Qualia

How can qualia be best explained? 


Qualia is a Latin root, meaning'what sort' or 'what kind.' This type of vagueness in the definition is something that, to me, can be best grasped from approaching qualia in a different direction. 


I'm currently reading Lessons from the Light, by Kenneth Ring, where he describes a patient who experienced a NDE who was blind from birth. It's difficult for us seeing folk to understand what being blind from birth would actually be like, but in hearing this woman's account, something became clear that should have been obvious to me. This patient, Vicki, remembers floating out of her body and experiencing the hospital room - actually seeing it. She then floated out of the hospital, and looked around at the city of Concord, where she was hospitalized. After this, she was shot through a tunnel, and the rest of her experience (actually, the entire thing), is like most other NDE's. What's interesting, and separates Vicki's account from others, is that she remembers seeing blood gushing out of body, but was unable to describe the color of the blood. It brings about the interesting concept of trying to describe a color without calling it the color itself, or relating it to another color. If you could use neither of these two things, how would you describe the 'redness' of blood?


There is a difference between colors, in this sense, and say, a book. If I am blind, I could still understand the concepts of 'smooth' and 'thin' and 'rectangular.' I feel the outline of a book, and I am told it is rectangular in its nature. I am told it's pages are thing. But how would I have the cover of the book, an illustration, described to me in colors?


Colors are a good example of qualia - especially obvious in relation to blind people. Vicki was able to recognize 'buildings' and 'rooms' and 'doctors' because she has heard them, and most importantly, felt them. She was able to recognize these things because she experiences them on a day-to-day basis, and upon actually seeing them, relate these experiences she has had to her new-found visual perception. 


The problem with color, is that we only know color through relations. How can a blind person, who is able to see, understand color without it being related? If I see the world 'red' next to the color I perceive as red, I have then grasped the concept of 'red.' Or, in Vicki's case, if she is pushed to answer what color the blood was, she could say 'Well, it was the same color as a stop sign." But Vicki obviously, has no idea of what a stop sign being red actually means. She knows what a stop sign is, and she probably knows they are red, but the concept of 'redness' she is told to associate with that stop sign is completely absent. 


And this brings us, I think, closer to seeing how qualia can be a problem for a materialist conception of the mind. If our mind can be reduced to the physical firing of neurons, in what sense could the firing of neurons ever amount to a color? In this sense, colors seem to be irreducible in nature. No doubt, our brains may have neurons associated with certain colors, but in what sense would these neuronal firings ever amount to 'blueness.' It could be argued that we only experience colors through objects, and when we imagine redness, we only imagine the redness insofar as we see a red object. But what Vicki's story shows us, is that only someone who is able to relate a stop sign to blood, and call the two red, must have an objective color in mind when they call the two red.