Post #1302795
2026-03-27 18:01 UTC
> However, answering the question "what it's like to be" is not relevant here. What's relevant is that existence has qualia at all.
Does existence “have qualia?” That treats qualia almost like it’s ontological, if I’m interpreting you correctly. Yet, qualia can only exist from the perspective of a *being* with the capacity to model a (seemingly external) world via said qualia. There is no *magic qualia sauce* we can embed inside something.
Qualia, I think, is a process of information reduction… but also it’s a flavor of information interrogation. Because, reducing electromagnetic radiation to “visual perception” happens inside light sensors too — albeit without counting as “qualia.”
What would you say counts as “qualia?” Or rather, what are its dependencies?
Replies (1)
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@Iconoclast@feddit.uk 2026-03-27 18:23
It's the fact of subjective experience - the warmth of a campfire, the bitterness of lemon, the greenness of green. We're essentially talking about consciousness here. The fact that there's something it is like to *be*. While nobody knows what consciousness is or how it comes about, what I mean by it is best captured by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his aforementioned essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" > Nagel argues that consciousness has an essentially subjective character, a what-it-is-like aspect. He states that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to *be* that organism – something it is like *for* the organism.