When visiting your girlfriend's family for the first time, imagine yourself fucking their mother, and then their grandmother, this will allow you to establish an approximate upper bound on the relationship length...

Edit:

Upon noticing a perceived flaw in your girlfriend's appearance, meditate upon it, if attachment remains after the meditative exercise, do the same thing as an exercise to try and prevent orgasm - if you can still cum, eternity awaits...

Edit2, De Sade's Principle:

Imagine the body decomposing, the shit in their bowels, the smell of their breath in the morning, decrepit and codependent... Enlightenment is turning the real into viagra.

They think that they are doing logic, but they have absolutely no clue about systems of logic. Why don't they try to reason within or about e.g. Hilbert-Ackermann calculi, if logic is so important to them? — alcontali

Why don't they try to reason within or about e.g. Hilbert-Ackermann calculi, if logic is so important to them?

logic is so important to them?

to them?

?

its always been an entire lived event involving a red thing. — Isaac

I think this is about right. I would emphasise, though I don't know if this is relevant to colour specifically, that when we perceive; language and conditioning plays a role, as do innate features of our sensory capacities (like the perception of motion when we step off a boat onto the land, say). The "the table is part of your arm" thing from Ramachandran plays with fundamental bodily processes, but there's also social mediation of perception.

Whatever we experience, we experience in an evaluated context to the task at hand, and what we experience in something can very much be informed by what we've learned. A doctor might be able to (non-figuratively) see abnormal lung structure in a lung x-ray. Where that 'abnormal' came from isn't something innate to any sense, it's a complex convolution of norms being embedded in our perception, and perception informing norms.

I suspect "norms informing perception" is why it seems so natural to some to describe their experiences as containing "red quales" or "seeing redness". "Perception informing norms" may be why colour words are cultural universals and roughly map onto each other (most of the time). This is more than just a change in vocabulary, experience has an ontology to it, what the 'beings' of experience are (facets of phenomenal character) isn't something we can ignore when studying it.

There's no "brute" sensory information or experiences, there are only relatively autonomous sensory processes that are still context sensitive (illusions, Ramachandran's stuff, lesions); or full blown socially mediated perceptions.

So let's imagine that there's an experiential state someone is in. This is how what they're doing feels. (edit: pay no attention to the situation and agent demarcations here, they are behind the curtain, there's also a fixity to the experiences in the presentation which arguably is not there - fixed by a phenomenological approach to description itself)

I'm currently in a room, with a mood, and doing some stuff.

I can stratify that into some distinct experiences.

I am in my room, I am curious, reflecting, I am typing on my laptop.

I can stratify those experiences in various ways. One way would be by sensory modality:

Vision: I'm looking at this page on TPF.
Hearing: Ringing in my ears, keyboard clicks.
Bodily position: sitting down.
Touch: fingers on keys, bum sitting down, pressure from headphones.
Thought: state of attention, introspective.
Smell: nothing of note.
Temperature: not of much note, a bit cold maybe.

I can stratify the vision experience into objects with positional relations between them, each object has shapes and colours.
I can stratify the hearing experience into distinct sound sources; ringing in my ears, keyboard clicks, occasional noise from the road outside.
I don't seem to be able to stratify the bodily position experience very well; it is a general sense of attended parts and where I am in the room, different parts are highlighted more or less at different points; my felt bodily position also seems to involve my vision somehow - where is my body? involves vision (but need not...).
I can stratify the fingers on keys into individual keystrokes; decomposing into pressure and... but this relies upon the positional awareness and visual information (where the keys are, the words on the page provide feedback, typo correction etc)
The thought experiences; I dunno, I'm catching thoughts and expressing them, the thoughts come as the words appear on the page; the thought formation and the keystroke experiences intermingle.
Smell: nothing of note, not really part of the experiential state.
Temperature: tied up with position feelings and bodily awareness, different parts are different temperatures, felt temperature variation occurs over my body, the intensities of temperature are not discrete, more a general sense over my body.

Which parts do we attach the label "quale" to?

I can very easily do that with my vision in a limited way; shape qualia and colour qualia - but are there distance qualia (how far something away is)? Brightness qualia? Opacity qualia?

Hearing: well I guess there's a 'what's it like' to have this ringing in my ears, but there are tonal variations, different intensities, the 'position' the sound appears to be emitted from in my ears changes with its pitch. Does each tone have a quale? Each pressure? Each felt location of origination?

Bodily position: interesting really, I'm not aware of most of my body during most of this state of awareness; my state of awareness does not chart every piece of leg, say, just bits of contact with the chair that are deemed relevant (those that are in contact). The "qualia" I'd associate with my leg positions seem to go away when I focus close to my bum, there's just a.. 'leg-bum' location, the contact area is treated as a single experiential unity with differences of intensity over it.

Touch: well, when I'm typing, not every keystroke I type actually has the same quale - is there a G key quale? When I'm hitting the space bar, I don't always notice it. I do always notice the end of the sentence, though. Maybe there are full stop quales. Or are these 'sentence ending" quales?

But I'm not really experiencing the end of the sentence through my sense of touch; there is a pause for thought. The touch quale there is really a thought quale and a bodily position quale (of stopping motion).

I could go on, but this is already long enough. It seems to me that that 'chopping up' of experience that we do prior to applying the label "quale" to it isn't particularly reflective of what it's like at all. What it's like to be in any experiential state is a colossal feedback and intermingling of my senses and thoughts.

And qualia aren't supposed to label "experiential states", they're supposed to label "components" of them. Where do the components come from? What principle distinguishes them? Are these distinctions retroactive or part of the phenomenal character?

It seems to me the types of qualia people usually talk about just aren't so independent or distinctive after all; the principle that individuates the components of phenomenal character is not tracked by the principle of individuation that generates phrases like "red quale".

Take a coin for example. There's a frame of reference that is the coin itself, and there's a frame of reference that's not the coin itself, but that's relative to the the coin from some other position, right? — Terrapin Station

Subjects are points in spacetime?

I don't really talk in terms of qualia, but if I had to define them I'd say they're just facets or aspects of subjective, first-person, phenomenal experiences. I don't think they (either experiences or qualia) are "things", separate ontological objects apart from the objects that those experiences are of. That kind of separate-ontological-stuff talk is the sort of assumption I've been explicitly denying. — Pfhorrest

This seems agreeable to me. I'm still curious over exactly what kind of stuff counts as a 'facet of experience'; where are the boundaries? How did the boundaries get there? But given a suitable (pragmatic or conceptual) reason to demarcate between different facets, we probably agree.

You were hinting at concepts. I'm not talking about concepts. I'm not saying something about it being theory neutral. I'm just saying that I'm not talking about concepts. — Terrapin Station

I know you are not talking about concepts, you are being influenced by ones which you have that you are not articulating.

Yeah, that's a property. In fact, even a homogeneous soup that's indeterminate would be properties. Since properties are simply ways that things are. — Terrapin Station

This is concept talk.

I'm not saying something about concepts in that. I'm saying that your experience has to be some way or other, has to have some characteristics or other, etc. — Terrapin Station

That you think you're providing a theory neutral description of phenomenal character is part of the problem.

the amount of cultural conditioning it takes to get someone to think that this is their 'spontaneous' self-report is incredible — StreetlightX

Very much this. Though I take a pretty cynical view of it. The kind of description of experience going on here is reflection upon it with a certain priming; we're in a philosophical discussion, people will necessarily bring their philosophical background to bear upon how the experience is parsed.

@Terrapin Station is having difficulty imagining that our experience isn't parsed into properties (with properties of those properties distinguishing things like colour properties and shape properties), and that it's either a philosophical or folk-theoretic means of interpretation to parse it that way. "This is just how my experience is".

What I've been attacking with @Terrapin Station is where the distinctions between these properties come from, whether it's a conceptual distinction imposed reflectively (and thus retrospectively) upon experience (between colour quales and shape quales), or our (visual) experience really is (or must be) parsed into distinctive property types. Where do these distinctions come from? is the central question I've been asking here.

When people use qualia language, they perform precisely these conceptual distinctions and then impute those conceptual distinctions into their experience; as if there are grounds for distinguishing colour qualia and shape qualia (of a table) within the phenomenal character of experience. The perception isn't furnishing the distinction, the conception of experience is.

A lot of philosophical framing devices have to be unproblematically assumed to even parse experience in that way, to have it 'read off the world (phenomenal character)' misses an extremely crucial point; when we reflect on our experiences, we apprehend them with a loose knit interpretive framework that was not necessarily present during the experience reflected upon. That presumptions are read into the phenomena is the sort of stuff faith is made of, not analysis (even though we all have 'faith' in this sense).

It is difficult to highlight an intellectual commitment which is enacted rather than articulated; a performative presumption, rather than a declared one. Exposing these presumptions is the goal.

That's not what it is with respect to our experience, though--our mental phenomena don't reflect that wavelength of EMR. — Terrapin Station

but one is extensional relations and the other is an electromagnetic frequency. — Terrapin Station

So the colour quales and shape quales are distinguished in our experience by something which is not reflected in our experience.

y. You'd not be able to experience the same shape with a different color or the same color with a different shape. — Terrapin Station

(1) I see the table, it presents as a certain shape and a certain colour.
(2) The shape and the colour present together. There is a shape-colour quale.
(3) There is no shape quale (in this experience of the table) independently of the colour quale. There is no colour quale (in this experience of the table) independently of the shape quale.
(4) There is a conceptual distinction between shape and colour.
(5) The distinction between "the shape quale of this table" and "the colour quale of this table" is conceptual, it is not based on the percept of this table.

(agree/disagree to list or items?)

You seem to want to say that "the shape quale of this table" and "the colour quale of the table" are distinct within the percept. That they are based on the phenomenal character of this experience. If this is true, what in this experience furnishes the distinction between the shape and the colour of the table?

If they are not distinct in the percept (2), then they can only be distinct in the concept.

Yes, obviously shape and color are distinct. — Terrapin Station

I agree. Shape and colour are distinct concepts. Are they distinct in the phenomenal character? Are they distinct in the percept?

The shape as you experience it is a property of your experience — Terrapin Station

Ok! I don't think we're talking cross purposes, then. At least, I think I understand you. I assume there will be an analogous colour quale.

Is the shape quale distinct from the colour quale? Are they distinct properties?

The only way for you to have the shape of the table as a property of the table in your experience is for your experience to be identical to the table--so that your experience is made of wood, can hold a cup of coffee, etc. — Terrapin Station

Right! And in the quale is there some corresponding shape property of the table?

But it's not that, is it? It's that: your theories make me nervous. Even the theories you dont realize you're employing. — frank

Maybe! I see the cup as blue. The (my) phenomenal character (in terms of colour) of the cup has a blue quale. "What it is like to see the cup? Partly, its colour is blue."

Does this pass your "I can talk in terms of qualia" test?

You thinking we are implying those unexamined assumptions that we explicitly deny implying is exactly what I mean about people thinking things other people are saying mean other than what they mean by them. — Pfhorrest

What assumptions are you explicitly denying? What's a quale to you?

Edit: run me through an encounter you have with a quale?

I'm baffled about how Isaac and fdrake manage to not understand it. — Pfhorrest

It's funny. Qualia discussions on here usually go like this in my experience. Everyone gets baffled because "the other side just doesn't understand". I don't think I'm baffled by this, because qualia talk has a set of base assumptions which are rarely examined; you have to "buy in" to grok them.

Edit: it's also very hard to not "buy in".

Or in other words, there's a common view that there is a table, but you don't literally have a table in your perception--that is, your perception is not made out of wood, you can't set a coffee cup on your perception etc. as you can with the literal table. — Terrapin Station

I agree with this. How could I not? What I don't agree with is that it says the same thing as this:

A common view is that there's some shape to the table, as a property of the table (whether we're talking about a "totality" of the shape of the table or not--that doesn't matter), AND that that shape of the table, as a property of the table, is different than the shape of the table as you experience it, or via your perception. — Terrapin Station

"There's some shape to the table, as a property of the table" - when you experience the table, are you saying you experience the shape of the table as a distinct part of the experience? When you experience and attend to your experience is the shape of the table distinct from the table?

To my reading, you've living in a world where there are table properties and experiential properties, and experiential properties are distinct from table properties. My question, and my site of criticism is regarding the phenomenal character of the experience; within the quale. You may say "I am describing what the phenomenal character of the quale is", but I still want to know what account you have of the shape of the table within the quale?

Again, this is a problem, because it suggests that you do not understand what I'm asking. I'm not asking anything about a "totality." That's completely irrelevant to what I'm asking you. — Terrapin Station

More words then please.

Do you agree that the shape of the table, as a property of the table, is different than the shape of the table in your experience or as part of your perception of the table"? — Terrapin Station

And I did. No. The shape of the table isn't experienced as a totality. If you like; there are table properties that are not experiential properties. Since there are table properties which are not experiential properties, the set of table properties is not identical with the set of experiential properties. Some subset of table properties might be identical to experiential properties of the table, but I don't know how to match the two. How do you match the two? How do you ensure the identity?

Especially when the aim is explaining something to you that you apparently do not understand/apparently are not familiar with. — Terrapin Station

Dude. I'm familiar with qualia (though I do not claim to be an expert). I quoted the SEP article's summary for the purposes of pointing out ambiguities I see in it. If I blur my eyes and drink the kool aid it makes perfect sense.

In a discussion, you'd not just ignore it and ask your own question and then get pissy about not moving on until you've answered the first question. That's rude behavior, not a discussion. — Terrapin Station

... Wow. That's how you behave all the time!

"Is not technical talk" in no way amounts to "does not make sense in terms of conscious experience" — Terrapin Station

Did you even read past the abstract? Or did you substitute a lazy assumption about the whole argument and what's at stake in it with what they say? It's not just about "it's not technical talk" => "does not make sense". It's about how "it's not precise" allows assumptions to creep in.

Which is largely what we've been discussing, in another form.

@Isaac also linked this one.

Sigh, you don't discuss with someone who refuses to answer return questions and defines your options. I don't want a rhetorical pissing match, I want a discussion.

What I asked about has nothing to do with the underside of the table. — Terrapin Station

Ok. The table has lots of properties. How do these consist in the perception?

isn't identical (as in literally the same thing) to the shape of the table in your experience — Terrapin Station

No? There's an underside of the table.

Might be garbled, might help.

I see the table. (an event)
$x R y$ (x = me, R = sees, y = table)
I see the table as brown.
Is this: $x R y$ ? $x R (B(y))$ ? $x R y \cap x R B(y)$? (x = me, R = sees, B(y) is the brown of the table, y is the table) $\cap$ is logical and.
What's the quale here? I have a quale? Is this:
$x R y$ or $x R B(y)$ or is this $x S (xRB(y))$ where S is some "access" relation, for self-awareness of the relationship I have with the table. Is this the right parsing? Or is it a property of the person... $P(x) \leftrightarrow xS(xRB(y))$ (in that case, where does the y go, does its existence become irrelevant under an epoche? Is usual perception "functioning like it's under an epoche"?)

Let's say there's some entailment relation:

$x R y \rightarrow (x R B(y) \cap xS(xRB(y)) \cup P(x)$

$\cup$ is logical disjunction. What's the status of that entailment with respect to perception? Is it something our perception "does"? Is it really a biconditional (this is what perception is)? How do we get from one to the other?

As far as terms like “redness”, I don’t know why that has to evoke any kind of essentialism. Does “color” evoke that same essentialism to you, or “appearance”? — Pfhorrest

I guess what I'm trying to emphasise is that maybe associating qualia with facets of experience; like redness or whatever; is rather artificial. There's got to be some principle by which you attend or demarcate the facets; it's not like I can separate the "shape quale" from the "colour quale" in my perception of this table, shape and colour are conceptual demarcations that use perceptual information, rather than perceptual information itself. Concepts rather than percepts.

I'm not going to deny that I see this table as browny-beigy with a wavering wood pattern; but I'm very careful to attend to the processing of experience this requires. The experiential state I have doesn't "have" browny-beigy with a wavering wood pattern - that's there in the table. The table doesn't effect me browny-beigy-wood-patterny-wise; there's a table here, and it looks like this and it suggests interpretation as browny-beige wavey-wood-patterny table.

How this "as" works looks really important to me. I'm not too happy to think of it as a "property of" the experience; that sets up some relational problem of the experiential property and the table properties; which is precisely what that as seems to address. So to put it "in the experiential property"? That looks like it might miss how experience works from the beginning; by asking questions whose framing precludes relevant information.

It's an ontological fact. If something obtains in some way, it has some characteristics, some qualities, some ways that it is, etc. — Terrapin Station

Tell me the story of how these properties inhere in a quale?

By observation or awareness of one's own mental state. So they're introspectively accessible. — Terrapin Station

Another thing that bugged me; observation or awareness of one's own mental state. If I'm observing a quale, the observation of that quale is part of my mental state, surely (in some sense anyway; my walls are not in my mind). So we have this criterion where "qualia only accompany self aware experiences"; or maybe "a quale only accompanies experiences that are aware of the quale"; but why would "an experience which is aware of a quale" be a typical experience?

When I look at the walls, they're white, they're textured; I guess they're also yellow due to the light, but when I look at them for a bit they seem kinda pink or purple. If I force the wall to be in my peripheral vision, turning my head, and focus my attention on the wall, I'm not really seeing it as white in the same way; the larger topographical features of the skirting board and the undulations of the wooden brace that skirts my room are by far the most notable features. The whiteness off the wall diminishes in felt intensity towards the edge of my field of view (presumably because the limits of my visual field are less sensitive).

When I was describing the experience of the wall, I was reaching for words that seemed appropriate during the cognitive act, "white" came to mind first. When I actually focussed on the suitability of "white" in describing the walls; it's not quite right, they're illuminated, little patches of shadow form revealing the raised parts of the wallpaper patterns... There's so much more detail there.

If I wanted to pull apart that experience (which was extended in time... not "instantaneous" if such a thing is even possible) in terms of felt properties, I'd be doing some intellectual (and writing) exercise. I'd focus my attention on certain parts of the walls, and certain distinctive property types that seem to apply ;topography, colour; and I'd used these properties to indicate the general features of my experience for public consumption.

But notice, I've had to pull apart my experience with a certain conceptual grammar; topography, colour. When I started describing things in terms of colour, the walls provided the same visual impression to me (well, not quite the same, the increased attention on writing dulled the intensity of things in my visual field outside of the screen), but my intellectual attention shifted, and I was processing memories with language; reflecting; at the same time as looking at the walls; experiencing.

This "pulling apart of experience with a certain conceptual grammar" is a cognitive act; intellectual post-processing of experience; for the purposes of describing it. It shifts attention to generalities which can be communicated, rather than singularities which are experienced. Where did the conceptual grammar come from? Does the wall have "topography quales" and "colour quales"? I don't think I see either in isolation, the partition of the wall into topography quales and colour quales is something I do using my sensory information with some interpretive heuristic... I really just see this wall.

There isn't anything that is absent properties — Terrapin Station

"This is a way Terrapin thinks about properties"

So yes you experience properties, — Terrapin Station

"Therefore we experience the way Terrapin thinks we do"

How could there be something you "could recollect" as an experience that wouldn't have properties? — Terrapin Station

What state of mind do you have to be in to notice properties (as you think of them) in what you're recollecting or experiencing?

The properties in question. Accessible by individuals. — Terrapin Station

You experience properties? Weird. Do phenomenal states consist of properties? What does that look like? How do you access them? A whole individual accesses a quale which is somehow a part of their phenomenal state through a posited process of "self awareness" which coincidentally links properties to individuals?

This looks to me like a stipulated characterisation of experience, rather than an experience (the internality/externality dichotomy cuts both ways). It seems just as plausible to me that self awareness is part of everything we could recollect as an experience, and that stipulated properties within those experiences are actually conceptual (not affective/sensory) understandings derived from them. Rather than a quale being the experience (or quales composing experience, depending on how they're individuated), it's a representation of the experience, filtered through our interpretations into words like "property" or "redness" or "red". Too pedantic a distinction? I don't think it is, it's really important to try and track how the experience of the walls in my room "counts as" an experience of white(ness), say, and whether that "counting as" is a retrospective act of conception/synthesis over experiences or "just" an instance of "self awareness".

Since we're self aware, we bring interpretive baggage (theory-ladened ness) to everything we think and perceive; so I'm suspicious of the (stipulated) neutrality of qualia at al.

What makes you so sure you experience properties? Does the thing you're calling a "property" there work like a concept or a percept? Is it both?

You said that you didn't understand the passage you quoted. I'm trying to help you understand it. You can't expect an entry in a philosophy encyclopedia to be divorced of any theoretical commitments or background. It would be impossible to write an article for an encyclopedia that way. — Terrapin Station

Aye. I don't expect an encyclopaedia article on qualia which goes through the positions to be completely theory neutral. What I do expect is that a stipulative definition of something which is supposed to characterise our experiences to be mostly theory neutral (ideally it only contains inherent thought biases and tricky to eliminate ideological biases). But the ways it is conveyed (and the way you're conveying it) always have some conceptual baggage. For previously stated reasons, it isn't surprising that the conceptual baggage is there, but I want to call a spade a spade.

I thought you were on board with the "extended mind" angle. — frank

Yes. That doesn't mean I think rocks are capable of producing their own phenomenal states?

What do you mean by "physical states"? — frank

Brain and/or bodily states.

Why do you accept MP's thoughts about the dependent character of qualia, but balk at applying the same insight to the self? — frank

I had no idea I balked at it!

Yes.

Not sure what that has to do with anything. — frank

Monism's usually understood as a substance ontology. There's only 'one type of thing', and neutral monism says that the 'one type of thing' is both mental and physical or either (as modes which possibly interact). Right?

I don't have the issues you do about selfhood, though. — frank

Eh, reducing questions about what a self is to what our intuitions tell us it is? That's not my jam.

It may be that a satisfactory theory of consciousness will develop in the context of neutral monism. Who knows? — frank

I shrug. Don't like substance ontologies (except Spinoza's).

"Introspection" refers to observing one's own mental state. That's how they're accessible — Terrapin Station

Introspection's a lot different from awareness. And are they accessible in the same way? Are sex quales like food quales? If you say "qualia come from self awareness", that's consistent with lots of radically different accounts, and there being many different (partially overlapping) forms of self awareness. Moreover, "observing one's own mental state" is not something we do all the time; we're simply not attending to our own thoughts and experiences in our usual mode of functioning, they impress upon us when we're doing stuff in a context (and the context includes our current state of mind). If you start presenting things like this, you can gloss over the details; but every opportunity to gloss over the details is an opportunity to frame things as obvious.

When they're not, they're really really not.

But we can't just say that they're accessible and leave it at that. — Terrapin Station

What is accessible by what? Accessibility is a 2 place relation, what kind of thing goes on "one side" of the relation and what kind of thing goes on "the other"? X accesses Y, what does that mean in the context of a quale? Is the "access" to the quale introspective, or is it self aware?

"Phenomenal" refers to appearance, and could be contrasted with "noumenal." When we're talking about qualia, we're talking about appearances to our own mind. — Terrapin Station

I had no idea we needed to inherit the intellectual tradition of Kant in order to process our own experiences.

You could say that "mental" is "inner" (re your question about this). Our minds are not directly observable to other people. — Terrapin Station

And now you have a whole epistemology of direct vs indirect access to give.

"Inside the head"--that's referring to your mind, on the view that minds are brains in particular states. — Terrapin Station

And now you're a physicalist.

Seriously Terrapin, what you think is just common sense and shared by everyone is batshit theory-ladened. And then you snark at me for being aware of (some of) my own bat-shit theory ladenedness?

That all seems way more complex than would be warranted by not understanding what you quoted from SEP. :razz: — Terrapin Station

Are you sure? It seems simple to me, I think you're sitting on stuff just as crazy, you just don't problematise it. And that's a problem.

Did he? Do you know in which writings he settles down into the view of panpsychism (as opposed to just considering it)? — frank

I don't think he's ever assented to it; or been totally convinced of it; but he has defended it as sensible. I think "worthy of consideration" is about as close to "I definitively believe this" as you get in analytic philosophy papers (hashtag snark).

So let me ask you: when you say that it's inevitable that baggage is drawn into the discussion, what baggage are you dragging in? What theory? — frank

A specific theory? Nah. Don't have one. The conceptual baggage I'm dragging into any discussion of first person experience (which I'm aware of and want to write up):

(1) Distrust of the usual mechanisms of introspection to yield knowledge; they're just part of it and don't suffice by themselves. I have higher requirements for conceptual constructions than I do of the thinking I need to do in the street or interpersonally.

(2) Suspicion about thinking of people (including myself) as individuals with intrinsic character of experience; I see us as much more diffuse. It doesn't even make too much sense to me for me to "have" a quale. Pre-theoretically I'll own the experience (that the experience is happening to me is often part of phenomenal character); but theoretically to me it looks a lot more like my body and environment are in a certain configuration with a certain history (of which only parts "have" phenomenal character, and of which only parts are "mine") rather than all of that being present "in me" and "accessible by" introspection (introspection is a practice we have to do, not something that happens all the time; it's a lot more cognitive effort than we usually put in in most things to introspect).

(3) The underlying intuition I have about (2) is that even something like my "body" or "soul" are distributed over bodily and socio-cultural processes, and I'm an "output" that can interact with the parameters of my situation and (some of my) self. I see my experiences as something like "questions" my body is asking itself and its environment (they talk back); self modelling built on top of pre-individual processes that emerge as phenomenal characters (and are conditioned by my history). But I would also like to say that my body and mind are something that can play parts as unities in other processes; giving someone a hug is something done as a whole body (and as a person), not something my limbic system does or the recipient's does.

Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs ontological metaphor is a good mission statement for my intuitions there.

(4) In terms of the "translation" of our bodily processes into phenomenal characters, I have no idea. Not all bodily processes are capable of them (our nerves have to be involved somehow, areas with little nervous connection don't seem to have distinctive feelings). Our mental states look to me to be high order interactions of bodily processes with an accompanying bodily process of self modelling (which looks to occur in the brain, as mirror neurons and high-order processing occur there, and we develop self consciousness after neural-cognitive development). How (phenomenal character) I experience seems intimately tied up with how other people have treated me developmentally; pre-self conscious anticipations and memories developing into self conscious ones (this ties into the self as a socio-cultural process, a self is a learned self constrained by individual level bodily variation). Edit: I'm pretty convinced that we see ourselves as "in our heads" just because our eyes are there, though.

(5) Tentatively I think questions about "why is this physical state conscious?" should be translated into "how is this physical state conscious?"; and there I think I broadly agree with Chalmers - at least his intention of providing a vocabulary for linking phenomenal states with physical ones - but I'm suspicious of "the explanatory gap" in general and the metaphysical consequences arising from it. To me it seems like a similar question to "why does money turn into food?". Of course, it doesn't literally, but we turn money into food through purchasing things. I think our bodies turn bodily processes into phenomenal states through (partial) self modelling (though not necessarily algorithmically!); and that self modelling is in part a social process (embedded in social practices).

Why would you be reading the idea that way? — Terrapin Station

Qualia aren't supposed to have hows, they're just there.

That we have experiences is (probably) theory neutral.
If you label those experiences "qualia" as an independent(?) act of judgement, that's probably also theory neutral, though I would be suspicious that anyone would do that without exposure to the literature on qualia.
If you talk about those experiences in terms of qualia, that's usually not theory neutral.

Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal (phenomena are introspectively accessibe? or do only introspectively accessible phenomena have qualia?) aspects of our mental (inner? is inner=mental?) lives. In this broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia. Disagreement typically centers on which mental states have qualia, whether qualia are intrinsic qualities of their bearers, and how qualia relate to the physical world both inside and outside the head (head = mental? experiential = in the head?). — SEP

This already makes me suspicious - an ontology populated by "mental states" which may or not be "accessible" in a (specified way) by "introspection" (so I have to introspect to "access" qualia? I thought they were immediate parts of experience...). I'm sure that there are coherent ways of fleshing all this out; but yeah, it's something in need of fleshing out, rather than immediate (in the Cartesian sense) understanding suggested in the phrase.

So, guide me through the process you would use to attend to a quale?

I'm fairly anti-realist about ontology, so I forget that others feel pretty strong commitments. — frank

Having global suspicion about a domain is a pretty strong commitment! Chalmers himself gets a lot of mileage out of (what he sees as) conceptual consequences of his posits.

With Chalmers, the focus is heavily on what we don't know, the approaches that are out there, and the challenge it all poses to science. He uses "first person data" pretty frequently. It's a pretty quiet, cautious, analytical approach. — frank

And yet he ends up in a qualified panpsychism and argues that all (or a strong most) hitherto existing science has not dealt with the problem he's posing?

Edit: What I'm trying to highlight is that the framing of this stuff is very much not theory neutral.

saturated, unstructured color field — StreetlightX

It makes sense! We always come to an understanding instantaneously of what we experience (experience-of is always experience-as). Something with no patterns in probably calls higher-order sensory processing architecture without lower-order sensorimotor information constraining it much; yielding hallucinations and loss of the sense.

I'm reminded of an exercise of when you simulate a response variable and millions of predictor variables independently (no links), eventually the response variable is perfectly modelled by what is really noise, and occasionally you get a near perfect fit by coincidence. If we always have to 'fit' even when it's 'noise', the only sensible 'fits' would be extremely abstracted patterns of relationship from the noise (coinciding by chance rather than through genuine relation); probably leveraging memory and imagination more than sensory information. They're also probably going to be aleatory and episodic; since the sensory information's patternlessness would 'refute' any pattern imposed upon it through the high order sensory processing.

From brief Googling that's consistent with the first person reports of Ganzfeld subjects.