The Face Palm of Hossenfelder on Qualia

Sabine Hossenfelder, whom I generally like and who's probably one of the most sane of the public physicists, thinks scientists have managed to measure qualia.

I suppose it's inevitable a physicist will incur into philosophical territory. In this case, Dr. Hossenfelder has done so in the way that seems best calculated to display her ignorance of philosophy. Qualia are by their nature unmeasurable. They are experiences, subjective if you will, that correspond to qualitative parts of the external world.

The difference is between the inside and the outside of an experience. Measure all you want, you'll still be poking around the outside of experience, and never penetrate to the inside, what it's like to have the experience. Being "approximately inside," as it were, doesn't make the real thing. Suppositions and creative renaming don't make the real thing.

In reality the scientists have measured the way brains react to similar stimuli. As a friend helpfully pointed out, the experiences of different organisms are incommensurable, even when those organisms are nearly identical; while the technique described might be a useful tool for, say, helping compare pain levels between patients, it falls short of explaining what pain feels like.

Dr. Hossenfelder would do better to study a little good philosophy before spouting off like this again. Lately I've been reading Michael Augros's very good book The Immortal in You, which would be an appropriate primer on the issues that Hossenfelder tries to discuss here.