1996/09/12 @ British Association Science Fair

Qualia conquered!

Just before Dan Dennett's keynote lecture on Thursday, chair Steven Rose made an announcement: 'Richard Gregory has solved the problem of qualia. And he's going to tell us. In five minutes.'

The audience cracked up.

People who weren't there need to know four things to get this deeply in-joke.

1: 'qualia' is philosophers' word for 'things' like 'redness'. 'So', many demand, 'if you say you can explain minds from physical phenomena: where is "redness"?'

2: there appear to be more theories of qualia than there are readers for books on them.

3: that some of these theories are unintelligible to (invoke no qualia in?) all but a few specialists.

4: a very large number of tree-qualia have lost their reference-points in the Real World as a result.

Professor Gregory proceeded to solve the problem of qualia.

Leave aside how physical systems represent qualia.

Concentrate on what (if anything) they do.

What do they cause? If nothing, why do they exist? If anything, then they appear spooky.

But: human perception is not very much centred on incoming sense data. A lot of it has to do with memory and with projection into the future.

I show you this red badge.

If you look at its redness, then shut your eyes, the redness goes away.

So: qualia like redness are temporary states flagging our immediate reality.

There are exceptions. If I remember an embarassing moment, I get bodily changes (like blushing) which I sense as incoming. This goes for other emotional memories, but not, I think, for intellectual memories.

Time taken: four minutes.

A tour de force, Professor Gregory... though I guess it was better if you were there...