[MUSIC] Hi, today we will talk about the qualia problem. You will think, well, what is it? Don't worry, I'll try to answer you. What do qualia are? Qualia are the personal, conscious, and phenomenal experience of an event. It's that kind of experiences that belong to our inner, perception of the existence of the world. And it's so difficult problem that it's called a hard problem into cognitive and, and minor studies because we can find a very, a very strong problem. That the emotions are related to personal feelings, to personal experiences of what are we feeling into our internal states. For example, when I think on, on a chocolate ice cream, the experience of what I am, I am, feeling it's a very personal experience, I cannot translate to other persons. I can explain it, I can explain how I feel, which are the, the emotional memories that give some value, a specific values to that experience. Or even to, to the idea, to, to the idea of the future of experience about eating that kind of, of piece of food. But the truth is that nobody can feel the same like me eating that kind of, of piece. Philosophers are very prone to, to talk about mental experiments. And I think that you will be very fastly bored if I keep talking on this topic without no examples. But the point is, well, we know that we feel things, we don't know what is the feeling of something like the feeling of a color, for example. I, I, we know that our, our sensory receptors of light translate, some specific pieces of information of vertical, of, of horizontal. Kind of data of the visual inputs and also about the because and then all those processes are reconstructed inside the brain. That creates something like an, an image of of what's happening out in the outside. But, perhaps we don't kno, we don't know how it's previews or how we really made this process but we know that we have those processes. And we know, we know, that other humans talk about these processes. But only humans are able to have these qualia, well, these are very, very big problem that the only animal who has symbolic language in order to try to think about what is happening is the human being. But some experts try to think on on a new facility. What could happen if we were able to rela, teach symbolic language to other animals? The chosen animals were these ones, these were the chimpanzees. And during the 60s and 70s were performed some experiments on animal language acquisition, acquisition. In which they tried to teach, words to the, to those chimpanzees and then tried to observe what where they able to do with those words. There were two famous, animals, one was Washoe, a female. Another one was, Nim Chimpsky, a male. The female, learned more words, 350 words. And with her expressions, she demonstrated to have, a real empathy towards humans, at the same time was able to express, self-consciousness, processes. For example she, she said one time, me, washoe, looking, to the, to the mirror. And, e, even she was able to make news words, for example, combining, noun words like metal, cup, or drink. In order to create a new, jo, joined, concept, trying to express what's a. At the same, on the other side, we could find Nim Chimpsky, who learned fewer number of, of, of words, only 125. But he even was able to create new, new words to this, to indicate, for example, the, the, playing actions. Or even he was able to create phrases like, cat me, Nim hug, trying to express his love towards one, one, pet, in the lab, facilities. So, we know that some animals, when they receive a symbolic training, they are able to produce the, the kind of, of personal experiences with which we know that we are able to understand the world. The difference is that we have symbolic language and the other animals have no, so progressed. And so well, constructed language in order to think about the world not to feel the world, but to be, be, aware about the feeling and the, the meaning of their own experience. So, we can really, strongly correlate emotions with, with, qualia, without more opportunities. No, because for example we can, we can see that, that emotions are related to nonverbal communication. For example, body gestures, [SOUND] this kind of things that express that you are really bored, explaining this and I can't talk in this tone all the time. I can talk, in this way, and you can really feel that or, or I I am full or I am cheating you. Or perhaps that, that the human expression process embraces a lot of, kind of, of, input data. We also interpret face expressions. We establish eye contact, It's not the same if I were talking to this camera or all because I was talking to the roof, or, to, I don't know. To my toys or to eh, anything you are, thinking about. This is also a question of, of proxemics of the, of the language of a space. If not the same I'm talking to you at, that, distance, or this distance or even [SOUND] at this distance or [SOUND] hi. Like, total, [SOUND] total, [SOUND] animal trying to explain things. But even to tell which direction is the same to, to tell somebody or not while you're explaining these serious things or maybe neutral things. At the same time, we can look at, at what is happening inside the brain looking at the neuron correlates while we are feeling something. But at the same time, above all the previous things, we have personal experiences of what, is happening around us. For example, it is very important at, at, this is a very specific place, a moment in which we, we need to explain very carefully what is happening when we go to the, to the, to the, to the hospital. I don't know if, if you have seen this film, Big Hero 6, but it's very funny because the robot tries to, to understand. How are you feeling about, about your internal experience of pain. And, and he always asked you on a scale of one to ten how would you rate your pain? And we in this moment have no, any objective mechanism in order to understand which is the real pain that you are suffering, inside your body. We need to ask people, people, what are you they feeling? It's a personal feeling, there is not an objective way to quantify. We can obviously exist, pain scales, based on self reports of obsession, observational, a physiological data. And we have made also cross-cultural studies on how people feel pain, but the truth is that there is not an object, objective way to understand what are you feeling. That your feeling depends on several variables, not only on a real piece of data, emotions are, dynamic processes inside the, the body. So, we can conclude saying that qualia exist and they are the backbone of our meaningful existence. Qualia are really personal but we can, we can, infer that all our guys, have them because, we see, they react like. We react in the sim, similar circumstances or otherwise we should embrace the solipsism. We al, also always, and also know that the qualia are present into some symbolic trained chimps. And finally that, that despite of several clues, emotional experiences are very intimate and are really personal. Thank you so much, and hope to see you in the next session, bye.
