An adjunction hypothesis between qualia and reports

Abstract

What are the nature of the relationship among qualia, contents of consciousness, and behavioral reports? Traditionally, this type of question has been only addressed via a qualitative and philosophical approach. Some theorists emphasize an incomplete and inaccurate nature of reports of one's own qualia to discourage formal research programs on qualia. Other empirical researchers, however, have made substantial progress in understanding the structure of qualia from such limited reports. What is the precise relationship between the two? To answer this question, we introduce the concept of “adjoint” or “adjunction” from the category theory in mathematics. We claim that the adjunction captures some aspects of the nuanced relationships between qualia and reports. The concept of adjunction allows us to clarify the conceptual issues with a precise mathematical formulation. In particular, adjunction establishes coherence between two categories that cannot be considered equivalent, yet has an important relationship. This rises in empirical experimental situations between qualia and reports. More importantly, an idea of adjunction naturally leads to various proposals of new empirical experiments to test the predictions about the nature of their relationship as well as other issues in consciousness research.

Quantum-like Qualia hypothesis: from Quantum Cognition to Quantum Perception

“…Rather, QQ proposes to consider qualia at the level of ensembles where some "similar" qualia properties are grouped together (as in the above categorical set of observables). How to construe "similar" is an important question, which the authors have discussed elsewhere, using concepts from category theory (Tsuchiya et al, 2016(Tsuchiya et al, , 2022(Tsuchiya et al, , 2023. In category theory, it is quite explicit what one considers as similar is a choice of mathematicians or scientists, not automatically or uniquely 'given' by the world (Cheng, 2022).…”

Three Comments in Case of a Structural Turn in Consciousness Science

“…In recent years, the idea of using mathematical spaces, or mathematical structure more generally, 1 to go beyond verbal descriptions and simple formalisations have started to sprout in virtually every discipline involved in the scientific quest to understand consciousness. Following pioneering work by Austen Clark [7] and David Rosenthal [58], mathematical spaces are now applied in philosophy [8,9,13,15,43,44,56,57,59,11,45,37,53,53,80,6,68,2], neuroscience [72,70,82,42,46,17,52,19,28,75,83,18], cognitive science [24,61,23,51], psychology [36,40,54,81] and mathematical consciousness science [16,32,69,55,47,48,…”

Three Comments in Case of a Structural Turn in Consciousness Science

“…In recent years, the idea of using mathematical spaces, or mathematical structure more generally, 1 to go beyond verbal descriptions and simple formalisations have started to sprout in virtually every discipline involved in the scientific quest to understand consciousness. Following pioneering work by Austen Clark [7] and David Rosenthal [58], mathematical spaces are now applied in philosophy [8,9,13,15,43,44,56,57,59,11,45,37,53,53,80,6,68,2], neuroscience [72,70,82,42,46,17,52,19,28,75,83,18], cognitive science [24,61,23,51], psychology [36,40,54,81] and mathematical consciousness science [16,32,69,55,47,48,…”