The Qualities of Experience (Q2Q III)

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

This is the third in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts, in which I study the phenomenon of consciousness with an eye toward discovering what kinship the topic may have with religious experience, Christian or otherwise. The most recent entry in the series was, until now, One Hand Clapping (Q2Q II).

David J. Chalmers, philosopher of mind and author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, says in his book's first chapter that consciousness's very existence is surprising. He wants to know why there should be consciousness at all: why there is a "subjective quality of experience" (see p. 6) that emerges from the complex brain states we possess as cognitive agents.

I spoke in my earlier posts as if the "qualitative feels" or qualia which our consciousness is aware of when it beholds, say, a red tricycle were characteristics of the tricycle itself. That was apparently a subtle error on my part. Chalmers makes of qualia, those qualities of experience that are associated with some phenomenon, a near-synonym for the phenomenon itself — the subjective experience qua experience which is consciousness per se.

Consciousness is phenomenal, rather than psychological — more on this distinction later. A phenomenon is a particular conscious state given rise to by a particular underlying psychological state. Chalmers wants a scientific (not merely philosophical) theory of consciousness to explain why that particular qualitative feel arises when we see a red tricycle or, say, hear middle C played on a piano.

I find it confusing that Chalmers uses "qualia" in both singular and plural. According to this Wikipedia article, "qualia" (plural) are "most simply defined as qualities or feelings, like redness, as considered independently of their effects on behaviour." The word "qualia" comes from the Latin for "what sort" or "what kind." There is also a Latin and English singular, "quale" (KWAH-lee), which I will henceforth adopt in place of Chalmers's singular "qualia" (KWAH-lee-uh).

Accordingly, when I behold a red tricycle, I am aware of the quale called "redness." I experience it. I am conscious of it. But this quale is not something the tricycle has. It is rather something that I have; it is given rise to by my perception of a red tricycle. In short, our qualia (plural) are all in our head.


Still, what are qualia? They are thus describable: a quale or set of qualia is "what it is like" to be in a particular mental or psychological state, i.e., to be doing certain kinds of information processing in the brain. These states, this processing, are spoken of by Chalmers as causing or explaining behavior, and of themselves having causes in the physical or psychological realm. But the qualia themselves are all about feelings we have while we are in the associated psychological states — not necessarily emotions per se, but possibly those too.

The "what it is like" aspect of qualia can be illustrated, I think, by this image:


This is an optical illusion. It comes into our brains as a particular pattern of (visual) sensation.

Depending on the perspective which our brain's perceptual processing capacity happens to impose on the sensation, we will see it as either a beautiful young woman or an old crone. Perception, Chalmers says, is largely psychological, though tinged with the phenomenal.

With some effort, we can learn to change perspectives at will. Learning, or adapting to environmental stimuli, is almost wholly a matter of the psychological, as opposed to the phenomenal, aspect of the mental realm.

All that sort of thing is a matter of controlling our mental states. That's mainly cognition, as opposed to perception, sensation, or even learning, and it's heavily weighted toward the psychological. For example, we often use reason to convince ourselves of certain beliefs, such as that the image above is not "really" one or the other, a beautiful young girl or an old crone.

What isn't a matter of our psychological capacities is how we react inwardly to what we see in the image: how the qualitative feel of the act of viewing the image switches as our perceptual perspective switches.

How we perceive the picture is psychological; it can determine what we do as we view the picture. Do our pupils dilate or contract? Do we smile or frown? Do we wrinkle our noses?

What it is like to perceive the picture from one perspective or the other is phenomenal; how we feel about the perception, how we react inwardly to it, does nothing with respect to our measurable behavior. It merely accompanies all the psychological, behavior-related stuff that is going on independently of it. That stuff would happen, willy-nilly, even if there were no conscious, subjective experience going on at the same time — even if, that is, we were zombies.

Even if we were non-sentient zombies, we might still wrinkle our noses — assuming we continue to recognize the need to behave differently toward old crones who are possibly evil witches than we do toward beautiful young girls who are, hopefully, not.

In short, behavior-related mental activity (psychology) and experiential mental activity (being attentive to qualia) are correlated, but ultimately different. Chalmers allows as how there may one day arrive some "deep" understanding which can unite the two in a comprehensive theory of the mind, but to wave off the psychological-phemomenal distinction a priori, he says, is an error best avoided at this stage.


Chalmers likens the conscious experience associated with the phenomenal more to pure sensation than to mental capacities like perception, cognition, and learning that lean more toward the psychological aspect of mentality. It puts me in mind of one of my favorite treats as a child. My father was a chief of police, responsible for selecting equipment to be used by his officers in controlling traffic. Salesmen would give him samples of glow-in-the-dark materials for making uniforms and other police accoutrements visible at night. He would bring these patches in their various glowing colors home to me, since he knew they fascinated me.

Whenever the electric power went out in a storm, he would let me set up an array of his glow-in-the-dark patches against a wall in the unlit dining room of our house, illuminate them briefly with a flashlight, then turn off the flashlight and in sheer rapture watch them luminesce. One of them looked about like this:


This image is from the Wikipedia article on "qualia." It is an illustration of the "canonical quale" we call redness. Redness seems to be, in everyday terms, a matter of sensation alone. But why does redness "feel" different from, say, blueness? As a child, I couldn't yet formulate such a question, but I knew I responded differently to different glow-in-the-dark patches whose only distinction was one of color.

Nor could I then realize that the circumstances of my primitive light show pretty much eliminated all perceptions beyond the mere shapes of the patches and all cognition beyond recognizing that the patches needed to be re-illuminated from time to time, or they would dim and go dark.

This is, I think, a good illustration of why Chalmers says that sensation leans more toward the purely phenomenal than do perception and cognition, both of which are heavily psychological.


In my next post in this series, I will bring up a point that Chalmers mentions and then passes over: the idea that, in addition to the phenomenal and psychological aspects of the mental, a third, the relational aspect, may exist.