CONCEPT
Qualia
The intrinsic qualitative character of conscious experience — the redness of red, the specific felt quality of pain — and the feature of mind whose relation to physical process is the substance of the hard problem.
Qualia are the felt qualities of experience: the particular way red looks, the specific character of the pain in your tooth, the texture of the thought that keeps you awake. The term names the aspect of mental life that resists functional characterization. You can describe what red does — it produces a certain discriminative response, it allows ripe fruit to be distinguished from unripe — but the description leaves untouched the question of what red is like. Qualia are the content of the hard problem, the explananda whose presence no functional account has adequately explained, and the dimension of mind whose presence or absence in machines cannot be settled by inspecting outputs.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The term was coined by C.I. Lewis in 1929 and has since become the standard philosophical term for the qualitative features of experience. Philosophers distinguish qualia sharply from functional states: two systems can be in the same functional state while