Qualia Structure

Summary: Establishing Qualia Structure Paradigm
Do subjective conscious experience and objective brain matters belong to completely different worlds? How are qualia, the contents of consciousness, related to the brain? The question of consciousness and the brain is not only of scientific interest, but it is also directly related to the problems associated with difficulties in understanding human feelings in the real world. Because qualia are difficult to even define in objective terms, conventional studies of consciousness have attempted to explore their neural correlates by fixing perceptual stimuli and reducing experience to binary judgments, such as seen vs. not seen. Recently, we have established a new paradigm to characterize the structure of qualia by measuring the similarity between visual qualia on a large scale, and to reveal their neural correlates and their information structure. The Qualia Structure project will further employ various research methods, including phenomenology, development, and constructivism, in order to estimate structures of qualia from perceptual to emotional domains. The outcome of this field is the creation of a new interdisciplinary research program that will have impacts to the general society, such as understanding the consciousness of others and the consciousness of animals and artificial intelligence.