Qualia
17
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11
EPISODES
11
PODCASTS
Search complete. 17 mentions across 11 episodes found for "Qualia".
Nov 9, 2026
AndrewHOST
His associate, Robert Kuhn, describes this word qualia as our internal phenomenological felt experience, the sight of your newborn daughter bundled up, the sound of Mahler's Second Symphony in the Fifth Movement, the choral finale.
AndrewHOST
Smell of garlic cooking in olive oil.
AndrewHOST
Qualia, the felt qualities of inner experience are the crux of the mind-body problem.
AndrewHOST
And that Christian philosopher again, David Bentley Hart, touches on this idea of qualia and its relation to matter.
AndrewHOST
The redness of the red, sorry, the redness of the red, red rose in my garden as I consciously experiencing while gazing at the rose in a poetic reverie has objective existence.
Thomas777GUEST
But the way to understand it in kind of shorthand...
Pete QuiñonesHOST
What's qualia? Qualia
Thomas777GUEST
is basically what people who study consciousness...
Thomas777GUEST
It's what they define as that intangible factor that makes humans human.
ThomasGUEST
But the way to understand it in kind of shorthand...
Pete QuiñonesHOST
What's qualia? Qualia
ThomasGUEST
is basically what people who study consciousness, it's what they define as that intangible factor that makes humans human.
ThomasGUEST
It goes to something beyond self-awareness.
Christian GonzalezHOST
You're about to watch a podcast with me and Andres Gomez-Emilson.
Christian GonzalezHOST
He is one of the co-founders of the Qualia Research Institute and honestly one of the most fascinating not only thinkers but also scientists out there today investigating consciousness.
Christian GonzalezHOST
We talk about a bunch of stuff.
Christian GonzalezHOST
We didn't have time to talk about all the things I wanted to talk about, unfortunately, but we were able to talk about why functionalism and computationalism as an explanation for consciousness does not work, his preferred alternative, the binding problem, the boundary problem, how consciousness might be found within the electromagnetic field.
6 MINS LATER
Andrés Gómez-EmilssonGUEST
Like Daniel Dennett.
Andrés Gómez-EmilssonGUEST
Yeah, Daniel Dennett.
Andrés Gómez-EmilssonGUEST
So like he wrote this famous paper called Equining Qualia, where he makes a pretty sophisticated, ultimately, you know, full of sophistry case for like why, you know, we should get a read of the concept of qualia and like how it's actually quite confusing and counterproductive.
Andrés Gómez-EmilssonGUEST
Yeah.
Duncan ClarkeHOST
The central question of this thought experiment is whether Mary will gain any new knowledge when she goes outside the black and white world and experiences seeing in color.
Duncan ClarkeHOST
The intuition that this thought experiment generates reveals the importance of what philosophers call qualia in conscious experience.
Duncan ClarkeHOST
Qualia refers to the subjective, qualitative properties of experiences.
Duncan ClarkeHOST
The redness of a rose, the bitter taste of black coffee, the richness and texture of the sick baseline on Tame Impala's apocalypse dreams.
Duncan ClarkeHOST
These vivid appearances in experience express what it is like to experience the reality around you.
speaker_0HOST
We have now traced the entire non-conscious infrastructure of the mind.
speaker_0HOST
Qualia, emotions, memory, awareness, attention, thinking, and language.
speaker_0HOST
Each of these is a functional achievement that contributes to the CEO sub-process's ability to navigate delusion effectively.
speaker_0HOST
But there is one more piece without which the entire infrastructure would produce a very different kind of agent.
ClaraHOST
Because data makes a really critical distinction between data storage and lived experience.
ClaraHOST
Philosophers actually call this qualia.
AdrianHOST
Qualia? Yeah.
AdrianHOST
Okay.
ClaraHOST
And data uses this brilliant analogy about the game of poker to explain this to Maddox.
EricHOST
We experienced the anger consciously and then we made up our reason for it.
EricHOST
So we get into this whole weird world of what is it that's happening in our brains? What cognitive functions are occurring consciously versus unconsciously? What are we aware of happening? What do we experience versus what just occurs? And I want to lean into the difference between something operating and us experiencing it with what's called qualia, right? So in 1983, Joseph Levine publishes a paper called Materialism and Qualia, The Explanatory Gap.
EricHOST
And What he does to start is he compares two claims about identity.
EricHOST
One of them is that water is H2O.
Artem ZenHOST
Welcome to Elevating Consciousness.
Artem ZenHOST
I'm your host, Artem Zen, and our guest today is Andres Gomez-Emelson, a consciousness researcher, philosopher, and co-founder of the Qualia Research Institute, an organization attempted to develop a precise mathematical language for describing subjective experience and its emotional valence with the ultimate aim of understanding and reducing suffering.
Artem ZenHOST
Andres' work spans algorithm design, psychedelic theory, neurotechnology, and mapping the computational properties of consciousness.
Artem ZenHOST
He holds a master's in psychology from Stanford with an emphasis on computational models and has a professional background in graph theory, statistics, and effective science.
Andrés Gómez EmilssonGUEST
what's impressive is,
Artem ZenHOST
you know, your seeming capacity to metabolize these otherwise difficult to digest experiences and apply a level of critical thinking to them that few others can and And I definitely want to explore psychedelics later.
Artem ZenHOST
But first, I want to start with the broader frame of your work with Qualia Research Institute, where you are attempting to develop a precise mathematical language for describing subjective experience and understand the nature of emotional valiance from happiness to suffering, mapping the full space of conscious experiences and building technologies to improve the lives of sentient beings.
Artem ZenHOST
Personally, I'm a layman when it comes to math, and I imagine many listeners are too.
Jordan CrowderGUEST
How we, how we grow is to have experiences.
Jordan CrowderGUEST
Um, you know, it's called qualia.
Jordan CrowderGUEST
Qualia is the subjective conscious experience of something, and I really think that, you know, if you, if you wanna wrap all this up into a metaphor You know, imagine your first car that you had.
Jordan CrowderGUEST
That car probably doesn't exist anymore.
Jordan CrowderGUEST
It's gone.
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