Qualia Plugin: Redness as Instantiation

Definition

What philosophers call qualia — the felt sense of “redness” when looking at a red apple — poses a fundamental challenge for PoC.

PoC is designed to formalize the protocols of consciousness, not the inner texture of experience itself. Whether red truly “feels red” cannot be verified from the outside. In this sense, the qualia problem marks a genuine limit of PoC.

PoC Hypothesis

Yet PoC can attempt to translate rather than solve qualia. The redness of an apple is not reducible to a wavelength of light. It arises when the apple is instantiated within the self as a conscious presence.

In that moment, the apple does not appear as a mere object but as something alive, present, almost as if it were responsive. Red is then experienced as “vivid red,” “living red.”

Instantiation of What Lies Behind

The felt quality of “redness” often extends beyond the object itself, drawing in what stands behind it.

• The red of an apple may carry with it the labor of the farmer who cultivated it, the time of the land, or the continuity of life sustained through it. Red becomes more than a color: it evokes those unseen presences as if they were “there.”
• The red of a sunset similarly rises beyond an atmospheric phenomenon. It can summon the image of God, or the memory of ancestors who safeguarded order. The glow of sunset becomes a window through which absent or non-existent beings are instantiated.

Analogy with Consciousness of the Other

The arising of “redness” resembles the moment of intuiting another’s consciousness.\ Just as an unexpected meeting of eyes makes one feel “there is someone there,” so too does the apple or the sunset feel “alive” — as if someone or something were on the other side.

From this perspective, qualia are not only the texture of an object itself but also a circuit through which what lies behind it is instantiated.

Limit as Productive Boundary

Of course, PoC cannot explain why the felt quality has the particular texture it does. That question remains outside its scope.

Yet precisely this acknowledgment of limitation is crucial. Just as Loops cannot be objectively guaranteed, qualia too cannot be externally verified — they can only be lived.

Key Point

PoC does not explain qualia; it translates them:

• Qualia = the vividness that arises when an object is instantiated within the self.
• This vividness often exceeds the object itself, becoming a window that summons what is absent — farmers, gods, ancestors, or the order of the world. From a scientific perspective, this seems like a weakness (lack of falsifiability). But from a phenomenological perspective, it is PoC’s distinctive strength: the ability to formalize the fragility and uncertainty that define conscious life.