I don't believe in qualia as a real entity, but when people talk about them they're referring to a genuine phenomenon which you also experience: that your conscious understanding of the experience of perception is only the merest shadow of the perception itself. Seeing red doesn't mean seeing something with a little XML "red" tag attached, but something much more complicated that happens beyond your conscious introspection. You can imagine the state of having switched that "red" experience with the "green" experience, in all your memories as well as in current perception, and still instantly knowing that the switch had occurred. This phenomenon is not an illusion, just a blind spot of conscious knowledge which happens to confuse the hell out of naive philosophers.
[Y]our conscious understanding of the experience of perception is only the merest shadow of the perception itself.
Of course. If I had perfect knowledge of my brain's functioning, now that would be a very strange thing indeed.
You can imagine the state of having switched that "red" experience with the "green" experience, in all your memories as well as in current perception, and still instantly knowing that the switch had occurred.
No, I can't. If all my memories had been altered to agree with my newly-altered perception system, what difference would I detect? How would I detect it? Different from what?
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.