Qualia

WIKIPEDIA
See Kant
SEE PHENOMENALISM

• Qualia is the plural of QUALE.
• A quale is a perceptual EVENT within the brain, a PHENOMENON of personal experience.
• The event is the end result of cascaded neurological processes.
• e.g., a visual QUALE is the culminating event in the following cascade:
  • photons strike an external entity, a NOUMENON [perhaps a cat]
  • the photons enter the eye and are focused upon the RETINA, forming a two-dimensional image on a surface of nerve receptors.
  • the nerve receptors induce streams of nerve impulses to flow in parallel nerve cables to various processors and filters within the brain.
  • eventually, the filtering and processing results in a QUALE, a personal perceptual event PHENOMENON, an experience.
  • and voila! we "see" the cat
• In the case of a cat, we can confirm the visual quale with tactile and auditory qualia
• For quarks and positrons, the noumenon/phenomenon dichotomy is starker. We have only the PHENOMENA¹ to go by. :o)

Footnotes

1. Which might be qualia induced by the visual readouts from a particle detector