Argumentative Essay On Qualia

1 Though individual experiences vary radically, modern philosophers believe that humans share a similar idea of reality. Experiences are unique because of how individuals perceive them. One could describe the feeling of hunger as an ache in the stomach. Although others may agree they have felt similar pain when hungry, the phenomenal experience of hunger they claim to share actually differs between individuals. This is an example of qualia. Michael Tye from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives another example of this in his paper, “Qualia”: I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has (Tye).

2 Qualia are the subjective qualities of experiences that make up an individual’s reality. Qualia affect the way humans identify with experiences, emotions, and themselves, thus altering personal identities and behavior. Since the theory of qualia was introduced in 1929, the term ‘qualia’

Michael Tye comments that, “Viewers of [a] painting can apprehend not only its content... but also the colors, shapes, and spatial relations obtaining among the blobs of paint on the canvas.” In this sense, qualia explains how humans can understand and recognize images on an everyday basis. If a person that had never seen a tree before was shown a drawing of a brown rectangle with a green circle attached to the top, the image would be foreign and unrecognizable. However, if a person had seen a tree before and was given the same drawing, they would recognize the general shape and colors of the image and assume it was a tree. By giving objects and experiences distinct, subjective qualia, images become recognizable and organized in the