Sony Qualia Man

10 March 2005

I was interested to see that Sony has been taking a close interest in the issue of qualia (the ineffable subjective qualities of experiences, the actual redness of red, for example which inevitably get left out of the scientific account of perception), and in fact has named its top-level range of equipment (launched in the US about a year ago) after it.

I suppose Sony is in the qualia business, though I'd never thought of it that way before. It raises the prospect of a gradual popularisation of the term - in a few years, nervous Hollywood agents pitching their projects to cynical moguls will probably be insisting that their film has 'strong qualia' as well as being 'high concept'. When Sony get round to David Chalmers, will they sue him, sponsor him, or option his book? In fact, they have an intellectual in charge of their qualia project already, in the shape of Ken Mogi. (His blog is here .)

It's rather nice to see that Sony is sponsoring his research as 'conceptor' of a 'qualia movement' within the company. As if one unexpected twist on the idea of qualia weren't enough, Mogi has issued the Qualia Manifesto, which gives the whole thing an aesthetic, almost an ethical turn. (Quotes from Ken appear with lush Flash graphics on the Sony site.) The Manifesto is not, as you might expect, a declaration of belief in the reality of qualia so much as a 'fundamentalist ' call for more of them.

Mogi has a kind of epicurean view of the issue: everyone, he suggests, enjoys seeking out new qualia, and (epistemological issues on one side) sharing them with others. We want more, better, newer qualia to be made available to improve all our lives. It's easy to see how this message might appeal to Sony, (though Ken also believes qualia are not easily marketable), but it is a rather unexpected angle, and I must admit it made me think about some fairly basic issues which I had hardly noticed before.

Mogi, for one thing, seems to assume that all qualia are inherently good; the taste of fine French wine, the majestic sight of the grand Canyon - it's simply a question of how many we can manage to experience. But surely many qualia are unpleasant - the qualia of clashing colours or stomach-turning smells?

Up until now, I have had a vague half-conscious assumption that there must, in fact, be as many bad as good qualia, all lying on some ineffable linear scale of pleasantness. Now I come to think about it, however, I see no particular reason why the bads and the goods should balance. It could be that good subjective experiences occupy a narrow band in the middle of the imaginary scale, with the infinite realms of too much and too little stretching away on either side. The seemingly uncategorisable variation of qualia actually suggests that there may in fact be no orderly scale at all, and no way of assessing whether the overall cosmic phenomenal balance tilts towards pleasure or pain.

In fact, based on introspective examination of a few qualia, I have come to the conclusion that none of the foregoing alternatives is correct: in fact qualia in themselves must, I think, be neutral, neither positive nor negative. It is only the pain or pleasure they provoke which makes them seem bad or good. Pain itself is generally regarded as a quale or a family of qualia, and I suppose the same could reasonably be said of pleasure; but they are both conative in a way that other qualia are not: they make you do, or want to do things (get your finger out of the electricity socket; stuff the cream cake in your mouth) - in fact, the conation may very well be all there is to them. Pure pain, on that view, is pure aversion, though we rarely if ever experience it in the absence of fear, anger, awareness of some specific bodily damage, and so on. I do remember once having mains electricity routed through my finger as the result of my own stupidity, and apart from the mild buzzing caused by the alternation of the current, the only phenomenological content of the experience was a very keen desire for it to stop as soon as possible.

So is Mogi right? Setting aside the basic desire to avoid pain and seek out pleasure, should we want more qualia? If the majority of them are neutral in themselves, why should we? I can understand that people might want to have more pleasurable experiences - seeing new sites of natural beauty, for example - but would we want to go on seeing ever more of an endless row of identical concrete bunkers? That's not quite a fair comparison, however, because Ken stresses the value of new, never-before-experienced qualia. It might be that the enlargement of our experience does tend to enlarge us, or our minds, in a way which is desirable quite apart from the direct pleasure involved. Perhaps Ken is on to something interesting.