I could only agree that maybe they aren't different. To repeat myself, "
Clearly, there's nothing in inputs and outputs as we think of them that could explain qualia".
We experience qualia in a certain way and we certainly don't experience inputs and outputs,
as we think of them, in the same way at all, if we
experience them at all. I would assume qualia to be somehow indicative of inputs and output, but possibly only to a very limited and specific extent, basically in what I would call the logic of our qualia. There seems to be a certain regularity about them which suggests they are subjected to some kind of rule or law, and one obvious and very plausible explanation would be to say that this is indeed where they would reflect inputs and outputs. And I feel I'm being a bit fussy here since it seems so straightforward and obvious it should go without saying.
However, despite this plausible connection between qualia and inputs/outputs, it should be just as clear to all of us, that qualia don't reduce to inputs and outputs, certainly not as far as we know. This should be clear to all of us unless, that is, you're all very, very different from me and from people who came up with the term "quale" to begin with. So, just as a reminder of what these people meant and of the fact that it's not just me having fancy ideas or that "qualia" isn't just a fancy word with no referent, just look at what Wiki says about it:
Quale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia (singular form: quale) are defined to be individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning "
of what sort" or "
of what kind" in a specific instance like "
what it is like to taste a specific orange, this particular orange now". Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation,
qualia stand in contrast to "propositional attitudes", where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.
So, I fail to see how qualia could be readily reduced to inputs and outputs. It might well be possible to do it, but what we would have to do first is to change the way we think of inputs and outputs. Qualia are not the kind of things we can do anything about. They're a given. All the rest can be discussed and changed, including QM and General Relativity if need be.
And it's not just me apparently who think qualia are a reality:
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us".
So, basically, you do qualia just I do unless all of this is a trick played on me by some mischievous god.
And, me, I'm not optimistic about the prospect of anyone ever coming up with some sort of rational explanation about the relation between qualia and the physical world that's supposed to be out there.
The human survives in a world she can sense and in which she can evolve driven by those and other worldly forces. Human nervous systems are collections of significant changes in structure and function across billions of years. It would be so simple to say she reorganized according to those changes.
But we know the mechanisms of evolution are random and deterministic in nature. Humans are of many minds all the time, many consciousnesses all the time, and therefor of many options for being aware in any given instant. We may come to understand nature well enough to presume to construct likely models, but, I fear we'd need multitudes of them to account for our behavior.
Whilst I don't suggest you hold the following position it needs saying. It is sheer conceit to presume we are organised as an integrated conscious being in the same what we are organized as a physical being since the general outline of our physical being evolves much more slowly than does instantiations of our neural and chemical being.
How else could we have come to gestural language in the last million years or so and then to spoken language after recent changes in our jaw and larynx? We are many directed beings depending on whims of events now of collections of biases previous and those whims have no need to be coherent.
Our philosophical thinking can no more be useful than can our current behavior when what is coming isn't yet present. No. We are certainly collections of analyzers near term and long term, of chemical commands then and now coupled with demands for attentions from this and that now and then. Turning them into something coherent as if it were designed is not to be, but, while it is surely to be approximated in many different forms from this or that or those adaptations.
All this applies
only to what I would call the objective contents of our minds. That is to say, whatever we can objectively determine that is going on inside our brains that we assume is essential to what's going on inside our minds. See Libet and al. and, broadly, all scientists working on the brain and on the mind. I say, let them work out their magic and see what interesting things they will come up with. They have a job and it's not mine. They do it and good luck.
So maybe approximations, but certainly not quale, or any consistent representation in consciousness. No we need go elsewhere to find models for mind than in philosophy where we can only use what we think which is dependent on how our systems evolved which our current representation has no understanding.
So we have to find information in objective time that can be seen consistently in subjective time to understand our subjective nature.
Any other path seems completely useless.
Yep, that may well be true. In fact, I think usefulness is a notion that only really applies to our relation to the physical world (if we just ignore any religious views here for a moment). I don't see that there is anything about qualia that we should feel needs urgently to be elucidated. I might well be wrong, but I see the question of qualia much as I see the question of reality itself. It's by definition a given and no amount of even very, very clever investigation will ever possibly solve the problem.
And to push a bit at my Descartes here, I only know of what it is to exist because of the qualia that make up my thinking.
You can always mull about that if you don't have anything better to do in life.
So, you say, what could therefore be the usefulness of ever discussing qualia?!
Oh, well, one thing at a time, right? It's not even my job to explain all this.
EB