On Qualia

This paper investigates qualia and the subjectivity of consciousness, its purpose is providing an explanation of the ontological and epistemological status of qualia, so that it will conform to the principles of materialism, and save their own subjective qualitative characteristics. We will discuss the debates of qualia in philosophy of mind from both the first person perspective and the third person perspective. This paper argues that only through combining the first person perspective and the third person perspective, could we explain the ontological and epistemological status of qualia reasonably.This paper firstly introduces qualia and the first person perspective and the third person perspective, then physicalism, eliminativism, functionalism, representationalism and their opponents’views on qualia, and then discuss the new studies on qualia and consciousness, at last come to the conclusion of this paper.The first chapter examines the history and contemporary definition of qualia, as well as two perspectives of study of qualia. Discussion on qualia could dated back to the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, and Locke and Leibniz also raised important idea which impact on future greatly. In contemporary philosophy of mind, qualia has a variety of forms of expression, such as original feeling, subjective characteristics, phenomenon of consciousness, etc., and the word qualia has also been given different meanings in different point. The first person perspective and the third person perspective are two dimensions of study of qualia, and we will discuss their meanings and roles in this chapter.The second chapter discusses the experience gap argumentation, explanatory gap argumentation, bat argumentation, etc., and eliminativism’s views on qualia, revealing the tension between qualia and physical description. On the level of experience intuition, we can not deny the existence of qualia, because it is directly related to the existence of subjectivity of consciousness; on the level of physical description, we can not go against the basic principles of physicalism. The debate between physicalism and anti-physicalism results in a confusion between cognition and ontological status of qualia. If we describe qualia from the first person perspective, we get the qualitative experience of qualia; if we discuss the ontological status from the third person perspective, we will find that it is a neural activity.The third chapter discusses the basic ideas of functionalism and its standards on the psychological state, and points out that the causal description of the object can not reveal the nature of objects. Functionalism describe the psychological state through the related terms of cause and result, it does not actually give a sufficient explanation to mind. On the problem of qualia, functionalism defines qualia as a functional status, and it believes that if two subjects have the same input and output of sensory, then they necessarily have the same state of mind and qualia. This view was opposed by absent qualia argument and inverted earth argument. Because of the confusion of the first person perspective and the third person perspective, functionalism theory has congenital defects on qualia and the subjectivity of consciousness.The fourth chapter discusses the relation between qualia and representationalism. Representationalism insists that qualia are determined by representational contents. If the representational contents are the same, then the qualia will be inevitably the same, if the representational contents are different, then qualia will be different too. Inverted spectrum argument and inverted earth argument oppose this idea. Representational description can cover the range of qualia of first-order sense, but it can not explain qualia of high-level sense. The fundamental reason is that qualia of high-level sense involves the subjectivity of consciousness, it is closely related to the first person perspective of the subject.The fifth chapter discusses the research of qualia from neuroscience, quantum mechanics and phenomenology. Edelman affirms the ontological status of qualia from the dimension of brain science, takes the relationship between whole and part as the reason of the existence of qualia. Quantum mechanics and consciousness have similarities on the level of the basic concepts and descriptions, it provides a new explanation for the relationship between consciousness and matter, and it is helpful to understand qualia. Phenomenology advocates the description of subjective experience from the first person perspective, which is not without benefits for understanding qualia and the subjectivity of consciousness.In the chapter six, we will begin with the hard problem of consciousness, taking the theory of supervenience as basis and combination of the first person perspective and the third person perspective methods as method to explain qualia, and show that our standpoint of physicalism. In the ontological sense, qualia is equivalent to neural processes of the brain; in the epistemological sense, qualia is cognition of subjective experience caused by neural processes of the brain from the first person perspective.