A fellow Redditor posted an idea about qualia that overlaps many of my own views, and I agreed to publish it here. I’ve been busy with other matters, but I will return soon to add some of my own thoughts in a follow-up post.
I’ve already posted a couple of times about qualia (see maralia), in relation to Mary the Colour Scientist, but that wa smostly to demonstrate that GPT4 has a surprising capacity to discuss these ideas with intelligence. I’ve not yet laid out my whole philosophical view of this issue.
Qualia are the subjective experiences we have of color, pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, taste etc. which do not seem to be present in the material world. The Hard Problem of Consciousness asks how qualia can emerge from a materialistic description of the body (which includes the brain and nervous system).
The hypothesis presented here is that qualia are like functors in an object-oriented programming language like C++. A functor is a class (type) and an instantiation of it is an object of that type. When used as an operator, it executes a function (technically called a method) which is a behavior mapping inputs to outputs. In the C programming language, the equivalent is a pointer to a function. In both cases, there is an object which is visible to the outside, but the point of the object is to execute a function lurking behind it. The function is “executed”, so to speak, upon the object being encountered by the cognitive system. This can explain the redness of red as an object which triggers a behavior on seeing red (like braking the car). Or having a sensation of pain when pricked which triggers a response (a higher-level response than just reflex action – like planning to avoid the situation in the future).
The action need not be an immediate mental or physical action. It could just be storing it as a pleasant or unpleasant memory in synaptic weights.
Functors are first-class objects in programming – i.e., they can be copied, moved and destroyed like other objects. However, they are essentially packaged behavior.
Basically, the claim is that the function (behavior) arrives at the cognitive system disguised as an object of perception. Since the cognitive module cannot perceive the outside world or its host body directly, it is captive to the transduced information-carrying signals reaching it. It thus has the illusion of perceiving something transcendental while what is really happening is only the desired behavior.
To extend the analogy further, in C++, a functor can be created on the fly and is then called a lambda function. The brain might be doing just that.
This may solve the Hard Problem. It resolves a key problem which Illusionism has, namely explaining how the brain can form beliefs about non-physical entities like qualia. In the proposed solution, the illusion is formed by presenting a purely physical behavior in the form of an object of cognition.
S. Sureshchandran