Maybe we're pushing the whole idea of "qualia" too hard

 From a 3 Quarks Daily piece linked by Massimo Pigliucci, my thoughts:

Per your previous posting from Mr. Elgat on qualia, I noted that originally, I heard of qualia in the sense of color, as in Dennett's "redness." 

Well, now we're going to go into evolutionary biology, and touch at the edges of Goodman, the new problem of induction ... and that famous word of his. 

As you know, our primate ancestors long ago evolved a third cone cell and trichromatic vision. So, let's talk about the qualia of "greenness." (Actually, given its peak frequency, it should more be yellow-greenness, and Photoshop will also tell you how much yellow many "greens" have.)

So, in that sense, contra Dennett, we have evolved for a certain type of qualia, it would seem. (Ditto for bees in the ultraviolet, had they the brains to think of such things?) But, at the same time, per Goodman, maybe we should talk of "yellreen"?)

More seriously, you've also probably read studies of anthropologists that show that in "primitive" societies, the first word they have for a color beyond black and white is "red." I think "blue" is second, then either "yellow" or "green" about equal.

So, we have a biologically driven concept of color, but degrees of how color is differentiated are driven by cultural evolution as well. 

But that's not all. 

I said "words." "Language." 

Now, we're also in linguistic philosophy. Insert women joking about how men can't tell mauve from periwinkle. But, that ties back to cultural evolution, or sub-cultural evolution, and a perceived need to be that precise on distinguishing tints, like classical Greek putting five adverbial particles at the start of a word. 

But, perception is not adverbial nuance. Per the evolution of that third cone ... men, of course, often suffer from red-green colorblindness. What I am getting at is that maybe the whole idea of qualia is framed too simply in general. It may not quite be p-zombies, but maybe its usefulness is less than some claim? 

To be more precise, I think we're pushing too hard the idea of qualia as a denoter of consciousness. That said, discussion of what qualia are? Where in the brain they might be located? THAT is indeed a good marker.