I remember when I first heard this term in a university lecture, I didn’t get it. It wasn’t until a year later that I would start to understand, but the first time I heard it, I was dense.
I do remember asking my computer science professors, “How can we program a computer experience things?” They tended to be less enthusiastic to answer that than I thought they would be. Even those teaching AI classes. “You’ll have to take a philosophy class for that.”
AI is all about data. Statistics, really. At Stanford, the prerequisite for studying AI is a probability course.
Qualia is the alternative to data. While data can describe what the wavelength of a ray of light is, qualia can describe what that light looks like. Can you imagine was 700 nanometer wavelength light looks like in your head? No. If you do, what’s wrong with you? Now, can you imagine what red looks like? Sure you can!
Well, my friend Ted actually can’t imagine things. It’s called Aphantasia. So, if you’re like Ted, look at something near you. A water bottle. A remote. A chair. Whatever, but just look at it. Do you know the measurement of the wavelength of light it’s reflecting? No. Do you know what color it is?
Alright, since you may also be color blind, or just blind, let me use an audio example. Turn on your favorite song and try to figure out how many hertz you’re hearing at any moment. Just kidding, I know you can’t do that. But, you can probably identify the instrument, or maybe even the pitch if you have perfect pitch.
Anyway, this is what I’m getting at: Qualia is a different type of information than data, and it’s everywhere.
In a literal sense, qualia is the only thing that matters. Literally, your entire life is qualia. Whenever you talk to a friend, the sound waves that are going into your ear are sent through your nerves to your brain, and then somehow, your brain does something and then, poof, you experience the sound waves. Every thing you sense is converted into qualia. Your entire reality is really just qualia.
But, if that makes you feel weird, please set that aside and continue on with me. Qualia, the concept, isn’t going to change your day to day life right now. It probably won’t impress anyone in a job interview, nor will it impress your spouse’s parents, nor will it help you fix your broken dishwasher. However, it may be able to help you indirectly with all of those things if you start thinking about things in terms of qualia.
Let’s start with business. To get good at investing, you can’t just read a book or take a class. You have to invest actual money. You may assume that practicing investing in a simulated environment, like a classroom or a video game, might help, but it really really won’t. Why? Because investing isn’t just about earnings reports and dividends. It’s largely about emotion. What will you do when your stock portfolio plummets overnight? Everyone knows you shouldn’t sell when that happens, but what if your stocks never come back up? Now, here’s where qualia comes in. If you haven’t invested before, you may think that this won’t happen to you, because you’re smart. But it will. You just don’t understand it because you literally haven’t experienced the qualia of owning a lame stock during a bad market.
How about love? Before I ever dated anybody, I thought heartbreak was an absurd and melodramatic word that people use to wallow in self-pity. It’s been so long since I was this naïve, but I fundamentally believed heartbreak wasn’t real. Then, in high school I was broken up with one summer, and somehow, a relationship that lasted barely two months wrecked my little heart and I actually felt physically awful. I wouldn’t call it pain, and I wouldn’t say it was in my heart, but it was more than just mental. It was much more than self-pity. I knew this was heartbreak, and I finally understood the qualia that maps to that word.
How about activism? There’s lots of discourse about how a white person can’t possibly understand what it’s like to experience racism as a member of any other race, and often white people will disclaim this fact before yammering on about their opinions about race. This pertains to gender and sexuality as well, because ultimately, there’s a common experience that groups who are discriminated against share that people outside of those groups literally don’t have. Most people are aware of this, from what I can tell. But, that disclaimer about how “as a white man I don’t understand” may start to feel played out to the speakers and the audience. When we refactor it in terms of qualia, however, it can become more sincere. “As a white man, I don’t know what racism or sexism feels like in the same way that a deaf person doesn’t know what a thunderstorm sounds like. So, I trust those who do know what it’s like to help me figure it out how to navigate it, if they’re willing.”
How about mental health? Perhaps you’ve experienced depression but you’re struggling to convey to a friend, family member, or partner what it’s like. Well, rest assured: that’s impossible. But that doesn’t mean you have no way of helping them understand how to help you. In the same way that you can tell a blind person that “red is hot, like fire, but also sweet like strawberries, and intense like blood,” you can describe a variety of analogies about depression. “It’s like I’m full of glue. It’s like every inch of my body is telling me I can’t do anything.” But analogies only go so far, and ultimately what you have to tell them is that, “I know it might not make sense to you, but if you’re willing to work with me on this, I’ll tell you when I’m feeling it, and what it feels like. The best thing we can do is just talk through it.”
There’s an endless list of applications I can cycle through, but I don’t want to just tell you how qualia can help you right now. I want to talk to you about far far more.
Very little. We don’t really know what it is. Some people believe it is an illusion, and that we do know the wavelength of the light we’re looking at, but our brains just pretend it’s something else to be efficient. I say, isn’t that the whole point? What’s that illusion made out of?
We also don’t know how our minds generate this stuff. We know that our minds do, or at least, they map it to our senses somehow and pull the appropriate qualia out when certain data comes in from our senses, but we don’t know what’s going on when that happens. It could be a physical matter. There’s some great research to suggest that qualia could be a byproduct of electromagnetic waves that are interacting with our brains. I’ll touch on that again, but not much.
Furthermore, we don’t know how to share it. How do I show you what my vision looks like, or what my smells are like? There’s a question I would hear kids ask on the playground growing up that goes like, “what if my red isn’t your red?” In retrospect, I don’t know why I associate that with the playground because whenever I tell anybody that’s where I first heard of it, they tend to ask “what on earth kinda playground did you go to?”