“Qualia” is a “technical” term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us.
The very same food often tastes different to me at different times.For instance, my first sip of breakfast orange juice tastes much sweeter than my second sip if I interpose a bit of pancakes and maple syrup, but after a swallow or two of coffee, the orange juice goes back to tasting (roughly? exactly?) the way it did during the first sip. Surely (ding!) we want to say (or think about) such things, and surely (ding!) we are not wildly wrong when we do, so . . . surely (ding!) it is quite okay to talk of the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t, and ask whether it is just the same as or different from the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t’, or the way the juice tastes to Jones at time t. Call these ways things can seem to us qualia.
This “conclusion” seems innocent, but right here we have already made the big mistake. The final step presumes that we can isolate the “qualia” from everything else that is going on—at least in principle or for the sake of argument.
The examples that seduce us are abundant in every modality. I cannot imagine, will never know, could never know, it seems, how Bach sounded to Glenn Gould. (I can barely recover in my memory the way Bach sounded to me when I was a child.) And I cannot know, it seems, what it is like to be a bat (Nagel, 1974), or whether you see what I see, color-wise, when we look up at a clear “blue” sky. These everyday cases convince us of the reality of these special properties—those subjective tastes, looks, aromas, sounds—that we then apparently isolate for definition by this act of philosophical distillation. Thus are qualia born.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
