Qualia are the basic building blocks of experience -- symbols that our brains understand as referring to certain states. The feeling of being in pain is one example. A simplistic account of utilitarianism might say that one of the aims is to "reduce pain," but this isn't quite right. As the phenomenon of pain asymbolia illustrates, there can be a dissociation between the state that the body senses as pain and the feeling of suffering. Clearly, we should aim to minimize suffering, not pain per se.

The dissociation between qualia and emotional valence is obvious from the fact that many qualia -- the redness of red, for instance -- can have no affective content at all (apart, perhaps, from associations with other, emotionally charged memories). In my own experience, I've noticed many occasions on which exactly the same stimuli produce diametric emotional reactions, just depending on my general hedonic disposition at the moment. For instance, when I'm in a good mood, I look positively on almost everything that happens to me. Even if I stub my toe or forget my keys, I laugh it off and think how amusing life can be sometimes. Every glass that I encounter is "half full." In contrast, on days when I have a depressed mood, it seems as though nothing is enjoyable, and even the most fortunate outcomes feel pointless and even painful.

So what is the brain system that gives rise to this conscious "goodness" or "badness" of an experience? This is what hedonistic utilitarians really care about, and if we could understand the neural architecture and algorithms behind it, we could go a long way toward answering questions like, "Can insects suffer?" and "What would it take to create a truly happy computer simulation?"

I think the answer is deeper than, and perhaps even orthogonal to, behavioral reinforcement. If I stub my toe when I'm in an especially good mood, I enjoy the experience -- just because I enjoy almost every experience I have -- but I feel no urge to stub my toe again. Moreover, there's a distinction between wanting and liking. As one research lab explains:

Pleasure arises within the brain. Sweetness or other natural pleasures are mere sensations as they enter the brain, and brain systems must actively paint the pleasure onto sensation to generate a 'liking' reaction -- as a sort of pleasure gloss or varnish. Our lab has discovered several 'hedonic hotspots' in the brain, in which neurochemcal activations paint pleasure on sensation, and which interact to form hedonic circuits. It is important to identify such pleasure-causing brain mechanisms as these hedonic hotspots, neurochemicals and circuits, because several other brain candidates once thought to mediate pleasure are now increasingly recognized to not cause pleasure after all (e.g., dopamine, electrical brain stimulation). Therefore we aim to find true causes and mechanisms in the brain for pleasure.

Hamlet observed that "there is nothing either good or / bad, but thinking makes it so." What is the process by which thinking does this? That is the question.

You like stubbing your toe when you're in a good mood? I don't!

You like losing your keys when you're in a good mood? This happened to me recently, and I didn't like losing them. I did like finding them, that was rewarding. But losing them? No.

I don't get the qualia thing, and I've seen it before. I can understand that qualia is the name given to qualities of experience as each one of us have them. However I don't understand the whole supposed non-material nature of them. I don't agree with the inverted spectrum argument.

Which step in the inverted spectrum argument do you disagree with? I notice some of it is misleading, at least on the Wikipedia page I looked it up on. For example, while I'd agree that someone with the same brain state could have different qualia, I doubt that it could happen in this universe with the laws of physics we have.

There is no logical step that could be used to deduce from something purely physical anything about qualia, is there?

Good question (and distinction), Brian. I've remarked on this sometimes, for example, when I have a heavy bag on my shoulder that's kind of cutting into my skin; I realize that it doesn't bother me because I know what's causing it, but if I were experiencing the exact same sensation without the bag on my shoulder, I would find it very painful and unpleasant. Clearly there's more to pain than the physical sensation.

I've also wondered if there is a third layer to our experience of pain. This came up when I was eating really spicy Thai food with a friend and we were talking about how we like different levels of spiciness. I can't tell which of these three hypotheses is more accurate:

(1) His tongue takes in less sensory input from the spice (maybe fewer taste buds or something).
(2) Our tongues take in the same sensory inputs, but my brain processes those inputs more strongly than his does, resulting in a stronger experience of pain for me than for him.
3) We both experience the same sensation of pain, but I have a more aversive reaction to the pain than he does.

Do those three layers make sense? Sensory inputs -> Experience of the sensory inputs -> Valence of the experience. I honestly can't tell if I'm making illusory distinctions here. I feel like I might be double-counting, in some sense.

DanielLC wrote:Which step in the inverted spectrum argument do you disagree with? I notice some of it is misleading, at least on the Wikipedia page I looked it up on. For example, while I'd agree that someone with the same brain state could have different qualia, I doubt that it could happen in this universe with the laws of physics we have.

I disagree that if someone has the same physical body and brain state as someone else, they can have different qualia. But then I was also looking at the Wikipedia article, which is much different to the one on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That second one I have trouble understanding.

I just don't get what's all the big philosophical fuzz about qualia I see from time to time: whether they exist or not, or whether they're material or not material... It's a name we give to something, to qualities of experience, the concept is no more metaphysically puzzling to me than other abstract concepts such as justice or bravery, and I don't see any big philosophical discussions on whether justice or bravery exist or whether they're non-material.

Anyway it was just a comment about the conflicts behind qualia, but here Alan Dawrst puts the concept to good use.

Do you have any idea how a brain might produce qualia? Do you know any way the qualia produced given a brain state could be worked out?

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Let me see if I can translate that into smaller words:

As well as qualia endowed with an affective valence, some limbic qualia literally <I>are</I> affective valence, other neocortical qualia are affectively neutral.

Some qualia is emotional, some is purely of emotion, and some is unrelated to emotion (for example, the qualia of redness, if redness doesn't have any sort of emotional connotation for you).

The evolution-driven "encephalisation of emotion" means that what would otherwise be pure affective limbic qualia can literally penetrate neocortical qualia. Thus a red rose can look intrinsically beautiful, a girl can look intrinsically sexy, a snake can look intrinsically scary, etc.

When you see a beautiful rose, you are not just separately experiencing the qualia of beauty and the qualia of roses.

This is a hugely computationally powerful, fitness-enhancing adaptation.

This is useful and requires a lot of brain power.

Crudely speaking, the encephalisation of emotion is mediated by the innervation of the neocortex by opioidergic and monomaninergic neural processes from the limbic system.

Stuff about how the brain processes emotion.

But a theory of composition of qualia - i.e. why phenomenal minds are not a mere structured aggregate of discrete "mind-dust" but (sometimes) unitary experiential manifolds - is elusive.

Nobody knows why you have all that qualia together, rather than each individual qualy existing on its own. For example, when you look at a red rose, it seems like the qualia of redness should be off on its own, and the qualia of balls, etc.

For what it's worth, I reckon not just "object binding", but also "affective binding", is dependent on macroscopic quantum coherence. But that's another story.

Your best guess is that it has something to do with quantum entanglement.

Daniel C: I know of no way a brain as conceived by orthodox materialism could generate qualia. This is the notorious Hard Problem of Consciousness and Levine's "Explanatory Gap".

That question I asked is a famous philosophical question called the "Hard Problem of Consciousness", and you don't know the answer.

By contrast, for the physicalistic panpsychist (cf. Galen Strawson's "Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does physicalism entail panpsychism?" (2006)) there is no Hard Problem.

Someone figured out how to bypass the question? Please say more about that.

Yet the physicalistic panpsychist must still explain why phenomenal minds aren't mere aggregates of discrete classical microqualia but (sometimes) unitary subjects of experience.

He still doesn't know why the qualia aren't all off by themselves.

Is that correct?

I don't think that there really is more to the qualia of a beautiful rose than the qualia of beauty and the qualia of roses. You just think there is because your mind associates beauty and roses. Also that association has it's own qualia.

In other words, you have the qualia of an association of beauty and roses, but you don't have an association of the qualia of beauty and roses.

This also might be why you don't have that mind dust stuff. Or rather, you do, but you don't realize you do.

As for quantum coherence, I'd like to point out that under the Many Worlds Interpretation, which is much simpler than the Copenhagen Interpretation, everything is always entangled. It's just that it doesn't normally make "structures" like that.

For example, suppose you have two electrons. The CI would say that normally they're just two electrons, but they can get entangled so exactly one has spin up and one has spin down. The MWI would say that there's a certain density of up-up, a certain density of up-down, a certain density of down-up, and a certain density of down-down. If those densities are such that the "probability" comes out independent, that's just a coincidence. It will be like that even if they've never been near each other.

Mike Retriever wrote:You like stubbing your toe when you're in a good mood? I don't!

You like losing your keys when you're in a good mood? This happened to me recently, and I didn't like losing them. I did like finding them, that was rewarding. But losing them? No.

It sounds strange, but yes, I do. That's the thing: In certain particularly good moods, I like everything that happens to me, regardless of what it is. My brain doesn't respond differently to "rewards" than to "punishments" -- instead, "all is groovy." And in especially bad moods, I hate everything that happens; it's all painful. These are extremes, but they do occur on occasion.

Mike Retriever wrote:However I don't understand the whole supposed non-material nature of them. [...] It's a name we give to something, to qualities of experience, the concept is no more metaphysically puzzling to me than other abstract concepts such as justice or bravery, and I don't see any big philosophical discussions on whether justice or bravery exist or whether they're non-material.

I think I agree. I like Gary Drescher's account of qualia, which, even if not entirely correct, is at least non-mysterious.

Julia Galef wrote:Sensory inputs -> Experience of the sensory inputs -> Valence of the experience.

I think that's exactly right. By analogy with a computer, step 1 is reception of input data, step 2 is running a classifier to decide the category to which the data correspond, and step 3 is using that category and the associated context to update some sort of internal "valence" value. I guess what I really want to know is how step 3 works inside our own brains: Is it like a numerical representation that can increase or decrease? I would guess it's more complicated, but the details are fuzzy.

Something seems to have gone wrong with David Pearce's comment: all I can see is a dashed line. Dave, could you repost it? Thanks.

[Sorry Pablo, I'd intended to reword the paragraph so it was less jargon-ridden. Basically I was suggesting that Alan's question may be a direct analogue of the "binding problem" in perception (or in world-simulation, if you're not a perceptual realist). Consider the "raw feels" of our core emotions in the limbic system and (what would otherwise be) emotionally neutral representations in the neocortex. How has natural selection "bound" them so that a red rose can look intrinsically beautiful, a girl can look intrinsically sexy, a snake can look intrinsically scary, etc. The crude anatomical substrates of this fitness-enhancing "encephalisation of emotion" are presumably the neural processes from the ancient limbic system that innervate our neocortex. But precisely how our opioid and monoamine neurotransmitter systems penetrate our neocortical representations to yield the emotional coloration to qualia that Alan asks about is obscure.]

Daniel C, apologies, it's my fault for slipping into philosophers' jargon. But there's a bit more to the Explanatory Gap than "I don't know the answer".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap
If you get the time, Strawson's book is IMO well worth reading
http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Its ... 1845400593
not least because materialism simply can't explain why we're not zombies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Zombie
As I was arguing above, however, even a physicalist panpsychist position like Strawson's still has a lot of work to do to show why we aren't quasi-zombies. After all, an ant colony or the population of China isn't a unitary subject of experience. So why should 100 billion apparently separate brain cells ever be any different?
Like you, I take Everett's Relative State Interpretation seriously. But for Everett to work as a potential solution to the "binding problem"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem
there must be something like "mind-dust" to be bound in the first instance i.e, I don't see how quantum mechanics can explain how consciousness is generated from supposedly total non-consciousness, at most the unitary character of some conscious states.
If such fleetingly unitary conscious states are indeed to be explained in terms of macroscopic quantum coherence, then Max Tegmark's ultra-rapid thermally-induced decoherence objection must be answered
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009
i.e. surely an organic brain is far too warm and noisy an environment not to wash out any distinctively quantum effects?
At least tentatively, I'd bite the bullet here. Why not 10- to-the-power-13 quantum-coherent frames per second? What would our experience feel like were this the case? (cf. how the persistence of vision means that we don't notice the separate frames in a 30-frame-per-second movie.)
Needless to say, this is pure speculation.

Dave: Many interesting ideas. However, I don't see how the mind-dust helps ( I think this is the main problem with panpsychism, a position which I like).

A unified qualia field of eg a red and a blue qualia (two bits of mind-dust) isn't identical to the mere sum of the red and blue qualia. Since there is no identity the field is a new emergent thing, distinct from the red qualia and the blue qualia. But now the existence of these other things don't do anything to explain the character of this new thing. Sure, it would be a law that a unified red-blue field would arise when we have a red qualia, a blue qualia and some further physical conditions. However, this law is doesn't seem less arbitrary than a law saying that the purely physical correlates to the qualia and the further physical conditions give raise to a unified red-blue field.

I admit that a law connecting qualia-mind-dust into unified qualia-fields seems more intuitively compelling. However I don't think this intuition is justified since I suspect it rests upon two misconceptions.

First, it is easy to forget what was assumed when accepting that there is a problem about the unity of consciousness. Had it been the case that the unified field was just the sum of the two pieces of mind-dust we have a clear explanation for why a red-blue field would follow from a red and a blue qualia and there would be no problem about unity. However, after introducing these considerations about the unity of consciousness we have assumed the unified field is something more than the sum of the parts. But given this assumption

Second, I suspect that we get confused by imagistic thinking. Eg, we are used to that when painting a red and a blue dot we will see a red and blue field - or for that matter when visually imagine/experience a red and a blue dot. So we become inclined to think that from the combination of a red and a blue dot/experience a red/blue field follows. But of course, such ordinary life experiences cannot justify our beliefs about what underlies unified qualia.

It is argued that the emotional feeling comprises the following two emotional qualia. (1) A nucleus feeling or primary emotional quale, which is the phenomenological counterpart of the end product of appraisal by the central nervous system. (2) The experience of being urged to emotion-related reflection or secondary emotional quale, which is the phenomenological counterpart of the brain's decision to inhibit pre-programmed emotional behaviour, and to initiate emotion-related reflections. Different brain modules regulate these two qualia, and thus each can be experienced independently of the other. The primary emotional quale is related to activation of the amygdala, it is emotion specific, and neutral with respect to affect. The secondary emotional quale is related to activation of the orbito-prefrontal cortex (O-PFC), and includes affective aspects. It is argued that emotional behaviour is regulated by the following three neural mechanisms, two of which two are directly related to the two qualia. (1) An evolutionary ancient system (amygdala-system), which comprises the amygdalae and subcortical nuclei, and which activates pre-programmed emotional behaviour. (2) An evolutionary recent system (PFC-system), comprising the prefrontal cortex, which inhibits pre-programmed emotional behaviour, activates emotional reflection, generates and evaluates behavioural alternatives. In contrast to the pre-programmed behaviour, the behavioural alternatives are more likely to serve long-term goals. (3) A default mechanism, which gives rise to default (i.e., just do something) behaviour. The first two systems are mutually competitive, while the third mechanism takes over if either the competition between the first two mechanisms, or the decision process of the PFC-system, takes too long. This default mechanism involves the function of the medial-prefrontal cortex (M-PFC).

Apparently Violette pasted the abstract of "The emotional feeling as a combination of two qualia: A neurophilosophical based emotion theory" by B. Bermond.