How to Include Qualia in Science

Vesuvius Now

How can science accommodate qualia? This essay gives the beginning of one way forward. The main idea is to put the actual qualia into sentences. It's shown that, while these sentences do indeed expand the purview of science, they behave very strangely.

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Aleksandr Maltsev

Did I understand you correctly?
You suggest biology for the blind, biology for the deaf, biology for the young, biology for people of age (I'm wearing glasses).

Arved Huebler

Dear colleague:

Isn't the concept proposed here in the form of hieroglyphics already a long known phenomenon which gets a current symbol form with the boom of the emoji?

Hasn't it been shown that the development of (natural) sciences goes hand in hand with a language that is as precise, exact and clearly defined as possible? Is that why such symbolic sign systems as well as natural written languages are today unavoidable in everyday communication, but increasingly outdated in science by formal languages, in the final effect by a binary coding?

Are there not many qualia, which cannot be formulated by symbols or only badly and for which the approach does not work and which can be defined exactly in the end only in a formal language from rich? Your chosen example "colors" is probably an exception? 🤩

cristi marcovici

this consider only a certain aspect of vision, and not particularly new , medieval scripts contained surrounding frames witch (overly) enhance the importance of the writing calligraphy and purpose . For a Scientific writing there could be various principles and rules like the one described here, for how to read and specify meaning . People practice the actual way of presenting, potentially because is just clear, breathable , aired or relaxing for sight. At the beginning of a lecture the notations terms are being defined , the lecture goes and use them with contrasting character by the end they might be discarded . There is a collision problem in case of common ~~easy to produce~~ characters .

Janko Kokosar

I have a similar idea: to develop a description of pain so, that a patient could better tell to a doctor, which sort of pain s/he feels and how intense. This can mean significant progress in medicine. Determination of health with high-tech devices (i.e. NMR) can help at this. The description of 1 to 10 is too much uncertain. This can be interesting also for neuroscience, and so also for philosophy and at physics (physics of consciousness).