What are Qualia?

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course
Due Date
* Qualia
Qualia is a term that is used to describe the introspectively phenomenal quality of a given mental state. Qualia as a tool for characterizing the phenomenal character of a given mental state is the most applied description for the term. When one stares at a red parked Mercedes, one subjectively goes through a visual experience that is different from the subjective experience when one is staring at parked Mercedes that is blue. If prompted to focus on the phenomenal aspects of the visual experiences, one is likely to pick out several qualities that describe the visual experience. The resulting accessible introspective qualities of the visual experience are regarded as qualia.
Notably, qualia have been restrictively used to describe the feature of sense data associated with a given experience. To this end, the physical experience is internalized in the mind to facilitate the discernment of the characteristics of the experience. In the application, qualia are considered a conscious experience as experienced by a conscious being. For example, if subject A is describing the conscious experience of seeing a tomato placed on a table to a subject B, Subject B can doubt the material object that subject A is viewing to be a tomato, but cannot have doubts that the object in question is round and red. In the example, there is an established relationship between qualia and the sense data.
* Arguments in Favor of Qualia
The knowledge argument provides one of the prominent arguments for the existence of qualia. To this end, the argument is based on the premise that a conscious individual who has comprehensive physical knowledge of another conscious being does not have access to knowledge that describes the experiences of the conscious being. The knowledge argument traces its origin to intuition fronted by Frank Jackson in 1982 that involved a brilliant scientist named Mary who existed in an odd circumstance (Glanzberg, PHIL 104, 36/47). The argument posits that an individual cannot perceive phenomenal truths about consciousness from complete physical truth.
In this case, Jackson fronts that Mary was brought up in an environment where she accessed the world only in black and white. However, she is brilliant. She acquires the neurophysiological data about human vision and can adequately describe what happens when one sees different colors (Glanzberg, PHIL 104, 37/47). For example, Mary can be able to describe the mental process that one experiences from seeing the color blue in the sky to the utterance that the sky is blue. Jackson notes that when Mary is released from the black-and-white environment, she will learn more knowledge about the world when she sees a ripe tomato and the accompanying visual experience (Glanzberg, PHIL 104, 37/47). Thus, Mary acquires more information about human color vision once she is released from the black-and-white environment proving that not all information is physical (Jackson 130).
The introduction of epiphenomenal qualia in Jackson’s passage also provides evidence of the existence of qualia. Through Mary’s argument, Jackson demonstrates that qualia are epiphenomenal in the sense that they do not affect the ph...