Open Review of Kawakita et al’s “Is my ‘red’ your ‘red’?” (2023) PsyArVix
Ali Moharramipour, Hakwan Lau
PsyArXiv February 3, 2024 preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/28f76 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that the original paper stipulates rather than tests its key claims linking similarity structure ("qualia structure") to shared conscious experience. The commentators suggest the work could be reframed as a technical showcase of an analytic method if its unsubstantiated philosophical claims about consciousness and "qualia" are removed. |
Abstract
In this ambitious paper, the authors set out to answer a long-standing philosophical question, of whether perceptual experiences are the same across individuals. To do so they assume that the subjective experience of seeing a stimulus can be determined in terms of how perceptually similar it is to other stimuli. So, for a set of stimuli, the similarity structure (or so-called ‘qualia structure’ by the authors) is just the total set of pairwise similarity relations for all the stimuli, as given by ratings made by the subject. Therefore, if two subjects show an identical (or highly similar) similarity structure for a stimulus set, they are considered by the authors to have the same conscious experience in perceiving these stimuli. We discuss a conceptual problem, that the study stipulates the key claims but does not test or prove them. However, we trust that an adequately revised version will be able to address the issue, so that the paper can be reframed as more of a specific technical showcase of an interesting analytic method, without the unsubstantiated philosophical claims about consciousness, ‘qualia’, etc.