Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[bennyboy]

You just make me think that qualia is some man-made concept to baffle everyone... It doesn't seem to be something real.

The red color is a electromagnetic wave which falls in a particular wavelength. Your dream of red is your recalling of your sensation of that electromagnetic wave. It's a memory. Memory on playback, mixed with other random elements from the same pool of memorized objects and concepts...

Maybe. But my memory involves the actual experience of redness, not just the plugging in of the "700nm" figure into a behavioral algorithm. The qualia idea is the only one that is NOT made up. Every observation we make must be experienced by us before we can encode it into a system of ideas. All learning, all communication: all qualia. It's just a word for talking about actual experience of things, as opposed to just talking about them.

For example, let's take the lovely smell of roses. If I've never smelled roses, I can still identify brain activity that someone has if they think about roses. I may identify "rose-smelling" neural systems in the brain, and predict people saying "I smell roses" by 0.27 seconds on average when someone else puts the rose in front of their nose. But I won't know what it's like to enjoy the smell of a rose.

"What's it like to _______?" Can only be described in subjective terms, and often not even that. What's it like to have an orgasm? What's it like to watch a midsummer sunset with a pretty girl at your side? What's it like to eat a cream-filled donut? You can fully describe ALL the physical mechanisms, and theoretically describe in detail all the neural and hormonal systems that interact during these activities. However, saying "During orgasm, we measured increased blood flow in the pleasure centers of the brain" is a much less meaningful response than, "Dude, it made my toes curl. I heard angels. The earth wept. The angels sang." Because "What's it like to ______?" are about qualia, and qualia are intrinsically subjective.