In his seminal article “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (Jackson, 1982) philosopher of mind Frank Jackson reintroduced the little known word “qualia” to the world of philosophy. First employed by american pragmatist philosopher C. I. Lewis in his book Mind and the World Order in 1929, Jackson uses the term to refer to ”. . . certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also for certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes.” In other words, “qualia” are the phenomenological properties of subjective experience — what Thomas Nagel describes as “what it is like to be.”
According to Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” the existence of qualia refute assertions that reality is merely physical. He argues that “[n]othing you could tell of a purely physical sort captures the smell of a rose, for instance. Therefore, Physicalism is false.” Jackson drives this point home with a thought experiment about Mary — a girl who grows up in a room devoid of color and receives all her information about the outside world via a small black and white TV.
Sympathy for Mary aside, Jackson’s argument seems to be an extension of an earlier one made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Remarks on Colour. In that work he says, “[w]hen we’re asked ‘[w]hat do “red”, “blue”, “black”, “white” mean? we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours — but that’s all we can do: our ability to explain their meaning goes no further.” Similarly, in his book Debate In Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist scholar Dan Perdue explains that logical reasoning in Buddhist debate must always meet back with epistemological verification. Perdue says that this point is effectively made in the logic primers that examine shape and color.
With what seems to be unintentional irony, the Sony company has launched a new line of televisions called “QUALIA.” Dedicated to the “exploration of qualia,” Sony advertises innovative features like the DRC (Digital Reality Creation). These new TVs, they say, “are the realization of a philosophy, of inspiration, of qualia.”
So is this the consequence of a growing popularity in philosophy of mind? Or perhaps just the brain child of someone at Sony with an interest in consciousness? It would seem to be the latter. The "Sony Qualia Man" is is Ken Mogi of Tokyo, Japan. By day, he works in the Sony Computer Science Lab and teaches at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. By night, he's the author of the "Qualia Manifesto" and self-appointed leader of the "Qualia Movement." Click here to read the latest post on his thought provoking blog "Qualia Journal."
The Dalai Lama’s new book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality received a mixed review from George Johnson in the New York Times Book Review (Sept. 18th, 2005). Johnson, a well known commentator on science and religion, tragically likens Buddhist causality to Intelligent Design, and asserts that Buddhist philosophy of mind was “rejected long ago by mainstream science.”
