The Trouble with Qualia: I. When Feeling Became a Thing

There is something odd about the way philosophers of consciousness talk about experience.

Suppose I stub my toe.

There is no mystery about the ordinary statement that I feel pain. My toe has been damaged, my nervous system responds, I withdraw my foot, my attention is drawn to the injury, and the event may influence what I do for some time afterwards. The pain matters to me because something has happened to my body that matters to the organism that is me.

But philosophical discussions of consciousness often take one further step. They ask:

What is it like to feel pain?

At first this sounds like an entirely innocent question. Of course there is something it is like to feel pain. Pain hurts.

But what, exactly, have we added?

We have moved from pain is felt to there is something it is like to feel pain. And from there it is a short step to talking about the phenomenal character of pain, or its quale: the supposedly distinctive subjective quality that makes pain feel the way it does.

The terminology can make the move seem inevitable. It may not be.

From a verb to a thing

Consider the ordinary sentence:

I feel pain.

Here, feel is a verb. It describes something the organism does, or more precisely, something that happens to the organism in a way that is available to its experience and behaviour.

Now consider:

There is a feeling of pain.

Nothing particularly strange has happened yet. We have simply turned the verb into a noun.

But then:

The feeling has a phenomenal character.

And finally:

The phenomenal character is a quale.

At this point something rather different seems to have happened. What began as a way of describing an organism's experience has acquired the appearance of an entity or property in its own right.

This may be entirely legitimate. But it requires an argument.

Why should the fact that pain is felt entail that there exists, in addition to the pain and the organism's experience of it, a further thing called the feeling of pain?

Perhaps there is such a thing. But we should not confuse the usefulness of a word with the ontological independence of what the word names.

What does “what it is like” add?

The phrase what it is like is central to modern discussions of consciousness. Thomas Nagel famously used it to characterise the subjective aspect of experience: there is, he argued, something it is like to be a conscious organism.

The expression is extraordinarily suggestive. It seems to point towards something that ordinary physical descriptions leave out.

But it is worth noticing what kind of expression it is.

When I say that falling into cold water feels shocking, I am not necessarily identifying another event that occurs after the falling and the shock. I am describing how the event is experienced by the person undergoing it.

Likewise, when I say that pain feels unpleasant, I have not obviously identified a second experience that accompanies the pain. I have described the character of the experience itself.

This distinction matters.

If what it is like is simply another way of describing the experience, then it is not obvious that it identifies an additional constituent of reality.

If, on the other hand, what it is like identifies something over and above the experience, then we need to know what that something is and how it relates to the experience.

The philosophical literature sometimes seems to move between these two senses without noticing the change.

Pain and nociception

There is, of course, an important distinction between nociception and pain.

An organism can detect potentially damaging stimuli and respond to them without necessarily experiencing what we ordinarily call pain. Conversely, the experience of pain can be influenced by expectation, attention, context, memory and other factors in ways that are not reducible to the amount of tissue damage.

This is an important empirical fact. It tells us that pain is not simply a passive read-out of bodily injury.

But it does not by itself establish the existence of a quale.

We might instead say that pain is a particular way in which an organism is affected by, responds to, and interprets what is happening to it. Its distinctive character is part of the organisation of that experience.

The question then becomes not:

How does the brain produce the additional thing called the quale of pain?

but:

What is involved in an organism being affected in the way we call pain?

That is a different question. It may be difficult, but its difficulty does not depend upon first assuming that pain contains an extra ingredient.

The temptation of “red”

Pain is perhaps too complicated an example for some philosophers, so discussions of qualia often turn to colour.

Suppose I look at a red object.

There is a physical object, light reflected from its surface, a visual system responding to particular patterns of stimulation, neural processing, perceptual discrimination, and eventually my report that the object is red.

But then comes the familiar question:

What is it like to see red?

The answer seems to be that there is a particular quality to the visual experience: redness.

Again, there may be no problem with describing the experience this way. The difficulty begins when we infer from the description that there must therefore be a further entity—the quale of redness—whose existence requires a special explanation.

Perhaps there is.

But perhaps we have simply taken a perfectly ordinary fact about perception and changed its grammatical form.

The organism sees red.

The seeing has a particular character.

We call that character redness.

Nothing has yet required us to posit another object inside the experience.

A small grammatical experiment

Try replacing the noun quale with a verb.

Instead of:

I have a quale of pain.

say:

I am affected painfully.

Instead of:

I possess the quale of redness.

say:

I experience this object as red.

The second formulations do not solve the problem of consciousness. But they do something useful: they keep the organism and its activity in view.

They also make it harder to imagine that experience consists of a subject standing on one side, an external world on the other, and a collection of private phenomenal objects somewhere in between.

Perhaps experience is not a container in which qualia are stored.

Perhaps it is a way an organism is related to its world.

That possibility deserves consideration before we decide that experience contains special objects whose existence physics cannot explain.

The first-person fact remains

None of this means that subjective experience is unreal.

That would be an extraordinary conclusion.

Pain hurts. Red looks different from blue. Music sounds different from silence. A remembered face is not identical to the neural description of remembering it.

The point is much more modest.

The reality of experience does not automatically establish the ontology of qualia.

There is an important difference between saying:

Experience has a particular character.

and saying:

That character is a distinct kind of entity or property requiring an explanation over and above the explanation of the experience itself.

The first is almost certainly unavoidable.

The second is a philosophical hypothesis.

And once we recognise that distinction, a familiar question begins to look rather different.

We are often told that the great mystery of consciousness is that physical processes somehow produce what it is like to experience them.

But perhaps we should pause before asking how physical processes produce what it is like.

Perhaps we should first ask:

What exactly have we identified when we say that there is something it is like?

That may turn out to be a much harder question than it first appears.

And it may also turn out that the famous hard problem has inherited some of its hardness from the way the problem was formulated.

That is a possibility worth exploring.

But first, there is an even stranger question.

If pain has a particular character, and seeing red has a particular character, what would it mean for consciousness itself to have a character?

What, exactly, would it feel like to be conscious?

That is where the distinction between experience and what experience feels like may begin to unravel.