Are qualia state variables of the mind, or input variables to the mind?

Question

Qualia - the elements of conscious experience - are associated with sensory information, most identifiably with what we see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. This is information "coming in" to the mind from outside. So we might think that there is some abstract boundary between (conscious) mind and non-mind, and that qualia are information as it crosses this boundary.

Contrarily, qualia can also involve information that we remember or imagine. But we can still fit this into the "information-from-outside" model, if we assume that the memory or the mind's eye are in effect extra senses attached to the conscious mind. In this interpretation, the memories or mental images are still crossing the boundary from a non-conscious system into the conscious system, and generating qualia as they cross.

The boundary would not be a distinct spatial location, because consciousness is spread through different parts of the brain, not centralized in a single location. To use a software analogy, suppose you have a program containing a linked list. The linked list does not exist at any single spatial location, as the cells of the list may be distributed anywhere in the program's memory, not necessarily contiguously, and the locations may change over time. However, when we add an element to the list, information crosses the boundary into it.

On the other hand, there is a model that qualia are state variables of the conscious mind. In this model, information from what we see, hear, smell, touch, or taste is not perceived as qualia until after it crosses the boundary into consciousness. Once the information is "inside," the state of the conscious system has been altered, and the qualia perceived is a function of the current state.

Which is true - is qualia information as it crosses the boundary of the conscious system, or is qualia information that's already inside the conscious system?

Answer 1

1. In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious(!) experience. Neuroscience adds “being irreducible” to this definition. Hence by definition, a quale is a conscious experience.
   And the anwer to OP’s question, as formulated in its last sentence, therefore is: Qualia are “already inside the conscious system”.

2. (Added) For the optic system it has been verified that a stimulus becomes a consciously registered perception not until a cyclic forward and backward activation between the associative areas and the primary visual fields has been established. It is not sufficient that the action enters into the component systems, it is necessary that it cycles between the component systems, see Noesselt et al..

   This obsersation seems to exclude your first alternative of qualia being "input variables." Who does advocate this alternative?

3. The Theory of Integrated Information employs the definition above.

   The theory develops a mathematical model to discriminate between different qualia. The model is based on the state space of a set of n neurons, a 2^n- dimensional space of possible states. Next, the model introduces the corresponding qualia space, the set of all probability distributions on the state space. The model considers a given quale as a specific set of directed links between these probabilities. It is the set of these links which discriminates between different qualia. For more details see Qualia: The Geometry of Integrated Information.

Answer 2

Both of your options presume there is a difference between a conscious mind, and an unconscious mind. These options intrinsically reject a variety of mind models, such as reductive eliminativism, neural identity theory, most idealisms, or delusionism, as they do not support your assumptions.

The conscious/unconscious boundary assumption requires some version of emergence, or ontological dualism. Emergent physicalism is the most common family of physicalist views, and both Popperian emergent dualism, and spiritual dualism both would support this unconscious/conscious boundary assumption for qualia, so there are a spectrum of mind theories that can be referenced here.

There are several research efforts on consciousness that seem like they could shed light on your question. The most useful I have found is David Eagleman's neo-dualist model of our unconsciousness using qualia "props" to create the illusion in our conscious mind of a fully fleshed out stage of the world which is then used as our world model in our "mind's eye". This is spelled out in his book Incognito: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9827912-incognito. Some of what is passed to our consciousness are detailed sensory quales, others are basically logic categories, such as "there is something over there". One key point Eagleman points out is that we have far fewer actual quales of perception than we THINK we do, because of so many sleight of hand logic frames that are passed rather than actual quales. Note, it is ME saying Eagleman's model is basically dualist, Eagleman considers himself to be a physicalist.

Additional test data set I find of great interest is the decision logic experiments of Daniel Kahneman, documented in Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman postulates that we have two mental systems, system 1 which is basically a neural net processor, and system 2 which is logical/algorithmic. Kahneman does not distinguish between consciousness and unconsciousness, but almost all of our formal reasoning is conscious, and our neural net processing is mostly unconscious, so his system 1 can be treated as an unconscious neural net brain, which feeds selected conclusions and data to a conscious reasoning system for a double-check on what the neural net processing recommends. Note, Daniel Dennett also thinks we have two systems in our heads, and refers to most of our mental processing being neural net processing, but considers that we run a "virtual von-Neuman machine" on our neural net hardware. While Dennett denies we are conscious, his concession to a two-system process is a significant admission from one of the giants of the field.

Two systems requires the interface you reference, as data is passed from system 1 to the conscious system 2, and whether that data is qualia, or whether system 2 generates qualia from that data, is a significant question.

Studying how the two systems interact can address this point. IF system 2 questions system 1, and wants more information about a problem -- such as "show me more details about the 'thing over there'" -- this appears to be system 2 doing thinking on its own, NOT just being fed qualia. And the units of experience behind "show me more details" are themselves qualia, even if system 2 is deluded (per Eagleman) that there are even two systems, or that it is asking a question of another system rather than of itself. So -- qualia can be states of the conscious system.

However, the blindsight experiments done by Nicholas Humphries are also highly informative. The unconscious mind can communicate information to the conscious mind without qualia in blindsight. But the degree of confidence system 2 has in this qualia-free data is greatly decreased. That confidence is ITSELF a qualia, which is self generated, once more showing qualia to be a state of system 2. BUT -- the difference in confidence between data that provides sight qualia, and data that does not, strongly suggests that system 1 is generally providing sight qualia to system 2. Therefore the answer to your question is very plausibly "both".

Therefore a tentative conclusion: System 1 provides qualia in much of its communication with system 2, and system 2 also uses qualia it generates for itself in thinking.