muflax65ngodyewp.onion/content_blog/consciousness/quale.mkd

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

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][A Course in Miracles - Jack and the Beanstalk]

Lucid Dreaming

I was learning to dream lucidly¹ 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 life². 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 mirror³ 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.

---

1. [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. ↩︎

2. 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. ↩︎

3. I literally once walked through a glass door. Don't do that. ↩︎