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NancyLebovitz 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.
There are different chemical sensors for various colors in people's eyes, while there's just one system for sound.
That being said, music has a major aspect of qualia, even if it's not consistent from one person to another or between cultures.
I wonder whether there's something simple about vision and/or something that enables people to be abstract about it.
People can feel emotionally connected to a wide range of visual characters, but we're still using voice actors for animated movies because synthesized voice doesn't sound good enough.
Actually, it's almost the other way around.
When a hair vibrates due to incoming sound, it sends an action potential to the brain. So we have three types of sensors for seeing, but thousands for hearing.
But there are even more pixels in the eye. The difference is that these inputs have dimensional structure. A pixel in the center of your vision results in a very similar response to one a degree higher. A sound at 1000hz sounds similar to one at 1100hz.
And in fact the structure of the brain actually enforces this dimensionality. Nearby frequencies have overlapping representations. E.g. 1000hz might be 00111000 and 1100 might be 00011100, representing the inputs which are active.
But colors have no dimensionality. Red is qualitatively different than blue. They are different kinds of inputs.
I guess part of the problem is that there are only three color receptors, rather than thousands, so there is less reason to represent commonalities between them. That said, we do talk about "warm" and "cool" colors, which mainly seems to refer to how much blue is mixes in them. So that seems a bit like a one-dimensional "heat" scale, with blue on the cold end and red/green on the work end?