The “problem of qualia” comes about for today’s materialists, because they apriori assume a highly geometrized ontology in which all that really exists are point particles located in space, vector-valued fields permeating space, and so on. When people were dualists of some kind, they recognized that there was a problem in how consciousness related to matter, but they could at least acknowledge the redness of red; the question was how the world of sensation and choice related to the world of atoms and physical causality.
Once you assume these highly de-sensualized physical ontologies are the *totality* of what exists, then most of the sensory properties that are evident in consciousness, are simply gone. You still have number in your ontology, you still have quantifiable properties, and thus we can have this discussion about code and numbers and names, but redness as such is now missing.
But if you allow “qualia”, “phenomenal color”, i.e. the color that we experience, to still exist in your ontology, then it can be the thing that has all those relations. Quantifiable properties of color like hue, saturation, lightness, can be regarded as fully real—the way a physicist may regard the quantifiable properties of a fundamental field as real—and not just as numbers encoded in some neural computing register.
I mention this because I believe it is the answer, when the poster says ‘I still feel like there is this “extra” thing I’m experiencing … I personally can’t find any way to relate this isolated “qualia of redness” to anything else I care about’. Redness is cut off from the rest of your ontology, because your ontology is apriori without color. Historically that’s how physics developed—some perceivable properties were regarded as ‘secondary properties’ like color, taste, smell, that are in the mind of the perceiver rather than in the external world; physical theories whose ontology only contains ‘primary properties’ like size, shape, and quantity were developed to explain the external world; and now they are supposed to explain the perceiver too, so there’s nowhere left for the secondary properties to exist at all. Thus we went from the subjective world, to a dualistic world, to eliminative materialism.
But fundamental physics only tells you so much about the nature of things. It tells you that there are quantifiable properties which exist in certain relations to each other. It doesn’t tell you that there is no such thing as actual redness. This is the real challenge in the ontology of consciousness, at least if you care about consistency with natural science: finding a way to interpret the physical ontology of the brain, so that actual color (and all the other phenomenological realities that are at odds with the de-sensualized ontology) is somewhere in there. I think it has to involve quantum mechanics, at least if you want monism rather than dualism; the classical billiard-ball ontology is too unlike the ontology of experience to be identified with it, whereas quantum formalism contains entities as abstract as Hilbert spaces (and everything built around them); there’s a flexibility there which is hopefully enough to also correspond to phenomenal ontology directly. It may seem weird to suppose that there’s some quantum subsystem of the brain which is the thing that is ‘actually red’; but something has to be.
The “problem of qualia” comes about for today’s materialists, because they apriori assume a highly geometrized ontology in which all that really exists are point particles located in space, vector-valued fields permeating space, and so on. When people were dualists of some kind, they recognized that there was a problem in how consciousness related to matter, but they could at least acknowledge the redness of red; the question was how the world of sensation and choice related to the world of atoms and physical causality.
Once you assume these highly de-sensualized physical ontologies are the *totality* of what exists, then most of the sensory properties that are evident in consciousness, are simply gone. You still have number in your ontology, you still have quantifiable properties, and thus we can have this discussion about code and numbers and names, but redness as such is now missing.
But if you allow “qualia”, “phenomenal color”, i.e. the color that we experience, to still exist in your ontology, then it can be the thing that has all those relations. Quantifiable properties of color like hue, saturation, lightness, can be regarded as fully real—the way a physicist may regard the quantifiable properties of a fundamental field as real—and not just as numbers encoded in some neural computing register.
I mention this because I believe it is the answer, when the poster says ‘I still feel like there is this “extra” thing I’m experiencing … I personally can’t find any way to relate this isolated “qualia of redness” to anything else I care about’. Redness is cut off from the rest of your ontology, because your ontology is apriori without color. Historically that’s how physics developed—some perceivable properties were regarded as ‘secondary properties’ like color, taste, smell, that are in the mind of the perceiver rather than in the external world; physical theories whose ontology only contains ‘primary properties’ like size, shape, and quantity were developed to explain the external world; and now they are supposed to explain the perceiver too, so there’s nowhere left for the secondary properties to exist at all. Thus we went from the subjective world, to a dualistic world, to eliminative materialism.
But fundamental physics only tells you so much about the nature of things. It tells you that there are quantifiable properties which exist in certain relations to each other. It doesn’t tell you that there is no such thing as actual redness. This is the real challenge in the ontology of consciousness, at least if you care about consistency with natural science: finding a way to interpret the physical ontology of the brain, so that actual color (and all the other phenomenological realities that are at odds with the de-sensualized ontology) is somewhere in there. I think it has to involve quantum mechanics, at least if you want monism rather than dualism; the classical billiard-ball ontology is too unlike the ontology of experience to be identified with it, whereas quantum formalism contains entities as abstract as Hilbert spaces (and everything built around them); there’s a flexibility there which is hopefully enough to also correspond to phenomenal ontology directly. It may seem weird to suppose that there’s some quantum subsystem of the brain which is the thing that is ‘actually red’; but something has to be.