Hold on to your hats here because I am going to try to describe what just struck me in my thinking about qualia and tetrachromats.
I will not bother with explaining some of the terminology that I use (like qualia), but will assume you are familiar with it. On the first use of a rather obscure term, I’ll link it to some definitional source.
Anyway, here goes.
I never thought too much about qualia until I heard about tetrachromats. Then that got me thinking. You see, the color field of a tetrachromat is in 4 dimensions, not 3 like most of us. Yet, tetrachromats properly have the 4 dimensional field of colors [citation needed]. But how could genetic evolution code for the neural processing of a 4th dimensional field of colors, given the rarity of this trait in humans?
Then it dawned on me — genetics doesn’t code for color fields at all! At least not directly. If it codes for anything, its something extremely abstract in this regard — abstract and general enough that the brain itself, during the formation of the visual cortex and other parts of the brain that processes the output from the visual cortex, etc.
If genetics doesn’t code for the dimensionality of the qualia of color, then how does it come about?
We know that the fine details of neural formation does not happen from genetics, but from stimulation by the environment. There has been much research on this, for feel free to Google away!
Now, you know the old philosophical arguments about where or not you and I see the same colour red, etc. But what is the essence of the color red? Why does red look red?
And more important, how is it that the brains of human tetrachromats can so easily process a 4th dimensional color field when we are clearly not evolved to do so?
It occured to me that the reason we have qualia at all is because the brain needs a way to handle the differential nature of the sensory input it gets tons of. During early formation our neural networks must “compute” these differentials and also find representations for them.
Our neural networks, during formation, are driven by the complex dynamics of the differential stimuli to form a complex differential representation which we call “qualia”. The qualia is therefore the result of this emergence: the qualia is the complex differential representation of the process complex differential dynamics of the stimuli the brain is constantly bombarded by.
I would also say the brain does it this way for all complex differential stimuli. Auditory, olfactory, tactile, spatial-temporal senses, etc.
This view may aid AI research, because we can configure neural nets to do processing this way.
I need to think about this more, because this encompasses so much. It may also help explain why we are so receptive to learning language as well when we are young. And it may inform other areas of neuroscience.
OK, time to take a walk and cogitate on this. Because it may also mean (and probably does) that what we think of a consciousness itself is the result of the brain doing that complex “sensory” differential analysis on itself!