Qualia Space is the space of all
possible experiences
Qualia Spaces are integral to formal and scientific research on consciousness, but what is the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological status of these spaces?
The space of all possible conscious experience.
— Richard P. Stanley, Qualia Space, 1999
Color is king in our innate quality space…
— W. V. O. Quine, Natural Kinds, 1969
…the only simple notions whose specialisations form a multiply extended manifoldness are the positions of perceived objects and colours.
— Bernhard Riemann, 1854 (trans. Clifford, 1873)
A quality space is an ordering of the qualities presented by a sensory modality in which relative similarities among those qualities are represented by their relative distances.
— Austen Clark, A Theory of Sentience, 2000
The idea
The notion of a Qualia Space has been rediscovered across many disciplines: in the geometry of color, the logic of perceptual similarity, behavioral learning, in studying the brain's maps, and in mathematical models or formal theories of consciousness.
Qualities are found to stand in relations of similarity and difference: red is close to orange, but far from green. All these relations together form a geometrical shape, a space within which each experience has a particular position. Whether that position is real, and what it does, are this site's questions.
- OntologyAre its unrealized points real?
- ActualityWhat makes one of them actual?
- ValueWhere do pain and value sit in it?
- AI ConsciousnessCan machines implement it?
Projects
Hypermodal Realism
Working draft, abstract and slides.
Read the draftPerceptual Representation
What is the difference between conscious and unconscious pattern recognition?
Read the thesis