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+--- Thread: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) (/thread-18150.html)
Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - C C - Jun 8, 2025
I'm starting to wonder if everybody's videos are AI generated now. I mean, they've been trained to pretty much address a topic the way the original person would, but still... It's kind of like the pod people in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".
https://youtu.be/NCD2A_bhDTI
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - Syne - Jun 8, 2025
Are they measuring qualia (what it seems like to the person), or are they only measuring how the brain responds to the same external stimuli?
There is a difference between what is projected on a screen and what the viewer sees. This has been verified through simple experiments like inattentional blindness.
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - C C - Jun 8, 2025
(Jun 8, 2025 01:25 AM)Syne Wrote: Are they measuring qualia (what it seems like to the person), or are they only measuring how the brain responds to the same external stimuli?
There is a difference between what is projected on a screen and what the viewer sees. This has been verified through simple experiments like inattentional blindness.
VIDEO EXCERPTS: ... The authors of the new paper recruited thirty-five participants and showed them different colours while measuring their brain activity using fMRI. Their goal was to find out if the experience of specific colours, like red or blue, creates consistent patterns in the brain. They compared the brain signals across participants and indeed found similarities that matched the perception of the same colours.
This is the first time scientists have objectively measured qualia, subjective experiences, by identifying neural signatures that are the same for different people seeing the same colour. In other words, they demonstrated that your red is, at least structurally and approximately, likely indeed the same as my red.
This experiment is part of a broader shift in how we think about consciousness and qualia. It’s a move away from philosophy to something that can be scientifically measured, quantified, and understood.
[...] In another recent study, the neuroscientist Anil Seth and coauthors have proposed a mathematical framework for consciousness in general and qualia in particular. They propose that subjective experience comes from our brains trying to constantly make predictions about what it expects to perceive based on past experiences. Then, it compares these predictions to the actual sensory input. When there’s a difference, the brain updates its model to better match reality.
[...] Seth and his colleagues argue that if we understand how this prediction and correction process works, we might be able to map subjective experiences, or qualia, in the same way the recent study mapped colour experiences...
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - Syne - Jun 8, 2025
Yes, I watched the video. Didn't answer my question.
This seems to be conflating how the brain reacts to stimuli with how the person subjectively perceives the stimuli. There doesn't seem to be any effort made to distinguish the two. Makes me think they aren't actually researching the thing they claim to be.
For example, I'm sure the brain has a whole array to associations with the color red. I'm sure the brain would light up very similar patterns of association in a very wide variety of people. I'm just not so sure that tells us anything about how each individual subjective perceives the color red. Does it even show a difference for those with a red/green color blindness?
Seems an important distinction, if you're claiming to be studying qualia at all.
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - C C - Jun 8, 2025
(Jun 8, 2025 02:45 AM)Syne Wrote: Yes, I watched the video. Didn't answer my question.
This seems to be conflating how the brain reacts to stimuli with how the person subjectively perceives the stimuli. There doesn't seem to be any effort made to distinguish the two. Makes me think they aren't actually researching the thing they claim to be.
For example, I'm sure the brain has a whole array to associations with the color red. I'm sure the brain would light up very similar patterns of association in a very wide variety of people. I'm just not so sure that tells us anything about how each individual subjective perceives the color red. Does it even show a difference for those with a red/green color blindness?
Seems an important distinction, if you're claiming to be studying qualia at all.
Just the fact that different people have for centuries been able to agree at all with respect to color identification meant similar neural correlates were substantiating what we experience. The experiment adds nothing apart from making the usual "gulls are attracted to garbage" kind of DUH official, as something now validated by research.
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - Syne - Jun 8, 2025
Oh, I see. The "fat girls get fewer dates" sort of research. 9_9
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - C C - Jun 8, 2025
(Jun 8, 2025 04:03 AM)Syne Wrote: Oh, I see. The "fat girls get fewer dates" sort of research. 9_9
Hossenfelder seems to be chortling that the study should be a significant revelation to the inverted spectrum crowd, in a distressful way. But it means little to those who consider the problem not to be the possibility of things like private representations of same frequency of light varying from person to person, but instead how the manifestations of experience can arise at all from what's currently on the table with respect to matter.
And I doubt this is even causing distress for the former group. Again, if they never apprehended -- that the ability of most people to agree on a flavor as sweet or a particular color as green or an odor as being foul decay -- was something that undermined their conviction that a specific quale could vary radically in nature from person to person... Then it's difficult to conceive how this research would likewise threaten them. Since it's essentially pointing out the same consistency.
This sets aside the minority members of the population who can't stand the taste of broccoli because they have more sensitive receptors on their tongue, people that are color-blind, etc. In those medical cases, there are physical deviations from the "norm" responsible for those variations. In their own way, those conditions have also long pointed to there being a universality to what leads up to and causes our specific experiences. If a critical component is missing, an experiences differs from what the majority encounters. With this study, of course, it's specifically about what happens in the brain -- not the acquisition of and transportation of sensory information prior to reaching the skull meat.
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - Syne - Jun 8, 2025
I'd just be interested if they ever get around to comparing and contrasting the kind brain activity invoked by a color and it's associations versus the color blind. That would seem like a good way to tease apart whether the brain activity does actually represent the subjective perception or just the cognitive associations to the stimulus.
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - confused2 - Jun 8, 2025
Sounds like object oriented programming (OOP) to me. To save space and complexity you start with (say) a tree. You might know a lot or a little about trees, doesn't matter. When you get a banana you know it grows on trees .. a banana tree .. that's everything you need to store about bananas. OK, shape, colour, taste/smell but those are minor details compared to the whole tree thing, roots, leaves and so on. Tree.banana. See also Tree.apple etc.
And from WhateverGPT
Pod people? How creative...
Sounds like a sci-fi nightmare... but hey, at least they’re not asking for poems, right?
RE: Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder) - Ostronomos - Jun 9, 2025
Your presentation is far from perfect.