- seCtIon one: tHe PRoBLem
ride your bike is a quale (pronounced kwar-lay). The sight of the bluey pink of the
sunset sky is a quale. The indescribable chill of delight you experience every time
you hear that minor chord is a quale.
The term was first used in this context by the American philosopher and logician
Charles Sanders Peirce in 1866, and then in 1929 was adapted by a student of
William James’s, Clarence Irving Lewis, who defined qualia as the fundamental
building blocks of specifically sensory experience – a slant it retains to this day
(Keeley, 2009). The concept of qualia has become mired in confusion, but the
basic idea is clear enough. The term comes from the Latin qualis (of what kind
or qualities) and is used to emphasise quality: to get away from talking about
physical properties or descriptions, and to point to experience itself. A quale is
what something is like (in the sense explained above). Conscious experience can
be thought of as consisting of qualia, and then ‘The problem of consciousness is
identical with the problem of qualia, because conscious states are qualitative states
right down to the ground. Take away the qualia and there is nothing there’ (Searle,
1998, p. 21, original italics). The problem of consciousness can thus be rephrased
in terms of how qualia relate to the physical world, or how objective brains and
bodies produce subjective qualia. There are many possible ways of constructing
an answer to the question posed in this way. The substance dualist believes that
qualia (e.g. the smell of coffee) are part of a separate mental world from physical
objects (e.g. pots of coffee or brains). The epiphenomenalist believes that qualia
exist but have no causal properties. The idealist believes that everything is ulti-
mately qualia. The eliminative materialist denies that qualia exist, and so on.
You may think it unquestionable that qualia exist. After all, you are right now
experiencing smells, sounds, and sights, and these are your own ineffable qualia,
aren’t they? Many theorists would agree with you, but many others would not.
The disagreements come about partly because people define the term in differ-
ent ways: they may use it to refer (amongst other things) to qualities of experience
in general, to qualities of sensory experience in particular, to distinct irreducible
nuggets of experience, or to ineffable qualities about which their experiencing
subjects cannot be mistaken.
In his essay ‘Quining qualia’, Daniel Dennett sets out ‘to convince people that
there are no such properties as qualia’ (1988, p. 42), and what he rejects is this last
use of the term. Dennett ‘throws the qualic baby out with the bath water’, says
British psychologist Jeffrey Gray (2004, p. 153). However, Dennett does not deny
the reality of conscious experience as something that has properties, nor does he
deny that we say things and make judgements about our own experiences. What
he does deny is the existence of the ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehen-
sible ‘raw feels’ that he claims people tend to mean when they talk about qualia.
Dennett provides many ‘intuition pumps’ (his term for thought experiments
designed to draw intuitions to the surface) to undermine this natural way of
thinking. Here is a simple one. The experienced beer drinker says that beer is an
acquired taste. When he first tried beer he hated the taste, but now he has come
to love it. But which taste does he now love? No one could love that first taste – it
tasted horrible. So, he must love the new taste, but what has changed? If you think
that there are two separate things here, the actual quale (the way it really tastes
to him) and his opinion about the taste, then you must be able to decide which
‘the smell of spices
as you walk past a
restaurant, the taste of
chocolate, the sensation
of jumping into a cold
swimming pool or
relaxing in a hot bath’
(Andrade, 2012, p. 579)
‘[Q]ualia [. . .] never
really existed [. . .].
There are no atoms,
no nuggets of
consciousness’
(Metzinger, 2009, pp. 50–51)