Qualia

Qualia are the subjective qualities of conscious experience, such as how red looks or pain feels. They concern experience as it is lived from a first-person point of view.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?: Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay argues that conscious experience has a subjective character inaccessible from an organism’s external description. Nagel’s question gives a classic formulation of the first-person character associated with qualia.
Illusionism: Illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness, as commonly conceived, does not exist, though people have experiences and beliefs about it. It rejects the idea that experience contains the irreducible properties often called qualia.
Phenomenal Consciousness: Phenomenal consciousness is the aspect of consciousness involving what it is like to have an experience. Qualia are commonly treated as the qualitative features of phenomenal consciousness.
Color Vision: Color vision is the ability to distinguish objects by the wavelengths of light they reflect or emit. Differences in color experience motivate classic questions about whether qualia can be measured objectively.
Knowledge Argument: Frank Jackson’s thought experiment argues that physical knowledge may not include knowledge of what an experience feels like. Mary’s first encounter with color tests whether knowing all physical facts exhausts knowledge of qualia.
Representationalism: Representationalism holds that the phenomenal character of an experience is determined by its representational content. It explains how experience feels through what it represents rather than through separate intrinsic qualia.
First-Person Perspective: A first-person perspective is the subjective standpoint from which an individual experiences and understands the world. Qualia are characterized by how experiences appear from the subject’s own standpoint.
Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Neural correlates of consciousness are brain states or processes systematically associated with conscious experience. Identifying neural correlates links qualitative reports to measurable brain activity without settling what experience is.
Explanatory Gap: The explanatory gap is the apparent difficulty of deriving facts about conscious experience from physical facts about the brain. It captures why descriptions of neural activity can seem to leave qualia unexplained.
Functionalism: Functionalism characterizes mental states by their causal roles, including relations to inputs, other states, and behavior. Functionalist accounts challenge the claim that mental roles leave an extra, irreducible qualitative property.

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