Qualia is, in simple terms, the objective experience of another. It may seem simple to say that it is impossible to accurately know the experiences of another person, but the idea of qualia (this is the plural, the singular number will be “kvale”) outputs this statement to the complex section.
For example, what is hunger? We all know what hunger “tastes like”, right? But can you be sure that the feeling of hunger in your friend Alexander or Vasily will be the same as yours? We can even describe it as “a feeling of emptiness in a rumbling stomach.” Not bad, but for Alexander, this “void” will be completely different from yours. Or here, for example, “red”. Everyone knows what red looks like, but how would you describe it to a blind person? Even if we break down the red color into light frequencies and find out which ones produce the reference red, we still can't be one hundred percent sure that Vasya or Sasha don't see it as the reference green.
Here the strange part begins. A well-known qualia thought experiment involves a woman growing up in a black-and-white room, getting all the information about the world from black-and-white monitors. She learns and learns everything there is to know about the physical aspects of color and vision: wave frequencies, how the eye perceives color — everything. She becomes an expert and eventually knows all the factual information on these issues.
Then, one day, she leaves the room and sees colors for the first time. In the process, she learns something about flowers that she didn't know until now. But why? First of all, what it's like to see color.
Qualia is, in simple terms, the objective experience of another. It may seem simple to say that it is impossible to accurately know the experiences of another person, but the idea of qualia (this is the plural, the singular number will be “kvale”) outputs this statement to the complex section.
For example, what is hunger? We all know what hunger “tastes like”, right? But can you be sure that the feeling of hunger in your friend Alexander or Vasily will be the same as yours? We can even describe it as “a feeling of emptiness in a rumbling stomach.” Not bad, but for Alexander, this “void” will be completely different from yours. Or here, for example, “red”. Everyone knows what red looks like, but how would you describe it to a blind person? Even if we break down the red color into light frequencies and find out which ones produce the reference red, we still can't be one hundred percent sure that Vasya or Sasha don't see it as the reference green.
Here the strange part begins. A well-known qualia thought experiment involves a woman growing up in a black-and-white room, getting all the information about the world from black-and-white monitors. She learns and learns everything there is to know about the physical aspects of color and vision: wave frequencies, how the eye perceives color — everything. She becomes an expert and eventually knows all the factual information on these issues.
Then, one day, she leaves the room and sees colors for the first time. In the process, she learns something about flowers that she didn't know until now. But why? First of all, what it's like to see color.