Why Can't Sabine Hossenfelder Find Her Qualia?

Maybe because she doesn't know what they are

Sabine Hossenfelder YouTubing on YouTube, credit: Youtube.

Philosophers, exciting news! The announcement Stephen Hawking made at the start of his 2010 book The Grand Design, that “philosophy is dead” because it hasn’t kept up with modern physics, apparently continues to be proved true. That is, according to physicist-come-YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, who announced last week that while philosophers continue to discuss the existence of qualia and their relationship to consciousness, physicists have just….measured them. Stupid philosophers said they couldn’t, but so help them they just did it anyway. Yet another philosophical mystery solved by science. Yay science.

If you are a philosopher or interested in the philosophy of mind, you probably thought “qualia” was a philosophical abstraction used to illustrate the conceptually seperate aspect of conscious experience from physical description, the qualitative experience of what it is like to taste chocolate or see the colour blue. Qualia aren’t “things” that you can “measure,” they are a word that isn’t really that scientifically applicable, and no philosopher claims they specifically exist seperate from consciousness itself¹ or that they are separable metaphysical entities or objects, they are just a conceptual word used in philosophy that can be both helpful and unhelpful depending on the context. Or at least, that’s what you might have thought.

Well Sabine Hossenfelder thinks that’s all wrong. But as it turns out, her claim is little more than a declaration that she considers the work of Thomas Nagal and David Chalmers to be “bullshit” and that you study the brain scientifically you are studying consciousness the end. She backs this up with a “fascinating new study” that came out in which scientists say it “might actually be possible to measure qualia.”

She is referring to studies that scanned patients brains with fMRI while showing them images of various colours, and attempted to correlate the colours with consistent patterns in the brain. Sabine explains this study and then says, as if it’s some kind of revelation: “this is the first time that scientists have objectively measured qualia.”

I’m sorry, what? Is this the first time Sabine has heard of an fMRI scanner? Has no scientist ever attempted to correlate objectively categorised experiences with states in the brain? Isn’t that literally what neuroscientists have been doing all day ever since they invented fMRI scanners? She seems to believe that this study is somehow particularly profound rather than just being another cumulative piece of mildly but not that interesting neuroscience research, and she thinks that since we find apparent similarities in patterns that present when shown certain colours, we can prove that your “red” is the same as my “red.”

There are so many problems here with Sabine’s complete misunderstanding of consciousness let alone her wild misuse of the word “qualia” it’s hard to know where to begin. We might start here: the study itself doesn’t claim what she is claiming, it only claims it is measuring what they term “qualia embeddings,” and the authors pretty much caution against her claim, saying: “we do not consider the estimated embeddings based on psychophysical experiments to represent the entire quality of experience…We should always be cautious about the task requirements of psychological experiments, whether they can extract phenomenological aspects.”²

She claims this is part of a large scale shift from philosophical to scientific attempts to understand consciousness. She evidences this by citing another paper by Anil Seth, in which she has apparently for the first time learnt about his theory of the brain as a predictive inference machine. To those who haven’t heard of him, Seth, a British neuroscientist and author of a book called Being You, describes consciousness as a “controlled hallucination,” the result of a continuously updated predictive model of the world, drawing on the work of people like Karl Frisson and his free energy principle and theories of the brain as a Bayesian and active inference machine. For what it’s worth, I personally find Seth’s work mildly annoying, I think a lot of the language he uses is gimmicky and unhelpful, for example describing experience as a “hallucination” simply robs the word itself of any meaning. Nonetheless, his book is pretty readable and gives a good explainer of things like the FEP and some current ideas in the field, and the theories his work is connected to are interesting, and certainly represent the frontier of studies of the brain.

Yet why Sabine cites this she doesn’t really explain, she simply seems to think that Seth would be explaining qualia with this theory of the brain. Yet if you actually read what Seth writes, while he is a physicalist he doesn’t claim to be directly explaining consciousness and solving the hard problem when he offers such theories, he instead calls himself a “pragmatic materialist” and argues we should replace the hard problem with what he calls the “real problem,” which is to say the cumulative work of neuroscience. He may somewhat agree with Sabine, but like the authors of the former paper, he isn’t making stupid claims about “measuring qualia,” most of the time he’s just attempting to research how the brain works.

She then cites a book called ‘The Metaphysics of Color’ as a claim that scientists are now apparently nearer to measuring colour³ objectively. I’ve never heard of this book before, but from looking into it the authors seem to be making the philosophical claim that colour is objectively real, they say in the conclusion “We see a world of colors because ours is a world of colors. That objects are colored explains why we see those objects as colored, and not the other way about.”⁴

This is a pretty fringe claim. It also doesn’t align with what Seth proposes about the brain, since Seth sees consciousness as a “hallucination” which you can read less sensationally as “representation,” and he says directly “we project colour into things that just reflect light and doesn’t have colour.”⁵ These theories are contradictory.

But Sabine claims “if these researchers are right then we might be on the edge of a new way to understand how experience happens and eventually how to create it.”

Again, what? Which of these completely unrelated researchers? What does this have to do with “creating” experience? At this point if I didn’t know Sabine had a doctorate in theoretical physics I’d assume she was just some unintelligent and disingenuous clickbaity YouTuber flagrantly conflating a bunch of things she doesn’t understand to generate some headline for an audience of people who don’t know any better. But how is that not what she is doing here? Nothing she has cited even really says what she is saying it says, I genuinely don’t think she’s even read the work on colour she cited or looked into Anil Seth’s work at all besides one paper.

Anyway, without further explaining any of these claims, Sabine segways into an advert for a sponsor, some AI science app, the advert for which lasts a minute and a half of the seven minute video and that’s it, the end. Given this and the list of links underneath for patreon, donorbox and more sponsered apps, I’m going to guess Sabine is actually more interested in measuring her bank account than measuring any qualia. All this amounts to is another depressing reminder of the way the incentives of algorithms degrade discourse, such that even someone apparently claiming to be communicating science from a qualified position is capable of offering a load of conflations and ironically projecting philosophical positions while attempting to discredit philosophy.

All Sabine has done then is announced that she is a physicalist and that she doesn’t understand or care about the hard problem. Let’s say that tomorrow neuroscientists produced a complete one to one brain mapping of all conscious experiences as Sabine seems to think we soon will: as Chalmers points out, there is a basic problem for a physicalist as to why one state is conscious and another isn’t, both in terms of explanation and in terms of ontological distinction. What does it mean that at some point a physical thing becomes/produces/emits/is a mental thing? Sabine’s answer is that she’s a scientist and isn’t interested in such questions, which is fine, but she’s dismissing philosophy as a discipline simply because she isn’t bothered with it and refusing to acknowledge some of the most difficult and widely asked questions about our own nature.

But you might also think about the sheer semantic absurdity of claiming to measure qualia. This is Sabine’s claim, not the neuroscientists who have measured a quantitative objective set of apparent entities in a brain and seen them on a brain scanner. There are still obvious questions unanswered here: What does it even mean to say that these representations are mental things? How can they be both? Does the question even make any sense?

More to the point, besides the philosophical problem there is still an obvious neuroscientific problem Sabine is sweeping aside: how does this explain how the particular structural aspect of colour processing in the brain is brought together into a coherent, valanced conscious experience in a unified field with our other senses and thoughts? Measuring correlates with colour in the brain is a bit like studying what a soldier has for dinner and thinking you can use it to understand the geopolitics of the war he is fighting in. Chucking in an Anil Seth paper doesn’t really offer a solution, Seth is hardly at a point of showing how and why the inference of the brain is actually conscious, and even goes as far in his book as feeling it necessary to explain Integrated Information Theory as one competing idea of consciousness, which tells you how far we are from putting all this together.

So there you go, even if Sabine’s physicalist position were true, her claims about what we are on the precipice of are still wrong. So much physicalism is simply this, an assumed philosophical position based on an odd kind of denial of a set of philosophical problems that continue to exist in the philosophy of mind. And who knows, perhaps they will never be solved, perhaps our brains are simply not made to be able to wrap around the fundamental nature of conscious experience, maybe it’s a question as difficult as asking why anything exists at all ever. Maybe the answer is religious, or maybe there isn’t one. But it takes a mind uniquely possessed by scientism to suggest we solve such a problem by “measuring it.”

But perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe Sabine’s next video will be her in a pond in waders with a butterfly net and a ruler declaring she’s caught a qualia and measured it. “Hey, speaking of measuring stuff, have you heard about my new AI science app?” Falls over in pond “30% discount, you won’t regret it. Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow.”

1. Actually that’s not entirely true, some panpsychists kind of think there are fundamental qualia-like building blocks to reality.

2. The paper she cites: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)00289-5

3. I’m British so quotes are spelt wrong with no U and mine are spelt right. If you think that’s the wrong way round I can measure it as proof because science.

4. The full thing is available online: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/metaphysics-of-color/F545A7249EB194DB6E3561BCE61C1F97

5. Clip of Seth saying exactly this here.