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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Feb. 16 - Feb. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Does anyone else find that the problem of qualia seems like more of a problem for some senses than others? For example, my sense of sight versus my sense of hearing. When I look at the color red, I perceive some fundamentally different sensation than when I look at blue. Though they are both caused by looking at different frequencies of light, there is something "over and above" the frequencies that is difficult to explain, and has caused so much ink to be spilled in the philosophy of consciousness.
However, when I hear something, I just hear frequencies. This is whether I am listening to a symphony or a single sine wave, white noise, or the person currently shoveling snow outside. There isn't anything "over and above" the sounds; they are all obviously the same "kind" of thing to me. I can categorize the individual frequencies if it is a simple enough sound, and more complicated sounds, while I can't categorize them, don't feel like they are anything different than just combinations of simple frequencies.
None of the sound frequencies are fundamentally different in the way that red and blue are. An oboe and a violin may have different profiles of overtones when played, but they aren't different experiences like color. I don't get the impression of fundamentally different qualities when I listen to them.
The difference between these two senses is so strong that I think if I had been born blind (and also without taste or smell, which are even MORE qualia-like and problematic), or at least born with black-and-white vision, I would never understand what the problem with qualia is. There wouldn't be any internal experience that would seem unknowable to others. When I looked at something there would just be "I am experiencing a light intensity of 75% maximum", just as when I hear something there's just "I am experiencing a certain combination of frequencies".
Why does light have "metadata" associated with each frequency in my mind, while sound does not?
EDIT: By qualia I am not referring to sensory perception in general, but to the ineffable and incommunicable experiences like the redness of an apple. I can't tell if someone else sees what I would call blue when they look at an object I would call red. Sound doesn't have that for me, as far as I can tell.
If I hear a word, then parsing from frequencies to language is a step that adds meaning.
When I'm dancing and most of my attention is focused on kinesthetic perception and the vibe of the music, I often don't get language immediately when my dancing partner just says something. It seems like my language module has to first to be restarted.
The McGurk effect is pretty interesting when thinking about audio qualia. The same frequency that reaches the ears produces different perceived qualia depending on visual input.
At the Solstice event I did lead a meditation where I among other things lead attention to perceiving the qualia of silence that exists independent of noises in the environment. Perceiving that qualia worked even for the person in that group where my priors were that they were least likely to be able to follow it. To me that silence-qualia is a audio qualia that's not simply a perception of frequencies.
At the moment I focus a lot of effort on phonemes. They are qualia that differ among different people. Most German speakers can't hear a difference between the English words "cap" and "cab". With training however it's possible to start hearing the difference and perceive the two words differently.
In Salsa Music it takes most beginners time to learn to hear "the one", the note that's begins a tact.
I personally got very irritated when I read of perception of rhythm in things in the writing of Moshé Feldenkrais. Even through I'm dancing for more than five years, I still feels completely different. In some sense hearing "the one" in Salsa is likely rythmn perception. A lot of my deeper investigation of qualia comes as a result of dealing with Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy. When I asked my main teacher for perceptive pedagogy about rhythm, she unfortunately told me that's she also bad at it. There's still room for me to develop finer qualia for rythmn.
I think we are using qualia to refer to different things. I am using it to mean something more specific than just a subjective sensory experience; I'm referring to incommunicable ,"extra" experience (i.e., there is no way to tell if we see the same "color" when we look at a red apple, even though we are both seeing the same frequency of light. For all I know, you experience what I would call blue). Sorry if my definition wasn't clear; is there another, more specific word for this aspect of qualia?
The difference between phoneme comprehension in different languages does not appear to reference this definition of qualia. I experience the phoneme "p", and though I am mentally assigning it to a bucket that other languages would split further into an aspirated "p" and unaspirated "p", there's no special "p-ness" about that sound that distinguishes it from other phonemes in some ineffable way. It's just frequencies, completely unlike colors which have metadata.
When you learn to hear "the one" note that begins a tact, does it sound fundamentally different from other sounds, or does it just feel different, even though the sound itself is qualitatively like all others? I would consider it to be an ineffable qualia iff that sound were as different from the same sound in a another context as red is from blue.
When I am playing piano, the upbeats and downbeats, or the beginning of a phrase, feel different to me, likely in the same way that the note that begins a tact feels different to you (I presume). But I wouldn't say the upbeats and downbeats are different qualia; they only feel that way to me because I'm anticipating them and treating them differently. They don't have any different qualities from each other.
But again, that's probably just me. I think the main reason I'm interested in reverse engineering minds is so we can finally properly research these questions. They're so hard to even talk about!
I can give you 100 pairs of colors that you couldn't distinguish from each other that go from red to blue. There no point where you would be able to draw a clear boundary where redness stops and blue begins. I likely even need less than 100 pairs.
If you touch my hand or if you touch my face, that's both a different qualia, in some sense. It's not the same way different than red and blue are different. It's also not the same way different than two phonemes or two notes are different.
Two days ago I has chatting with a friend and we both have well developed kinesthetic qualia. We talked about how I'm not speaking from being present in my belly. Then I said something and he said: "Well, you are in your head, there no solution to the problem from there." I answered: "I do feel present in my chest, don't you also perceive me as present in my chest?". He answers: "Yes, you are present ribcage upwards, but not in your belly...".
I would guess, that most people on LW wouldn't know what to do with that notion of presence. It's something we both perceive but where the experience is incommunicable for me.
Feel is a word for things that are perceived kinesthetically. I see no reason not to things perceived kinesthetic qualia. Of course kinestic qualia aren't visual qualia.
A recent experience was getting annoyed by the drilling machine of my neighbor. I can recognize that I feel tension in specific parts of my head that are produced by that sound. I don't feel "the one" in Salsa in a similar kinesthetic way that's communicable. For me it's an incommunicable experience that I can't break down. It's a primitive.
If we go back to red and blue. It's also worth noting that English is a language that has words for those two colors. Ancient Greek doesn't have exactly the same distinction. Homer speaks of a wine dark sea.
The same way you can train new phoneme distinctions you can train new color distinctions. Interestingly naming the colors helps with the ability to develop a new perceived color.
This is true, but it doesn't change the fact that I am experiencing colors when I look at them. Why is there "redness" or "blueness" to begin with?
But being able to distinguish between colors or sounds isn't the problem I'm trying to address. The problem for me is, why do colors have metadata associated with them while sound does not?
What about (for example) "low" and "high"? ("What if low pitches sound to you the way high pitches sound to me, and vice versa?")
Hmmm. That could be true. But it still doesn't feel like there are qualia associated with sound in that way; for low pitches you can actually hear the individual vibrations, so to me it doesn't seem like it's possible for you to be hearing what I hear as a high note. The true nature of the sound is apparent at such low pitches, and it's as if there's nowhere for qualia to be hiding.
The core question here is: For how many colors do you have something like "redness" or "blueness" and what does it take to get that for a new color.
Particularly it takes a name. The name is metadata. It's makes the thing a primitive. An important step from going from vague feelings of difference to things with metadata is to give it a name. At least that's what I happen to believe at the moment.
I don't think perceiving color as qualia requires a name-- in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff describes a lot of research on how people classify color. While some languages have more words than others for colors, there's good agreement on what the best example is for each color, and a sequence for the order in which color words appear in each language.
Also, even if there's a word which covers red and orange, best examples of the color peak at what we would call a good red or a good orange,
The experience of how perceiving the sound "C3" is different from perceiving the sound of a raindrop also seems very incommunicable. I don't think I could communicate it to a person who's completely deaf.
I don't think that's what you need the name for. tzachquiel speaks about "metadata". A name adds "metadata" that goes beyond what was there beforehand.
Emotions are quite interesting in that regard. It changes things to put a label on a sensation. In Focusing, putting a label on the sensation is an essential part. It's also a step in the Sedona method. Taking a label away can also make certain process such a EmoTrance easier.
If you want to describe how you are angry you can talk about how your heart rate rises and how you feel sensations in your belly but the label "anger" adds incommunicable metadata to it. It changes the experience.
Fear also raises emotions and might also let's you feel sensation in your belly but it's different in a way that just doesn't boil down to raised heart rate and inner movement.
I'm reasonably sure that my experience of Focusing being different from ordinary use of language is typical-- ordinary use involves accepting approximate words for experience, while Focusing takes a lot more time to find words that feel satisfyingly exact.
I agree that there's metadata associated with sounds as well as color.
Though there are many specific shades that I would group under the category "red", each one is it's own separate experience and I can distinguish colors very finely (I get a perfect score on this color sorting test) and remember them later. I do not believe naming the categories is the cause of qualia, because I also name sounds (C, E-flat, oboe, violin, etc.) and I don't experience the same thing with sound as I do with color.
That still opens the door to find colors for which you don't have a separate experience at the moment and develop a separate experience.
The proliferation of incommunicable experiences doesn't seem like a good way to solve this problem :) But on a related note, that's actually a good idea for some Anki cards; learn a bunch of more fine-grained color names and become able to better remember them. Of course, the fidelity of the screen will become important at that point...
The interesting thing is studying the process of what happens when you build more of them. It might be possible to systematize the process and then find out something interesting through quantitative analysis.
If you want I can send you the deck. My deck has all CSS color names and also finer distinction via hex numbers.
Otherwise I have thought a bit about the issue. Redness is not only a single color but also a dimension. If you take any two colors you can compare them in their redness. You can't compare to notes by how much "C" they are. A note is either C or it isn't.