experience - in fact, it goes out of its way to remove the human experience from our questions - which allows us to consider possibilities that seem absurd to our “logical” brains (I.e. Quantum).

So to answer your question, physicists would simply shrug, say “go ask a neuroscientist”, and go back to drinking their tea.

Here is a simple, popular example of why qualia exist:

Mary is blind and has been all her life. However she is an expert in neuroscience and she knows all of the physical attributes in the brain required and activated when 'seeing red,' as well as the necessary wavelengths of light, but she's never seen it. If through some surgery or miracle, Mary regained her eyesight, she would undoubtedly 'gain' an experience when she first sees red. Therefore qualia are not physical, and it exists.

I propose that qualia are still physical because I have a problem with this thought experiment. Although Mary knows the brain regions necessary to see red (eyes obviously, optic chiasm, optic nerve, occipital lobe, etc, and all the nerves that connect these parts) these neurons have never fired for her because 700nm light never stimulated all of the nerves/neurons necessary for her to 'percieve' red. If her vision were restored, these neurons would be firing for the first time and, like a computer saves a password, she would forever remember the experience of seeing red, the 'qualia' of red. Hence, qualia are physical and have no real meaning besides being a term to distinguish who has or has not experienced certain colors, tastes, etc. It's a matter of semantics, not some supernatural notion that consciousness is anywhere else but physically in the brain.

Why do people believe in qualia?

I’m not sure what you have in mind by “believe in” here, John. Qualia is a term used to describe a person’s direct experience. As such, it isn’t something you believe in, the way you might believe the ultimate goodness of people or the importance of teaching ethics in school. Qualia simply are. They require no belief.

In fact, let me flip the question around: Why do people believe in anything other than qualia? That should help clarify things a bit.

Are you familiar with the classic “brain in a vat” thought experiment? The question it addresses is: How do we know that what we experience is real? For all we know, any one of us could a brain floating in a vat of nutrients with wires hooked up to it that trigger all the right sensory areas to make it feel like we are in a real world with a particular set of qualities, even though we aren’t. The point of this line of questioning is to make clear that all we really know directly is the sensations we get from external stimulation. From these sensations, we build up a mental model a world beyond the extent of our brains that could generate the kinds of sensation we experience. But all of this — the entire world we believe we live in — is supposition based on our direct sensations.

It’s a bit (but not exactly) like when Rene Descartes came up with the proposition “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes was going through a dark period in his life in which he was questioning every aspect of what we call reality, and he was trying to find some sort of conceptual ground on which he could stand while making statements about what is real and what is not. But everything he could think of was always subject to doubt. Eventually, he realized that the one constant among all the possibilities he was considering was the irrefutable fact that he was thinking about those possibilities. Thus, he concluded that his inner experience of thinking was his ground truth, and that any propositions about a “real world” beyond those thoughts was something to be tested for credibility and explained through through the rules of evidence and reason.

So, people — even those especially peculiar, pesky people known as philosophers — believe in qualia because it’s the only direct experience they have, and all other beliefs are founded on that direct experience.

To explain Qualia, let me first tell you a story. It is not strictly related to qualia, but it will make you understand qualia more easily.
The story is based on real events.

I am a mechanical engineer. One day, I had an oral examination of one of my subjects - internal combustion engines. The exam was scheduled at noon and I was reading a chapter (which I had never read before) in the morning. The chapter was about radiators. Without getting technical (which would surely averse the non-technical readers) I would just tell you what a radiator is. A car engine needs to be cooled. Sometimes it is cooled using water. What I mean to say is, a water is brought in contact with the engine. The water absorbs heat from the engine and cools it down. Now, to use same water to further cool the engine, that water itself, needs to be cooled. That’s what a radiator does. That water is made to pass through narrow tubes and tubes are placed before a fan. The fan cools the water in the tubes. Those tubes are called The Radiator. I read all this that day in a hurry and went for the exam. I thought I knew what a radiator is.

Now comes the funny part. During the oral, the examiner took me to an engine and asked me if the radiator existed in that setup. I froze. I couldn’t tell. I tentatively said no because I couldn’t see any narrow tubes. I was right. Now he further asked me if the radiator existed, where it would have been. Now I had to think a minute or two to answer this. The answer suddenly dawned. A fan inside the engine setup caught my attention. And I realized with a stroke that the radiator has to be right in front of it! And now the most important part, I came to know that I, in fact, did not know what radiator was until that moment. I only thought I knew it!

So the lesson to be learned here is that there is a difference between knowing the definition and function of a radiator and really knowing what a radiator is. The sentence ‘Tubes that carry water which gets cooled by a fan’ comprehensively describes what radiator is. NO question. But, the feeling which I had during the oral, makes me really ‘understand’ what a radiator is. So the feeling of understanding something is inherently different from the feeling of merely knowing the description of it.

And folks, this really is what qualia is. If you search Wikipedia, it will tell you qualia is ‘The instance of the personal and subjective experience’. And that’s what it really is. If you read the sentence using the background of the above story, you will understand it a little better. Everybody describes the radiator in fairly the same way, but everyone ‘understands’ it a bit differently. And that understanding is qualia.

Confused?

Ok! Let’s go further and tackle qualia head on.

It is time for another example. A little more technical and more relevant. Everybody knows what a sound is. But what everybody does not know is, there is something known as the spectrum of sound. You must be knowing what a light spectrum is. The famous prism thing. You pass a white light beam through a prism and it gets split in seven colors, which proves the white light really has 7 colors in it. Similarly a typical sound contains something knows as different ‘frequencies’. A sound may have 2 or 3 or 10 or 100s of frequencies in it. But they are all not playing at the same loudness. Suppose a sound has 3 frequencies. Alpha, beta and Gamma. Now it may happen that beta is being played very loudly, gamma is being played, well, not so loudly and beta is somewhere in between them. If you change the loudness of gamma by some means and make it louder, the sound will change. You will actually hear it differently. And surprise, there are softwares which could do this. They manipulate sound. They make it sound ‘smooth’ by lowering the loudness of some frequencies and so on. But for doing that, the software must ‘decode’ the sound. By decode, it should know what frequencies are there in a given sound and the loudness at which each frequency is being played. And this information, is known as spectrum of sound.

You must be thinking what all this is to do with qualia. Please have a little patience.

Now, suppose I give you a table of all frequencies and there corresponding loudness in a particular sound. Well, it’s would not be very interesting to read, sure, but guys, it would completely and comprehensively describe that sound.

BUT,

You would not able to imagine that sound. You can’t tell how it will sound to your ears. And you would think that what I have been talking until now is rubbish. You would tell me those numbers are not really what a sound is! A sound is something different, very very different, and the table is absurdly incompetent to describe what a real beauty that sound is.

But you would be wrong. That table IS IN FACT what a sound is. Don’t believe me? Let me tell you how you own biological brain processes sound.

A sound enters your ears. And by sound, I mean vibrations. They are amplifies by a unique arrangement of 3 very small bones. You will probably appreciate I am not being too technical here. Let’s just take it for a fact that those 3 bones somehow amplify it. Then those vibrations enter a long and big tube. Now, this tube has certain strings of tissues. And each tissue has a special frequency, associated with it. And a marvelous thing happens after that. Suppose out good old alpha, beta, gamma sound enters that tube, then the tubes which have these 3 frequencies associated with them will start vibrating! Mind you, just those 3! And another beautiful thing. If the alpha frequency is the loudest, the alpha string will vibrate more vigorously that others! This magic really happens. Don’t believe me? Google it. Your brain, actually creates a spectrum of a sound it hears! It’s a brain’s way of writing the table of frequencies and loudness. So you must rest your case. The frequency and loudness table is indeed what a sound really is.

But a table does not make you cry. It doesn’t feel beautiful.

But a sound you hear does feel special and beautiful when you hear it, although the brain merely splits it into its components. The table which gets created in your brain ‘feels’ different.

And this guys, is what a qualia is! The feeling of sound beyond its spectrum. The sound is nothing. The qualia makes you cry.

Same goes with a sense of smell. Your nose just separates different molecules which enter nose canal. Qualitatively. Some molecules will be more in number than others. You plot a table which tells you which type of molecules are there and how many copies of each molecules are there. But you won’t call that table a smell. But that’s what it really is.

But that table doesn’t move you. Qualia of smell may take you closer to your mother even if you are thousands of mile away from her.

According to Wikipedia, Qualia is “ the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.” In other words you and I may smell the same aroma, and one of us find it pleasing while the other dislikes it. A subjective and individual reaction to the aroma of an essential oil or blend. People often ask us “what is your best Lavender?” and we can not answer that, because reaction to aromas is so very subjective. Qualia! thank you for that word. Now, how does it affect aromatherapy? I can think of at least two ways, perhaps three. 1. It is my experience that our bodies know what we need; that we are drawn the the oils that we need at a specific time. When an oil has physical or emotional effects that I need, I am more apt to be drawn to it, while if, for some reason, it is going to be contraindicated for me, I may find it unpleasant. 2. If we dislike an oil’s aroma, we are apt to not allow it to work for us, especially if we are using it for emotional/mental/spiritual purposes. Ie, If I am using an oil to help lower my stress level, and I actively dislike the scent, it will be more apt to increase, rather than lower, stress. 3. If I am to use a blend that I dislike on a fairly regular basis to treat..whatever.. if I find the aroma distasteful, I’m less apt to use as often as directed. “Patient compliance” may be an issue. Whereas if I love it, I’ll use it lavishly. Please note, I have recently seen some marketing reps saying “if you don’t like it that means that you need it more.” This is exactly contrary to both my training and experience, but, perhaps, a good way to get you to buy more of an oil you would normally pass over. So, yes, in my training and experience, “Qualia” can have an effect on the oils. This is why most (but not all!) aromatherapists will have a client actively participate in blending their blends, offering more than one essential oil that can address the issues at hand.

Interpretation; the mind. Experiencing sensations, emotions and feelings means being alive, being life. The mind is always happy to separate and oppose the objects of experience, into ‘me and not me’ creating the subject-object idea and taking this artificial creation as real. While ‘not me’ is more easily defined, the ‘me’ is quite vague and not really questioned. If you take the time to look deeper, you may be able to see that there are no objects without ‘me’, that ‘me’ is the crux, upon which all the other ‘not me’ things hang onto.

The perception of those things happens ‘here’, inside ‘me’, not ‘out there’. When renouncing interpretation that induces the confusion of the object observed with the concept associated with that object, perception is direct knowing. In perception, the duality subject-object is dissolved and the knowing happens directly, without the mediation of the mind. All that appears is in consciousness, as opposed to the traditional view where appearances are in the mind [the mind itself being a concept].

The taste of sour vs sweet is valid at the mind level only. At the level of consciousness there is only a ‘movement’, no different than one in which the mind distinguishes between green and red, hot and cold, or any other opposing concepts. Consciousness is ‘movement’/change; it is life in motion, bereft of its content. Consciousness is the foundation without which no content can manifest as interpreted by the mind. Life, being, requires no mind to be experienced; the world does.

It is clear from experiences and experiments that all qualia we feel are the result of some sort of brain activity.

Yet brain activity is, technically speaking, nothing special or magical. It's just a dense forest of neurons which, like everything else in the world, is bound by laws of physics. Even the high-level thinking such as emotions and decision-making are a result of nothing other than neurons dumbly reacting to physics, firing electrical signals only as an uncontrollable response to other signals.

The only difference between a brain and a thermostat is the complexity of those "dumb physics reactions" that happen after detection of temperature. Thus we are forced to conclude that even a thermostat generates a tiny bit of experience/qualia, even though it's extremely dumb, and its version of "cold" is completely unlike our version of "cold".

If we admit a thermostat generates qualia, what's stopping us from admitting that a single particle bouncing against another particle also does it? After all, it is not unlike what happens in the lowest levels of our brain when one neuron shoots a bit of information to another neuron to produce an emotion or awareness. Let's say my brain at this moment is firing 10 million neurons to evoke the uncanny phenomenon of first-person experience. How many electrical events do we have to remove for this awareness to disappear? 5 million? 7 million? It's like asking how many bees do we have to remove before it stops being called a swarm. There is no "line" that divides aware from not aware. The more you remove, the less I'll feel.

Thus there is only one possible conclusion that is consistent with all this logic: Qualia/awareness are inherent in all matter and energy. The degree to which they are "felt" depends on the amount of complexity of the consciousness, and consciousness is evoked by a special type of computation in various degrees.

A quick way to clarify what qualia is for those who are opposed to the term on the grounds that it doesn’t mean anything.

Top mug: Blue qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 490 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Center mug: Red Qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 690 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Bottom mug: Multicolored Qualia image based on electromagnetic radiation near the 780 nanometer range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

What you see is qualia, not electromagnetic radiation. You can see red qualia in your dreams or visual imagination, but you couldn’t see electromagnetic radiation in the visible range there because it doesn’t physically exist in your brain. Electromagnetism is invisible and is a property transmitted by tangible, mechanical, photoelectric effects on matter in public space.

Visible light is qualia which can be *stimulated to appear* through tangible, mechanical photo-electric effects on matter in public space, but the qualia itself is not that stimulation. The qualia itself is a visible, aesthetic-participatory phenomenon that depends on your ability to access an intangible palette of visible hues, the extent of which is unknowable (there are at least three primary colors, but there may be many more, or infinitely many more, or new ones all the time…we don’t know.)

Qualia is kind of complex. The question is, basically, when I see the color “Blue”, do you see the same “Blue” that I see?

Technically you do, we both identify “Blue” as the same physical frequency of light. But that isn’t what the question is about; it is about the quality of “Blue.’ And the same is true about other senses, and general words like “love” or “laughter” or “friendship”. Are we talking about the same things? What is it like for me to be in a blue room and you to be in blue room; is it about the same, or not?

That’s hard to figure out, but there is a useful hypothesis, I think.

Throughout your life (presuming you are normally sighted) you have learned to associate the word “Blue” with everything that predominately reflects that frequency of light; from blueberries to the sky to water to particular shirts you have. Even to “blue jeans”, and an unhappy mood (he’s feeling blue), and to being cold (it was so cold my lips were blue). We have tiny neural models of all these things that relate to the word blue.

And when we hear the word blue, there is a subconscious phenomenon called “neural priming” in which all those models, while they don’t actually fire, do move a step closer to firing.

This is why the game of “Twenty questions” works. We are trying to guess something, and the first question we ask is “person, place or thing?” When we hear “thing”, that narrows the candidates to the few million neural models in our head. And every question we then ask is to narrow the field further. The neural models that keep getting primed, when reduced to a smaller number of candidates, will actually fire; and we start to ask questions that can distinguish one from another.

But we are talking about “qualia”. That sense we get when we experience Blue, which is different when we experience “Green”, is the difference between all the Blue-related models being neurally primed, and all the Green-related neural models being primed.

Since we all grow up on our own unique path, this will not be precisely the same. Every brain is unique. But, in the same time, the same culture, in the same language, we all experience approximately the same encounters with “Blue”, and we can expect (except in some unusual circumstances) pretty equivalent neural models to be associated with the word Blue.

Less so for more culturally determined things, like foods, religion, expressions, etc. Americans and Brits likely have different qualia for the word “royalty”, or “bugger”. (We seldom say “bugger off”.)

In some foreign cultures male friends often hold hands when walking together and it isn’t seen as a romantic act like it is in America; an American seeing that will have a completely different qualia at the sight (different relationship models being primed) than a native seeing that. (I can personally attest!)

How an experience “feels” to us depends upon the sum of reactions to the elements of that experience, as determined by our history with those elements and how they are arranged together.

But it isn’t magical in any way, or otherworldly. It is just our brain working the way it does; constantly subconsciously trying to figure out what it means and anticipate what is most likely to happen next, to anticipate danger or opportunity, threats or good times. Qualia are important, it is all part of our brain constantly searching for meaning.

No, but quanta are qualifiable. We can look at numbers and computations as sensory phenomena. If we count to five on our fingers, we are abstracting the experience of counting into a cognitive, sense-making language which we participate in directly. While the language of mathematics is intentionally designed to be free of personal qualities in order to be universal, it is still ultimately a language which is composed of aesthetic qualities. Arithmetic itself floats on top of an ocean of sensory expectations - of recursiveness, symmetry, augmentation, progress, symbolic reference, equality, etc. Mathematics can be understood as the reverse of poetry. Poetry uses language to evoke a multitude of disparate harmonies of meaning - a qualitative fugue that is artistic. Mathematics is to science as poetry is to art, sculpting unambiguous, formal definitions in which the meaning minimizes qualitative play.

Qualia are not quantifiable for the same reason that you can't add water to beef jerky to make cattle. To quantify is to remove as much qualia (personal, proprietary feeling) as possible, so that only the most impersonal, generic qualia is left. When we do that, we access a different kind of sense which is like a crystallized reflection of the space between qualia. Quantification relates to communication, transportation, and publicity. It is about effects in the world rather than private feeling.

I think that the distinction here would be along that lines that ‘Emotional states have a certain phenomenal character [qualia]’. So that in this sense the ‘emotion’ would be ‘more fundamental’ and the qualia would be ‘more abstract’— because other state-types can have qualitative aspects, but the qualia have to be ‘attached’ to one of the more fundamental states.

I think that the ‘emotional state’ would be on the same level of abstraction as a ‘perceptive state’, and that both emotions and perceptions would be said to have associated qualia.

Examples:

1. Seeing a double-rainbow [perceptual state] would have, so it goes, the ‘qualitative first-person subjective phenomenal character’ that it does, involving appreciating the ‘violet-ness of the violet, the ‘green-ness of the green’ and so on, ‘what it’s like’, as they say, to appreciate colors.
2. Feeling awe, wonder, happiness, aesthetic beauty [emotional state] caused by the perceptual state of viewing the rainbow [with all of its qualia] would have, in addition, its own qualia— ‘what it’s like’ to feel the euphoric state that brings tears to one’s eyes as they experience the emotions.

Orthocoherence is a term that is not commonly used in philosophy or cognitive science, so I am not sure what you mean by "the orthocoherence of inverted qualia and qualia". However, I can explain what inverted qualia and qualia are.

Qualia are subjective, first-person experiences, such as the experience of seeing red or feeling pain. Inverted qualia is the idea that two people could have different subjective experiences even though they are both looking at the same thing. For example, one person might see a red apple and experience it as a warm color, while another person might see the same apple and experience it as a cool color. In this sense, the subjective experience of color is inverted between the two people.

There is much debate among philosophers and scientists about whether inverted qualia are possible or meaningful. Some argue that they are logically possible, while others argue that they are not. Some argue that even if they are possible, they would not have any practical consequences for how we perceive the world.

Overall, the question of whether inverted qualia are possible or meaningful is an open and controversial one in philosophy and cognitive science.