Recently read about an interesting thing in philosophy. A quale (plural: qualia) is a quality which generally everyone can recognize, but if someone couldn't innately recognize it, we'd have no way of explaining it to that person. For example, unless you're blind, you just know what the color red is. But good luck explaining "red" to a blind person.
Some examples of qualia would be.. the various colors, various sounds, smells... and a lot of more subtle things. Like the feeling you get when you see a familiar, friendly face.
So I was thinking about what other examples of qualia I could come up with.
One quale is the feeling of being "in state", or "in the zone". You should know what I'm talking about, I'm sure you've felt it lots of times. But damned if I can come up with a good objective explanation of it. When you get in state, it's like you're playing life with cheat codes enabled, you absolutely can't fail, you're superman. This is an interesting quale because English doesn't really have an adequate noun for it, instead using turns of phrase like "in the zone". Since we can't describe them outright, when discussing any particular quale, it's essential to have a name for it, hence the names of the colors and such. I guess you could say "inner state" or something for this phenomenon, but it's not really standard. I've heard it refered to as "nimbus", and that word might have the same kind of etymology as "being on cloud nine" (a nimbus is a type of cloud).
A side-effect of being language-driven creatures is that when we don't have a name for something, it slips through our fingers, and it takes a high level of awareness just to be aware of it. I'm always bugging groups like alt.english.usage for names for obscure sensations and things when I realize they exist and yet know they have no name. State, or nimbus, is one of those things. It shouldn't really be so slippery, because we all feel it: everyone's had a good day, and everyone's had a bad day, and that's state. And we can't directly talk about it because it doesn't really have much of a name.
Another thing I think is a quale, is presence. Presence, the state of being in the moment, like when a crisis occurs and you stop thinking and somehow from somewhere deep inside you just know what you have to do, and you just do it. See, I can describe situations in which presence occurs, just like I can say "red is what you see when you see a rose", but these explanations assume the reader has actually had similar experiences. I have no way of describing presence to someone who's never been present.
People have been aware of presence and calling it various things for millenia, but at least in the west, it's not really common knowledge. To learn the names, you have to read specific books. You could easily go your whole life without learning about it, whereas it would be very hard to live a reasonable lifetime without learning about "red".
I guess qualia can inherently be divided into "easy qualia" and "hard qualia" (I'm just making those words up). An "easy quale" would be one which pretty much everyone experiences and knows the name for, like "the color red". A "hard" quale would be one which people generally experience, but don't have a name for. "State" would be an example of a hard quale because we speak about it only indirectly, with phrases like "on a roll". Presence is basically a hard quale because most random people off the street don't have a name for it.
It really makes me wonder just how many things I'm missing, "right under my nose", just for lack of it having a name in English. There could be a whole world of experiential detail that we don't consciously acknowledge because our conscious mind is a linguistic object and our language has no words for these experiences. I've heard, for example, that many language don't have an equivalent to the english word "cozy" and that it's very hard to translate that word.
I'll continue, as I always have, keeping my eyes open and trying to nail down some of these elusive unnamed phenomena that so evade my English-programmed mind...
There's no way for me to describe how awesome it feels to read these other articles, you'll just have to do it for yourself and find out:
Is Society Biased Against Smart People?
The Mirror Model of Social Interaction
How The Mind Learns
Some examples of qualia would be.. the various colors, various sounds, smells... and a lot of more subtle things. Like the feeling you get when you see a familiar, friendly face.
So I was thinking about what other examples of qualia I could come up with.
One quale is the feeling of being "in state", or "in the zone". You should know what I'm talking about, I'm sure you've felt it lots of times. But damned if I can come up with a good objective explanation of it. When you get in state, it's like you're playing life with cheat codes enabled, you absolutely can't fail, you're superman. This is an interesting quale because English doesn't really have an adequate noun for it, instead using turns of phrase like "in the zone". Since we can't describe them outright, when discussing any particular quale, it's essential to have a name for it, hence the names of the colors and such. I guess you could say "inner state" or something for this phenomenon, but it's not really standard. I've heard it refered to as "nimbus", and that word might have the same kind of etymology as "being on cloud nine" (a nimbus is a type of cloud).
A side-effect of being language-driven creatures is that when we don't have a name for something, it slips through our fingers, and it takes a high level of awareness just to be aware of it. I'm always bugging groups like alt.english.usage for names for obscure sensations and things when I realize they exist and yet know they have no name. State, or nimbus, is one of those things. It shouldn't really be so slippery, because we all feel it: everyone's had a good day, and everyone's had a bad day, and that's state. And we can't directly talk about it because it doesn't really have much of a name.
Another thing I think is a quale, is presence. Presence, the state of being in the moment, like when a crisis occurs and you stop thinking and somehow from somewhere deep inside you just know what you have to do, and you just do it. See, I can describe situations in which presence occurs, just like I can say "red is what you see when you see a rose", but these explanations assume the reader has actually had similar experiences. I have no way of describing presence to someone who's never been present.
People have been aware of presence and calling it various things for millenia, but at least in the west, it's not really common knowledge. To learn the names, you have to read specific books. You could easily go your whole life without learning about it, whereas it would be very hard to live a reasonable lifetime without learning about "red".
I guess qualia can inherently be divided into "easy qualia" and "hard qualia" (I'm just making those words up). An "easy quale" would be one which pretty much everyone experiences and knows the name for, like "the color red". A "hard" quale would be one which people generally experience, but don't have a name for. "State" would be an example of a hard quale because we speak about it only indirectly, with phrases like "on a roll". Presence is basically a hard quale because most random people off the street don't have a name for it.
It really makes me wonder just how many things I'm missing, "right under my nose", just for lack of it having a name in English. There could be a whole world of experiential detail that we don't consciously acknowledge because our conscious mind is a linguistic object and our language has no words for these experiences. I've heard, for example, that many language don't have an equivalent to the english word "cozy" and that it's very hard to translate that word.
I'll continue, as I always have, keeping my eyes open and trying to nail down some of these elusive unnamed phenomena that so evade my English-programmed mind...
There's no way for me to describe how awesome it feels to read these other articles, you'll just have to do it for yourself and find out:
Is Society Biased Against Smart People?
The Mirror Model of Social Interaction
How The Mind Learns
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