Your brain is contained within a prison made of bone. Wet, floating darkness is its only reality. And always has been. It never encounters the external world. And given that you are your brain, that means you never meet the outside world either.
So what is it that you “see”? When you look up from this screen, you see a room, you feel its warmth, you hear the buzz of the various electric appliances. But none of this is, strictly speaking, real.
Your sense organs – your eyes, your skin, your tongue – encounter the world, then send electrical signals to your brain. These electrical signals are all that your brain has in its prison of darkness. It can’t verify them with other sources, and it can’t see what your eyes “see”. So, it must guess. It guesses a picture of the world, and that is the world that you see. All shapes, sounds, colours. Your mother’s face. Never witnessed directly.
That world that you “see” outside of you is simply your brain’s hallucination of its idea of reality.
So far, so uncontroversial.
Qualia and the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Qualia are the images you see when looking at the world. They are what we’ve considered as your brain’s hallucinations. Qualia are the what it is like to be you, experiencing the world. They are the subjective experience of reality – subjective and private to you.
They are also ineffable. That is, they can’t be expressed or communicated to another. Try explaining to someone what a colour looks like, and you’ll find you can’t do it. You could (with the help of a good internet connection) name the bandwidth of light. You could point to the source of the colour. Those are objective, describable things. But the experience of the colour, the qualia, that’s private and ineffable.
The definition of Qualia
Dependent on the individual perspective of the observer and cannot be measured objectively
Can only be accessed by the person experiencing it. An outside person cannot know what it is like for the person experiencing it
Cannot be described. It cannot be communicated meaningfully about between two people
But here’s the Problem. What the Philosopher David Chalmers called the Hard Problem of Consciousness:
We can see quite clearly that the brain, the body, and all physical things are objective, non-private, describable things. They can be dissected and scanned. Their makeup can be communicated in textbooks and lectures. Hypothetically, at least, there is nothing in a brain that a neuroscientist couldn’t, one day, know. BUT qualia are subjective, private and ineffable. They’re different kinds of things to the physical brain. This would mean that explaining the workings of the brain would not explain the workings of qualia.
Check out our video on the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Put it this way: One day we’ll be able to fully describe the physical workings of the brain, but included in that description will not (and cannot) be a description of qualia. So, qualia are not a physical part of the brain. Perhaps, are not physical at all.
David Chalmers and Zombies
Ok, so things are about to get a bit weird. Sorry. There’s no way around it. But bear with me.
David Chalmers argues that it is entirely conceivable – possible without contradiction – that a human could exist with no qualiac experiences. That is, a human could exist that is physically identical to us, but which doesn’t have qualia – doesn’t see red or hear a bird singing. They process the information from their eyes and ears in the same way as us, make decisions in the same way, but they experience no qualia. This is possible because qualia are not required for brains to function.
Chalmers calls these sorts of hypothetical humans zombies. Not brain-eating monsters, just hypothetical humans who are physically identical to us, but who lack conscious subjective experiences.
Now, if it is conceivable that we could be physically the same, but without qualia, then qualia isn’t something that can be explained through the normal physical processes. Consider that you, and your zombie equivalent, are physically the same. Then the qualia that you have, and your zombie equivalent doesn’t have, cannot be the result of your biology.
This could lead you down all sorts of rabbit holes to explain qualia. Perhaps qualia are a non-physical attribute of the brain? Or maybe qualia are a base reality of the world, and all physical things contain it to varying degrees?
Or maybe Chalmers is wrong. Maybe qualia don’t exist at all.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness doesn’t exist
So, the Hard Problem of Consciousness says that qualia are subjective, private and ineffable, whilst the brain is objective, open to study and description. The two cannot be the same.
However, the Philosopher Dan Dennett argues that we’ve misunderstood what qualia are. Fundamentally, qualia are not distinct things at all. Our experience is just the process of the brain. In the sense we’ve been describing them, qualia simply don’t exist.
Dennett considers Chalmers’ zombie case again. He says that there is some misunderstanding in what we think of as a zombie. If they are physically identical to us in every way, then they will have every brain process (except this mysterious qualia) that we have. For instance, they will be able to reason, decide, know, believe. Even – importantly – believe that they have qualia.
If this is the case, then qualia are not explanatorily useful. They don’t add anything to our explanation of consciousness, so there is no reason to believe that they exist as distinct things. Instead, they are perhaps just the emergent properties of our reasoning, deciding, knowing and believing.
Dennett’s solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness is to simply delete half the problem. The brain and qualia are different things? No problem – qualia don’t exist.
Want to learn more about the Philosophy of Mind?
We have a whole series on this included in the Cogito Membership package!
