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I felt his questioning was more existential than essential. "What's it like being..?" The subjective experience.
by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Mar 8th, 2010 at 12:39:11 PM EST
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I was once speaking about being TS to a group of schoolkids and one of them asked me how my sexual experience might compare with a natural born female's. I responded by asking her to describe how it was for her so that I might compare.

he he

keep to the Fen Causeway

by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Mon Mar 8th, 2010 at 01:02:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Precisely.
"Qualia" (pronounced ˈkwɑːliə or pronounced ˈkweɪliə), singular "quale" (pronounced ˈkwɑːleɪ, roughly KWAH-leh), from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the redness of an evening sky. Daniel Dennett writes that qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us."


En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Mon Mar 8th, 2010 at 02:05:35 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I (mis)understood the term as concerning essence, but it's clearly more interesting than that.
by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Mar 8th, 2010 at 04:00:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I once read a characterisation of qualia along the lines of "the question is not what it is like to be a bat, but what it is like for the bat to be a bat".

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Mon Mar 8th, 2010 at 04:08:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]
"Interesting" in the way that metaphysics is interesting. Because it is very hard to communicate, operationaly the idea of "qualia" boils down to the impossibility of actually "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" if that someone else is very different from you (and not necessarily so different as a bat from a human).

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 10th, 2010 at 05:43:05 AM EST
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