The Notion Of 'Qualia' Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 114):

Qualia constitute the collection of personal or subjective experiences, feelings, and sensations that accompany awareness. They are phenomenal states — "how things seem to us" as human beings. For example, the "redness" of a red object is a quale. Qualia are discriminable parts of a mental scene that nonetheless has an overall unity. They may range in intensity and clarity from "raw feels" to highly refined discriminanda. These sensations may be very precise when they accompany perceptual experiences; in the absence of perception, they may be more or less diffuse but nonetheless discernible as "visual," "auditory," and so on. In general, in the normal waking state, qualia are accompanied by a sense of spatiotemporal continuity. Often, the phenomenal scene is accompanied by feelings or emotions, however faint. Yet the actual sequence of qualia is highly individual, resting on a series of occasions in one's own personal history or immediate experience.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the notion of qualia embraces

• mental processes actualised through sensers and 
• the phenomenal ranges or causes of such processes.  

Such phenomena are construals of an individual's experience as perceptual meanings, which, in humans, are correlated with the meanings of language.