Qualia are the subjective, felt qualities of our experiences - like the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. They're central to understanding consciousness, highlighting the gap between our inner experiences and objective scientific approaches.

Philosophers debate whether qualia are physical or non-physical properties of the mind. This raises tricky questions about how brain processes create subjective experiences. Various theories try to explain qualia, but capturing their essence remains a major challenge in cognitive science.

Qualia and Subjective Experience

Definition and role of qualia

• Qualia refer to the subjective, phenomenal aspects of conscious experiences that capture the qualitative feel or "what it's like" to have those experiences (redness of red, painfulness of pain, taste of an apple)
• Play a central role in the study of consciousness and subjective experience by highlighting the first-person, subjective nature of conscious experiences that pose challenges for objective, third-person scientific approaches to consciousness
• Raise questions about the relationship between the physical brain and subjective experience, specifically how physical processes in the brain give rise to qualia and consciousness (neural correlates of consciousness)

Philosophical arguments on qualia

• Existence of qualia is widely accepted, but their nature is highly debated with some arguing qualia are irreducible, non-physical properties (dualism) while others contend qualia can be reduced to or explained by physical processes (physicalism)
• Explanatory gap refers to the difficulty in explaining how physical processes give rise to qualia, as subjective experiences seem to be more than just physical brain states, making bridging the gap between objective brain processes and subjective qualia a major challenge
• Philosophical thought experiments highlight the puzzling nature of qualia:
  1. Mary the color scientist: does she learn anything new upon experiencing color for the first time after only knowing the physical facts about color?
  2. Inverted qualia: could someone's experience of red be like your experience of green, even if they use the same color labels?

Qualia vs reductionist theories

• Reductionism aims to explain mental phenomena in terms of more basic physical processes, but qualia seem resistant to such reductionist explanations as the qualitative, subjective aspects of qualia are difficult to capture in purely physical terms
• Physicalism holds that everything, including the mind, is ultimately physical, but qualia pose a challenge by suggesting there are non-physical aspects to the mind (the hard problem of consciousness)
• Explanatory gap between physical processes and qualia is a major hurdle for physicalism, as subjective experiences seem to be more than just neural activity or brain states (neurons firing)

Approaches to understanding qualia

• Functionalism explains qualia in terms of their functional roles and causal relationships to other mental states and behavior, but is criticized for leaving out the subjective, experiential aspects of qualia
• Representationalism explains qualia as representational properties of mental states, where the qualitative character of an experience is determined by what it represents (red represents a certain wavelength of light), but faces challenges in explaining how representational properties give rise to subjective experiences
• Phenomenal concepts suggest we have special concepts for referring to and thinking about qualia based on our first-person access to them, not on physical descriptions, which explains why qualia seem distinct from physical properties even if they are ultimately physical
• Integrated information theory proposes that consciousness and qualia arise from integrated information in the brain, with qualia being explained as specific patterns of integrated information (phi), but faces challenges in measuring integrated information and linking it to specific qualia