Can any one provide a link to the research?

So what are the "qualia" that were measured?

How well might this satisfy people who think a person's experiences can only be experienced by themselves? — TiredThinker

The inverted spectrum problem is still alive and well. No brain scans or neural activity measurements will ever convince me that your experience of red is the same as mine. You might see red as green, for all I know. Pragmatically, I think you experience the world the way I do, but I have no justification for that. For all I know, you're a p-zombie with no qualia at all and no brain research will ever convince me otherwise.

Sabine often spouts loads of nonsense whenever she strays outside of her own narrow domain of expertise, which is theoretical physics. In this case, it's so egregious that it's hard to even know where to begin. To be fair, most of the neuroscientists that she quotes in this video are nearly as equally confused about qualia as she is. But, at least, they're producing interesting neuroscientific results even though they misunderstand or over-hype the philosophical implications of finding neural correlates of subjective experiential states in human subjects.

(With my apologies to the OP. This curt response is meant to be dismissive of Sabine's misinformed blathering; not of your fine question/topic.)

The fact that Sabine feels the hard problem 'is bullshit' - her words - indicates to me that she hasn't grasped the point of the argument (and many don't.) 'Qualia' really just means 'the quality of (an) experience' - and as such is something that only a subject can be aware of, as experiences are only ever undergone by subjects.

The paper by Da Costa et al does not claim to measure qualia per se, nor does it claim to 'resolve' the hard problem of consciousness. What it does is assume (as a methodological stance) that the content of conscious experience can be formally modeled as a belief state — i.e., a probability distribution of observable correlates of internal or external causes of sensory input. It proposes to use this to explore how differences in these belief states might correlate with differences in reported phenomenology, and then to apply mathematical tools to quantify differences between such modeled belief states, and to propose testable hypotheses related to time perception, attention, and cognitive effort.

What it doesn't do is offer a means to measure qualia themselves in any philosophically robust sense (which after all would require the quantification of qualitative states!) That would require somehow rendering the intrinsically first-person nature of experience into a third-person measurable variable—which remains the crux of the hard problem.

(Actually, the first sentence of the abstract gives the game away - ' a key challenge is how to rigorously conceptualise first-person phenomenological descriptions of lived experience'. 'Conceptualising' an experience is in no way the same as undergoing it.)

What it doesn't do is offer a means to measure qualia themselves in any philosophically robust sense (which after all would require the quantification of qualitative states!) That would require somehow rendering the intrinsically first-person nature of experience into a third-person measurable variable—which remains the crux of the hard problem. — Wayfarer

You are quite right, and your comments are on point. I would suggest, thought, that the issue of the third-person accessibility of qualia (and the so called epistemological problem of other minds) can be clarified when we disentangle two theses that are often run together. The fist one is the claim that qualia are essentially private. The second one is the claim that they can be accounted for in reductionistic scientific terms (such as those of neuroscientific functionalism) and thereby "objectified". It's quite possible to reject the second thesis and yet argue that subjective qualia (i.e. what one feels and perceives) can be expressed and communicated to other people by ordinary means.

That's the research?

There's a section on the method used to measure belief. If there is to be a critique of that idea, it ought start by explaining the process used.

Would that we had a neuroscientist on call.

a subject’s phenomenology can be mathematically formalised as a belief (i.e. a probability distribution) encoded by its internal states. The subject produces first person descriptions of phenomenology that can then be used to infer its lived experience... Bayesian mechanics affords a correspondence between internal dynamics and belief dynamics. This furnishes a generative passage if we assume that phenomenological content can be formalised as a belief — p.14

So there's the usual Bayesian analysis as a stand-in for belief. All sorts of things wrong with that, and foremost the presumed equivalence to which Way points.

But the notion of qualia being used - the word only appears in a footnote - remains obscure.

It's quite possible to reject the second thesis and yet argue that qualia (i.e. what one feels and perceives) can be expressed and communicated to other people by ordinary means. — Pierre-Normand

Agree, but because of the fact we're similar kinds of subjects. We know what it is to be a subject, because we are both subjects.

I think, as @Pierre-Normand suggested, the problem lies with Sabine's gloss on what the paper means. Her video is called 'scientists measure qualia for the first time' but I don't think they actually make the claim. (I like Sabine's videos, overall, but philosophy is not her strong suit.)

Given that I don't think the very notion of qualia can be made coherent, I oddly find myself agreeing with you, but for completely different reasons.

My laptop, even after all these years, still insists on quail over qualia.

Agree, but because of the fact we're similar kinds of subjects. We know what it is to be a subject, because we are both subjects. — Wayfarer

I can't quite agree with this. Arguably, a philosophical zombie isn't a "subject" in the relevant sense since, ex hypothesi, they lack subjective states. So, if our solution to the problem of other minds is to infer, inductively, that other people must experience the world (and themselves) in the same way that we do because they are the same kinds of subjects that we are, then the argument is either circular or, if we take "subject" to only designate an "objective" structural/material similarity (such as belonging to the same biological species with similar anatomy, behavior, etc.) then it is, in the words of Wittgenstein, an irresponsible inductive inference from one single case (our own!)

Given that I don't think the very notion of qualia can be made coherent, I oddly find myself agreeing with you for completely different reasons. — Banno

I don't think is can be made coherent either while hanging on to the notion that they are essentially private mental states, which is their ordinary connotation in the philosophical literature, but not always part of the definition.

'qualia' is academic jargon. You will notice that the only time it is ever usually mentioned is in relation to discussions of a certain clique of academic philosophers, mainly American, and often in support of the so-called 'eliminative materialism'.

I can't quite agree with this. — Pierre-Normand

I see your point and it’s a fair caution. But I think we might be talking at cross-purposes. When I said "we know what it is to be a subject, because we are both subjects," I wasn’t suggesting inductive inference from similarity of biological structure or behavior, rather a kind of eidetic insight—a recognition of subjectivity from the inside, so to speak, that others are beings like myself.

Yep.

I'm fairly well acquainted with some of the literature. My basic objection is that if they are private experiences then they are unavailable for discussion, and if they are available for discussion then they seem to be just what we ordinarily talk about using words like "red" and "loud".

So not of much use.

My basic objection is that if they are private experiences then they are unavailable for discussion — Banno

I think there's an unreasonable equivocation between 'subjective' and 'private'. The subjective qualities of experience ('qualia') are not objective (as a matter of definition) but neither are they necessarily private.

I make this distinction between the subjective and the personal: 'The subjective refers to the structures of experience through which reality is disclosed to consciousness. In an important sense, all sentient beings are subjects of experience. Subjectivity — or perhaps we could coin the term ‘subject-hood’ — encompasses the shared and foundational aspects of perception and understanding, as explored by phenomenology. The personal, by contrast, pertains to the idiosyncratic desires, biases, and attachments of a specific individual.'

I would say that what you're calling 'private' equates to the latter.

You may stipulate as you wish. It makes no nevermind.

My opine:

Seems to me that there is nothing that talk of qualia is about. In so far as talk of qualia is usable and useful, it is no different to talk of colours or tastes or what have you. In so far as something is added to the conversation by the addition of qualia, seems to me that Dennett is correct in showing that there is nothing here to see. — Banno

Didn’t stop him from spending, or wasting, 50 years talking about it.

Fair.

So what they actually did was measure the neural correlates of colour experience.

The inverted spectrum problem is still alive and well. No brain scans or neural activity measurements will ever convince me that your experience of red is the same as mine. — RogueAI

Strictly speaking the inverted spectrum problem doesn’t even require qualia. Even if colour experiences are reducible to particular neural activity it is possible that the same wavelength of light triggers different neural activity in different people such that the neural activity that I describe as “seeing blue” is the same as the neural activity that you describe as “seeing red”.

Color is such a flat aspect of qualia. It does the trick, but really, when decorating a living room with someone and talking about why they like orange more than red, you probably get more intimate measures of their experience of red than any brain state data will tell you.

Taste is better than sight to understand qualia. Maybe her research wasn’t fully cooked and she doesn’t know what fully baked philosophy is supposed to taste like.

Are we talking about taking measurements of someone else’s brain that would enable us to predict whether that person will like or dislike the taste of strawberries, or just that when that person is eating X (which happens to be a strawberry), we can take measurements that show us he must be tasting strawberry?

Because really, along with all of the brain states, instead of measuring those, you could just watch his face as he eats a strawberry. Knowing the correlates in the brain is nice, but knowing exactly what it is like to be that guy eating a strawberry? When you love strawberries and he seems to hate them? You can know every inch of the brain state and still not account for taste. Or redness to him. Right?

I think the person in the video doesn’t understand the concept of qualia very deeply.

The scientists measured brains seeing red and noted the similarities. What if the scientists saw three similar brains all looking at the same color, but the scientists didn’t know what the color was? Could they figure out “that must look like a darker shade of taupe to those people”?

It’s the “like….to those people” that is not being touched by the science no matter how many times the speaker says “science.”

Is my “red” your “red”?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment
Genji Kawakita1,2,7 ∙ Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston3,4,7 ∙ Ken Takeda1,7 ∙ Naotsugu Tsuchiya3,4,5,6,8 naotsugudottsuchiyaatmonashdotedu ∙ Masafumi Oizumi1,8,9 c-oizumiatgdoteccdotu-tokyodotacdotjp

Whether one person’s subjective experience of the “redness” of red is equivalent to another’s is a fundamental question in consciousness studies. Intersubjective comparison of the relational structures of sensory experiences, termed “qualia structures”, can constrain the question. We propose an unsupervised alignment method, based on optimal transport, to find the optimal mapping between the similarity structures of sensory experiences without presupposing correspondences (such as “red-to-red”). After collecting subjective similarity judgments for 93 colors, we showed that the similarity structures derived from color-neurotypical participants can be “correctly” aligned at the group level. In contrast, those of color-blind participants could not be aligned with color-neurotypical participants. Our results provide quantitative evidence for interindividual structural equivalence or difference of color qualia, implying that color-neurotypical people’s “red” is relationally equivalent to other color-neurotypical’s “red”, but not to color-blind people’s “red”. This method is applicable across modalities, enabling general structural exploration of subjective experiences.

The Qualia is the object's property that the mind directly perceives (this is discussed here). The object and neural processes directly interact. Therefore, what the mind perceives is indirectly caused by the neural processes. It is possible to make a correlation between Qualia and neural processes, but it is impossible to measure what Qualia is to the mind.

My biggest concern was that it was fmri research which isn't the highest res and often delayed data so that is kind of fuzzy on its own.

I'm fairly well acquainted with some of the literature. My basic objection is that if they are private experiences then they are unavailable for discussion, and if they are available for discussion then they seem to be just what we ordinarily talk about using words like "red" and "loud". — Banno

But this commentary leaves the confines of your Wittgensteinian box. "Qualia" has meaning. It's meaning is how it is used within the language game. You seem to want to say qualia is a hollow concept because it lacks an internal anchoring, but meaning under this theory is never assessed upon its internal anchoring. It's assessed by public use.

Qualia is available for discussion as the thing I guess you say is not available for discussion. That's your use, but I just want to be sure you aren't talking about qualia as an ontological entity, as if you can.

Carrying on from this, I can't know what it feels like to give birth but I know that there is such a feeling, I know the public occasions that elicit such a feeling, and I know that the phrase "what it feels like to give birth" refers to that feeling.

The private language argument against private sensations has got to be one of the most unconvincing arguments I've encountered.

I can't know what it feels like to give birth — Michael

Surely pain is measurable. Sure, specifics of such, as one could imagine privately without needing speak such graphic details are unique to those who experience them. That aside, we more or less all have the same "hardware", so to speak, at least mentally. (absent those who don't, of course)

It's not some inconceivable concept, that is. Kidney stones, for example. I'm told the pain of such is quite awful.

The private language argument against private sensations has got to be one of the most unconvincing arguments I've encountered. — Michael

I think it's contrived in order to avoid metaphysical converations that don't yield answers. It strikes me as a prescriptive use of the term "language" that violates the fundamental rule that language is derived from use. Internal states are not denied, they just can't be spoken about and they just exist alongside language.

By example, AI engages in language usage in a very precise way. This shows that having an internal state is unnecessary to assess words and to use them consistently. The fact that ChatGPT has no internal state and is able to use words precisely means that meaning is derived from word usage, not from what is going on in your head. Or so the argument goes.

Of course, that's not how we use the word "language." We mean it as a term that describes how we convey private mental states to other people. The words are not just epiphenomenon to our mental states. They represent the mental state, but that is what is rejected in this Wittgensteinian analysis.

The argument is that since we don't need a consciousness to describe conscious states, our descriptions are not of conscious states, but are just games we play with one another, for some strange reason. This idea dispenses with the messiness of the experience, the phenomenal state, and it allows an entire linguistic philosophy to emerge without having to deal with Chalmers and the like, which are, in my estimation, real philosophers dealing with real issues. I see the logical analytic linguistic enterprise as a complicated puzzle, like playing a chess match, figuring out rules and what not, but I don't find it convincing, or useful (ironically).

But this commentary leaves the confines of your Wittgensteinian box. — Hanover

Good.

"Qualia" are either a something about which can share nothing, or they are the subject of the common terms we already use to talk about our experiences.

The private language argument does not conclude that we do not have sensations.

Surely pain is measurable. — Outlander

Indeed.

Hanover has misunderstood the argument twice today.

Could we show ChatGPT what pain is? It does not have the mechanism required, obviously. But moreover it cannot participate in the "form of life" that would enable it to be in pain.

A "Quale" should be understood as referring to an indexical rather than to a datum. Neuro-Phenomenologists routinely conflate indexicals with data, leading to nonsensical proclaimations.

whereas here's me thinking it something that gentlemanly toffs fired at with shotguns.

The private language argument does not conclude that we do not have sensations. — Banno

I didn't suggest otherwise.