---
title: There Is Only Quale
date: 2010-09-23
techne: :done
episteme: :fiction
---

> If you believe such nonsense                                   
> You'd better dream your dreams at night.                       
> At last, it's really happened, 
> Though we don't know how.       
> The only miracles are in the storybooks                       
> And they are lies. 
>
> -- ジャックと豆の木 (engl. dub, Jack and the Beanstalk)

Lucid Dreaming
==============

I was learning to dream lucidly[^lucid] again, so that I could use some of my
sleep hours to meditate. Tibetan Buddhists swear on that kind of thing. As part
of this learning process, I needed good dream recall, so I started keeping a
dream diary. One night, I was having a weird dream where I was skipping classes
by flying over a forest in a kind of space ship with 3 old friends who were
ignoring me. (Almost all my dreams manage to be incoherent and awesome at the
same time.) When I woke up, I was exhausted from other dreams that night and I
didn't feel like writing this one down. I thought, half-asleep, that it was so
vivid that I could remember it anyway.

Several hours later, the dream came back to mind. "I was right", I thought. "I
really *do* remember this dream clearly. If I had just written it down, then the
essence of it wouldn't have been captured anyway." But then my mind kinda
exploded when I realized something.

**How can I remember that I remember it clearly?**

Think about it. It's not that I remember what happened. It's that I remember
how lucid I was at the time, how vividly I saw everything. I could recreate it,
compare it and then knew, yup, this is the same thing.

I immediately wrote down a couple of questions - the bold sentences - on my
whiteboard before the rest of my brain caught on to the fact that I just
realized that it was cheating, right then and there. A sequence of rapid
short-circuits went off and a minute later I realized I had just become lucid
*without dreaming*.

[Puredoxyk][] once said that meditation makes your brain leaky, but in a good way.
I think this is what she meant.

> From this perspective, dreaming can be viewed as the special case of
> perception without the constraints of external sensory input. Conversely,
> perception can be viewed as the special case of dreaming constrained by
> sensory input.
>
> -- Stephen LaBerge

Some years ago, when I had just gotten serious about this enlightenment thing, I
was experimenting with lucid dreaming for the first time. At the same time, I
was reading up a lot on hallucinogenic drugs. One day, something happened that
made me afraid; I have only been more afraid once in my life[^fear]. I was doing
reality checks throughout the day, where you ask yourself if you are dreaming,
and hopefully it becomes a kind of habit and you start doing it in your dreams,
too, where the answer will be "yes" and you become lucid.

I walk up some stairs, when suddenly the reality check fails and for a moment
I'm lucid while awake. It's the weirdest feeling, like you just stepped through
a mirror[^mirror] into another world. I am conscious in a way I was never
before, then relapse right back. As if Picard in "The Inner Light" - when he was
made to re-live someone else's life and memories, so that towards the end, Picard
really believed that he was always Kamin - as if he, just for a moment, woke up
to the fact that this whole life is just fake, he's really on the Enterprise. I
thought I went insane. 

This scared me so much that I didn't touch lucid dreaming again for years.
Fortunately, I got over it.

Qualia
======

**How can I know that I ever _was_ conscious?**

To be able to tell how lucid I was would require for me to remember what I was
conscious of at the time. But I can't do this. At best, I can recreate the
perceptions as closely as possible and be conscious of them right now. But
that's a different thing. I'm still only conscious now, just of similar input.

So I'm essentially trying to compare two qualia, to see if they are the same. 

A quale (plural: qualia) is the direct experience of something that can't be
communicated. It's the redness of red. I can tell you that an apple is red, what
wavelengths red corresponds to and so on, but what red *looks* like to me, I can
never tell you. This is a quale.

The question is, do qualia really exist? Plenty of modern consciousness
scientists reject the notion. The most common basic theory, functionalism, is
incompatible with qualia, as is materialism in general. What exactly is a quale
supposed to be in material terms? It can't be any information or you could
communicate it. It can't be a property of things or your instruments could
detect it. So qualia must be a powerful delusion, a mistake.

Pretty much everyone has thought about qualia, but probably not using this name.
The most common approach is the Inverted Color Spectrum. Maybe, what you see as
red, I see as green and so on. Because this difference would be systematic and
all the relationships between colors would be identical, how can we be sure that
everyone has the same color perceptions? (Of course, provided you're not color
blind or something like that.)

A lot has been said about qualia, but it all rests on the same basic assumption
- if qualia exist, then they can be compared.

But how exactly is this supposed to work?

**How can I know that more than one quale - the one right now - exists?**

There's a sleight-of-hand going on here, one that I only just noticed in that
very moment. The thought process goes something like this: "I see A. I store my
perception of A in my memory. I then see B. Finally, I retrieve A and compare it
with B."

But that's impossible by definition! **If memory could contain qualia, then
so could third-person perspectives. They would be encodable.** 

It doesn't matter how you would try to wiggle out of this - if you can compare
them, then you can store information about them, then you can communicate them.
I could, with futuristic equipment, check your brain for this information - read
your memories - and establish if we have the same qualia. If *you* can compare
your own qualia, then *I* can compare them with my own ones, too.

But that's exactly what is supposed to be impossible with qualia. They are the
subjective experience, they can't be shared. So qualia can't be compared. Let
this sink in.

Only Now
========

**I was never conscious before and will never be conscious again.** 

**I am only conscious right _now_.**

This is my only chance. I'll never see the world again. This all passes,
forever, the very next moment. Already gone, already too late. But it is my only
chance again, this time, to see this moment. How long will it last? 

Every moment is a gift. There are no second chances, so pay attention.

[^mirror]:
    I literally once walked through a glass door. Don't do that.

[^lucid]:                             
    [Lucid dreaming] is when you are aware during your dream that it is a dream.
    The moment you do, you gain great clarity and lots of control over the
    dream. Most people start flying around. Buddhists meditate, of course.  We
    are one-trick ponies.


[^fear]: 
    This was the day I died, using Ayahuasca. Really, as long as you cling to
    reality and only *think* you *may* die, it's the most horrible experience
    ever. It's like years of Buddhist study condensed into one day, giving
    you the worst trip of your life as the reality of no-self, impermanence and
    suffering completely overwhelm you. Sure, this also happens during Buddhist
    meditation, eventually, but by then you have months, if not years of
    practice. But with Ayahuasca, you realize how ill-prepared you are for your
    own death and this vine is gonna kill you right now over the course of the
    next few hours, so *deal* with it. 
    
    Once the nice effects have come and gone and the trip just keeps on
    accelerating, Ayahuasca throws away its mask and puts you on direct line
    with the rest of your brain. "So you wanna see what I do all day? The crap I
    have to put up with, that you are completely unconscious of? Let me *show*
    you!" It's like you are travelling aboard the Enterprise all your life and
    the worst you ever saw was being thrown around after a little Klingon
    attack, when one day Scotty decides to show you how mind-bogglingly fast the
    ship is by strapping you to the front while going to maximum warp.
    
    At first, there is only fear, fear of being poisoned, going mad or things
    like that, but then the fear gets so strong that there it isn't *about*
    anything anymore. There is just fear. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, your mind
    dissolves into a mess of colors and vertigo and you even forget to scream,
    or whatever one is supposed to be doing in that kind of situation. Then the
    fear goes away for a moment and you realize what is happening - you are
    being digested. Everything that enters your skull, before your mind can deal
    with it, has to be broken down and analyzed and so on, and *this is the raw
    data stream*.                 

    Then you die, but that's a story for another day.

    Damn, I really need to write this trip up some time, and repeat it. Not sure
    in which order. Until then, I watch Blueberry (aka Renegade) again. The only
    accurate depiction of Ayahuasca on film.
