You’ve heard of splitting the atom: W. Alex Escobar wants to split the quale. His recent paper (short article here) proposes that in order to understand subjective experience we may need to break it down into millions of tiny units of experience.  He proposes a neurological model which to my naive eyes seems reasonable: the extraordinary part is really the phenomenology.

Like a lot of qualia theorists Escobar seems to have based his view squarely on visual experience, and the idea of micro-qualia is perhaps inspired by the idea of pixels in digitised images, or other analytical image-handling techniques.  Why would the idea help explain qualia?

I don’t think Escobar explains this very directly, at least from a philosophical point of view, but you can see why the idea might appeal to some people. Panexperientialists, for example, take the view that there are tiny bits of experience everywhere, so the idea that our minds assemble complex experiences out of micro-qualia might be quite congenial to them.  As we know, Christof Koch says that consciousness arises from the integration of information, so perhaps he would see Escobar’s theory as offering a potentially reasonable phenomenal view of the same process.

Unfortunately Escobar has taken a wrong turning, as others have done before, and isn’t really talking about ineffable qualia at all: instead, we might say he is merely effing the effable.

Ineffability, the quality of being inexpressible, is a defining characteristic of qualia as canonically understood in the philosophical literature. I cannot express to you what redness is like to me; if I could, you would be able to tell whether it was the same as your experience. If qualia could be expressed, my zombie twin  (who has none) would presumably become aware of their absence; when asked what it was like to see red, he would look puzzled and admit he didn’t really know, whereas ex hypothesi he gives the same fluent and lucidly illuminating answers that I do – in spite of not having the things we’re both talking about.

Qualia, in fact, have no causal effects and cannot be part of the scientific story. That doesn’t mean Escobar’s science is wrong or uninteresting, just that what he’s calling qualia aren’t really the philosophically slippery items of experience we keep chasing in vain in our quest for consciousness.

Alright, but setting that aside, is it possible that real qualia could be made up of many micro-qualia? No, it absolutely isn’t! In physics, a table can seem to be a single thing but actually be millions of molecules.  Similarly, what looks like a flat expanse of uniform colour on a screen may actually be thousands of pixels. But qualia are units of experience; what they seem like is what they are. They don’t seem like a cloud of micro-qualia, and so they aren’t. Now there could be some neuronal or psychological story going on at a lower level which did involve micro units; but that wouldn’t make qualia themselves splittable. What they are like is all there is to them; they can’t have a hidden nature.

Alas, Escobar could not have noticed that, because he was too busy effing the Effable.