qualia
fundamentally i think most discussion of qualia gets the situation exactly backwards. the assertion tends to be that things like “seeing red” or “feeling joy/pain” are raw experiences, the fundamental unit of the universe, and it is both possible and important to identify those experiences in a highly substrate-independent manner.
i think the truth is that there’s no such thing as globally coherent mind-independent qualia. i think this is sort of obvious when you actually think about it. there is nothing it-is-like for you to be a whale. you are not a whale. the brainstates it experiences are quite different from your own. there is no plausible way to directly identify them. you can translate, but only lossily. what you think of as the qualia of “seeing red” is really “seeing red as you”. it is your humanbrainstate of seeing red. we have a little leeway on this. of course you can see red multiple times in your life and abstract over them and have a more general sense of seeing red. and likely the neural patterns that make up seeing red are abstractable somewhat, we can say that my seeing red is quite close or sanely translatable to yours. but the thing we are talking about when we talk about “seeing red” as humans is not some universally translatable platonic object out there in the universe. it’s a verbalization of our very specific brains. alien minds do not have red qualia. or pain qualia. or joy qualia.
that’s not to say alien minds can’t be conscious, and that’s not to say that they won’t see some wavelength and have some consistent correlated mindstates about it. but the question of “how do we identify those mindstates as being the same as ours when we see red?” sort of dissolves. they’re not the same, they’re obviously not the same. the raw experience is completely different. the whole thing we’re thinking of when we talk about experience is entirely about ourselves.
