Tom has written a nice dialogue on the subject of qualia: it’s here.

Could we in fact learn useful lessons from talking to a robot which lacked qualia?

Perhaps not; one view would be that since the robot’s mind presumably works in the same way as ours, it would have similar qualia: or would think it did. We know that David Chalmers’ zombie twin talked and philosophised about its qualia in exactly the same way as the original.

It depends on what you mean by qualia, of course. Some people conceive of qualia as psychological items that add extra significance or force to experience; or as flags that draw attention to something of potential interest. Those play a distinct role in decision making and have an influence on behaviour. If robots were really to behave like us, they would have to have some functional analogue of that kind of qualia, and so we might indeed find that talking to them on the subject was really no better or worse than talking to our fellow human beings.

But those are not real qualia, because they are fully naturalised and effable things, measurable parts of the physical world. Whether you are experiencing the same blue quale as me would, if these flags or intensifiers were qualia, be an entirely measurable and objective question, capable of a clear answer. Real, philosophically interesting qualia are far more slippery than that.

So we might expect that a robot would reproduce the functional, a-consciousness parts of our mind, and leave the phenomenal, p-consciousness ones out. Like Tom’s robot they would presumably be puzzled by references to subjective experience. Perhaps, then, there might be no point in talking to them about it because they would be constitutionally incapable of shedding any light on it. they could tell us what the zombie life is like, but don’t we sort of know that already? They could play the kind of part in a dialogue that Socrates’ easily-bamboozled interlocutors always seemed to do, but that’s about it, presumably?

Or perhaps they would be able to show us, by providing a contrasting example, how and why it is that we come to have these qualia? There’s something distinctly odd about the way qualia are apparently untethered from physical cause and effect, yet only appear in human beings with their complex brains.  Or could it be that they’re everywhere and it’s not that only we have them, it’s more that we’re the only entities that talk about them (or about anything)?

Perhaps talking to a robot would convince us in the end that in fact, we don’t have qualia either: that they are just a confused delusion. One scarier possibility though, is that robots would understand them all too well.

“Oh,” they might say, “Yes, of course we have those. But scanning through the literature it seems to us you humans only have a very limited appreciation of the qualic field. You experience simple local point qualia, but you have no perception of higher-order qualia; the qualia of the surface or the solid, or the complex manifold that seems so evident to us. Gosh, it must be awful…”