[질문] 감각질(qualia)에 대한 몇 가지 궁금증

1) What are some types of qualia? Is the difference between the experience of hunger and the experience of sensing the color red a difference in kind or a difference in degree? Can we make a clear distinction between endogenous qualia (usually for desires) and exogenous qualia (usually sensory perception)?

2) Deja-vu: is it a distinct quale in itself? Per 1), would deja-vu count as endogenous qualia? But it is still prompted by sensory perception, isn't it? Another interesting line of thought may explore what this qualia is really about. Common-sensical notions seem to explain deja-vu as a quale that feels like one has experienced the quale before. A possible intervention here would be to say that deja-vu is in fact not a quale of remembrance but a quale of oblivion, of forgetting. What if it is replacing information attached to a specific former quale (=a mathematical structure)? This might explain 1 why) we do not experience deja-vu when we have similar everyday experiences, and also 2) why we cannot seem to explicate in good detail when or around where this quale must have occurred to us before--it might be because deja-vu is a quale of oblivion and we are forgetting that context by the time we overwrite the quale with new information.

3) Recalling a vivid memory through sensation: is it a distinct quale in itself? How is this tied to the questions posed in 2)?

4) Visual sensory information feels like it is coming from the front, whereas auditory information seems to come from each side behind our 'visual scope.' What gives us such information on the location of sensory qualia? Does the geometrical composition (topology) of objects in our consciousness-system contribute to our experience of these qualia? Or is the sense constituted and integrated after-the-fact by virtue of our knowledge that our eyes are in front of our ears?

5) The questions raised in 2) seem to presuppose a duality of sorts in qualia. Information & affect? Somatic marker theory? A quale as a composite of information (non-physical) & neuronal processes (physical)? Quantity and quality? What kind of duality does this suppose?

6) Causality seems to be at the core of the issue. To put it in another way, if causality was unaffected by qualia, then qualia wouldn't really matter. Qualia is important because it feels like it is the source of causality. Integrated Information Theory, for now, is the only theory that seems to tackle this question head-on in regards to consciousness.

7) Again, time-consciousness. What is it like to feel time? Is this quale similar to other qualia, or is it distinct? For instance, we can easily imagine us being blind and still having an experience(=qualia). Does that work the same way for time-consciousness? Could we have any experience without it? The philosophical definition of qualia/consciousness must be tuned better. The definition that qualia is the "what-is-it-like-to-feelness" of an experience confounds the issue of time-consciousness. Be-verbs indicate endurance. Endurance indicates a concept of time. How should we conceptualize time?

대충 끄적였던 조각글이지만 일단 기록용으로.

2018.08.10