Member-only story
Are they sensory only, or more abstract?
“Qualia”, defined as “individual instances of subjective, conscious experiences”, are an important topic of discussion among philosophers concerned with the nature of consciousness. A useful summary of thinking about Qualia is provided by the Wikipedia article on that subject, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia , from which the foregoing definition is quoted.
I would like to interpret and attempt to understand the definition in the context of a specific example. Many of us play games of cards, and the experience of playing with physical cards involves various subjective, conscious experiences, from the visual appearance of the cards and their movement to the tactile sensations of handling the cards.
And many of us also play games of cards on our computers, sometimes with real people and sometimes with computer algorithms as our partners or opponents. There our sensory qualia are clearly different in some ways. We have visual and tactile experiences, but those are most directly of our computer screens and mice or other pointing and “dragging” devices. Normally our consciousness of those experiences subsides as we shift our conscious attention to experiences of viewing and manipulating playing cards. So do the sensory qualia disappear or subside, at least…
