Qualia in the context of Knowledge Argument

Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. Time dictates all forms of action, age, and causality, being a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events (or the intervals between them), and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.

Time is primarily measured in linear spans or periods, ordered from shortest to longest. Practical, human-scale measurements of time are performed using clocks and calendars, reflecting a 24-hour day collected into a 365-day year linked to the astronomical motion of the Earth. Scientific measurements of time instead vary from Planck time at the shortest to billions of years at the longest. Measurable time is believed to have effectively begun with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, encompassed by the chronology of the universe. Modern physics understands time to be inextricable from space within the concept of spacetime described by general relativity. Time can therefore be dilated by velocity and matter to pass faster or slower for an external observer, though this is considered negligible outside of extreme conditions, namely relativistic speeds or the gravitational pulls of black holes.

Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind that expresses the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.

Eliminativism about a class of entities is the view that the class of entities does not exist. For example, materialism tends to be eliminativist about the soul; modern chemists are eliminativist about phlogiston; modern biologists are eliminativist about élan vital; and modern physicists are eliminativist about luminiferous ether. Eliminative materialism is the relatively new (1960s–70s) idea that certain classes of mental entities that common sense takes for granted, such as beliefs, desires, and the subjective sensation of pain, do not exist. The most common versions are eliminativism about propositional attitudes, as expressed by Paul and Patricia Churchland, and eliminativism about qualia (subjective interpretations about particular instances of subjective experience), as expressed by Daniel Dennett, Georges Rey, and Jacy Reese Anthis.

In the philosophy of self, self-awareness is the awareness and reflection of one's own personality or individuality, including traits, feelings, and behaviors. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's body and environment, self-awareness is the recognition of that consciousness. Self-awareness is how an individual experiences and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires. Because the term is used in both philosophical and psychological contexts, researchers distinguish between different forms of self-awareness, ranging from awareness of consciousness itself to awareness of oneself within social situations.

In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, are differing models that describe the nature of conscious experiences. The debate arises out of the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience.

Indirect perceptual realism is broadly equivalent to the scientific view of perception that subjects do not experience the external world as it really is, but perceive it through the lens of a conceptual framework. Furthermore, indirect realism is a core tenet of the cognitivism paradigm in psychology and cognitive science. While there is superficial overlap, the indirect model is unlike the standpoint of idealism, which holds that only ideas are real, but there are no mind-independent objects.

Clarence Irving Lewis (April 12, 1883 – February 3, 1964) was an American academic philosopher. He is considered the progenitor of modern modal logic and the founder of conceptual pragmatism. First a noted logician, he later branched into epistemology, and during the last 20 years of his life, he wrote much on ethics. The New York Times memorialized him as "a leading authority on symbolic logic and on the philosophic concepts of knowledge and value." He coined the term "Qualia" as used in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive sciences.

In the philosophy of mind, the "hard problem" of consciousness is to explain why and how humans (and other organisms) have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioural functions such as watching, listening, speaking (including generating an utterance that appears to refer to personal behaviour or belief), and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioural—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.

Proponents of the hard problem propose that it is categorically different from the easy problems since no mechanistic or behavioural explanation could explain the character of an experience, not even in principle. Even after all the relevant functional facts are explicated, they argue, there will still remain a further question: "why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?" To bolster their case, proponents of the hard problem frequently turn to various philosophical thought experiments, involving philosophical zombies, or inverted qualia, or the ineffability of colour experiences, or the unknowability of foreign states of consciousness, such as the experience of being a bat.

Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or of something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.

The topic of animal consciousness is beset with a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form because animals, lacking the ability to use human language, cannot communicate their experiences. It is also difficult to reason objectively about the question because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that they do not feel, their life has no value, and that harming them is not morally wrong. For example, the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes is sometimes criticised for enabling animal mistreatment through his animal machine view, which claimed that only humans are conscious.

Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is consciousness hypothesized to be possible for artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience.

The term "sentience" can be used when specifically designating ethical considerations stemming from a form of phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness, or the ability to feel qualia). Since sentience involves the ability to experience ethically positive or negative (i.e., valenced) mental states, it may justify welfare concerns and legal protection, as with non-human animals.

New mysterianism, or commonly just mysterianism, is a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by humans. The unresolvable problem is how to explain the existence of qualia (individual instances of subjective, conscious experience). In terms of the various schools of philosophy of mind, mysterianism is a form of nonreductive physicalism. Some "mysterians" state their case uncompromisingly (Colin McGinn has said that consciousness is "a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel"); others take a "pseudo-mysterian" stance, being of the belief that consciousness is not within the grasp of present human understanding, but may be comprehensible to future advances of science and technology.

In architecture, spatial design, literary theory, and film theory—affective atmosphere (colloquially called atmosphere) refers to the mood, situation, or sensorial qualities of a space. Spaces containing atmosphere are shaped through subjective and intersubjective interactions with the qualia of the architecture. Atmosphere (or projected affect) is linked with anthropology, architectural theory, critical theory, cultural geography, phenomenology of architecture, and pragmatism.

Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article about the Kentucky Derby by Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized the style. It is an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire. It has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.

Gonzo journalism involves an approach to accuracy that concerns the reporting of personal experiences and emotions, in contrast to traditional journalism, which favors a detached style and relies on facts or quotations that can be verified by third parties. Gonzo journalism disregards the strictly edited product once favored by newspaper media and strives for a more personal approach; the personality of a piece is as important as the event or actual subject of the piece. Use of sarcasm, humour, exaggeration, and profanity is common.

The inverted spectrum is the hypothetical scenario, pertaining to the philosophy of color, of two people sharing their color vocabulary and discriminations, although the colors one sees—that person's qualia—are systematically different from the colors the other person sees.