qualia

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the subjective, phenomenal, first-person qualities of conscious experience — what it is like to see red, to taste coffee, to feel pain — as distinct from the functional or physical processes that produce them; the concept of qualia, introduced in its modern philosophical sense by C.I. Lewis and central to the hard problem of consciousness, captures the felt, intrinsic character of experience that seems irreducible to any purely physical or functional description; philosophers debate whether qualia are real properties that physicalism must explain, whether they are illusory or misdescribed, and whether their existence implies that consciousness cannot be fully accounted for in purely material terms