Waiting Bar at an Italian Restaurant ③ *Note ②: ChatGPT Analysis: Analyzing Qualia as Structural Theory

Treating 'qualia as a structure' is a fairly advanced position, situated at the intersection of phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science. The point is to rethink it not as 'the quality itself,' but as relationships, differences, and arrangements.
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1. Starting point: Qualia are not 'isolated points'
Intuitively, the 'feeling of red' seems to exist on its own, but structural theory denies this. Red is:
• Not blue
• Not green
• Within a continuum of dark red/light red
In other words, qualia are defined only within a network of differences from other qualia.
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2. Structuring using color as an example
Color qualia serve as an easy-to-understand model. Thinking in terms of color space (hue, saturation, brightness):
• Red is not a single point but a coordinate
• Proximity relationships (what colors it resembles) are important
• Changes are continuous (gradation)
This suggests that qualia can be treated as 'topology (phase structure)'.
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3. Structural definition of qualia (abstraction)
Structurally, qualia can be described in the following three layers:
(1) Discriminability
Can a certain experience be distinguished from others?
→ Close to information-theoretic distance
(2) Similarity structure
Which ones are similar to which?
→ Metric of mental space
(3) Transformability
How does it change (continuous/discontinuous)?
→ Properties as a dynamic system
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4. Philosophical lineage of this position
This direction connects with several schools of thought.
● Edmund Husserl
Analyzing experience not as the 'object itself,' but as a structure of appearance
● Ludwig Wittgenstein
'Meaning is in use' → Qualia also have meaning within relationships
● Modern cognitive science
Treating qualia as a 'high-dimensional representation space' (representational geometry)
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5. Strong claim: Qualia are 'structure,' not 'quality'
Stepping further here, the position splits into two:
A. Weak structuralism
Qualia have quality, but can be described by structure
B. Strong structuralism
Qualia are the structure itself, and the surplus called 'quality' does not exist.
The latter is quite radical; it is, so to speak, the 'demystification of qualia'.
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6. Merit: Why structure it?
This perspective has clear advantages:
• Connection with science becomes possible
→ Can be mapped to the distance structure of brain states
• The problem of other minds is weakened
→ If they have the same structure, they can be considered the same experience
• Application to AI becomes possible
→ Qualia can be treated as 'reproducible things'
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7. However, the core problem remains
Even so, there is one question that remains at the end.
Even if the structures match perfectly, can we really say that 'that feeling' is the same?
This leads directly to the so-called:
• Inverted spectrum problem
• Philosophical zombie problem
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Summary
Viewed structurally, qualia are:
A high-dimensional structure consisting of relationships of difference, similarity, and change,
and they become the arrangement of relationships themselves, rather than an entity called 'redness'.