[ExI] Jason asked me and I cannot do better than the dictionary

[Jason Resch]

On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 9:28 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar
> kind; the degree of excellence of something.
> "an improvement in product quality"
>
> clas
> condition
> character
> nature
> constitution
> makeup
> form
> rank
> worth
> value
> level
> sort
> type
> kind
> variety
>
>    - general excellence of standard or level.
>    "a masterpiece for connoisseurs of quality
>
> bill w
> _______________________________________________
>
>
I think that's a good definition, and it points to the relative
comparability of quale of a certain class. This means quale map to some
continuous dimensional space. E.g. for sounds, lower and higher relative
frequencies or amplitudes, and for colors, lower and higher relative
brightnesses or the three dimensional color space.


This hasn't gone unnoticed by philosophers when considering qualia:

“Having made these distinctions let us now speak of sensation in the widest
sense. Sensation depends, as we have said, on a process of movement or
affection from without, for it is held to be some sort of change of
quality. [...] Each sense then is relative to its particular group of
sensible qualities: it is found in a sense-organ as such and discriminates
the differences which exist within that group; e.g. sight discriminates
white and black, taste sweet and bitter, and so in all cases. Since we also
discriminate white from sweet, and indeed each sensible quality from
every other, with what do we perceive that they are different?”
-- Aristotle in "On the Soul <http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.html>"
(350 B.C.)


"A fourth, more promising approach appeals to these methods to explain the
structure of experience. For example, it is arguable that an account of the
discriminations made by the visual system can account for the structural
relations between different color experiences, as well as for the geometric
structure of the visual field (see e.g., Clark 1992 and Hardin 1992).
Take color sensations as an example. For every distinction between color
experiences, there is a corresponding distinction in processing. The
different phenomenal colors that we experience form a complex
three-dimensional space, varying in hue, saturation, and intensity. The
properties of this space can be recovered from information-processing
considerations: examination of the visual systems shows that waveforms of
light are discriminated and analyzed along three different axes, and it is
this three-dimensional information that is relevant to later processing.
The three-dimensional structure of phenomenal color space therefore
corresponds directly to the three dimensional structure of visual
awareness. This is precisely what we would expect. After all, every color
distinction corresponds to some reportable information, and therefore to a
distinction that is represented in the structure of processing."
-- David Chalmers in "Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness
<http://consc.net/papers/facing.html>" (1996)


“Van Gulick (1993), for instance, notes that the fact that the structure of
our color space correspond directly to a structure that is represented in
visual processing, and suggests that this closes the “explanatory gap” by
providing a functional explanation of color sensation. Clark (1993) devotes
an entire book to this strategy, arguing that sensory qualities can be
completely explained by accounting for the relations of similarity and
difference within quality spaces. [...]
States of experience fall directly into information spaces in a natural
way. There are natural patterns of similarity and difference between
phenomenal states, and these patterns yield the difference structure of an
information space. Thus we can see phenomenal states as realizing
information states within those spaces.
For example, the space of simple color experiences has a three-dimensional
relational structure that we have already discussed. Abstracting the
patterns of similarity and difference among these experiences, we obtain an
abstract information space with a three-dimensional relational structure
which the phenomenal space realizes. Any given simple color experience
corresponds to a specific location within this space. A specific red
experience is one phenomenally realized information state; a specific green
experience is another.
More complex experiences, such as experiences of an entire visual field,
fall into information spaces with a complex combinatorial structure. When I
look at a picture, for example, my experience falls into a space with (at
least) the combinatorial structure of a two-dimensional continuum, with
each element in that continuum having (at least) the three-dimensional
relational structure of simple color space. The structure of color patches
in a visual field is not so different in kind from the structure of binary
digits in a ten-digit message, although both the combinatorial and the
relational structure are much more complex.”
-- David Chalmers in "The Conscious Mind" (1996)


"Using nothing more than the notion of relative similarity, one can
determine the number of different respects in terms of which things are
sensed to resemble or differ. One can distinguish those different respects,
separate compassion qualities, and rectify imperfect communities. [...] We
show that, if two objects have the same physical effects on particular
cells of the sensory system, and those effects are the ones that bear
information for later stages of sensory processing, then the two objects
will be globally indiscriminable: there will be no third object
discriminable from just one of them. [...] Sense impressions are an
ensemble in a channel subserving discriminations. The qualitative
attributes of sense impressions are information-bearing properties of those
states: they sort them into different ‘types’ in the ensemble. Furthermore,
they are differentiative properties: the ones bearing the information on
which discriminations turn. [...] The number of independent differentiative
properties of encodings can be determined purely from the structure of the
lists of which stimuli are indiscriminable and which are not. Those pair
lists define a space–a multidimensional order–that I have called a ‘quality
space’ or ‘sensory order’. The number of distinctive qualitative attributes
of encodings in a given modality will fall out as the number of dimensions
of the quality space. [...]
For example, to identify a particular colour, one specifies where it is in
the series of hues, where it is in the series of saturations, and where it
is in the series of lightnesses. In effect, one gives a ‘coordinate’ for
each dimension. A sensation that has the same relative location in each of
the dimensions of variation will present exactly the same qualitative
content. Those that differ qualitatively must differ in at least one
respect. [...]
I have argued that any analysis of such terms must drop all reference to
stimuli. We cannot mention oranges–or any other stimuli–when trying to
define ‘orange’. Such references are extrinsic to the quality space. They
name contingent attachments. Similar considerations would lead us to drop
all mention of particular behaviors. ‘Pain’ cannot be defined in terms of
pin pricks or of wincing. The result is that definitions of qualitative
terms must confine themselves to intrinsic features of the quality space.
They must proceed purely in terms of the relations of discriminability and
relative similarity that give the quale its place in the quality space.
‘Orange’ could only be defined as something like ‘a hue that is somewhat
reddish and somewhat yellowish, and is about as yellow as it is red; the
complement of blue–green’. All the other colour terms in such a definition
would receive definitions of the same sort.”
-- Austen Clark in "Sensory Qualities" (1996)

"It is not surprising that colours are experienced as systematically
interchangeable on the most obvious level of functioning. For colours
serve, quite literally, as mere placeholders in our spatial experience. It
must be that one colour could easily appear in the place of another. Yet
colours must be distinguishable; something in how we experience them makes
red look different from blue. If a colour has any look for us we must be in
a state of appropriate response to that look. And the *a priori* assurance
that functions preserve all experience requires that the colour having its
look just is our being in such a functional state."

-- Arnold Zuboff in "What is a Mind <https://philpapers.org/rec/ZUBWIA>"
(1996)

“As we shall see, qualia can be considered forms of multidimensional
discrimination that are carried out by a complex brain. We can analyze them
and give a prescription for how they emerge, but obviously we cannot give
rise to them without first giving rise to appropriate brain structures and
their dynamics within the body of an individual organism. [...]
With these hypotheses in hand, we reexamine the critical issue of
qualia–the experiencing, for example, of redness, loudness, warmth, and
pain–from a new standpoint. We will see that qualia are high-order
discriminations among a large number of states of the dynamic core and
that, as such, they are both highly integrated and extraordinarily
informative.”
-- Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi in "A Universe of
Consciousness" (2000)

“Human beings can discriminate among a vast number of colors and color
gradations, up to several million. Nevertheless, psychophysical
investigations suggest that perceptual “color space” may actually be
organized along just a few axes: Different perceived colors correspond to
different points in a low-dimensional space spanned by these few axes. Much
evidence exists for a set of primary axes corresponding to the opposing
pairs red-green, blue-yellow, and light-dark. Studies of color naming in
different cultures further indicate that colors tend to be universally
categorized into certain classes. The “focal” or prototypical colors around
which suggest such categorization is organized correspond to the primary
axes just mentioned (red, green, yellow, blue, black, and white) and to a
few derived composite categories (such as orange, purple, pink, brown, and
gray).
-- Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi in "A Universe of
Consciousness" (2000)


A lot of work seemed to happen in 1996, for some reason. :-)

In short, there seems to be broad agreement that qualia are discriminations
(or comparisons) within some space (or continuum) of one or more dimensions.

This fits quite well with a quality being "the standard of something as
measured against other things of a similar kind". e.g., that orange color
is slightly more reddish than that other orange color. Such a comparison is
meaningless when comparing anything else not extant within the color space,
which also may explain why qualia can't be explained in terms of anything
else.

Jason
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