Qualia as Existence Itself

An investigation into the relationship between qualia, time and existence. Also known as "playing with fire".

When you look at the image above, you see the color yellow but what does it evoke for you?

I would imagine it evokes fire. But the ineffable, incommunicable, feeling when you see yellow is a highly contentious issue. It’s called “qualia”.

Qualia is considered to be the irreducible phenomenon of consciousness itself. Some philosophers of mind would say that the existence of qualia is evidence that consciousness itself is not emergent from material things - because if qualia cannot be reduced, then neither can consciousness.

Others, though, say it is an illusion. The feeling, they say, is purely functional: evolution has imbued in us a natural association between yellow and fire, the danger associated with it, the warmth and so on. This innate and subconscious recollection is what we call the qualia of yellow.

But the question then becomes: why would a simple association produce a phenomenal feeling ?

Imagine a neural network that has encoded billions of associations between patterns in its input. In a computer a neural network is just an array of memory slots and an algorithm running on that data. Why would the setting of values in certain neurons create a feeling? It’s just numbers, after all! And in our brain, it’s just electrical and chemical activity. Nothing else.

But upon closer inspection we’d find it is actually a little more than that: these neuronal weightings of associations also inform what we decide to do next. Perhaps seeing yellow activates that little part of us that would scream “run!”, if only it had more information to confirm the fear. It anticipates more information to make a potentially swift and decisive action.

And these primal associations are probably quite strong, because without them we’d die. So naturally, survival-related actions are considered important to us and weigh heavily on decisions we make.

Yet, again, aren’t these still just neurons triggering? Electrical activity? Chemical movement? How does it become an actual feeling ? There is no actual anticipation, just the possibility of there being other neurons that might be enough to tip the scales. It’s easy to dismiss it as some kind of illusion, but given it’s the only access we have to existence itself, it seems a little arrogant to wave it off like this.

Survival Sense

If we look at this matter through the lens of downward causation, as has been discussed in this blog prior to this article, then qualia takes on an entirely different role.

In that framework, we start not with the senses, but with a first-person model. This model incorporates patterns it looks for, observes, specifically in order to create a bridge from its current state to its new state.

As part of this observation, the senses would clearly take on a large role. The immediate patterns it would look for would be those that pertain - before anything - to ways in which the observer would survive. And so before anything, all sense data is evaluated on those terms. Is that color red, actually blood? Is that color yellow, actually fire? Is that color blue, actually water? Is that color white, actually sunshine? Each of these are primal patterns.

Patterns, that is, that allow continuity of my model and in that enable a moment of consciousness. In other words, these colors are our portal to measures of possible futures in which I am more conscious, compared to those where I am less conscious.

What we call an experience of qualia could actually just be the sensation of “greater consciousness” itself.

Moreover, it could be the experience of creating time, which without consciousness would truly have no passage, no motion, no actuality.

In other words, qualia could be creation of time and existence itself. This selecting of a firm bridge, a bridge from a first-person information model to a slightly more complex model, from a potentially infinite option of other possibilities. a bridge that we ultimately call time and existence itself.

Qualia isn’t simply electrons moving or neuron weightings, it could be the key to the process of existence itself: selecting a conscious moment among an infinite sea of unconscious multiversal possibilities.

And that selection, qualia, is all that actually exists.

Does Existence Necessarily Feel like Qualia?

So this might actually be something important. Does existence necessarily feel like something? If time only “moves” with conscious experience, and that is really the essence of existence itself, then is there something about this movement of time, the thing that pulls us forwards to the next moment, really what existence is?

Are the two inseparable? Like, for there to be “anything at all”, must it necessarily be the “pulling forward” of one moment to the next, being bridged by a moment of consciousness? Does this “bridge” have a specific pattern, as we discussed being the change in a first-person model?

Let’s boil this down to something simple. Why do we take a breath?

It’s something that we all do, all the time. But we don’t notice it. We don’t remember it. It just happens without any kind of thinking. Sometimes it’s very slow, and maybe not even that frequent (every few seconds). But it always happens.

If we were to be aware of that moment we take a breath, we’d experience the qualia of the desire to breathe. Of course if we resist, then we’d feel something even stronger than that: a yearning to breathe. And that would build as seconds pass, until you truly experience the survival instinct.

But it will always come, and must necessarily. If we were to look at this in terms of the multiverse, there must surely be other, parallel branches of the universe where I do not take a breath. And probably branches where I don’t even feel the desire to.

But here we are. Why?

Again, there is a selection going on. The branches where I take the breath without thinking will take precedence. If that isn’t possible because there are only branches where I am thinking about breathing, then it will necessarily give precedence to the branches where I am thinking that I need to take a breath. But regardless of whether it involves thought or not, the pattern of my current first-person information model persisting from now to the next moment will always occur.

What propels that is what we might call qualia. It’s the necessity of time and existence, and that’s what feeling is. Existence itself.