Hi Ben, > how the subjective experience of qualia is connected to the neural > correlates of qualia. ........but the tricky question is how a physical > system (the brain) can "generate" subjective, phenomenal experiences.
Oh dear....having jumped in I feel like I'm in over my head already! :) What follows is just intuition, with no research or deep reading foundation at all....... Let's say I look at something and I see/feel "red" colour. First my brain lumps lots of different frequencies under a limited pallete of colours that have a network in the brain. So pure frequencies and mixtures of light frequencies are all routed to the same colour network. Also my brain corrects for light intensity and context etc. So many different external light stimuli trigger a certain 'redness' network in the brain. This colour network has evolved since colour vision exisited and also has a particular evolutionary history leading to humans - so chances are most humans know they are seeing the 'same' red because the recognition system has, through evolution, created much the same response structure in most human brains (exceptions for colour blindness phenomena, also cultural and training experience will modify the response). My guess is that the pallete of colours (smells, tastes, tactile, all other sense feelings) we see is a bit like a hard-wired language - especially important in social beings that need to intuitively understand each other (ie. the system evolved a long time before word-based language) and relates to the value of social animals being able to 'mind read' ie. it is valuable for coordination to have a set of similar qualia experiences going in on in many brains so that the animals are working to the same 'story'. Also my guess is that qualia are linked fairly closely to the neural 'attention system' - are qualia apparent to anyone if they are not paying attention to a phenomenon? My intuition is to say they are not. My guess is that when we pay attention to sensory, or other data that our brains connects with a quasi-sensory response, the data is tagged with labels that are used to trigger a suite of qualia responses - deep hard-wired patterns and associations built up through life - linking to memories, emotions etc. My guess is that it is the richness of associations that makes the qualia feel rich. But this would be very demanding of brain processing capacity so I imagine that is why 'qualia triggering' would only be done in relation to things we are paying attention to. Am I right in feeling that many people associate the experience of qualia with the inuitive/folk notion of 'consciousness'? If so, the connection might be the 'attention system' linkage? I don't know whether any of what I've said deals with the 'hard problem' that you felt I had not addresses in my last message. Let me know! :) Cheers, Philip ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
