Being the hallmark feature of the specialness of our subjective experience as a separate Self -- qualia -- the discussion surrounding it has probably been the one thing that has thwarted the full acceptance of the physicalist program by consciousness researchers. It just seems too unlikely that the ineffable experience of something to “feel like anything” can be captured by a cold, mathematical algorithm, even if executed on wet and warm hardware. That is, even if we were to find the equations of consciousness and their instantiation in specific neural circuitry in the brain, which we are making slow progress on, science will never be able to explain what it actually feels like to live through them. So the argument goes.
So far this has been a stalemate, with both sides agreeing to disagree. The philosophers saying that qualia is unexplainable irreducible, thus making up the very ground of existence. And the scientists calling BS, saying it all comes down to the right algorithms run in a specific way in the correct substrate. For them, qualia is just an emergent phenomena of all that biological computation. But what if it didn’t have to be a stalemate? The two aspects to tease apart to get to a resolution are the following: what counts as an explanation and what does it mean to have an experience.
On the former, many philosophers mistake scientific algorithms as purely rational explanations. Meaning, that whenever scientists say they can explain the algorithm behind the experience of red that it would be the descriptive explanation which could somehow infer the experience of it. That’s of course wrong. What is meant is that, knowing all we know about the color experience of red and the physical substrate, we would then instantiate it in a human brain that has never experienced red and thus, almost “telepathically”, transfer this experience over into the naive subject. Would they then have an “experience of red”, of the qualia of red? Absolutely. Total knowledge does not only come in the form of words, it needs to recapitulate all dimensions of what is supposed to be reproduced and that includes biological instantiation. Thus, a full physicalist explanation of the qualia of red would always entail it being executed in a brain. Show don’t tell, as they say. Which explains the confusion around “full explanations” between philosophers and scientists. However, is reproducing the qualia of red via algorithms-in-the-brain-instantiation really a full explanation or are we simply looking at a correlation...?!? The jury’s out on that one.
The second issue is a bit trickier: what exactly is an “experience”? Even if a color-blind person were suddenly able to perceive red and its qualia via neural implants, why should any of it feel like anything at all? Why should a biological computation come with vibes? We know that emotions, for example, are a “biological summary” of a brain computation showing a too great discrepancy. Happiness? Exceeding expectations. Anger? Violating expectations. And in both cases, the body is flooded with chemicals which trigger the characteristic physiological changes, like increased heart rate. None of which we perceive directly, they are largely inaccessible to us. But we do get the summary of them, and then we say we “feel angry”. Same with the experience of red. Any type of feeling or qualia seems to simply be neural circuits firing and subconscious body signals reverberating without us being able to resolve them meaningfully.
“But still”, most qualia-obsessed philosophers would argue, “why would an algorithmic biological response feel like anything”? In other words, why have a full-blown, ineffable experience when a simple summary algorithm, as is the emotion of anger, could also just be neutral?! Why feel angry?! The physicalist answer is usually something like: “because that’s just how it is, that’s how we perceive biological summaries.” [11] Which, on first glance, seems like a very unsatisfying answer. But perhaps it only feels unsatisfying because we’re asking the question in the wrong frame.
Let’s return to the data. What do we know? In the zeroth-person perspective, there is no “feeling.” No anger, no joy, no red, no Self. Feelings, emotions, qualia, vibes ... they only emerge once the Self-loop comes online, once the eddies rise from the calm sea of infinity. Zooming in on that experience, we realize that we often toggle between being in an emotion and neutrally observing it. Just like enjoying the redness of a sunset, aka being fully immersed in it, and then wondering why it feels like anything at all, aka taking the view from above. Philosophers often reify the immersion while scientists feel like they are done if they can explain the view from above. That’s where the entire disagreement comes from. But both of them miss the important part: the transition into any type of subjective differentiated experience in the first place. That’s where qualia come into being. Not in the toggle later on.
But that transition we know. It’s coherence forming bounded eddies in the undifferentiated infinity as described by the ruliad. And thus, any time we experience -- and wonder about the experience -- of the redness of red, looking for a proper algorithm to describe it all, we have to admit that we are the very calculation running and we can’t step outside of it. Us and the way we build our experiences are not some separate entity we can isolate in a lab and explore like a cell culture. We are the very exploration exploring. We are like an eddy trying to discover itself in its fullness, from the view above, but that’s impossible. Because there is no view from above. All there is is the ruliad (or an equivalent monism), and any coherence eddy “broadening its horizon” to capture itself in the act of being said eddy would have to deconstruct its own boundedness until it, inevitably, finds itself in the totality. Only there it could become fully known. But also there, it doesn’t exist as graspable, separate entity to be examined. All the questions about qualia it might have ever had cease to exist right in the moment it could have finally put its finger on them.
Said differently, the question of transitioning from zeroth to first person perspective, and thus the question of qualia, is fundamentally about a process of coherence which can’t capture itself in its entirety. That’s the crux. It’s not a biological summary of conveniently tagged bodily changes, a view from above in that sense, nor is it the ineffable and unexplainable ground of existence. Rather, it is a process trying to catch itself in the act of processing, and never quite succeeding.
This is a powerful reframe of the qualia debate, a whole new access point to resolve the decades-old stalemate. Take the example of the emotion of anger. Of course we can describe it algorithmically as “violated expectations” and list off all the released chemicals and physiologically changes. We can then instantiate it in a test subject by artificially replicating these details. We can even teach them to label the ensuing experience as anger. But as soon as the awareness and label of such a feeling becomes known to mind, the experience itself becomes a point of inquiry, and that’s where we step into a-process-not-catching-itself-fully territory. That doesn’t make it unexplainable or completely inaccessible by theoretic means, as some like to claim [12]. But having a theoretical description also doesn’t make it entirely pin-down-able, as others might hope. And it for sure doesn’t support any line of argument simply explaining qualia away, as heralded by others again [13]. Rather, it all points us to a new and highly intriguing point of exploration: the transition from zeroth to first person perspective. The birthplace of that which we call “experience”. That’s where we all should gather to discuss qualia.
Yet, still, why does a process trying to catch itself feel like anything in the end? Feeling for sure is a biological summary, but why not come in neutral? That we don’t know yet. But we might be able to because now we can finally ask a better question, one that can resolve the old tensions. That is the power of this unifying framework.
