Explain the inexplicable: what is qualia and how language affects thinking

How to explain to a blind man what color is? The properties of sensory experience are called qualia, incommunicable information. We tell how the inability to explain some phenomena affects science and society

What is qualia?

One of the most difficult problems in philosophy and biology is the subjectivity of sensory experience. It can be best understood by the example of color perception.

Color is an objective physical property of an object, which depends on the length of the wave reflected from its surface. But the very perception of color by a person is an interpretation by our brain of electrical impulses that occur after reflected light hits the retina of the eye. For example, we perceive wavelengths from 590 to 760 nm as red.

But what is red? Imagine that you need to explain what a particular color looks like to a person who has never seen objects of that color. It is impossible to explain the sensation of hue, as well as the individual perception of taste or pain. Such untranslatable sensory properties of sensory experience are called qualia. The term is predominantly used in the English-language analytic philosophy of mind.

Simply put, qualia is incommunicable information. These include:

• taste;
• smell;
• Colour;
• a sense of texture and other physical properties of objects;
• feelings.

Any experience that is inaccessible to anyone other than the subject who perceives it is qualia.

Reversed qualia

Since perception is subjective, and we cannot empirically test what “red” looks like in the interlocutor’s head, it is possible that colors look completely different to the other person’s inner eye. This is called “inverted qualia”. For example, your green qualia could be another red qualia. Or maybe we do perceive colors (and not only) in completely different ways and qualia are unique?

At the same time, experiments show that the difference between visual and auditory experience does exist. At least because of the difference in the anatomical structure of each individual.

Language framework of thinking

The concept of incommunicable information closely borders on the problem of the relationship between language and thought. Language is a tool with which we can express and convey our own experiences and thoughts. Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-British philosopher, argued that the limits of the language in which we think determine the limits of the world we perceive. If any concept is absent in the usual language apparatus, it becomes quite problematic to understand it. In general, this point of view is called the hypothesis of linguistic determinism. Similar ideas were also voiced by the anthropologist Franz Boas at the end of the XNUMXth century, suggesting that people perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures.

Although the hypothesis of linguistic determinism is controversial, there are studies that confirm that language influences thinking by creating semantic structures based on sensory experience. This partly determines the development of human cognitive abilities, and also complicates the description of qualia.

Chinese room and artificial intelligence qualia

The Chinese Room is a thought experiment that describes a person who does not know Chinese being placed in a room with blocks with characters. The subject is given instructions describing which hieroglyphs should be used to respond to requests coming from outside. Over time, the person in the room masters the skill of manipulating the cubes to perfection, so much so that even the Chinese who ask questions believe that they are communicating with the carrier. However, the man himself still does not understand anything. He owns the syntactic algorithm, but the semantic content of hieroglyphs is not available to him.

This, at first glance, an absolutely philosophical question, has quite practical significance. In the event that an artificial intelligence is created that, in our opinion, has self-awareness, we will not be able to check whether it really feels itself and experiences qualia or is engaged in high-fidelity imitation. So even if a machine passes the Turing test, we don’t know if it actually thinks.

The test is based on the purely functionalist approach to the study of the mind that prevailed in the 1950s. At that time, the mind was perceived as a system that operates with physical symbols. Therefore, it seemed that a computer could be programmed in a similar way, obtaining an artificial “real intelligence”. However, the human mind does not work according to the rules – “algorithms” can even contradict each other. A person does not manipulate symbols, but meanings, but mental patterns are difficult to attach to “cubes with hieroglyphs”, since they most often represent qualia. Subjective sensory experience cannot be calculated, therefore it cannot be digitized by a neural network—which means that fundamentally different systems and mechanisms will be required to create real AI.

Philosophical zombie in Plato’s cave

In another theoretical concept, proposed by David Chalmers, an abstract person is considered – the “Chinese komanata”. He is devoid of inner conscious life and unable to experience qualia, but he can quite successfully imitate the behavior of an ordinary person. Such a creature Chalmers called the “philosophical zombie”. Such a zombie operates in “mental darkness” – he does not understand the meaning of the things he deals with. A zombie is able to adhere to the rules written for him, and can even perform heroic deeds – but only by imitating their morality, since sensory experience is not available to him.

In philosophy, the inability to operate with meanings is not always determined by the internal characteristics of the individual. A person can turn into a “zombie” due to negative external influences. For example, being placed in Plato’s cave. In the dialogue “The State”, the ancient Greek thinker described people born and chained in an underground cave, in which they can only observe the shadows of the real world. It is their prisoners that are considered genuine things, without thinking that they can be discarded by something else – more complex, colorful and multidimensional. The people in the cave never saw anything but shadows on the wall. They did not even see themselves, therefore they accept as truth only the two-dimensional world to which they have access. It is also impossible to explain anything to the prisoner, since the lack of relevant sensory experience turns any fact about the outside world into incommunicable information.

Why study qualia?

On the one hand, the study of qualia is an ambitious task for doctors and biologists. The study of the mechanisms of color perception can help in the treatment of color blindness or achromatopsia. Colorblind people are immune to individual colors, while people with achromatopsia see the world in black and white.

On the other hand, solving the problem of qualia will bring humanity closer to the creation of a full-fledged artificial intelligence – the era of sentient machines, which Ray Kurzweil wrote about.