Quantifying Qualia and the Pleasure of Pain
EDIT: Here's the heart of the topic -
What can we infer from the proposition that qualia are irreducible? If qualia are irreducible, then a quale has no accidental properties - it's essence is indistinguishable from itself. If I can tell the difference between two qualitative experiences, they are not the same. I can change the qualitative experience of eating a sandwich by adding more salt. Before adding salt, the eating experience is salty, but after adding salt the eating experience is very salty. If qualia are irreducible, then there is no essence of saltiness common to both the salty and very salty experience, since that would leave a difference between the experiences that is accidental.
However, consider a set-up: you have a taste test where you are presented a quantity of salt, a much larger quantity of salt, and a quantity of sugar. You can determine from a blind tasting which quantities are salt and which is sugar. Further, you will be able to determine which of the two quantities of salt was larger from taste alone. It follows that there is a common substrate between the experiences with tasting salt, saltiness. Such a substrate could not exist if qualia were irreducible, since substrates indicate parts of a whole. If there is a common substrate between the two taste experiences, yet you can still tell them apart, then the differences in them are not essential, but rather accidental. Therefore, while saltiness itself may be irreducible, various salty qualia are reducible to quantitative degrees of this quality of saltiness.
To what extent can qualia be quantified?
When we distinguish between degrees of pleasure, are we considering multiple units of a type of qualia? I mean, is there a substrative 'pleasure unit' or some such?
Or is it impossible to reduce qualia even to other qualia and we just associate various qualia by the way they arise and label them accordingly? I mean, does 'pleasurable' refer to individual qualia that have no common substrate but rather simply fall under the category of "comes from actions I desire"? So while the quale from a back-rub and the quale from a candy may both be pleasurable, they are completely unassociated except in the fact that back-rubs and candies are both desired by me? So that "more pleasurable" does not refer to "a greater quantity of pleasure units" but rather "arising from physical events I prefer to other physical events"?
I consider a 'mysterious' neurological case where, due to a brain tumor, a human feels pleasure when experiencing things that normally are considered painful. This distinguishes a whipping, or the like, from its resulting qualitative 'interpretation' by the mind. The potential resulting qualia of an action, pleasure or pain, are only distinguishable from each other to an outsider by the reaction of the patient, his/her desiring more of the action or desiring less of the action respectively. It seems, then, that it is not possible for it to be the case that pain is pleasurable in itself because the terms are mutually incompatible by the virtue of what we observe them to mean. However, we are familiar with the case of masochists, whom we don't doubt are actually experiencing the same pain we experience when whipped, or the like, because a masochist does not typically want to be whipped at just any time a person may be willing to whip them, but s/he desires to be whipped in a certain context. Does this context, whatever the masochist determines it to be, actually change the quality of their experience itself, or does the context provide a great enough pleasure that is worth tolerating the quale that we commonly understand to be pain? Is pleasurableness of an experience actually distinguishable by a person's desire for physical events that give rise to the qualitative experience, or is pleasurableness something so separate from this standard that "pleasurable pain", however confusing the concept, must really exist?
What can we infer from the proposition that qualia are irreducible? If qualia are irreducible, then a quale has no accidental properties - it's essence is indistinguishable from itself. If I can tell the difference between two qualitative experiences, they are not the same. I can change the qualitative experience of eating a sandwich by adding more salt. Before adding salt, the eating experience is salty, but after adding salt the eating experience is very salty. If qualia are irreducible, then there is no essence of saltiness common to both the salty and very salty experience, since that would leave a difference between the experiences that is accidental.
However, consider a set-up: you have a taste test where you are presented a quantity of salt, a much larger quantity of salt, and a quantity of sugar. You can determine from a blind tasting which quantities are salt and which is sugar. Further, you will be able to determine which of the two quantities of salt was larger from taste alone. It follows that there is a common substrate between the experiences with tasting salt, saltiness. Such a substrate could not exist if qualia were irreducible, since substrates indicate parts of a whole. If there is a common substrate between the two taste experiences, yet you can still tell them apart, then the differences in them are not essential, but rather accidental. Therefore, while saltiness itself may be irreducible, various salty qualia are reducible to quantitative degrees of this quality of saltiness.
To what extent can qualia be quantified?
When we distinguish between degrees of pleasure, are we considering multiple units of a type of qualia? I mean, is there a substrative 'pleasure unit' or some such?
Or is it impossible to reduce qualia even to other qualia and we just associate various qualia by the way they arise and label them accordingly? I mean, does 'pleasurable' refer to individual qualia that have no common substrate but rather simply fall under the category of "comes from actions I desire"? So while the quale from a back-rub and the quale from a candy may both be pleasurable, they are completely unassociated except in the fact that back-rubs and candies are both desired by me? So that "more pleasurable" does not refer to "a greater quantity of pleasure units" but rather "arising from physical events I prefer to other physical events"?
I consider a 'mysterious' neurological case where, due to a brain tumor, a human feels pleasure when experiencing things that normally are considered painful. This distinguishes a whipping, or the like, from its resulting qualitative 'interpretation' by the mind. The potential resulting qualia of an action, pleasure or pain, are only distinguishable from each other to an outsider by the reaction of the patient, his/her desiring more of the action or desiring less of the action respectively. It seems, then, that it is not possible for it to be the case that pain is pleasurable in itself because the terms are mutually incompatible by the virtue of what we observe them to mean. However, we are familiar with the case of masochists, whom we don't doubt are actually experiencing the same pain we experience when whipped, or the like, because a masochist does not typically want to be whipped at just any time a person may be willing to whip them, but s/he desires to be whipped in a certain context. Does this context, whatever the masochist determines it to be, actually change the quality of their experience itself, or does the context provide a great enough pleasure that is worth tolerating the quale that we commonly understand to be pain? Is pleasurableness of an experience actually distinguishable by a person's desire for physical events that give rise to the qualitative experience, or is pleasurableness something so separate from this standard that "pleasurable pain", however confusing the concept, must really exist?