Sense qualities {conscious experience} {phenomenal character} {phenomenal experience} {phenomenal property} {phenomenally conscious mental state} {phenomenological property} {qualitative character} {qualitative state} {raw feel} {sense quality} {sensory quality} {subjective quality} can be what something is like to observer, rather than physically is. Qualia are ways things seem when awake, dreaming, or hallucinating.
comparisons
Experience differs from awareness because it has meaning. Sensations of reality, illusions, and hallucinations are similar. Experience differs from perception because it requires awareness. People can know that they are having experience and can know its type. However, phenomena then are about perception rather than object.
types
Sensations are colors, sounds, touches, temperatures, smells, and tastes. Sensations track feature and object positions, momenta, energies, and times. Sensations correspond to physical intensities, frequencies, materials, and other properties. Tastes are liquid-like. Smells are gaseous-like. Touches are surface contours and motions. Sounds are vibratory. Sights are surfaces.
People hear sounds, which have loudness intensity and tone frequency. People can hear thousands of tones. Sounds have harmonics, with fundamentals and overtones.
People smell air molecules, based on molecule shapes, sizes, rotations, and vibrations, at different intensities. People can smell thousands of smells. Olfaction sense qualities are acrid or vinegary, floral, foul or sulfurous, fruity, minty, ethereal like pear, musky, resinous or camphorous, smoky, and sweet.
People taste molecules dissolved in water, based on molecule polarities and acidities, at different intensities. Gustation sense qualities are saltiness, sourness, sweetness, bitterness, and savoriness.
People feel compression, tension, and torsion pressure, at different intensities. People feel temperature by random molecule motions. People can feel gentle touch, motion, shape, sliding, texture, tickle, vibration, warmth, and coolness.
People can see visible light. People can see millions of hues, including blacks, whites, grays, and browns, with different brightness and saturation.
field
People can be conscious of many events and objects simultaneously. Subject experience has one moving viewpoint, which differs from others' viewpoints. Observation is having sensations. Observed and observer are an observing system. Processing and memory registers are observations, and reader and writer are observers. High-level perception builds scene, perceptual space, or phenomenal world, which is like ovoid including eye, face, periphery, front, and focal point. Unusual body motions can break sense-field coherence [Bayne and Chalmers, 2003] [Cleeremans, 2003].
Perception uses a self-centered egocentric reference frame, which has forward point during motion, receiving point for incoming stimuli, and vestibular-system gravity-aligned vertical axis. Consciousness has world-centered or object-centered allocentric reference frame, which has two horizontal axes and vertical axis.
variation
Verbal reports indicate that most people have similar sensations. Gene alleles, culture, and age can vary experiences. Sense qualities of yellow can change with age. Sensitivity, acuity, precision, accuracy, discrimination, and generalization can vary. Conscious activities change often.
properties
Sensations always have location, size, duration, time, intensity, and phenomenal sense qualities. Phenomena can shift, compress, stretch, twist, rotate, or flip.
Sensations are continuous, with no discontinuities, no gaps, and no units [VanRullen and Koch, 2003]. Inputs from small and large regions, and short and long times, integrate to make continuity [Dainton, 2000].
Sensations are immediate, and so not affected by activity, reasoning, or will [Botero, 1999].
Sensations are incorrigible, and so not correctable or improvable by activity, reasoning, or will.
Sensations are ineffable, with no description except their own existence.
Sensations are intrinsic, with no dependence on external processes [Harman, 1990].
Sensations are private, and so not available for others' observation or measurement.
Sensations are privileged, and so not possible to observe except from first-person viewpoint [Alston, 1971].
Sensations are subjective, and so intrinsic, private, privileged, and not objective [Kriegel, 2005] [Nagel, 1979] [Tye, 1986]. Subject experience belongs only to subject. No one else can have that experience or know it. Physical objects, such as stars, have no owner or have other owners, such as cars.
Perhaps, phenomena belong to mental state rather than to subject.
Sensations are transparent, with no intermediates [Kind, 2003].
Sensations are analytic, and so, like sounds, independent with no mixing.
Sensations are synthetic, and so, like colors, dependent with mixing.
Sensations are not physical.
Sensations have no mass but have a type of density.
Subjective experiences seem not to be ignorable and have self-intimation.
Sensations always feel indubitable.
Sensations seem unerring and infallible.
Sensations always feel irrevocable.
Sensations are not about microscopic things but about macroscopic regions.
Sensations are not relational and not comparable.
Sensations are the only thing that has meaning, because brain uses them for reference. However, sensations do not always have meaning.
Subject experience is not observable by others and so is personal and not directly communicable, because it has no units with which to measure.
non-locality
Physical events happen locally and instantaneously. Mental relations characteristically relate two or more physically separated points, within one psychologically simultaneous time interval, and so are non-local. Mentality requires time to gather information from separated locations to integrate them. Mentality requires space to gather information from separated times, memories and current perceptions, to integrate them. Perceptions unify local sense processing about features, objects, and events. Mentality unifies separate things into structures or processes.
surface property
Sensations are about surfaces from which information began, not about information carrier to sense organ. Intensity energies carry surface information to sense organs but have no sense qualities. Information channels cannot have sense qualities. For example, electromagnetic radiation has no color. Sound waves have no sound.
Only surfaces can have qualities. Color is not about waves traveling through space but is about surface from which waves emanated. Sound is not about waves traveling through medium but is about surface from which waves emanated.
Visual sense qualities are about surface sizes and reflectances. Aural sense qualities are about surface vibration intensities and frequencies. Touch sense qualities are about surface torsion, compression, hardness, and texture. Taste and smell sense qualities are about surface molecular configurations.
Experience is of objects and events, which people can invent or extend. Cognition, category making, distinction finding, and memory are consciousness foundations [Seager, 1999]. Sensations are about objects, events, and features, which cognition later interprets.
brain
Perhaps, sensations are brain events. However, experiences do not seem to be in brain or be like brain. Brain produces perceptions internally but perceives sensations externally, at spatial positions on surfaces. Consciousness itself does not provide knowledge of things external to mind, only of internal mental things [Seager, 1999].
Perhaps, external references are to object and event concepts or properties, rather than to external objects and events.
Sensations can come from inside and outside body. When thinking, people talk to themselves and hear same sounds as if really talking.
Perhaps, sensations are judgments or dispositions to do something about perceptions.
Animal behaviors make it appear that only humans have experiences.
nature
Perhaps, sense phenomena are physical-object qualities. Identical objects then have same phenomena. However, same person can have different phenomena about same object, and different people can have different phenomena about same object.
Perhaps, sense phenomena are experience or object physical properties. However, experience does not provide access to surface-reflectance relations, other physical properties, or experience relations.
Mind and mental states use thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and moods {propositional attitude, phenomena}, which associate phenomenon with representation or intentional content.
Perhaps, sense phenomena are relations to external or internal objects. However, experience seems to be about object features, not about relations.
Sensations are meaningful because they represent something outside mind [Cummins, 1989] [Cummins, 1996] [Darling, 1993] [Papineau, 1987] [Perner, 1993]. Sensations represent physical data only to level useful for acting quickly and correctly in most situations. However, sensations can be different phenomenon, such as inverted spectrum, though intentional content does not vary. Sensations can be the same, by automatic sense processing, though high-level representations differ, such as Inverted Earth. Experiences, such as feeling depressed, can have no representations.
Perhaps, when representation becomes explicit, it is conscious. Implicit representations are not conscious, though implicit activity can become explicit [Adolphs et al., 1999] [Zeki, 2001].
categorization
Sense processes categorize sensations, breaking continuous values into ranges, such as different colors with different brightnesses. Among senses, ability to categorize depends on pairwise comparisons between multisensory neurons. Within sense, ability to categorize depends on pairwise comparisons between sense neurons [Donald, 1991].
media
Like television, brain receives coded information and translates code into visual array. However, sensations have no substrate or medium to carry them. They are not physical and do not need substrates. They are their own medium.
Having experience is not like looking at holograms, printed pages, or television displays. Those displays have boundaries, whereas sensations have no definite boundary. Those displays cover only some visual field, whereas sensations cover all space. Those displays have controls for adjusting display color, brightness, and contrast, but people cannot will sense-quality changes. Those displays often have distortions or false colors, but sensations are consistent and complete. However, they can distort if people take drugs. Size, flatness, and errors can distinguish displays from real world, but sensations are not distinguishable from real world, because people's memories depend on same abilities. Observers can look away from television displays but cannot look away from sensations. However, observers can look at different sense-quality parts, just as people watching television can look around.
memory
Sensations summarize and categorize whole-field and full-spectrum processing results to compress information for storage and recall. Previous experiences affect later experiences, automatically. Repeating similar experiences changes experience.
labeled lines
Sense organs make same sensations no matter which physical energy strikes them. For example, tapping eye causes light flashes. Receptor stimulation and brain-region stimulation cause same response type.
time
Consciousness requires time to integrate. Time is short enough to be psychologically simultaneous and long enough to integrate locations and parts. Psychologically simultaneous events are within 20-millisecond to 50-millisecond intervals. Features, objects, events, and scenes integrated during this interval automatically associate in space and time.
information
All senses require large information amounts.
passivity
Sense qualities require awake or dreaming brain processing but seem not to need conscious effort or will.
emotions
Colors, sounds, touches, smells, and tastes can convey emotion, such as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and remembrance. Most sensations have no associated emotion. Sensations can attract or repel, so people like or dislike them. People can feel doubt or confidence in statements. Feeling level goes from pleasure to pain. Success level goes from reward to punishment.
Consciousness>Consciousness>Sense>Experience
1-Consciousness-Sense-Experience
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Date Modified: 2022.0224