I take the hallmark of a good idea to be its utility. The notion of qualia has no value
The idea that everything must be useful to explain something else doesn’t work unless you have a core things that need explaining, but are not themselves explanatory posits...basic facts...sometimes called.phenomena.
So qualia don’t have to sit in the category of things-that-do-explaining , because there is another category of things-that-need-explaining.
Even if we stopped teaching philosophy and all discussion of qualia vanished, I would not be surprised to find the notion emerge once again. People are not good at making inferences about what the world is like based on their phenomenology.
“Phenomena” (literally meaning appearances ) is a near synonym for “qualia”. And people aren’t good at making inferences from their qualia. People generally and incorrectly assume that colours are objective properties (hence rhe consternation caused , amongst some, by the
dress illusion
).
That’s called naive realism, and it’s scientifically wrong.
According to science , our senses are not an open window on the world that portrays it exactly as it is. Instead , the sensory centres of our brains are connected the outside world by a complex causal chain, during which information, already limited by our sensory modalities, is filtered and reprocessed in various ways.
So scientific accounts of perception require there to be a way-we-perceive-things...quite possibly , an individual one. Which might as well be called “qualia” as anything else. (Of course , such a scientific quale isn’t immaterial by definition. Despite what people keep saying, qualia aren’t defined as immaterial).
I wouldn’t expect a theory of colour qualia to re emerge out of nowhere, because naive realism about colour is so pervasive. On the other hand, no one is naively realistic about tastes, smells etc. Everyone knows that tastes vary.
The idea that everything must be useful to explain something else doesn’t work unless you have a core things that need explaining, but are not themselves explanatory posits...basic facts...sometimes called.phenomena.
So qualia don’t have to sit in the category of things-that-do-explaining , because there is another category of things-that-need-explaining.
“Phenomena” (literally meaning appearances ) is a near synonym for “qualia”. And people aren’t good at making inferences from their qualia. People generally and incorrectly assume that colours are objective properties (hence rhe consternation caused , amongst some, by the dress illusion ).
That’s called naive realism, and it’s scientifically wrong.
According to science , our senses are not an open window on the world that portrays it exactly as it is. Instead , the sensory centres of our brains are connected the outside world by a complex causal chain, during which information, already limited by our sensory modalities, is filtered and reprocessed in various ways.
So scientific accounts of perception require there to be a way-we-perceive-things...quite possibly , an individual one. Which might as well be called “qualia” as anything else. (Of course , such a scientific quale isn’t immaterial by definition. Despite what people keep saying, qualia aren’t defined as immaterial).
I wouldn’t expect a theory of colour qualia to re emerge out of nowhere, because naive realism about colour is so pervasive. On the other hand, no one is naively realistic about tastes, smells etc. Everyone knows that tastes vary.