What does it mean to crack it? Well, we know qualia exists. We have plenty examples of it. But, we have no idea how it connects to “the real world”. The physical world. We have no idea what creates qualia, or how. We have no idea how to share it, or if thats possible. These are some of the issues we ought to explore, just to start.
This has been called “the hard problem of consciousness” by David Chalmers. That name is, perhaps, an understatement. My philosophy professors generally told me that this problem is impossible. As did my peers. As have I believed, on occasion.
Many of my conversations about qualia overloaded my brain until I just wanted to watch dumb youtube videos and eat chips in bed.
It’s hard to wrap your head around itself.
However, there are other opinions. In the world of artificial intelligence, prominent figures in AI and AI alignment (such as Sam Altman and Eliezer Yudkowsky) tend to believe that an AI will simply generate qualia one day once its programming is complex enough. Meanwhile, the Qualia Research Institute (led by **Andrés Gómez Emilsson)** holds that Qualia is a byproduct of the way our brains interact with electric fields. Alternatively, one of the most academically respected opinions would be that of Daniel Dennett, who contends that qualia is not real. He argues it’s an illusion and that we’re distracting ourselves by getting into this.
I could dissect and debate these arguments, but I won’t, because I believe that’d be less interesting than what I have to say.
I think it’s possible to crack qualia. I think it’s possible, but not with machine learning, nor with brain surgery, nor magic. But, to be clear: I have not cracked qualia. I still don’t have the answers to any of the questions I raised. I have a new idea for how to get them though. I believe our minds are currently incapable of figuring out how qualia works. But, we can massage and sculpt our minds into ones that can. To do that, we can use language.
Did you know that Russian-speakers can see blue better than English speakers? Russian has more words for different shades of blue, therefore Russian speakers have an advantage at differentiating those shades of blue. Famously, the blockbuster movie Arrival (based on a story by Ted Chiang) uses a similar premise for its story–spoiler incoming–where an alien species teaches humanity a language which is atemporal, so it enables its speakers to experience reality in four dimensions, such that time is simultaneous.
This gets at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that language can alter our perception of reality. Another example of this is that the Inuit language has many words for snow, so they’re much better at interacting with and navigating snow than we are, with our singular word for it. Furthermore, it’s clear that humans can imagine more than they could have before we invented language. From fictitious monsters, such as ghosts, zombies, vampires, and dragons, to heady concepts such as black holes and utopias, we live in a world full of ideas that simply couldn’t survive in our minds for very long without the words and grammar we’ve created to sustain them. Language has already molded us. It seems very plausible to me that we could develop our language in order to mold us in a new direction.
We have already done as much before. With the invention of numbers and mathematics, we flooded our language with new symbols that require a completely different kind of education to understand. In tandem, we cultivated the field of logic, which has some neat new symbols but uses a lot of the olds ones too. In doing so, we’ve conquered something that we now call data. Now, I know you know what data is, but I want to share with you a new definition I use for it.
Data refers to the class of information that can be measured.
A measurement can be a quantity or category that describes anything by comparing it to some reference point. Like a pound of silver. What you probably take for granted is that, by measuring something, you can now share that information with someone else. You cannot do this with qualia.
Qualia refers to the class of information that can be experienced.
An experience is a feeling that is unique to an individual, and not much more can be said about it because words are a type of data. So, wait a second. If data and qualia are separate things, then how do we use data to understand qualia?
While computers input and output data, you and I input and output qualia. Any data that is scrawled across our eyes or ears gets mapped to qualia. That’s why “a sunny meadow” conjures an image in your head that perhaps has other feelings associated with it. Earthy odors and cut grass. Chirping bugs and birds. Tickling plants. Golden rays. The tannins in a glass of red wine at a picnic. Joy. Peace. Friendship.
If you let those words I wrote soak into your mind, you’ll find yourself in a sort of scene from a story. But, the scene I imagined when writing those words is different from that which you imagined, and any other person who will read this. We all have similar qualia that map to these words, but not identical. What if that is true for more than just these symbols though? Perhaps the word “sunny” invokes different qualia in your imagination than mine because you literally experience sunlight differently than me. This may raise a question: how much may our experiences be different?