Declaration of Qualia Fundamentalism

 The value of a work of art is determined by the quality of sensation,

 or "Qualia" which are felt when you see it in front of you.

It cannot be verbalized

It cannot be symbolized

It cannot be marketed easily.

 Surprisingly, even a work of literature, which is the art of words,

is determined by the quality of Qualia experienced, that which

cannot be verbalized or symbolized.

 When you look back you realize that the important things in

life is all things that cannot be verbalized.

 That ticklish feeling when you got into a swimming pool with

your friend when you were a child. That restless feeling before

your first date. That heavy feeling you get when you are in

conflict with someone.

 It originates in ordinary daily living and crystallizes in the promise

 of the ultimate. When you feel like this in front of a work of art,

you call it a masterpiece and are thankful for it. The joy of

being alive surges through you.

 Forget what is already on the market. Stay with your

inner, most compelling, sweet, sad Qualia. And sublimate that

Qualia into a pop-like style.

 I hereby declare Qualia fundamentalism.

(c) Ken Mogi 2004, Dr. Ken Mogi, AXIS Vol. 109, pp.158-159 (June, 2004)

Qualia - raw feelings or over-cooked stew?

By Cristina Andersson

Recently I had a very interesting, short conversation with a friend of mine. I suddenly asked her, “What does the redness of a rose mean to you?” She looked at me with a surprised mien and said, “Unfortunately I cannot say anything about that. You see, I don’t like red roses. First of all that reminds me of my mother-in-law who hated red roses because they reminded her about the communists. I don’t like the stoniness of the bright red colour either. Sorry that I have nothing to say.” Wow, I said! You said a lot, exactly what I needed to hear. In that short comment she explained what qualia is about without knowing anything about qualia or ever hearing the word.

This is my first attempt to write about qualia and I acknowledge I am a novice on the subject. The phenomena began to draw my attention when, in my studies of semiotics, I reached a point where I realized that semiotics could not help me advance to a deeper understanding in the experience of transcendence. Although the semiotic, the Sorbonne professor Eero Tarasti in his book “Existential Semiotics” and later in “Signs and values” explains, is the transcendence from one “dasein” [being-there/here] to another praiseworthy and widely known “dasein” but also acknowledging that there is still much to learn and to understand.

Tottering towards qualia

Before I dive into the cold waters of qualia, let me briefly explain my interest in transcendence. I am an educationalist whose main interest has (almost) always been the learning process in its different meanings and applications. When I worked as a consultant I was above all a process consultant, helping people and companies to observe, realize, study and develop their processes. Later on I withdrew from consulting to write the book “The Winning Helix” where I describe an action-learning process, using the DNA-double helix as a metaphor, in a way that I felt the phenomena should be described; in a natural, experiential and ongoing way that combines both tops and downs and growth and mow; a process model that allows a person or an organisation to create a learning environment that prepares to win, learn and transform and to make shifts to new levels of skill. Mobilizing energy and the flow are some of the key topics of the book as well.

“The Winning Helix” was released in 2005. Already then I knew that there is something more to the action-learning process that I described in the book. Many of my interviewees, mainly artists, athletes and scientists, reported an experience that is beyond the winning feeling, beyond flow – an experience where one feels like learning during the flow of peak-performance. I had experienced this personally too but on my ideational level the phenomena was not ready to be written in the Winning Helix; and on the other hand it is a topic of its own.

I realized that learning during the peak-performance must involve an event that is not a process but more like a semiosis that transpires in space instead of time creating emblems instead of data or information. It is like a process that, with all its phases and elements, is transformed into one single event in a creative space of ecstatic existence. I decided to call this event “the transcendental learning” or “emblematic learning”. The future book will reveal which term I decided to use.

One side path into qualia is also my interest in ambience-design. In “The Winning Helix” I write about “dynamic attunement”, which refers to attuning the mood to match with the performance of task. An article about Ambience-design can be found on my e-journal “Acta Laurus et Perceptum”. Understanding changing ambiences and their effects on feeling is vital in order to understand the transcendence.

What is qualia?

Related literature and the internet offer many definitions about qualia; from a very wide apprehension to narrower definitions. I am not going to go through those definitions but will envisage the topic ontologically from the point of view of raw or authentic experience or feeling.

Professor, PhD John Greco from the Fordham University has explained qualia in “Modern Ontology and the Problems of Epistemology," American Philosophical Quarterly 32, 3 (1995), pp. 241-251:

On the most general level, then, we may distinguish three elements or moments in the perception of an object. These elements need not be thought of as being temporally or even ontologically distinct, and the distinctions are not meant to be exhaustive. My point is only that one can make these distinctions in a rough and ready way, and I make them here because they will help us to understand the theories of evidence to be discussed shortly. The elements or moments I wish to distinguish follow below.

a.) The uninterpreted qualia of experience. (Sensations characterized as lacking conceptual content.)

b.) Interpreted experience. (Sensations characterized as involving conceptual content.)

c.) Beliefs about objects in the world.

I believe that examining the uninterpreted qualia of experience provides me a certain foundation to build on my further studies on this fascinating topic.

Raw experience or feeling

From Wikipedia we can read: “Another way of defining qualia is as "raw feels". A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition. In contrast, a "cooked feel" is that perception seen as existing in terms of its effects.”

Maybe one problem with the world we live in is that we try to explain things to death. A cigar cannot be just a cigar, but it is loaded with meanings that might alienate us from experiencing the pure pleasure of smoking a good cigar.

A Finnish psychiatrist Ben Furman wrote a book: “It is never too late to get a happy childhood”. The idea is that you give your childhood a new, happy, explanation and become free to seek happiness in your adulthood. Does this really help? Do we not instead need to have a truthful look at our experience and feel the experience as it is instead of as we wish that it would have been?

Matthew Elton in his review of Kirk Roberts Raw Feeling: a Philosophical Account of the Essence of Consciousness says: “‘Raw Feeling’ addresses the topic of phenomenal consciousness. How do mere mechanical parts in motion give rise to sensations such as pain, pleasure, taste, vision, and smell? Kirk’s main thought is that a necessary and sufficient condition for enjoying such consciousness is that a creature comes equipped with a ‘basic package’ of information processing tools that allow her to consider multiple possibilities at once. The considering of an array of possibilities is what gives scope for items within the array to have a character, a distinctive raw feel.”

John Welwood, Ph.D. describes ‘raw aliveness’ as the ground of feeling. Raw aliveness is according to him the same as ‘joie de vivre’ where the ‘simple joy of just being is an extraordinary experience’. In order to enjoy life, experience aliveness as a basic force, do we not gain from experiencing the events and issues of our lives as they are?

Raw experience and qualia

I started this article with a short conversation about the redness of a rose. My friend gave a perfect example about how a raw experience and qualia were combined; she said she had nothing to say about the matter but she, however, spontaneously said a whole lot of things, from ‘stoniness’ of the red colour to ‘communism”. Her raw, authentic, experience contained a lot of qualia without herself being conscious of that. We could of course, think of her comments as a ‘cooked feel’ but I do not agree. A cooked feel would have been a situation where I would have represented a party that represented a particular ideology for her. For example if I was representing the Florist’s organisation, political party or a car-shop, her answer would immediately have changed from spontaneous, raw experience to a cooked communication aiming to fill my expectations.

Gertrude Stein described the ‘ding an sich’ [thing in itself]: “A Rose is a Rose is a Rose”, a rose with no other qualia than its rosiness. With the concept of raw experience I don’t mean this kind of pure existence but rather the spontaneous experience arising from the being-in-the-now, the person with her present existence, knowledge and understanding. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Rhodora”, in my opinion, describes better the phenomena of raw experience and feeling in the way I think of it:

On being asked, whence is the flower.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

Here the flower has a task and effect on its surroundings but also has its own right for existence as a Rhodora.

Does Qualia exist?

If I understand right the discussion about the qualia, any common understanding about their existence has not so far been brought forth.

As mental properties the qualia might be something that exist in the person and the qualia activates when a certain perception takes place and the inner qualia makes a match with the qualia of the thing in the outer world. For example, if I am sad and I see a grey cloud I might say “my sorrow is grey as that cloud” and my raw feeling can be comforting when I realize I am not alone in this universe, “even the sky mourns with me”. We are to remember that the feelings inside a person are always big, they are in fact the biggest feelings in the world for that individual and cannot and should not be compared with other people’s feelings. The more we understand the phenomena of qualia the more and better we can help our fellow humans to live better lives.

My answer to the question “do qualia exist” is yes, they do definitely exist but we need to do more study and gain more understanding. What do they mean on the narrowest individual level and on the other hand on a collective level? Could the lay-out of the question be formed in two categories: the individual “the rosiness of a rose” and “the davidbeckhamness of David Beckham” referring to David Beckham as a global, collective and highly public phenomena?

And.. on the other hand we should not kill qualia with zombifying explanations.

“The splendour of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.”

- Therese of Lisieux

About the writer:

Cristina Andersson from Helsinki is the author of the “Winning Helix – the art of learning and manifesting your true potential”. She is an educationalist, who has taught in several business schools and in the University of Helsinki and consulted several companies on strategic learning issues. She lectures about winning, learning and action-learning processes. She is also a motivational speaker and an inspiring soprano singer.

Cristina Andersson is also a ‘semiotic in spe’ and studies eagerly topics like Qualia, Ambience and Transcendence for her next book about transcendental learning.

cristina.andersson@develor.fi