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Camp Statement

Go live Time : 10 March 2013, 01:48 PM

Best word to mean communicating that which is ineffable

The terms quale (pl: qualia), phenomenal qualities, and ineffable are already fairly well accepted and commonly understood, at least amongst expert theoreticians that discuss consciousness.

There is an additional idea emerging which has to do with the communication of such 'phenomenal qualities' or that which is normally ineffable. That which is effable, is that which can be communicated. There are theories that predict various week and strong physical communication techniques can be employed to make the phenomenal nature of qualia, or that which is ineffable, effable.

For example, If you can know the necessary and sufficient conditions, enabling one to reliably predict when one is or isn't experiencing a particular quale, like redness, it will be possible to scientifically observe when such is occurring in a brain. Upon which the conscious entity (artificial or otherwise) being communicated to could say: 'oh THAT is what your redness is like'.

Another stronger technique was first described by V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein in their seminal Three Laws of Qualia paper. They proposed that the phenomenal nature of qualia could be communicated if brains could be appropriately connected with a "cable of neurons".

If science proves this is possible, as predicted, you will then be able to 'ground' such abstract words as red or the taste of salt in a way that the person can know, phenomenally, what you are talking about. In other words, any of these techniques converts that which was normally ineffable, into something that is now effable. Achieving such would pierce the phenomenal Veil of Perception and solve the Problem of Other Minds. Some argue that discovering the relationship between phenomenal qualities we can experience, and the underlying neural correlates, could be the greatest discovery in physics, ever.

The purpose of this open survey topic is to survey for what everyone thinks is the best term to describe this new still theoretical possibility.

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