Empathy and third-person perception of qualia

There is mind and there is matter. Between them, a fundamental divide exists. One can be observed, the other not, apart from experiencing it through being. This strict dichotomy between first- and third-person views feels intuitively correct, and seems usually to be taken for granted even by those who deny the concept of universe divided into two fundamentally distinct substances. Such denial, of course, becomes somewhat shaky if consciousness is indeed intrinsically unobservable. There would be a very basic level divide in existence then, mandating some degree of dualism, if not full-blown one.

In this essay I will argue that there is no such divide. Qualia of others aren't any more unobservable in principle than any physical characteristic. The fallacy of unobservability shall be shown by two examples of perceiving consciousness: One real though limited, other theoretical but clear.

Consider empathy. Most humans are capable, to a varying degree, of observing the whole rich repertoire of conscious and unconscious communication of others. With this information, they can construct an inner model of mental states that caused those communicative acts, and respond to them in appropiate manner. This construct usually has affective as well as cognitive component. In other words, empathetic human being feels what others feel. Qualia of emotion perceived.

Foul play and sophistry? Empathy is, after all, based on perceiving the external correlates of consciousness, and those are very much physical. It might seem that consciousness itself is again safe from observation, the divide intact. However, defining observation as perceiving the thing-in-itself has the unfortunate side effect of making all physical objects impossible to observe as well. You aren't seeing these letters themselves, nor your monitor. What you see is an inner model constructed by your brain out of information from your eyes, that based on stream of photons from whatever you're looking at. What kind of stream arrives does correlate with its physical characteristics, which permits a construction of model very useful to your interaction with the world - but a construct it stays, nonetheless. In fact the nature of this observation-construct might differ from the observed thing more in the case of physical objects. In empathy brain is modeling brain, in other cases things very different from itself. This leads to striking differences, such as the entirely arbitrary distinctions existing in the models of actually continuous phenomena. The wavelength of visible light is not really divided into parts, nor are there two qualitatively different states of temperature.

Empathy is, of course, defective instrument. Communicative acts aren't perfect indicators of mental states. Humans lie, they fake emotions, they conceal them. Even without all this, the amount of information conveyed is small relative to that contained by some brainstate, and as such, any picture based on it is bound to be rather crude. Constructing a thought-experiment involving neither of these restrictions proves illustrative. Imagine a futuristic descendant of today's FMRI machines, with spatial and temporal resolutions fine enough to read the activity of even individual neurons. This instrument is connected to a device capable of stimulating or inhibiting the brain activity, again at any level wished for. The system reads the brainstates of persons A and B. It selects some part of person A's state, for example that correlating with his verbalized thoughts. Then it constructs a functionally identical replica of that pattern, and uses the brain manipulator to write it into B's head. As a result, B thinks A's thoughts. The principle could be applied to emotions, sensory experiences, essentially every conscious thing that's happening in the brain. Of course it is unlikely that the resulting experience would be identical to original, with differing brain structures and inevitable entanglement of the replica with other patterns in B's brain. Still, as noted, no realistic concept of perception can demand this.

All in all, the apparent unreachability of qualia rests on inaccurate intuitions on the nature of perception, as well as our inadequate natural capacity of observing the brains of others. Medieval scholar, if he had somehow became aware of ultraviolet light, might very well have considered it qualitatively different from visible light, since it is invisible and impossible for him to observe. In a certain sense he would have been correct, but today we know that no such difference exists in the world - solely in the minds of those incapable of perceiving UV wavelengths. His mistake would have been perfectly understandable, but no less a mistake for that.