Qualia are Physical Qualities

We predict that qualia are physical things. We predict the reason some things in the brain behave the way they do, is because of their intrinsic phenomenal quality. Even though we can observe the behavior of various physical things in the brain, the resulting objective description of those behaviors tells us nothing about what they are like. The only way to define a word like: “redness” is to point to something that has the quality in someone’s consciousness and say to them: “That is redness.”

We predict that a redness experience is substrate dependent and that a redness experience will not be possible without whatever physical thing it is that has that redness quality.

An important part of whatever has phenomenal qualities is their ability to resonate with other qualities making up multi-colored waves, giving them the ability to become part of a unified multi-colored gestalt experience.

We could be considered “pan qualityists” as we predict things in nature have intrinsic qualities. It’s just that qualities aren’t part of a gestalt experience until they are put together into some colored wave gestalt. The only colors in reality you can be consciously aware of, are the ones that are computationally bound into the gestalt experience wave in the CPU of your brain.

The competing Qualia are Waves camp makes this claim: “We do not experience color as individual points of color experience, molecule by molecule. We experience color as extended spatial surfaces and volumes on every object in our experience. That is NOT a molecular type experience.”

We believe this claim doesn't account for the way 3D gestalt surfaces can have multi colored pixels, as can be demonstrated in artwork like Brandon Bouck’s Eye of the Tiger :

And color gradient images where every pixel is a different color like this:

Qualia are Physical Qualities

"Qualia are Physical Qualities" predicts qualia are physical things. For example, without the right physics or energy (the exact thing that is a redness quale), there is no redness experience. In other words, a computer using abstractions to represent redness with 1s and 0s could never experience redness as it exists in the brain. Representational materialism is in contrast to functionalist theories that predict redness is a function (for example, the computer abstraction mentioned above).

Qualia are Material Qualities

Representational Materialism predicts qualia are physical things. For example, without the right physics or energy (the exact thing that is a redness quale), there is no redness experience. In other words, a computer using abstractions to represent redness with 1s and 0s could never experience redness as it exists in the brain. Representational materialism is in contrast to functionalist theories that predict redness is a function (for example, the computer abstraction mentioned above).