Scientists measure qualia – It was thought to be impossible (Hossenfelder)

[Syne]

Really? It's hard to affirm you like or dislike of broccoli? It's hard to define that you have personal tastes and opinions that differ from those of other?

[Magical Realist]

From that linked article:

"An empirical claim: People are all over the map with what they mean by "qualia." Some think that they are properties of mental states, especially experiences. Some think they are the experiences themselves. Some think they are the objects of experiences, the things experienced. And some muddle-heads don't really know what they think (surely YOU, dear reader, aren't one of THEM).

A normative judgement: People are way too all over the map in this regard."

While I agree with him that there is some ambiguity about what qualia are, I don't agree it is a meaningless word or concept. It's just a very non-linguistic dimension of experience. I can certainly grasp that what it is like for me to experience redness is a quale. The uniqueness of that state. The ineffability of it. Who can describe that quale after all? But that doesn't mean it isn't real. In fact it is possibly SO REAL and close to our consciousness that it is hard to frame it in terms of our usual abstractive thinking. It is afterall a property of subjectivity, and not an objective thing. Of what makes possible experience, and not what is experienced.

[C C]

Qualia are just specific properties that are discerned in the general manifestations of consciousness, that are accordingly abstracted from the latter. This obsessive preoccupation which the establishment has with them is a distraction from something more fundamental that needs to be solved: The very capacity for manifestation itself, that the brain internally exhibits.

When a brain/body dies, everything disappears (the images, the sounds, the odors, the tactile sensations, the personal thoughts, etc). That "absence of everything" is what matter normally wallows in, across the universe. No conventional materialist believes in panpsychism -- that that cosmos at large is present to itself as such neural-generated appearances, as well as indulging in conceptions about itself (cognitive events).

There is no science for the deep origins of the manifestations. They are a brute add-on to the brain's electrochemical activity, no explanation is provided of what they arise from. Because unlike the atoms and particles that biological cells are composed of, physics provides nothing for experiences to be constituted of.

There is also no science for where the manifestations even exist. Unlike the philosopher, physics does not posit that matter has hidden, intrinsic (internal) states[1] -- only that there is an extrinsic (external) character to matter. And physics certainly does not posit that there are undetectable, wholly invisible "fields" that the brain or any other organization of matter could produce, that the manifestations either are or abide in (dualism).

The nice thing about an old-timer like Schrödinger (below), is that he wasn't distracted by secondary items like qualia. He zeroed in on the fundamental mystery. Though similarly limited to hand-wave at correlating phenomenal experience to a "process", which explains little when there is nothing elemental provided for the process to manipulate into a complex product or output. It leaves the process hanging as a magical spell or conjuring ritual -- the most absurd and contradictory remedy that materialists could be appealing to.

Erwin Schrödinger: The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness? --What is Life? Mind and Matter (1959)

- - - footnote - - -

[1] Charles Peirce: "....mind is directly or indirectly connected with all matter, and acts in a more or less regular way; so that all mind more or less partakes of the nature of matter. . . . Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness." --Man's Glassy Essence

[confused2]

One of the problems with Object Oriented Programming is that it makes no sense until you know what it is. I'll try anyway.

First thing..
Modern computers do 'a thing' in less than a millionth of a second .. so the clock speed allows for a million things a second .. with 64 cores a cpu can do 64 million 'things' a second. The human equivalent clock speed is about 10 'things' a second. BUT. We have (effectively) more than 64 million 'cores' working simultaneously so we're still up there with supercomputers.

Second thing..
For computers the program and the data are generally separate so a 'core' has to go fishing for any data it needs to do whatever its doing. In contrast humans can store 64 million images and each one has an embedded 'that_looks_a_bit_like_me' feature. So in a tenth of a second we can scan 64 million images and have a list of matches to whatever we're looking at. BUT. The image isn't just an image .. it is soo much more than that.

The thing..
Fluffy tail. You've got a rabbit. Put 5 rabbits onto short grass. Fly over them. One sees you and does the rabbit alarm call ('eee' ?). The rabbits all run to the holes which were in the grass even though I didn't mention them at the start.

The rabbits are objects. The scene is also an object (which we can fly over in glorious 3d).. made up of rabbits, grass and the rest. As a minor point I max out at 5 rabbits, they get a bit blurry after that .. probably just me.

My grandmother is talking, I can almost make out what she's saying even though she died 50 years ago. She's an object too.

Has my grandmother been talking (in my head) for the last 50 years or does she only do it when I shine the spotlight on her?

Edit..
To find sensible answers you have to be asking a sensible questions .. my feeling is that 'philosophers' are altogether too self-reverential [sic] to do either.

[Syne]

You could probably think of qualia as an analogue to the metadata of an object, in OOP. Metadata is information that's not necessarily needed for using, displaying, or manipulating the object itself, but is useful in storing, organizing, and manipulating data about the object. It's information ABOUT the object that is not really an intrinsic part of the object itself. This metadata can used and manipulated in different ways by different programs and programmers... without changing the object itself. That is the subjective difference between how people experience the subjective qualia of the same object.

[confused2]

You could probably think of qualia as an analogue to the metadata of an object, in OOP. Metadata is information that's not necessarily needed for using, displaying, or manipulating the object itself, but is useful in storing, organizing, and manipulating data about the object. It's information ABOUT the object that is not really an intrinsic part of the object itself. This metadata can used and manipulated in different ways by different programs and programmers... without changing the object itself. That is the subjective difference between how people experience the subjective qualia of the same object.

We see a tail and we search through animals and automatically match it to the animal it came from - that's what our brains are designed to do - are tails qualia? We see a red screen - that's probably a dead end so not much brain activity. And red on its own is rather meaningless .. I'd expect a '?' response.

[Syne]

No, tails and animals would all be objects, in OOP. Your metadata would be all the associations you could link to tails (size, shape, animal, color, texture, etc..). The qualia is how different programs or programmers utilize that data. Some will associate tails to superficially similar, but otherwise completely unrelated, objects. Like a rabbit tail and a cotton ball. While others will associate different sense perceptions. Like the appearance of a rabbit tail and the feel of cashmere against their cheek.

Each object has an almost endless list of metadata associations, that go from the very obvious and distinct to the very subtle and vague. And each person will utilize those associations in unique ways. It's this unique use of the metadata that is the qualia. "How you use the data" determines "what it seems like" to you. "Seems like" is the subjective associations you personally use and select from the almost endless metadata of any object.