Does anyone else find that the problem of qualia seems like more of a problem for some senses than others? For example, my sense of sight versus my sense of hearing. When I look at the color red, I perceive some fundamentally different sensation than when I look at blue. Though they are both caused by looking at different frequencies of light, there is something “over and above” the frequencies that is difficult to explain, and has caused so much ink to be spilled in the philosophy of consciousness.
However, when I hear something, I just hear frequencies. This is whether I am listening to a symphony or a single sine wave, white noise, or the person currently shoveling snow outside. There isn’t anything “over and above” the sounds; they are all obviously the same “kind” of thing to me. I can categorize the individual frequencies if it is a simple enough sound, and more complicated sounds, while I can’t categorize them, don’t feel like they are anything different than just combinations of simple frequencies.
None of the sound frequencies are fundamentally different in the way that red and blue are. An oboe and a violin may have different profiles of overtones when played, but they aren’t different experiences like color. I don’t get the impression of fundamentally different qualities when I listen to them.
The difference between these two senses is so strong that I think if I had been born blind (and also without taste or smell, which are even MORE qualia-like and problematic), or at least born with black-and-white vision, I would never understand what the problem with qualia is. There wouldn’t be any internal experience that would seem unknowable to others. When I looked at something there would just be “I am experiencing a light intensity of 75% maximum”, just as when I hear something there’s just “I am experiencing a certain combination of frequencies”.
Why does light have “metadata” associated with each frequency in my mind, while sound does not?
EDIT: By qualia I am not referring to sensory perception in general, but to the ineffable and incommunicable experiences like the redness of an apple. I can’t tell if someone else sees what I would call blue when they look at an object I would call red. Sound doesn’t have that for me, as far as I can tell.
There are different chemical sensors for various colors in people’s eyes, while there’s just one system for sound.
That being said, music has a major aspect of qualia, even if it’s not consistent from one person to another or between cultures.
I wonder whether there’s something simple about vision and/or something that enables people to be abstract about it.
People can feel emotionally connected to a wide range of visual characters, but we’re still using voice actors for animated movies because synthesized voice doesn’t sound good enough.
A row of approximately 3,500 inner hair cells (IHC’s) are situated along the basilar membrane, picking up the resonances generated by the incoming waves. The inner hair cells are spread out exponentially over the 3.4 centimetre length of the tube—with many more hair cells at the beginning (high frequencies) than at the end (low frequencies). Each inner hair cell picks up the vibrations of the membrane at a particular point—thus tuned to a particular frequency. The ‘highest’ hair cell is at 20 kHz, the ‘lowest’ at 20 Hz—with a very steep tuning curve at high frequencies, rejecting any frequency above 20 kHz.
When a hair vibrates due to incoming sound, it sends an action potential to the brain. So we have three types of sensors for seeing, but thousands for hearing.
But there are even more pixels in the eye. The difference is that these inputs have dimensional structure. A pixel in the center of your vision results in a very similar response to one a degree higher. A sound at 1000hz sounds similar to one at 1100hz.
And in fact the structure of the brain actually enforces this dimensionality. Nearby frequencies have overlapping representations. E.g. 1000hz might be 00111000 and 1100 might be 00011100, representing the inputs which are active.
But colors have no dimensionality. Red is qualitatively different than blue. They are different kinds of inputs.
I guess part of the problem is that there are only three color receptors, rather than thousands, so there is less reason to represent commonalities between them. That said, we do talk about “warm” and “cool” colors, which mainly seems to refer to how much blue is mixes in them. So that seems a bit like a one-dimensional “heat” scale, with blue on the cold end and red/green on the work end?
If I hear a word, then parsing from frequencies to language is a step that adds meaning.
When I’m dancing and most of my attention is focused on kinesthetic perception and the vibe of the music, I often don’t get language immediately when my dancing partner just says something. It seems like my language module has to first to be restarted.
The McGurk effect is pretty interesting when thinking about audio qualia. The same frequency that reaches the ears produces different perceived qualia depending on visual input.
At the Solstice event I did lead a meditation where I among other things lead attention to perceiving the qualia of silence that exists independent of noises in the environment.
Perceiving that qualia worked even for the person in that group where my priors were that they were least likely to be able to follow it.
To me that silence-qualia is a audio qualia that’s not simply a perception of frequencies.
At the moment I focus a lot of effort on phonemes. They are qualia that differ among different people. Most German speakers can’t hear a difference between the English words “cap” and “cab”. With training however it’s possible to start hearing the difference and perceive the two words differently.
In Salsa Music it takes most beginners time to learn to hear “the one”, the note that’s begins a tact.
I personally got very irritated when I read of perception of rhythm in things in the writing of Moshé Feldenkrais. Even through I’m dancing for more than five years, I still feels completely different. In some sense hearing “the one” in Salsa is likely rythmn perception.
A lot of my deeper investigation of qualia comes as a result of dealing with Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy. When I asked my main teacher for perceptive pedagogy about rhythm, she unfortunately told me that’s she also bad at it. There’s still room for me to develop finer qualia for rythmn.
I think we are using qualia to refer to different things. I am using it to mean something more specific than just a subjective sensory experience; I’m referring to incommunicable ,”extra” experience (i.e., there is no way to tell if we see the same “color” when we look at a red apple, even though we are both seeing the same frequency of light. For all I know, you experience what I would call blue). Sorry if my definition wasn’t clear; is there another, more specific word for this aspect of qualia?
The difference between phoneme comprehension in different languages does not appear to reference this definition of qualia. I experience the phoneme “p”, and though I am mentally assigning it to a bucket that other languages would split further into an aspirated “p” and unaspirated “p”, there’s no special “p-ness” about that sound that distinguishes it from other phonemes in some ineffable way. It’s just frequencies, completely unlike colors which have metadata.
When you learn to hear “the one” note that begins a tact, does it sound fundamentally different from other sounds, or does it just feel different, even though the sound itself is qualitatively like all others? I would consider it to be an ineffable qualia iff that sound were as different from the same sound in a another context as red is from blue.
When I am playing piano, the upbeats and downbeats, or the beginning of a phrase, feel different to me, likely in the same way that the note that begins a tact feels different to you (I presume). But I wouldn’t say the upbeats and downbeats are different qualia; they only feel that way to me because I’m anticipating them and treating them differently. They don’t have any different qualities from each other.
But again, that’s probably just me. I think the main reason I’m interested in reverse engineering minds is so we can finally properly research these questions. They’re so hard to even talk about!
I would consider it to be an ineffable qualia iff that sound were as different from the same sound in a another context as red is from blue.
I can give you 100 pairs of colors that you couldn’t distinguish from each other that go from red to blue. There no point where you would be able to draw a clear boundary where redness stops and blue begins.
I likely even need less than 100 pairs.
If you touch my hand or if you touch my face, that’s both a different qualia, in some sense. It’s not the same way different than red and blue are different. It’s also not the same way different than two phonemes or two notes are different.
Two days ago I has chatting with a friend and we both have well developed kinesthetic qualia. We talked about how I’m not speaking from being present in my belly. Then I said something and he said: “Well, you are in your head, there no solution to the problem from there.” I answered: “I do feel present in my chest, don’t you also perceive me as present in my chest?”. He answers: “Yes, you are present ribcage upwards, but not in your belly...”.
I would guess, that most people on LW wouldn’t know what to do with that notion of presence. It’s something we both perceive but where the experience is incommunicable for me.
When you learn to hear “the one” note that begins a tact, does it sound fundamentally different from other sounds, or does it just feel different, even though the sound itself is qualitatively like all others?
Feel is a word for things that are perceived kinesthetically. I see no reason not to things perceived kinesthetic qualia. Of course kinestic qualia aren’t visual qualia.
A recent experience was getting annoyed by the drilling machine of my neighbor. I can recognize that I feel tension in specific parts of my head that are produced by that sound.
I don’t feel “the one” in Salsa in a similar kinesthetic way that’s communicable. For me it’s an incommunicable experience that I can’t break down. It’s a primitive.
If we go back to red and blue. It’s also worth noting that English is a language that has words for those two colors. Ancient Greek doesn’t have exactly the same distinction. Homer speaks of a wine dark sea.
The same way you can train new phoneme distinctions you can train new color distinctions. Interestingly naming the colors helps with the ability to develop a new perceived color.
I can give you 100 pairs of colors that you couldn’t distinguish from each other that go from red to blue. There no point where you would be able to draw a clear boundary where redness stops and blue begins.
This is true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am experiencing colors when I look at them. Why is there “redness” or “blueness” to begin with?
The same way you can train new phoneme distinctions you can train new color distinctions. Interestingly naming the colors helps with the ability to develop a new perceived color.
But being able to distinguish between colors or sounds isn’t the problem I’m trying to address. The problem for me is, why do colors have metadata associated with them while sound does not?
Hmmm. That could be true. But it still doesn’t feel like there are qualia associated with sound in that way; for low pitches you can actually hear the individual vibrations, so to me it doesn’t seem like it’s possible for you to be hearing what I hear as a high note. The true nature of the sound is apparent at such low pitches, and it’s as if there’s nowhere for qualia to be hiding.
But being able to distinguish between colors or sounds isn’t the problem I’m trying to address. The problem for me is, why do colors have metadata associated with them while sound does not?
The core question here is:
For how many colors do you have something like “redness” or “blueness” and what does it take to get that for a new color.
Particularly it takes a name. The name is metadata. It’s makes the thing a primitive. An important step from going from vague feelings of difference to things with metadata is to give it a name. At least that’s what I happen to believe at the moment.
I don’t think perceiving color as qualia requires a name—in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff describes a lot of research on how people classify color. While some languages have more words than others for colors, there’s good agreement on what the best example is for each color, and a sequence for the order in which color words appear in each language.
Also, even if there’s a word which covers red and orange, best examples of the color peak at what we would call a good red or a good orange,
The experience of how perceiving the sound “C3” is different from perceiving the sound of a raindrop also seems very incommunicable. I don’t think I could communicate it to a person who’s completely deaf.
I don’t think that’s what you need the name for. tzachquiel speaks about “metadata”. A name adds “metadata” that goes beyond what was there beforehand.
Emotions are quite interesting in that regard. It changes things to put a label on a sensation. In Focusing, putting a label on the sensation is an essential part. It’s also a step in the Sedona method.
Taking a label away can also make certain process such a EmoTrance easier.
If you want to describe how you are angry you can talk about how your heart rate rises and how you feel sensations in your belly but the label “anger” adds incommunicable metadata to it. It changes the experience.
Fear also raises emotions and might also let’s you feel sensation in your belly but it’s different in a way that just doesn’t boil down to raised heart rate and inner movement.
I’m reasonably sure that my experience of Focusing being different from ordinary use of language is typical—ordinary use involves accepting approximate words for experience, while Focusing takes a lot more time to find words that feel satisfyingly exact.
I agree that there’s metadata associated with sounds as well as color.
Though there are many specific shades that I would group under the category “red”, each one is it’s own separate experience and I can distinguish colors very finely (I get a perfect score on this color sorting test) and remember them later. I do not believe naming the categories is the cause of qualia, because I also name sounds (C, E-flat, oboe, violin, etc.) and I don’t experience the same thing with sound as I do with color.
Though there are many specific shades that I would group under the category “red”, each one is it’s own separate experience and I can distinguish colors very finely
That still opens the door to find colors for which you don’t have a separate experience at the moment and develop a separate experience.
The proliferation of incommunicable experiences doesn’t seem like a good way to solve this problem :) But on a related note, that’s actually a good idea for some Anki cards; learn a bunch of more fine-grained color names and become able to better remember them. Of course, the fidelity of the screen will become important at that point...
The proliferation of incommunicable experiences doesn’t seem like a good way to solve this problem :)
The interesting thing is studying the process of what happens when you build more of them. It might be possible to systematize the process and then find out something interesting through quantitative analysis.
But on a related note, that’s actually a good idea for some Anki cards; learn a bunch of more fine-grained color names and become able to better remember them.
If you want I can send you the deck. My deck has all CSS color names and also finer distinction via hex numbers.
Otherwise I have thought a bit about the issue.
Redness is not only a single color but also a dimension. If you take any two colors you can compare them in their redness. You can’t compare to notes by how much “C” they are. A note is either C or it isn’t.
My guess is that the difference is in the structure of the visual cortex vs auditory cortex, in addition to the difference between input sensors. In people who lack one of these two senses, the remaining one takes over most of the “unused” cortex. So it would be interesting to compare their qualia to the “standard” ones. I bet there is some literature to this effect.
Someone should do a large-scale study of peoples’ experiences of qualia for each sense. Much like Galton’s experiments with mental imagery, people could have wildly different experiences that we previously weren’t aware of. I’m not aware of any such studies, though, or studies that look into the relationship between sensory deficits and heightened experiences. Heightened sensitivity, sure, but not quality of experience. Philosophers don’t seem to do many psychology experiments.
One account has to do with the influence of labels, as imposing some kind of structure. In this case, using distinct words to refer to colours vs (typically) lack of such for sound frequencies, see for example Gary Lupyan (2012) (pdf).
But there are such labels for sound; we label individual frequencies as notes (C, D, E, et cetera), as well as overall profiles of sound (oboe, violin, piano, etc.). We also have words to describe the qualities of arbitrary sounds such as harsh, melodious, twittering, whining, thumping, and many others. I don’t think the difference between sight and hearing has to do with splitting up the space into discrete categories, since we do that for both senses.
That brings up an interesting point, though; I can’t tell the absolute pitch of a note without some thought (I cheat by comparing it to the note I know I’d make if I hummed completely without tension, which is a B, though I wish I had perfect pitch). So sounds are all relative to each other for most people, which could somehow account for them all sounding alike.
Can anyone with perfect pitch tell us whether they experience notes as being fundamentally different in the way colors usually are?
Can anyone with perfect pitch tell us whether they experience notes as being fundamentally different in the way colors usually are?
When I was a child I had perfect pitch, but as I didn’t follow a musical career, I’ve never used it, and I haven’t checked whether I can still hear a note and hit exactly the same key on the piano first time. But to me, pitch perceptions form a continuous one-dimensional space. It’s more like being able to recognise the length of things. There’s no special quality to something being a foot long rather than 11 or 13 inches; it’s just recognisably 12 inches long.
Harmonies, on the other hand, are more like colours. There are distinct qualities to major and minor triads etc., and to chord sequences.
Agreed—we do use such labels for many aspects of sounds, but with the exception of labelling musical notes, sound-related terms tend to refer to multidimensional characteristics of sounds, not just frequencies (although in many cases, related to frequency). This leads to a situation in which sound quality terms may tend to be less discrete than basic colour words; if so one would predict less categorical perception than is observed for basic colour words.
I think we can also see this same phenomenon in colour as well—once we go beyond a language’s basic colour terms where colour labels are not nearly so contrastive (mauve/fuschia?).
However, when I hear something, I just hear frequencies. This is whether I am listening to a symphony or a single sine wave, white noise, or the person currently shoveling snow outside. There isn’t anything “over and above” the sounds; they are all obviously the same “kind” of thing to me. I can categorize the individual frequencies if it is a simple enough sound, and more complicated sounds, while I can’t categorize them, don’t feel like they are anything different than just combinations of simple frequencies.
Really? Do you know how well you hear tones and musicality? Because my mind seems to attach all kinds of subtle qualia to sound.
I’m definitely not tone deaf, I love classical music, and I play the piano, so I assume I have an above-average ability for musicality. I love music, it’s just that the individual tones I hear aren’t special in the way colors are. They’re just… frequencies.
Initially I think of a dessicated purple fish lying on a desert highway, but that’s just because my brain went for what I assume is not the version of “bass” you meant. If I try thinking about it in the intended sense, I see a highway through a purple filter, the purple getting stronger towards the edges of my vision. The image is wavering in time to thumping dubstep. An interesting image, even if it is irrelevant.
Arrgh, that is translation for you. I myself see a highway dipping slightly and then rising and somewhat hazy because of hot air. It’s just, have you ever felt that singleness of imagery as a combination of traits, that do not necessary include colour? Does not curved/straight line seem to add more meaning to some descriptions than it strictly should, for example?
Here some other (mangled) translations, hopefully showing what I mean (from the poetry of Ондо Линде):
tongue’s restive lightning
Speech is a stone shearing the river’s ripples, reflection running along rejections
cavernous between-the-lines
plaintains’ ballroom skirts
the votive candles’ slumber of little birds
etc. It seems to me that there is a perception of objects at rest, objects rushing by and objects caught in a moment of movement, weightless, that can occupy more attention than colour in a description. (Is this what you meant by qualia?)
I’m a reader who’s relatively willing to cooperate with the writer—unless I’m sure the writer is speaking nonsense about facts, I’ll go with “what might that mean”? When Lovecraft talks about unspeakable horrors, I’ll reflexively try to create a (toned down) reaction of unspeakable horror rather than thinking “if you aren’t going to describe it, why should I bother scaring myself when you aren’t giving me anything to work with?”.
I was just saying that for me, at least, color is not the only qualia (?) that has an unparalleled vividness, I also have this impression from depth/vastness/enclosedness/… and from stillness/continuing movement/..., and it doesn’t have to be activated through vision.
Does anyone else find that the problem of qualia seems like more of a problem for some senses than others? For example, my sense of sight versus my sense of hearing. When I look at the color red, I perceive some fundamentally different sensation than when I look at blue. Though they are both caused by looking at different frequencies of light, there is something “over and above” the frequencies that is difficult to explain, and has caused so much ink to be spilled in the philosophy of consciousness.
However, when I hear something, I just hear frequencies. This is whether I am listening to a symphony or a single sine wave, white noise, or the person currently shoveling snow outside. There isn’t anything “over and above” the sounds; they are all obviously the same “kind” of thing to me. I can categorize the individual frequencies if it is a simple enough sound, and more complicated sounds, while I can’t categorize them, don’t feel like they are anything different than just combinations of simple frequencies.
None of the sound frequencies are fundamentally different in the way that red and blue are. An oboe and a violin may have different profiles of overtones when played, but they aren’t different experiences like color. I don’t get the impression of fundamentally different qualities when I listen to them.
The difference between these two senses is so strong that I think if I had been born blind (and also without taste or smell, which are even MORE qualia-like and problematic), or at least born with black-and-white vision, I would never understand what the problem with qualia is. There wouldn’t be any internal experience that would seem unknowable to others. When I looked at something there would just be “I am experiencing a light intensity of 75% maximum”, just as when I hear something there’s just “I am experiencing a certain combination of frequencies”.
Why does light have “metadata” associated with each frequency in my mind, while sound does not?
EDIT: By qualia I am not referring to sensory perception in general, but to the ineffable and incommunicable experiences like the redness of an apple. I can’t tell if someone else sees what I would call blue when they look at an object I would call red. Sound doesn’t have that for me, as far as I can tell.
There are different chemical sensors for various colors in people’s eyes, while there’s just one system for sound.
That being said, music has a major aspect of qualia, even if it’s not consistent from one person to another or between cultures.
I wonder whether there’s something simple about vision and/or something that enables people to be abstract about it.
People can feel emotionally connected to a wide range of visual characters, but we’re still using voice actors for animated movies because synthesized voice doesn’t sound good enough.
Actually, it’s almost the other way around.
When a hair vibrates due to incoming sound, it sends an action potential to the brain. So we have three types of sensors for seeing, but thousands for hearing.
But there are even more pixels in the eye. The difference is that these inputs have dimensional structure. A pixel in the center of your vision results in a very similar response to one a degree higher. A sound at 1000hz sounds similar to one at 1100hz.
And in fact the structure of the brain actually enforces this dimensionality. Nearby frequencies have overlapping representations. E.g. 1000hz might be 00111000 and 1100 might be 00011100, representing the inputs which are active.
But colors have no dimensionality. Red is qualitatively different than blue. They are different kinds of inputs.
I guess part of the problem is that there are only three color receptors, rather than thousands, so there is less reason to represent commonalities between them. That said, we do talk about “warm” and “cool” colors, which mainly seems to refer to how much blue is mixes in them. So that seems a bit like a one-dimensional “heat” scale, with blue on the cold end and red/green on the work end?
If I hear a word, then parsing from frequencies to language is a step that adds meaning.
When I’m dancing and most of my attention is focused on kinesthetic perception and the vibe of the music, I often don’t get language immediately when my dancing partner just says something. It seems like my language module has to first to be restarted.
The McGurk effect is pretty interesting when thinking about audio qualia. The same frequency that reaches the ears produces different perceived qualia depending on visual input.
At the Solstice event I did lead a meditation where I among other things lead attention to perceiving the qualia of silence that exists independent of noises in the environment. Perceiving that qualia worked even for the person in that group where my priors were that they were least likely to be able to follow it. To me that silence-qualia is a audio qualia that’s not simply a perception of frequencies.
At the moment I focus a lot of effort on phonemes. They are qualia that differ among different people. Most German speakers can’t hear a difference between the English words “cap” and “cab”. With training however it’s possible to start hearing the difference and perceive the two words differently.
In Salsa Music it takes most beginners time to learn to hear “the one”, the note that’s begins a tact.
I personally got very irritated when I read of perception of rhythm in things in the writing of Moshé Feldenkrais. Even through I’m dancing for more than five years, I still feels completely different. In some sense hearing “the one” in Salsa is likely rythmn perception. A lot of my deeper investigation of qualia comes as a result of dealing with Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy. When I asked my main teacher for perceptive pedagogy about rhythm, she unfortunately told me that’s she also bad at it. There’s still room for me to develop finer qualia for rythmn.
I think we are using qualia to refer to different things. I am using it to mean something more specific than just a subjective sensory experience; I’m referring to incommunicable ,”extra” experience (i.e., there is no way to tell if we see the same “color” when we look at a red apple, even though we are both seeing the same frequency of light. For all I know, you experience what I would call blue). Sorry if my definition wasn’t clear; is there another, more specific word for this aspect of qualia?
The difference between phoneme comprehension in different languages does not appear to reference this definition of qualia. I experience the phoneme “p”, and though I am mentally assigning it to a bucket that other languages would split further into an aspirated “p” and unaspirated “p”, there’s no special “p-ness” about that sound that distinguishes it from other phonemes in some ineffable way. It’s just frequencies, completely unlike colors which have metadata.
When you learn to hear “the one” note that begins a tact, does it sound fundamentally different from other sounds, or does it just feel different, even though the sound itself is qualitatively like all others? I would consider it to be an ineffable qualia iff that sound were as different from the same sound in a another context as red is from blue.
When I am playing piano, the upbeats and downbeats, or the beginning of a phrase, feel different to me, likely in the same way that the note that begins a tact feels different to you (I presume). But I wouldn’t say the upbeats and downbeats are different qualia; they only feel that way to me because I’m anticipating them and treating them differently. They don’t have any different qualities from each other.
But again, that’s probably just me. I think the main reason I’m interested in reverse engineering minds is so we can finally properly research these questions. They’re so hard to even talk about!
I can give you 100 pairs of colors that you couldn’t distinguish from each other that go from red to blue. There no point where you would be able to draw a clear boundary where redness stops and blue begins. I likely even need less than 100 pairs.
If you touch my hand or if you touch my face, that’s both a different qualia, in some sense. It’s not the same way different than red and blue are different. It’s also not the same way different than two phonemes or two notes are different.
Two days ago I has chatting with a friend and we both have well developed kinesthetic qualia. We talked about how I’m not speaking from being present in my belly. Then I said something and he said: “Well, you are in your head, there no solution to the problem from there.” I answered: “I do feel present in my chest, don’t you also perceive me as present in my chest?”. He answers: “Yes, you are present ribcage upwards, but not in your belly...”.
I would guess, that most people on LW wouldn’t know what to do with that notion of presence. It’s something we both perceive but where the experience is incommunicable for me.
Feel is a word for things that are perceived kinesthetically. I see no reason not to things perceived kinesthetic qualia. Of course kinestic qualia aren’t visual qualia.
A recent experience was getting annoyed by the drilling machine of my neighbor. I can recognize that I feel tension in specific parts of my head that are produced by that sound. I don’t feel “the one” in Salsa in a similar kinesthetic way that’s communicable. For me it’s an incommunicable experience that I can’t break down. It’s a primitive.
If we go back to red and blue. It’s also worth noting that English is a language that has words for those two colors. Ancient Greek doesn’t have exactly the same distinction. Homer speaks of a wine dark sea.
The same way you can train new phoneme distinctions you can train new color distinctions. Interestingly naming the colors helps with the ability to develop a new perceived color.
This is true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am experiencing colors when I look at them. Why is there “redness” or “blueness” to begin with?
But being able to distinguish between colors or sounds isn’t the problem I’m trying to address. The problem for me is, why do colors have metadata associated with them while sound does not?
What about (for example) “low” and “high”? (“What if low pitches sound to you the way high pitches sound to me, and vice versa?”)
Hmmm. That could be true. But it still doesn’t feel like there are qualia associated with sound in that way; for low pitches you can actually hear the individual vibrations, so to me it doesn’t seem like it’s possible for you to be hearing what I hear as a high note. The true nature of the sound is apparent at such low pitches, and it’s as if there’s nowhere for qualia to be hiding.
The core question here is: For how many colors do you have something like “redness” or “blueness” and what does it take to get that for a new color.
Particularly it takes a name. The name is metadata. It’s makes the thing a primitive. An important step from going from vague feelings of difference to things with metadata is to give it a name. At least that’s what I happen to believe at the moment.
I don’t think perceiving color as qualia requires a name—in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff describes a lot of research on how people classify color. While some languages have more words than others for colors, there’s good agreement on what the best example is for each color, and a sequence for the order in which color words appear in each language.
Also, even if there’s a word which covers red and orange, best examples of the color peak at what we would call a good red or a good orange,
The experience of how perceiving the sound “C3” is different from perceiving the sound of a raindrop also seems very incommunicable. I don’t think I could communicate it to a person who’s completely deaf.
I don’t think that’s what you need the name for. tzachquiel speaks about “metadata”. A name adds “metadata” that goes beyond what was there beforehand.
Emotions are quite interesting in that regard. It changes things to put a label on a sensation. In Focusing, putting a label on the sensation is an essential part. It’s also a step in the Sedona method. Taking a label away can also make certain process such a EmoTrance easier.
If you want to describe how you are angry you can talk about how your heart rate rises and how you feel sensations in your belly but the label “anger” adds incommunicable metadata to it. It changes the experience.
Fear also raises emotions and might also let’s you feel sensation in your belly but it’s different in a way that just doesn’t boil down to raised heart rate and inner movement.
I’m reasonably sure that my experience of Focusing being different from ordinary use of language is typical—ordinary use involves accepting approximate words for experience, while Focusing takes a lot more time to find words that feel satisfyingly exact.
I agree that there’s metadata associated with sounds as well as color.
Though there are many specific shades that I would group under the category “red”, each one is it’s own separate experience and I can distinguish colors very finely (I get a perfect score on this color sorting test) and remember them later. I do not believe naming the categories is the cause of qualia, because I also name sounds (C, E-flat, oboe, violin, etc.) and I don’t experience the same thing with sound as I do with color.
That still opens the door to find colors for which you don’t have a separate experience at the moment and develop a separate experience.
The proliferation of incommunicable experiences doesn’t seem like a good way to solve this problem :) But on a related note, that’s actually a good idea for some Anki cards; learn a bunch of more fine-grained color names and become able to better remember them. Of course, the fidelity of the screen will become important at that point...
The interesting thing is studying the process of what happens when you build more of them. It might be possible to systematize the process and then find out something interesting through quantitative analysis.
If you want I can send you the deck. My deck has all CSS color names and also finer distinction via hex numbers.
Otherwise I have thought a bit about the issue. Redness is not only a single color but also a dimension. If you take any two colors you can compare them in their redness. You can’t compare to notes by how much “C” they are. A note is either C or it isn’t.
My guess is that the difference is in the structure of the visual cortex vs auditory cortex, in addition to the difference between input sensors. In people who lack one of these two senses, the remaining one takes over most of the “unused” cortex. So it would be interesting to compare their qualia to the “standard” ones. I bet there is some literature to this effect.
Someone should do a large-scale study of peoples’ experiences of qualia for each sense. Much like Galton’s experiments with mental imagery, people could have wildly different experiences that we previously weren’t aware of. I’m not aware of any such studies, though, or studies that look into the relationship between sensory deficits and heightened experiences. Heightened sensitivity, sure, but not quality of experience. Philosophers don’t seem to do many psychology experiments.
One account has to do with the influence of labels, as imposing some kind of structure. In this case, using distinct words to refer to colours vs (typically) lack of such for sound frequencies, see for example Gary Lupyan (2012) (pdf).
But there are such labels for sound; we label individual frequencies as notes (C, D, E, et cetera), as well as overall profiles of sound (oboe, violin, piano, etc.). We also have words to describe the qualities of arbitrary sounds such as harsh, melodious, twittering, whining, thumping, and many others. I don’t think the difference between sight and hearing has to do with splitting up the space into discrete categories, since we do that for both senses.
That brings up an interesting point, though; I can’t tell the absolute pitch of a note without some thought (I cheat by comparing it to the note I know I’d make if I hummed completely without tension, which is a B, though I wish I had perfect pitch). So sounds are all relative to each other for most people, which could somehow account for them all sounding alike.
Can anyone with perfect pitch tell us whether they experience notes as being fundamentally different in the way colors usually are?
When I was a child I had perfect pitch, but as I didn’t follow a musical career, I’ve never used it, and I haven’t checked whether I can still hear a note and hit exactly the same key on the piano first time. But to me, pitch perceptions form a continuous one-dimensional space. It’s more like being able to recognise the length of things. There’s no special quality to something being a foot long rather than 11 or 13 inches; it’s just recognisably 12 inches long.
Harmonies, on the other hand, are more like colours. There are distinct qualities to major and minor triads etc., and to chord sequences.
Agreed—we do use such labels for many aspects of sounds, but with the exception of labelling musical notes, sound-related terms tend to refer to multidimensional characteristics of sounds, not just frequencies (although in many cases, related to frequency). This leads to a situation in which sound quality terms may tend to be less discrete than basic colour words; if so one would predict less categorical perception than is observed for basic colour words.
I think we can also see this same phenomenon in colour as well—once we go beyond a language’s basic colour terms where colour labels are not nearly so contrastive (mauve/fuschia?).
I have no education in labeling sounds, but I do think I generally attach more “meaning” or structure to them than I do to colors.
Really? Do you know how well you hear tones and musicality? Because my mind seems to attach all kinds of subtle qualia to sound.
I’m definitely not tone deaf, I love classical music, and I play the piano, so I assume I have an above-average ability for musicality. I love music, it’s just that the individual tones I hear aren’t special in the way colors are. They’re just… frequencies.
If I tell you about a ‘dry, purple bass of the highway’, what do you feel? What do you imagine? (Sorry if this is irrelevant.)
Initially I think of a dessicated purple fish lying on a desert highway, but that’s just because my brain went for what I assume is not the version of “bass” you meant. If I try thinking about it in the intended sense, I see a highway through a purple filter, the purple getting stronger towards the edges of my vision. The image is wavering in time to thumping dubstep. An interesting image, even if it is irrelevant.
Arrgh, that is translation for you. I myself see a highway dipping slightly and then rising and somewhat hazy because of hot air. It’s just, have you ever felt that singleness of imagery as a combination of traits, that do not necessary include colour? Does not curved/straight line seem to add more meaning to some descriptions than it strictly should, for example? Here some other (mangled) translations, hopefully showing what I mean (from the poetry of Ондо Линде):
tongue’s restive lightning
Speech is a stone shearing the river’s ripples, reflection running along rejections
cavernous between-the-lines
plaintains’ ballroom skirts
the votive candles’ slumber of little birds
etc. It seems to me that there is a perception of objects at rest, objects rushing by and objects caught in a moment of movement, weightless, that can occupy more attention than colour in a description. (Is this what you meant by qualia?)
I think of the sound of cars hissing along the highway, possibly at dusk.
And yet it is a single image, is it not?
Yes, though I’m not sure why that’s important.
I’m a reader who’s relatively willing to cooperate with the writer—unless I’m sure the writer is speaking nonsense about facts, I’ll go with “what might that mean”? When Lovecraft talks about unspeakable horrors, I’ll reflexively try to create a (toned down) reaction of unspeakable horror rather than thinking “if you aren’t going to describe it, why should I bother scaring myself when you aren’t giving me anything to work with?”.
I was just saying that for me, at least, color is not the only qualia (?) that has an unparalleled vividness, I also have this impression from depth/vastness/enclosedness/… and from stillness/continuing movement/..., and it doesn’t have to be activated through vision.