Journal of Consciousness Studies
jcs-online thread:
Forget qualia, zombies and zimboes

Qualities and the world

Joe Jeffrey, Computer Science Dept., Northern Illinois University

Gordon Globus writes:

...it is the world we experience...world qualities, not mental qualia. We always find ourselves already thrown in a world of qualities...

I think Gordon's line of argument is on target. It seems to fit observation much more accurately, with no need for objects in a special ontological category (namely, qualia).

World qualities look a lot less mysterious if you treat them as properties and relationships, which you can do as follows:

• We observe states of affairs, which include other, related, constituent states of affairs, objects, processes, and events. "Related" means that the constituents must be in various relationships for the state of affairs to be what it is, i.e., *that* that of affairs, not another one.
• The relationships that make the state of affairs what it is can be specified using an ordinary language name, or a formal, mathematical notation. Properties, as in formal logic, are treated as unary relationships. So, we can say, "The tomato is red" as a name of the observed state of affairs in the world, or Red(the tomato).
• Instead of treating red as a quality, a separate *thing* somehow embedded in surfaces, etc., think of "red" as the name of relationship, which has a place in state of affairs descriptions as above. So, we observe red tomatoes, red apples, red crayons, etc., and it's not that they have some *thing*, like "redness", in common, but rather that they are all instances of states of affairs that includes the unary relationship named "red," and an object.
• Qualities of the world, I *think*, are properties and other relationships. (This seems to fit things like red, but may not fit more general cases.)

I don't think qualities, such as as red, are enough to capture the distinction between observing someone eat a tomato and the experience of eating a tomato, but Gordon's basic logic still does seem to hold. For those things, I think you need to work the logic having a position in the world, and that the world, this thing we are all in (what Gordon refers to as thrown into) being a *world*, not something else (such as a set of objects). In particular, the concept that seems to fit is that the world is the single thing, the totlity, that encompasses all other objects, processes, events, and states of affairs. That allows you to incorporate concepts such as 1st-person and 3rd-person, the position of the person whose world it is, and so forth.

A discovery from Tucson: A crucial question, perhaps *the* crucial question, is which relationships you count as real. If you accept as real only those relationships definable in terms of physical quantities, you get the physical world (and physicalism and reductionism). If you accept as real other relationships, you get a larger world, one in which the physical world is, in the mathematical sense, embedded. If you take to be real all those relationships a person is prepared to act on, you get the most general case of a person's world. (One can of course be wrong about what one takes to be the case, and in particular an observer/describer can be mistaken about what relationship a given person is acting on, so often some care must be exercised in deciding which what descriptions are accurate, justified, etc. -- i.e., in assigning a status to one's descriptions of what relationship is being acted on.)