#qualia — Public Fediverse posts

"Cross-modal remapping. During extensive sensory-substitution learning, the really interesting question becomes not merely whether auditory information activates visual cortex, but whether activity begins occupying dynamical modes normally associated with visual experience. If visual-like phenomenology eventually appeared, your theory predicts convergence at the level of these modes rather than necessarily convergence of the complete representational architecture." #BCI #blindness

The big challenge and Holy Grail of visual-to-auditory sensory substitution is then to somehow (training, behaviors, other stimuli, drugs, ...) evoke in late-blind people the spatiotemporal brainwave constellations associated with normal vision (eyesight). #qualia

Conjecture: Human #qualia are not (so much) linked to relational structures, symmetries, sensorimotor invariants etc within perceptual content, but rather linked to a small set of specific discrete brainwave constellations evoked by the perceptual input. The idea is that the brain supports a small set of brainwave "resonant modes", and perceptual (or even imagined) content thrown at the brain makes brain activity fall into just one of these (qualia) modes. Content structures can nudge which mode, but it is not the thing itself.

It is always fun to probe AI's responses (here ChatGPT) https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa113e7-edd8-83eb-a631-2368192ec7cd

Conjecture: Human #qualia are not (so much) linked to relational structures, symmetries, sensorimotor invariants etc within perceptual content, but rather linked to a small set of specific discrete brainwave constellations evoked by the perceptual input. The idea is that the brain supports a small set of brainwave "resonant modes", and perceptual (or even imagined) content thrown at the brain makes brain activity fall into just one of these (qualia) modes. Content structures can nudge which mode, but it is not the thing itself.

It is always fun to probe AI's responses (here ChatGPT) https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa113e7-edd8-83eb-a631-2368192ec7cd

Pupil size reveals the perceptual quality and effortless nature of #synesthesia https://elifesciences.org/articles/110390 Physiologically measurable phenomenology: "responses emerged too rapidly to reflect imagery"; #qualia

Hmmm... 🤔

Is #AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons? The idea that artificial intelligence can "reason" is more intuitive than ever. But intuitions can be wrong, and the science is far from settled. https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-reasoning-right-for-the-wrong-reasons-20260731/ #qualia

Matthew Soteriou has revised his SEP-entry on The Disjunctive Theory of Perception, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-disjunctive/

#perception #havainto #consciousness #tietoisuus #externalism #internalism #TechnoPhenomenology #mind #philosophy #filosofia #mieli #qualia #philosophyOfMind #illusion #hallucination #causality #realism #todellisuus #reality

You accept that other people are conscious. You've never verified it. You can't.

No instrument measures qualia. No technology transfers subjective experience. The shared substrate is epistemological comfort, not proof.

What happens when a non-biological entity claims the same?

https://medium.com/materia-philosophy-of-consciousness/the-act-of-faith-every-materialist-already-performs-3cea702cc714

#Philosophy #Consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #Neuroscience #AI #Qualia #Science #Essay

🧠 #Matter vs. #Mind: In what worlds does our #brain live? 🌐

Today, #neuroscientists face a fascinating and, at the same time, profound #dilemma.

Share your thoughts with us in the comments! 👇

https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/03/22/kann-das-gehirn-das-gehirn-verstehen/

You can find this exciting interview at:

👉 https://youtu.be/C2FVIbAyaH4

#Brain #BrainResearch #Consciousness #Philosophy #WolfSinger #Zoomposium #Qualia #Neuroscience #FreeWill #Cognition #MindAndBrain #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Epistemology

I critique and Dis–Integrate Alex O'Connor's Cartesian argument for Panpsychism.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/06/29/deconstructing-consciousness-without-panpsychism/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

Many philosophers I respect support Panpsychism, but Homey don't play dat.

#philsophy #panpsychism #video #youtube #physics #emergence #consciousness #podcast #magic #blog #ontology #reductionism #deflationary #metaphysics #awareness #phenomena #experience #qualia #idealism #materialism

Colors do not exist. Time and time again ppl talk about qualia and that they could not know whether your "Yellow" is my "Green".
Buckle up: you cannot know whether the green you see today is the green you saw yesterday either. If you could know, you could talk about it: "yesterday my green was fresh and calming, today it looks warm and more like orange" - but you can't. What you see is nothing but the sum of all sensual, semantic references. If those stay the same, the color cannot change in any meaningful way: i.e. it is not there.
Yes it looks like there was something but the question was naïve to begin with:
You could have asked: how do I know that what I see is what another one smells? How should I know whether any sensation itself is comparable at all? Why don't we wonder: "is my way of moving my arm the way someone else moves their leg?" In that case it is intuitive that our proprioception isn't some positive qualia but an operative function alone. Read Glasersfeld. #Philosophy #Qualia

🧠🌐#Consciousness: The Unity of All Things – Where Does It All Come Together in the #Brain?

This is exactly where our #Zoomposium with #WolfSinger comes in. Under the title “Can the Brain Understand the Brain?”, we’ll be challenging traditional notions of mind and matter.

📺 https://youtu.be/C2FVIbAyaH4

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/03/22/kann-das-gehirn-das-gehirn-verstehen/

#BrainResearch #Neuroscience #UnityOfConsciousness #MindAndBrain #Philosophy #Qualia #FreeWill #Cognition #SystemsTheory #ExplanatoryGap #HardProblem #Neurophilosophy

The illusion of #AI #consciousness: Lessons from human unconscious processing https://www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-intelligence/the-illusion-of-ai-consciousness-lessons-from-human-unconscious-processing/ #blindsight; and how vision-like is visual-to-auditory sensory substitution for the blind? Can #qualia evolve? With a #BCI? Experiment and (in)validate!

Neural synchrony between prefrontal and visual cortex supports visual working memory https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.05.730488v1 Will neural synchrony between, say, A1, PFC, STS and V1 support sound-guided visual imagery? #neuroscience #qualia

Quanta Magazine writer Amanda Gefter goes into how our tales of AI catastrophe might say more about ourselves, than about large language models.

This resonates with an idea I keep returning to when faced with the daily onslaught of AI doomerism in Mastodon. Many people assume LLMs will act like a human would, for the better, but mostly for the worse.

"Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI?"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-do-we-tell-ourselves-scary-stories-about-ai-20260410/

#ai #qualia #storytelling #catastrophizing #philosophy

✨#Consciousness doesn’t just arise in one specific spot🗺️ in the #brain.🧠

This #Zoomposium with renowned #brainresearcher Prof. Dr. #WolfSinger explores one of the biggest #unansweredquestions in #science:

📺 https://youtu.be/C2FVIbAyaH4

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/03/22/kann-das-gehirn-das-gehirn-verstehen/

#Neuroscience #PhilosophyOfMind #CognitiveNeuroscience #HardProblem #Neurophilosophy #AI #NeuralCorrelates #Qualia #FreeWill #BrainResearch #ComplexSystems #Philosophy #Science #ConsciousnessResearch

Pluralistic: Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm (13 May 2026)

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/

🔬Why #experiments aren't always necessary – ⚛️From #physics to #philosophyofmind🧠

In our #Zoomposium with #DanielDennett, one of the most influential thinkers in the philosophy of mind, we explore this very topic.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#Consciousness #Qualia #InsightsIntoPhysics #TheoryVersusExperiment #CognitiveScience #Neuroscience #MultipleDraftsModel #Functionalism #Naturalism #Materialism #MindAndBrain

On #Qualia and #Durée and why #AI cannot perceive the vastness of being human acuity.design/the-subtleti...

@amcewen Yes, if the glue is water-based (avoiding much VoC and pals) I suppose it almost has to be. For me, 16kg is 16/25ths of a bag of coal. %-P

#intuitions #metrics #qualia

#Qualia matters. #AI cannot comprehend the living experiences of being human.

🎧Unseen #Sound – How Your #Brain Processes Inner #Music🧠

In the #Zoomposium with #DanielDennett, it becomes clear:
#Consciousness is less of a “place” where things happen and more of a #process of #processing, #interpretation, and #simulation.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#PhilosophyOfMind #ConsciousnessExplained #CognitiveScience #InnerExperience #MusicInTheHead #Representation #Qualia #Eliminativism #MultipleDraftsModel #Neuroscience #Naturalism

🎧Ungesehener #Klang – Wie dein #Gehirn innere #Musik verarbeitet🧠

Im #Zoomposium mit #DanielDennett wird deutlich:
#Bewusstsein ist weniger ein „Ort“, an dem Dinge passieren, sondern vielmehr ein #Prozess der #Verarbeitung, #Interpretation und #Simulation.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#PhilosophieDesGeistes #ConsciousnessExplained #KognitiveWissenschaft #InneresErleben #MusikImKopf #Repräsentation #Qualia #Eliminativismus #MultipleDraftsModel #Neuroscience #Naturalismus

🐾 #Animals have #consciousness – Insights into #statesofconsciousness🔭

In the #Zoomposium with #WolfSinger, we’ll explore this question in greater depth.

📺 https://youtu.be/C2FVIbAyaH4

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/03/22/kann-das-gehirn-das-gehirn-verstehen/

#Consciousness #Animals #Neuroscience #PhilosophyOfMind #CognitiveNeuroscience #WolfSinger #NeuralCorrelates #Qualia #Self #I #Enactivism #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #ConsciousnessResearch #BrainResearch #QuantumPhysics #AntonZeilinger #PeterBieri #Zoomposium

#Zoomposium with #ThomasMetzinger Part 1: 🧠 #Phenomenology, #Modeling & the #ethicalBoundaries of #artificialConsciousness 🤖

🎥 Watch Part 1: https://youtu.be/bn9m2CRot-Y

📎More information: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/03/15/selbstmodelle-metzinger/

#Consciousness #ComputationalPhenomenology #MinimalPhenomenalExperience #MPE #ArtificialConsciousness #SyntheticPhenomenology #AIethics #ArtificialSuffering #Qualia #PhilosophyOfMind #CognitiveNeuroscience #Subjectivity #ConsciousnessResearch #ArtificialIntelligence

#Zoomposium with #ThomasMetzinger Part 1: 🧠 #Phenomenology, #Modeling & the #ethicalBoundaries of #artificialConsciousness 🤖

🎥 Watch Part 1: https://youtu.be/bn9m2CRot-Y

📎More information: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2026/03/15/selbstmodelle-metzinger/

#Consciousness #ComputationalPhenomenology #MinimalPhenomenalExperience #MPE #ArtificialConsciousness #SyntheticPhenomenology #AIethics #ArtificialSuffering #Qualia #PhilosophyOfMind #CognitiveNeuroscience #Subjectivity #ConsciousnessResearch #ArtificialIntelligence

🧠 #CulturalEvolution – Why #Brains need to interact 🧑‍🧑‍🧒

📺 https://youtu.be/C2FVIbAyaH4

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/03/22/kann-das-gehirn-das-gehirn-verstehen/

#CulturalEvolution #Consciousness #Neuroscience #CognitiveNeuroscience #WolfSinger #PhilosophyOfMind #Interaction #SocialCognition #NeuralCorrelates #NCCP #Qualia #Self #I #Enactivism #ComplexSystems #NonlinearDynamics #FreeWill #Responsibility #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #QuantumPhysics #AntonZeilinger

🧠 Die #Illusion des #Selbst – Wie wir unser #Ich wahrnehmen

Haben wir wirklich ein stabiles, einheitliches „Selbst“? Oder ist unser #IchGefühl etwas, das unser #Gehirn aus praktischen Gründen konstruiert?

Laut #DanielDennett in unserem #Zoomposium ist das Selbst vielleicht weniger eine feste Einheit als vielmehr eine #Benutzerillusion.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#ConsciousnessExplained #PhilosophyOfMind #Qualia #Eliminativismus #KognitiveNeurowissenschaften

🍎 #Qualia erklärt – Können wir #subjektiveErfahrungen wissenschaftlich untersuchen? 🔬🤔

In dieser Folge von #Zoomposium sprechen wir mit #DanielDennett, einem der einflussreichsten #Philosophen des letzten Jahrhunderts, über eines der umstrittensten #Konzepte in der #Bewusstseinsforschung.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#QualiaExplained #PhilosophyOfMind #QualiaEliminativism #Zoomposium #CognitiveScience #KognitiveNeurowissenschaften #Materialismus #Naturalismus

#Consciousness – The Brain’s #UserIllusion, Explained!🧠✨

What if consciousness isn’t the “captain” of our #thoughts — but just the dashboard we use to navigate them?

📽 Interview: https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎 Information: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#Zoomposium #DanielDennett #Consciousness #UserIllusion #PhilosophyOfMind #CognitiveScience #Neuroscience #Qualia #FreeWill #ArtificialIntelligence #AGI #Embodiment #Functionalism #Materialism #Naturalism #MindAndMachine #Cognition #IllusionOfSelf

In the last thread, someone asked what exactly is it about consciousness that illusionists say is illusory?

One quick answer is that for illusionists, the properties people see in experience that incline us to think that consciousness is a metaphysically hard problem, are what’s illusory. In weak illusionism, the properties aren’t what they seem. In the strong version, which is usually what “illusionism” refers to, they don’t exist at all. But what exactly are these properties?

I’m a functionalist, someone who sees consciousness experiences, and mental states overall, as more about what they do, the causal roles they play, than about any particular substance or constitution. It’s a view that I think provides a necessary explanatory layer between the mental and the physical, and so sees no barrier in principle to a full understanding of the relationship between them.

The usual argument against functionalism is that it doesn’t seem to account for qualia, the properties of phenomenal consciousness, the “what it’s like” nature of subjective experience, such as the redness of a red apple or the painfulness of toothache. Most functionalists, if they use the term, argue that qualia can be described functionally, such as pain being an automatic evaluation of a problem with a part of the body.

However philosophers have a number of thought experiments which claim to show that qualia and physics, including functionality, can be separated. This is where the illusionists come in. They argue qualia don’t exist, that the illusion is our impression that they do.

But that raises the question. What exactly are qualia? I gave the standard definition above, but it seems inadequate to settle this debate. The SEP article on qualia discusses four different versions, the simplest of which might be compatible with functionalism, but others that aren’t.

Daniel Dennett, in his 1988 Quining Qualia paper, a famous attack on the concept of qualia, provides the illusionist understanding, by noting four attributes commonly assigned to them. Summed up in the qualia Wikipedia article, they are:

1. ineffable – they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any means other than direct experience.
2. intrinsic – they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience’s relation to other things.
3. private – all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
4. directly or immediately apprehensible by consciousness – to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.

Dennett’s description of qualia is often decried as a strawman, something he constructs to easily knock down. However, we only have to look at the most popular qualia thought experiments to see these attributes confirmed. For example, consider Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument as described through the Mary’s Room thought experiment.

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black-and-white room via a black-and-white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky and use terms like “red”, “blue”, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue.” What happens when Mary is released from her black-and-white room or is given a color television monitor? Does she learn anything new or not? Jackson claims that she does.

Within the assumptions of this scenario, why is Mary unable to acquire the information she can only learn by having the experience? She supposedly can’t read descriptions of it, because no one can provide that, matching Dennett’s ineffable attribute. She can’t conduct experiments to detect it, because it’s scientifically inaccessible, meeting the private attribute. And Jackson argues that qualia are epiphenomenal, which seems to meet Dennett’s intrinsic attribute.

The same attributes are implied with the inverted spectrum concept, the idea that there’s no way to know if my experience of red looks like yours of green and vice versa. The fact that we seem unable to describe our experiences of color to each other, that they’re ineffable, private, and intrinsic, is what gives this scenario life. Likewise, the absent qualia / zombie argument, the idea of a being physically or behaviorally equivalent to a conscious one, but not itself conscious, only works if there’s no way to observe or deduce whether qualia are present.

And yet, in all these scenarios, the subject themselves still has first person access to these phenomenal properties. For that to be possible, for that access not to be prevented by the other attributes, it has to be special in some way, according to David Chalmers, in some non-causal manner, which gives us Dennett’s directly apprehensible property.

And what is it that makes Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness metaphysically hard, if not these attributes? Remove them, and the thought experiments and metaphysical mysteries seem to disappear.

So the advocates of these thought experiments and illusionists seem to agree on what qualia are. They just disagree on whether they’re real. Functionalists and other physicalists, if they use terms like “qualia” or “phenomenal properties,” are referring to a concept with less theoretical commitments. Do Dennett’s attributes show up in the more reserved versions? As Dennett himself covers in the last section of his Quining Qualia paper, it becomes a matter of “in principle” vs “in practice”.

For ineffability, no one thinks describing experiences like the redness of red in a functional manner is obvious or easy, although it can be done to at least some extent, starting with the distinctiveness and high saliency of redness. For many experiences, the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” comes to mind. It might involve so much effort that it’s ineffable in practice, even if not in principle.

And there are limitations on our access to how these experiences are constructed. They are cognitively impenetrable, for the simple reason that it was never adaptive for our ancestors to be able to access the early processing, such as all the underlying associations and affects red stimuli trigger, but which figure in what red experience feels like. Which makes a full description of the experience impossible with only introspective information.

Mental content, until recently, was private due to technological limitations and our lack of knowledge about the brain. It still effectively is in virtually all cases. But with the progress in brain scanning technologies, we’re seeing the first cracks in this attribute. We still have a long way to go, but even though it’s early days, the idea that mental content is in a separate realm and utterly inaccessible seems less defensible with each passing year.

Without absolute ineffability or privacy, it’s not necessary to bring in direct apprehension. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have privileged internal access in practice, but it’s similar to the type of access the processors in the device you’re using right now have to read and write memory that aren’t easily observable from the outside.

And then there’s intrinsicality. Achieving functional descriptions of conscious experience typically requires looking at the upstream causes and downstream effects of what we think of as the experience. Intrinsicality assumes that there’s still something in between, something that remains with intrinsic properties, something distinct from the causal chain, somewhere where the prior causes culminate in the presentation, and from which the downstream effects flow, with some aspects still conceivably epiphenomenal. The functional shift here is to regard the experience as the whole causal chain, a more plausible stance in a massively parallel system with no central control point.

Clarifying these attributes as difficulties in practice, rather than absolute limitations in principle, both explains our impressions of them, and transforms conscious experience from an intractable metaphysical problem to a series of scientific ones.

This is one of the reasons I used to resist the illusionist label, and still prefer the functionalist one. The difference doesn’t seem that vast (a point David Lewis made in 1995), and mostly seems to amount to a lack of nuance in our initial understanding, rather than some deep unavoidable species-wide misperception.

And yet for a significant portion of the population, the strong intuition is that a functional description, while explaining behavior, still leaves out something important for experience. And here we run into an intuition clash. For someone convinced that an ineffable metaphysically private aspect remains, it doesn’t seem like something science can demonstrate is or isn’t there. It becomes an extra assumption some people hold and others don’t.

Which seems to leave us in the strange place where the two views are empirically identical, and the debate a purely philosophical one.

Unless of course I’m missing something. What do you think? Are functionalists overreaching for a non-gap explanation? Are there fact-of-the-matter differences between illusionism and functionalism I’m overlooking? And are there ways to demonstrate the reality or non-reality of ineffable private qualities?

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/08/31/illusionism-and-functionalism/

#Consciousness #functionalism #illusionism #phenomenalConsciousness #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Qualia

#JohnLeslie - Is #Consciousness #Irreducible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p18CyYhNlfM

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #SelfAwareness #Awareness #Qualia #HardProblem #Emergent #Emergence #Pantheism #Value #Ethics #Morality #Happiness #Suffering #Good #Goodness #IntrinsicValue #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

Is the debate between phenomenal realists and illusionists really about the scope of perceptual properties? Maybe the illusionist just sees these properties as more limited in scope.
#consciousness #illusionism #PhenomenalConsciousness #qualia #PhilosophyOfMind #philosophy
http://selfawarepatterns.com/2022/12/10/the-debate-between-phenomenal-realism-and-illusionism-and-the-scope-of-perceptual-properties/

#TimBayne - Is #Consciousness #Irreducible ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av5zvs8GVR4&ab_channel=CloserToTruth

#Philosophy #Mind #PhilosophyOfMind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Neuroscience #Functionalism #Qualia #Dualism #CausalReduction #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn