Qualia Structure Project by Nao Tsuchiya @ QB3 2024 Jan 15

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Nao Tsuchiya
Title: Qualia Structure Project
Abstract:
Do I experience the world in the same way as you do? How similar is my consciousness to other humans, animals, insects, octopuses, and artificial intelligence? In this talk, I will discuss this issue focusing on the content of consciousness, what-it-feels-like, or in short qualia. Can we scientifically investigate if my red qualia is similar to your red qualia? Traditionally, the answer has been No. Because qualia are so intrinsic and purely subjective, qualia have often been considered as outside of the realm of scientific inquiry. Recently, our group has proposed a method of characterising a quale in terms of its relation to all other qualia, inspired by a mathematical theorem called Yoneda lemma in the field of category theory. Based on this idea, we conducted experiments in which we asked a large number (over 500) of neurotypical and colorblind subjects to report the similarity of a subset of ~5000 colour combinations in an online setting. Using the similarity structures estimated from these data, we quantified whether it is possible to “align” the colour qualia structures between different populations, using an unsupervised method, called “optimal transport” in the field of machine translation (psyarxiv.com/h3pqm). Our qualia structure approach is generalizable to qualia in other domains (such as similarity of evoked emotional experience of short movies), or even to structures between qualia structures. The relationship between qualia structures may eventually provide an opportunity to address questions such as, “Why are colour qualia perceived as colour qualia?”