--- date: '2025-11-10' description: phenomenal properties and what resists functional explanation id: qualia modified: 2026-06-10 23:44:47 GMT-04:00 seealso: - '[[thoughts/functionalism]]' - '[[thoughts/identity]]' - '[[thoughts/representation]]' - '[[thoughts/philosophical zombies]]' - '[[thoughts/knowledge argument]]' - '[[thoughts/inverted spectrum]]' - '[[thoughts/chinese room]]' - '[[thoughts/Attention]]' - '[[thoughts/dualism]]' - '[[thoughts/physicalism]]' - '[[thoughts/phenomenal consciousness]]' - '[[thoughts/access consciousness]]' - '[[thoughts/panpsychism]]' tags: - philosophy - pattern - consciousness title: qualia created: '2025-11-10' published: '2025-11-10' pageLayout: default slug: thoughts/qualia permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/qualia.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- when i think about qualia, i’m usually not trying to define them cleanly; i’m noticing the stubborn feeling that my experiences have a “what-it’s-like” character that my functional stories don’t touch. the hard part (for me) isn’t explaining what i _do_ when i see red. it’s explaining what red is _like_. the phenomenal character, the first-person givenness, the “what it’s like” to have the experience—this is what keeps slipping out of my functionalist nets. thomas nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat?” \[@nagel1974bat\] still shapes how i approach this. the question isn’t about bat behavior, bat neurology, bat information processing. it’s about bat _experience_. if i can’t access the first-person perspective, i haven’t captured consciousness. and functional descriptions—input/output mappings, causal roles, computational states—feel like they never quite give me that perspective; they give me third-person structure. ## how the gap shows up in my thinking chalmers’ easy/hard split is the cleanest version i know. \[@chalmers1996consciousmind\] - easy problems: discrimination, integration, reportability, attention, wakefulness. these feel amenable to functional explanation; i can imagine specifying roles, implementing them, testing them. - hard problem: why any of this feels like anything at all. why there’s subjective experience accompanying the information processing. when i try to map my intuitions, the gap doesn’t feel like “unknown details” waiting to be filled; it feels structural. functional explanations tell me what systems _do_. phenomenal properties are about what systems _feel_. my brain treats those as different kinds of fact. > \[!example\] how mary’s room hits me > > mary knows every physical and functional fact about color vision while living in a black-and-white room. when she leaves and sees red for the first time, i can’t shake the sense that she learns something new: what red is _like_. if that’s right, then functional/physical knowledge wasn’t complete. \[@jackson1982epiphenomenalqualia; @jackson1986whatmary\] > > the [[thoughts/knowledge argument]] is my way to keep this intuition organized: no amount of third-person functional description seems to capture first-person phenomenal character. the quale of red feels additional to the functional role of red-processing. ## [[thoughts/access consciousness|access]] vs [[thoughts/phenomenal consciousness|phenomenal]] consciousness block’s access vs phenomenal distinction helps me keep my confusions sorted. \[@block1995confusion\] - **access consciousness**: information poised for use in reasoning, report, action control. functional through and through—defined by availability, integration, control. - **phenomenal consciousness**: what it’s like, subjective character, qualia. not obviously functional. these can come apart in ways that feel psychologically real to me: - blindsight: visual information without visual experience. - tip-of-the-tongue: a distinctive feel without full access to content. for [[thoughts/functionalism]], if mental states are just functional roles, and phenomenal consciousness isn’t functional, then either phenomenal consciousness isn’t really mental (which i don’t buy) or my functionalism is missing something important. ## how functionalists push back (as i understand them) when i read functionalist responses, they mostly fall into three patterns in my head: 1. **deny the extra thing.** qualia don’t exist as separate properties. “what it’s like” talk is confused. all consciousness is access consciousness; phenomenal talk just picks out functional properties we haven’t analyzed clearly yet. \[@dennett1988quining\] - this still feels like a topic shift to me. when i ask about subjective experience and get told it’s really just functional access, i notice a sense of loss, like the thing i was pointing at has been renamed away. 2. **stuff qualia into the role.** expand the functional role: pain isn’t just “state caused by damage that causes avoidance”; it’s “state with phenomenal character q that’s caused by damage and causes avoidance.” \[@levin2024functionalism\] - this reads to me as labeling rather than explaining. the phenomenal character is now in the spec, but i don’t see why _that_ character shows up, or how multiple realization is supposed to work if different phenomenal characters all satisfy the same role. 3. **reduce experience to representation.** representationalism says phenomenal properties _are_ representational properties: what it’s like to see red = representing red in the right way. representation is functional (information, tracking, control), so phenomenal properties reduce to functional properties after all. \[@tye1995ten; @dretske1995naturalizing\] - here i get stuck on underdetermination: same representational content, different phenomenal character (the [[thoughts/inverted spectrum]] stories). and some experiences (pains, moods, background bodily feelings) don’t obviously represent anything external. none of these fully defuse my sense of an explanatory gap, but they do change how i think about what the gap might be _about_ (concepts? cognitive architecture? something metaphysical?). ## modal pressure i still feel conceivability arguments keep this whole topic live for me: - [[thoughts/philosophical zombies]]: functional duplicates without consciousness. if i can coherently imagine them, that tempts me to treat phenomenal properties as additional to functional properties. - [[thoughts/inverted spectrum]]: same functional role, different phenomenal character (your red = my green). if that really holds together, function doesn’t fix phenomenology. - [[thoughts/knowledge argument]]: knowing all functional facts still seems compatible (from the armchair) with not knowing what red looks like. all three use the same pattern: show that phenomenal properties can vary independently of functional properties. if they can vary independently even in imagination, my brain wants to treat them as different kinds of thing—even if i’m not sure that’s good metaphysics.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Wittgenstein, PI, 153