Qualia – maybe not such a hard problem after all?

Let’s now tackle head-on the issue of “qualia” – those subjective conscious experiences such as the redness of an apple or the pain of a headache, sometimes referred to as “raw feel”.  The undeniable reality of qualia, coupled with their “ineffability”, has been taken to be a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of consciousness such as the Model Theory.

Well I don’t think so.  In fact I regard qualia as, ultimately, nothing more than information, albeit extremely complex, organised, self-referential information.

If you think about it, there’s lots of other “stuff” in the universe which is not physical matter but is nevertheless “real”.  The contents of a phone directory, a novel like War and Peace, a piece of music, the whole of mathematics.  All essentially information.  Although they are not matter, they are expressed through matter, as markings on a piece of paper, or recordings on a CD, or bits and bytes within a computer.  But they are all more than this – there is something which transcends the physical substrate which in a sense is pure information.  Would this something still exist if there was no human mind to appreciate it?  Yes, I think it would.  Would it still exist if there was no matter, no universe?  Well we’re now getting into very deep philosophical water, but again my answer would be “yes, in a sense”.

Now let’s think about a model or simulation, of, say, a weather system, running on a powerful computer.  The model consists of data structures such as tables of temperature gradients, or wind patterns, all operating on each other according to programmed logic, and running through time to generate a simulated weather system which is in some sense similar to the real thing, except that one has as a substrate the real world – air, water, land and so on – while other has as a substrate the circuits of a computer, and of course is much, much simpler.

Now imagine a much, much more sophisticated computer simulation, or, indeed, the model inside our head.  This model is much wider in scope and complexity, but fundamentally is still information – a vast, interacting set of data structures corresponding to sense data, feelings, memories, symbols, higher level abstractions of physical objects or concepts, and so on.  This is how I conceive of the raw material of qualia.

But hang on you say, “you haven’t explained the conscious nature of qualia – what it feels like to experience redness – I can accept that War and Peace as a story transcends the physical book it is written in, but War and Peace can’t appreciate itself”.  Well, the crucial point about our Mind Model is that it contains a “model within a model” which is the Self.  As the Mind Model runs, the Self sub-model interacts with other sub-models corresponding to entities which have properties corresponding to qualia such as redness, pain, the melody of a song, and so on.  It seems inconceivable to me that this could all go on in some sort of intellectual vacuum, or zombie state without the model itself having access to, experience of, and knowledge of what is going on inside it.  The net effect is consciousness.

OK, it’s not perfect, but to my mind, at least, it’s a reasonable explanation.  Legions of philosophers have of course agonised over this issue, but I think they get hung up on arcane “thought experiments” and just make the whole thing too complicated.  I may return to the vexed question of qualia, but for the time being my working hypothesis is that the Mind Model is in essence an extremely complex information system and that consciousness is an emergent property arising out of the self-referential features of the system.

Meanwhile, an intriguing thought.  In some ways, by conceiving of mind as consisting of information, which exists in a physical substrate, the brain, we are in a sense reverting to a duallist notion insofar as information is distinct from matter.  But what if all matter was ultimately information.  More on that later!