From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 13:34:27 MST
On Mon, 20 Dec 1999, Damien Broderick wrote:
> Another way of putting that is to speak of `qualia', a kind of
> reification or chunking or lexical compactification of the experiencing
> process. `Heat' (my example) is just such a reification of the motion of
> molecules. Ditto `wetness', given the appropriate atoms. There is nothing
> weird or ineffable about heat or wetness.
This is interesting, because it implies having qualia, at least at
the level where it gets interesting, implies that you have to have
words to relate the experience. One of the interesting and subtle
things about languages is when you have words that have both similar
and different common underlying qualia representations. For example,
"wet" to an eskimo, probably means wet *and* cold, while "wet" to
a Polynesian islander is more likely to mean wet *and* warm. They
may both use the term wet loosely, but the "default" meaning is
quite different.
Now, extending this further, what happens when language is describing
"synthetic" qualia? I.e. the experience being discussed is one that
has little physical basis but occurs entirely within the realm of
ideas? The qualia of ideas or relationships are much less concrete
but I would argue you experience them. One of the old languages
from central Russia has a very interesting quality that it has
verb tenses that directly correlate with the "strength" of an
experience, or its "truthfullness". They express things like
"it happened to me", "I saw it happen", "It happened to a close
relative", "it happened and was viewed by a number of people
I trust", "it happened in a village of people who are usually
reliable", "it was heard from people who are only marginally
truthful", etc. through verb modifications. These experience
of the reliability or trustability of something are much less
easy to express in English and probably most other languages
because we lack the terms that concisely describe such qualia.
Just as we have programming languages that are able to accurately
and concisely express specific concepts and methods, it would seem
that one needs a "language" that would be used to talk about
qualia ranging from those have physical sources to those that
occur only within the realm of ideas or relationships.
Robert
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