Qualia, By C. I. Lewis

We all know what hunger is and how it feels, but how do you know your experience of hungriness is the same as others? Most of us know what colors are and how they look, for example the color green, but how do you know if the green I see is the green that other people see? Everything above comes to the term— qualia, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary the word qualia, means “A quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person. Qualia are often referred to as the phenomenal properties of experience, and experiences. This term was introduced into the philosophical literature in its contemporary sense in 1929 by C. I. Lewis in a discussion of sense-data theory.” “Qualia are, simply, the objective experiences of another. It …show more content…
For example, what is it like to be a fish? With our advanced technology today we might know quite a lot about fish, but we can never truly know what it is like to be a fish. We can never experience how fish feel in the ocean. Another example is, what is it like to be a cell, bacteria, or something so small that does not even have a brain. A bacterial cell contains lots of the same stuff that you would find in an eukaryotic cell, such as those which make up our bodies. Although bacteria consist of eukaryotic cells like humans, what is it like to be bacteria? If they do not have a brain, then do they even have consciousness? A third example will be like to be someone else? If you and your friend are hungry at the same time, how would you know if his hungriness feels the same way as yours? Some people can stand or walk on hot coals without getting hurt, so do people feel pain differently? If you were to explain what pain is to aliens who feel no pain, will you be able to explain it well enough to make them actually feel what pain is like? With our technology today, we still cannot find the answer to these questions. When you cannot explain that feeling to someone, which relate to the next argument called the explanatory gap argument. The term explanatory gap argument means the difficulty that theories of mind are hard to explain the way things feel when …show more content…
“Mary the color scientist knows all the physical facts about color, including every physical fact about the experience of color in other people, from the behavior a particular color is likely to elicit to the specific sequence of neurological firings that register that a color has been seen. However, she has been confined from birth to a room that is black and white, and is only allowed to observe the outside world through a black and white monitor. When she is allowed to leave the room, it must be admitted that she learns something about the color red