Qualia means the specific way that you experience something. And if you don’t experience something in any way at all, then you don’t experience it. So if there are no qualia, there are no experiences. But they don’t mean the same thing, since qualia means “the ways things are experienced”, not “experiences.”
Suppose I propose that physical objects have not only “mass” but “massiness”, which is “the way things have mass”. I agree that we can do the usual calculations using mass and that they will tell us how particles move, but I insist that we do not know that massiness is purely physical; that doing those calculations may miss something about massiness.
I guess that you would have little sympathy for this position. Where (if at all) does the analogy “experience : qualia :: mass : massiness” fail?
I have quite a bit of sympathy for that position, actually. I am not sure that analogy fails at all. However, we directly notice that we experience things in particular ways; if there is a particular way that things have mass, it is not part of our direct experience, since mass itself is not.
How are qualia different from experiences? If experiences are no different, why use ‘qualia’ rather than ‘experiences’?
Qualia means the specific way that you experience something. And if you don’t experience something in any way at all, then you don’t experience it. So if there are no qualia, there are no experiences. But they don’t mean the same thing, since qualia means “the ways things are experienced”, not “experiences.”
Suppose I propose that physical objects have not only “mass” but “massiness”, which is “the way things have mass”. I agree that we can do the usual calculations using mass and that they will tell us how particles move, but I insist that we do not know that massiness is purely physical; that doing those calculations may miss something about massiness.
I guess that you would have little sympathy for this position. Where (if at all) does the analogy “experience : qualia :: mass : massiness” fail?
I have quite a bit of sympathy for that position, actually. I am not sure that analogy fails at all. However, we directly notice that we experience things in particular ways; if there is a particular way that things have mass, it is not part of our direct experience, since mass itself is not.