The Objective Existence of Qualia

On the Ontological Reality of Empirically Unverifiable Facts

Imagine a person, P, sees Socrates for the first time and, upon that first experience of seeing Socrates, has an emotional response.

Since we cannot see into the inner worlds of others, we cannot define the emotional response. Let’s go further and say that P does not identify the emotional response with the terms P has been given for emotions in a public language. That is, P thinks the emotional state is not anger, fear, love, or any other emotional state P knows the names for.

In such a situation, P decides to name the emotional state E, lacking a better term for the state.

The emotional state may or may not be a unique combination of emotional states defined in a public language.

Upon asking P what emotion they felt upon seeing Socrates, P can respond that P felt E, even if E is not a term in a public language. The feeling will not be adequately communicated and E will be, in a public sense, a meaningless term.

However, the moment that P experienced E and internally named it E to himself, P gave E an initial baptism with a rigid designator.

The nature of this designation can be empirically stated as follows:

Upon seeing Socrates, P experienced E.

In this formulation, Socrates, P, and E are all rigidly designated entities that exist in all possible worlds where they exist.

Therefore, Socrates, P, and E exist in this world.

Therefore, private emotional states — qualia — are real-world entities that, despite being private and incommunicable in their entirety, are nonetheless ontologically real in an objective sense.

This is the case whether E is a combination of previously identified emotional states or not.

This also remains the case whether P can define E to another or not.

If we assume that E is incommunicable to another person, we can say that the true existence of E is unverifiable and its full contents are ineffable. However, this is an epistemological claim and not an ontological one.

Skeptics may furthermore say that the unverifiability of qualia undermines their practical significance. This is true in the context of empirical inquiry, and merely proves that empirical observation necessarily prioritizes the verifiable over the ontologically real. This prioritization does not diminish the reality of qualia but instead reflects the constraints of empirical methodology and the limitations of empiricism when it sacrifices access to deeper ontological truths in favor of what can be objectively measured and communiciated.

Thus, while the empirically verifiable may have more practical utility than the ontologically real, the verifiable is not inherently more real than the empirically unverifiable.

Unverifiable truths by necessity exist and empiricism sacrifices unverifiable truths.

The ability to name emotional states emerging from qualia also proves that emotional states are objectively real and not merely existent within a psychological state. However, a level of understanding of an emotional state may hinge upon a particular psychological state.

If emotional states as the effects of qualia thus are ontologically real whether or not they are empirically verifiable, it stands that qualia are ontologically real regardless of their empirical verification.

Let us say that P has another emotional experience, E’, that recalls to P the memory of E. Even if we assume that P’s memory is imperfect and P is incorrect to assert that E’ is E, the false belief that E’ = E hinges upon the objective existence of E.

P cannot be wrong about the comparison of E’ to E if E did not exist and has not existed.

P cannot even make the comparison of E’ to E if E did not exist and has not existed.

Both the experiences of the uncanny and nostalgia are common occurrences of this emotional state. In both situations, a person has an emotional experience that resembles another emotional experience that exists outside of the person’s current emotional state.

If we object that E is private and inaccessible, thus not real, the simple response is that accessibility touches upon the empirical verification of a fact rather than its ontological truth. We do not need to directly encounter Socrates for Socrates to have existed or, more directly, we do not need to correctly identify Jack the Ripper for Jack the Ripper to have already committed murder.

To the objection that E is ineffable and thus unverifiable and meaningless, we again can simply state that this is true empirically but not ontologically. My inability to describe E, much like my inability to identify Jack the Ripper, means that an empirical truth cannot be communicated, but it does not mean that an ontological fact of the experience of E or the identity of Jack the Ripper is unreal. This objection proves the limitations of communicability and verifiability of emotional states but it does not disprove the objective ontological existence of those emotional states in all possible worlds where they exist.

Wittgenstein’s critique of private language, therefore, is incorrect. The act of baptism tying E to Socrates has provided an external criterion for reference. We do not need an exhaustive description of E for E to have existed, anymore than we need to know every single detail of Socrates’s life for him to have existed. We can, however, assert a level of skepticism at the contents of E, but we cannot dismiss that P experienced E upon seeing Socrates — the initial baptism confirms that the emotional state is just as real as the physical existence of any human being in the world.

This demonstrates that qualia, like real physical entities, exist in the real world as real collections of facts.

The subjective and possibly ineffable nature of qualia may mean that these real world facts cannot be externally verified or communicated, but this simply demonstrates that there are real world facts that do in fact necessarily exist but cannot be verified or communicated.

Therefore, materialism is an incomplete accounting of all facts of the world.

Let us go further and say that P has cataloged every emotional state they have ever experienced as E, E’, E’’, etc. and collected these as a set of emotional states, set E.

The elements of set E are rigidly designated snapshots of the conscious experience of P over time. Even if imprecisely or falsely defined, set E’s elements have quantized the qualia of P’s consciousness over time in much the same way as particles are quantized elements of quantum field potentials.

Our expressions of and possibly experiences of emotional states are, therefore, ontological anchorings of conscious processes. The accuracy of these anchorings, whilst potentially unverifiable, may never approach complete accuracy but exist within a field of partial accuracies.

A third party observer to these anchorings may distribute them across a probability distribution field and thus produce a rough mapping of another person’s consciousness, and these mappings will vary in accuracy.

Furthermore, an individual’s own quantization of their conscious process may be inaccurate due to the failings of memory and other faults, suggesting that set E is merely an imprecise mapping of the true dynamic conscious process that was quantized as set E.

From this perspective, we see that consciousness is fundamentally and necessarily a dynamic process that, much like the position and velocity of particles, we are constantly striving to fix, but can never be fixed entirely — quite possibly because total stasis either of conscious processes or physical processes is impossible.

Furthermore, we can conclude that consciousness underlies and outlasts emotions or emotional states, and that emotions are probabilistic mappings of a dynamic conscious process. The reality of those emotions hinge on the conscious process that operates the mapping function of feeling and identifying feelings.

Our emotions are less real than our awareness of them.