Many on the list have responded to Gordon Globus' posts on qualia so I hope the following won't be too repetitious:
We do not experience the world *and* qualia re-presenting it; we experience the world.
Right. We don't experience experience. Rather experience, in the form of complex ensembles of basic qualitative components (qualia) constitutes a subjective, representational world of constructed entities and events, including the subject as a seeming (but not literal) observer. This subjective world is a good enough approximation to the world external to the brain, in the respects that are relevant to our survival, so that we indeed survive. Normally the external world is the primary contributor to the veridical sensory experience which controls behavior, in contrast to non-veridical dreams and drug-induced hallucinations which are primarily internally generated. (The latter can be educational and exhilarating under controlled conditions; they reveal that our experience can change radically depending on the state of the brain, holding the external world constant.)
That both brain states and qualia represent the world doesn't seem controversial or problematic to me. The eye gathers an image of the immediate locality near the organism and this is elaborated in higher visual processing in ways that preserve (or perhaps create) a useful representation of the locality. Similarly with binaural hearing or echolocation, or proprioceptive maps of the body. Behavior can only be consistently successful when under the control of functional mappings of sensory input from the world and the body, creating higher level representations that coordinate the interaction of the organism with its environment. I've argued that qualia might just be the neurally instantiated elements of such mappings, the ones that normally participate in the control of the sorts of behavior that we are capable of only when conscious.
We always find ourselves already thrown in a world of qualities, and never experience qualia which re-present that world. So Tom's claim that qualia are representational is, I think, an inference, and I would like to know the basis of that inference, which is crucial to his account of qualia.
We always find ourselves "thrown in a world of qualities" because experience creates (is) a subjective world, representing the external world and body, and consisting ultimately of not-further-decomposable, but relationally defined (on my view) qualities. We infer, properly, that qualia represent the world, and are not properties of what distally causes sensation, by noticing that our experience of the same objects under the same (external) conditions will vary depending on changes in internal processing, whether it be a bottom-up disruption of sensory input (a ringing in the ear, a newly acquired color blindness) or a top-down change in expectations (someone tells me the duck is really a rabbit). I once had, briefly, a strange visual distortion that made straight lines look wavy in just a certain quadrant of my visual field. I didn't suppose the world was wavy but that my representation of it was defective.
We can properly call tomatoes red, or say that they *are* red, even though redness is just a matter of how our brains respond to stimulation that's describable in terms having nothing to do with color. Tomatoes are red simply because they normally look red to most of us (they don't look red to those who are color blind). The experience of redness represents (discriminates in a useful fashion) a certain complex property consisting of light reflected off the tomato as contrasted with light from its surround, and on a functionalist view the experience itself can be identified with a set of complex, "third-person", non-qualitative properties having to do with the control of behavior.
As limited organisms the only world we've got - according to science - is that represented in experience, but within this world we (at least us sophisticated types) can distinguish between that which does the representing (the brain), that which is represented (the world and body external to the brain), and the basic elements of the representational process that are grouped in distinct sensory domains (qualia). The external world appears to us in terms of qualia, ordinarily in the solid seeming chunks of multiple qualities we know as objects. The brain doesn't appear to us because it's what we consist of as a representational medium (causing our bafflement at the apparent gulf between neurons and experience).
The world as represented by us includes the central metacognitive fact that we are representational creatures. We can say that we experience the *world* (and not qualia) precisely because experience *is* representational. And just because they are representational, the qualitative elements of our experience, properly organized in normal consciousness, constitute nicely adaptive versions of reality.
--Tom Clark (twc@world.std.com)
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