qualia: a standalone construct

The philosopher C. I. Lewis introduced the modern term qualia in his 1929 book Mind and the World-Order, using it for the immediately given qualitative characters of experience, such as the particular redness of a red patch or the specific way a pain feels, considered apart from any judgment about their cause. Thomas Nagel's 1974 essay What is it like to be a bat? sharpened the idea by arguing that a conscious mental state has qualia when there is something it is like, for the creature that has it, to be in that state, a felt point of view that a purely physical description seems to leave out. Frank Jackson's 1982 knowledge argument pressed the same point through the case of a scientist who knows every physical fact about color vision yet learns something new on first seeing red, suggesting that the felt quality is a further fact beyond the physical account. In current usage qualia name the intrinsic, subjective, felt qualities of conscious experience, the raw what-it-is-like of seeing color, tasting, or hurting, and they anchor long-running debates in philosophy of mind about whether such felt qualities can be explained fully in physical or functional terms. The singular form is quale.[1][2][3]

Unit

A qualitative, felt property of a single conscious mental state (singular: quale)

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not directly measurable; identified through first-person report and philosophical thought experiments such as the inverted-spectrum and knowledge-argument cases, and studied indirectly through the neural and functional correlates of conscious experience