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I don't follow this. What is being associated with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc.? When you see a random drop of fresh blood on the ground during your walk, you might identify it as "red" because it appears similar to fire trucks and stop signs and strawberries which you were taught at a young age were "red," but what is it that you're comparing in order to associate these things in the first place? I would characterize it as comparing the qualia of observing a stop sign with observing fresh blood on the ground, which would be another way of describing "what it is like" to see the color red. If there's no there there, and there's no actual experience of seeing the color red when you observe fresh blood or a stop sign, then how is it that you're associating the color of the blood to the color of a stop sign?
You're associating your sensory inputs with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. If you sever your optic nerve, and then you point your eyes at a stop sign, you will not experience redness.
I claim that qualia are what it feels like from the inside to ascribe meaning to your raw sensory experience.
Do those sensory inputs exist as an experience that I have outside of my memories, emotions, etc. though? If they don't, then how am I able to identify colors of entirely new things sans context? I'm not sure how that would make sense, so I conclude that I do experience sensory inputs, i.e. those sensory inputs are a form of qualia. Which then raises the question of if the qualia of me experiencing the sensory input from observing a stop sign is similar to that of someone else doing the same thing. We can empirically observe that the meaning that we ascribe to these sensory inputs are very similar, but that wouldn't actually get us to the similarity of the sensory inputs themselves.
It's also possible that, since qualia is intrinsically and, as-of-yet, inescapably subjective, the very concept of comparing qualia between two people is incoherent, and the best we can do is to figure out if the qualia of the meaning that we ascribe to sensory inputs are similar, as a proxy that we can never get better than.
No? What would they even be sensory inputs to?
I don't think that's a thing you're able to do sans context. Infants, lacking context, aren't able to identify the colors of anything.
I suspect we're using the word "context" differently - what exactly do you mean by "sans context"? Are your memories a part of the context? Are the innate saccade patterns that all humans use to look at things (e.g. gaze snaps to contrast, edges) part of the context? How about the learned saccade patterns (e.g. scanning in reading order)?
You don't experience unmediated sensory inputs. The map is not the territory, and you can only experience the map, never the territory directly. See exhibit 1932741: the blue/black or white/gold dress. There's an excellent diagram on that page which shows how the exact same colors on the screen can lead to the perception of a white/gold dress or a blue/black dress, in a way that makes it very easy to verify that your raw sensory data really is the same for the blue on one dress and the white on the other.
And so if you have a quale of seeing white on the ruffles of the dress, that quale is not just your raw sensory inputs.
I would say the question should be "how similar is it" rather than "is it similar", but yes.
True, but since we don't directly experience the raw sensory inputs, I don't know how much it matters how similar the raw sensory inputs are. We could quantify the similarity of those raw sensory inputs (e.g. by doing the same dimensionality reduction trick on optic nerve spike frequencies), but I don't think doing so would buy us anything beyond pretty pictures to look at and maybe some cures for diseases.
I reject the idea that qualia are inescapably subjective. People talk about qualia all the time. Therefore, those qualia are causally upstream of what they're saying. If you can figure out the full chain of causality from sensation to perception to meaning making to conversion to language to speech, I don't think there's anything left to explain. It's a lot of stuff to understand, and we don't yet understand all the links in that chain, but that's a statement about the inadequacy of our knowledge, not the unknowableness of the phenomenon.
We probably are. Memories wouldn't be a part of the context, but it would be a tool that allows you to interpret the context (what does context even mean if you lack memories by which to understand it, anyway?). When I say "sans context," I mean that there's no context around the object that would allow you to identify its color even if you couldn't see its color. I.e. if it's so dark that my vision has become black & white - even then, I could guess that a stop sign is red, based on where it is, its shape, the words on it, etc. My contention is that, if I were interrupted during my walk by God bringing into existence some piece of paper on the ground in front of me that was painted a solid color of some color I'd never observed painted on a piece of paper before, I would still be able to identify that color, and the qualia that I experience from viewing that object will be reflective of the photons that bounced off of the paper and onto my retina, such that if similar-wavelength photons bounced off different things and landed on my retina, I would experience similar qualia.
OK, fair enough. You seem to be saying that the qualia you experience only comes up after your sensory inputs have been mediated by your memories, concepts, etc., and all the stuff that exists before that is inaccessible to your conscious mind and hence not really qualia. Seems likely to be correct.
But this doesn't address the question of how similar that qualia between different people actually are. The experiments you designed seem to be very capable of telling if the relationship between qualia that people have are similar to each other (which seems obviously true - people consistently place "orange" between "red" and "yellow" or "purple" between "blue" and "red," for instance). But having similar (or "very similar" or whatever) qualia doesn't refer to similarities in how one individual's various qualia relate to each other, it refers to similarities in the qualia themselves of observing the same thing between multiple different people. Which, as of yet, can't be measured directly. And one might say that the fact that relationships are pretty consistent between humans should push us towards believing that the qualia themselves are consistent, but we also know that, mathematically, it's pretty easy to have different coloring systems that are homeomorphic to each other.
That's a heck of a big "if," though, to figure out a chain of causality like that. If we could figure out in full just the link between sensation to perception, that in itself would be enough to make qualia "objective." But we don't have much of an idea on even beginning that. I'd say that figuring out that link is in the same category as mind-uploading or revival after cryogenic freezing in terms of being sufficiently advanced science as to be magic. I don't support the notion that science can never advance sufficiently, but also, it certainly hasn't, and so we lack the existence proof that this is possible.
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