Qualia and QM

I would posit that any system doing information processing at the molecular
scale should have subjective experience (however simplistic).

One key is that qualia occurs only in the present; we cannot remember qualia
except as remembering that such-and-such qualia occurred (e.g., we know that
we ate a red apple but cannot remember the redness itself).

Which leads me to equate qualia with the transition between what is possible
and what is real. And since this transition is associated with collapsing
quantum wavefronts, it follows that qualia represents a state of mind that
exists as a possibility in the future whose subsequent collapse into the
present prevents qualia from being remembered and/or otherwise treated as
information. When we see a red apple, we also see a possibility of its red
property that doesn't exist in the ordinary world, but does exist in a
possible world. We see light not only as it exists here but also in another
realm.

If this is true, then it means that people who dream in color (or who can
picture actual color sensations in their minds) are having their thought
content channeled along the same mental hardware as the optic system does,
instead of simply recalling images from memory. Such content is actually
being manufactured wholly new in the present and becoming subject to the
same quantum collapse effects as viewed light.*

But for any of this to happen, a mind must employ quantum-level signal
processing, so that the information in the mind can briefly exist as a
varying possibility. And although it is always collapsing, new coherent
wavefronts keep arising, so our perceptions are continually forming from a
steady, unbroken stream of qualia, thus never letting us see an "unqualia"
or "ordinary world of mere information".

Ray


* There would, in fact, be two wavefront collapses -- that of the photon and
of the signal processor in the mind. It could be that some special
entanglement occurs, or that for a moment, there is no distinction between
either, and mind and external reality fuse and we achieve direct experience
(and which we label as qualia).