Hi there,
I have long been interested in Buddhism, ever since my first conversation with my Dad on this topic at our dining table in Madras, India, when I was 12. Since then I have visited Bodhgaya, Nalanda, and Vaishali in my quest to learn more. Over the years, my quest has taken me computer science and the "hard problem of AI", i.e., the study of consciousness itself.
To this end, I have attended the first Viapassana 10 day course and have been meditating for the last decade or so.
I am sick and tired of new age thinkers who go on and on about "healing energy" and such, only because they do not provide a rigorous framework to fit it into and so do not really progress knowledge beyond what it was over 2.5 millenia ago. My attempt to do so can be found here (I hope you do not misunderstand it): Serotonergic and tryptaminergic overstimulation on refeeding implicated in “enlightenment” experiences.
I recently and accidentally experienced Turyia, but have since been unable to reproduce it. This has given me some insight into many hitherto opaque readings in Buddhist, Zen and Hindu literature. (It also completely destroyed my then current theories on consciousness; however, I remain very much a materialist.)
It had always struck me that during the Vipassana talks, it was mentioned at least twice, that the Buddha "...saw things as they are..." and my intuition then and now is that this may not metaphorical, i.e., that in deep states of meditation, qualia perception mechanisms are perhaps altered and allow us to see things in a unique way. That is what I hope to learn about in my quest to try to understand qualia--what does the Buddhist literature (and Buddhist theories of atomism) have to say on this.
The problem of qualia is brute and simple--so simple that in the beginning, I found it very hard to understand even what the basic problem was about. It took me a while to get it. Take the color red for example. The physics of light tells us that this is electromagnetic radiation of 428 THz. The problem is this: there is no physics that can explain how this electromagnetic frequency shows as "red" in our head.
That is the "qualia problem." In the Wikipedia entry on Buddhist atomism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_atomism), there is a very intriguing statement that pertains to qualia:
...Both systems [Sānkhya and later Indian Buddhism] share in common a tendency to push the analysis of Existence up to its minutest, last elements which are imagined as absolute qualities, or things possessing only one unique quality. They are called "qualities" (guna-dharma) in both systems in the sense of absolute qualities, a kind of atomic, or intra-atomic, energies of which the empirical things are composed. Both systems, therefore, agree in denying the objective reality of the categories of Substance and Quality, ... and of the relation of Inference uniting them. There is in Sānkhya philosophy no separate existence of qualities. What we call quality is but a particular manifestation of a subtle entity. To every new unit of quality corresponds a subtle quantum of matter which is called guna "quality", but represents a subtle substantive entity. The same applies to early Buddhism where all qualities are substantive ... or, more precisely, dynamic entities, although they are also called dharmas ("qualities")...
It seems to come from the writings of the Soviet Indologist Shcherbatskoy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Shcherbatskoy). I have only found Volume 2 of his 2 volume summary of Buddhist philosophy, but can't readily find the above reference in it (V2).
I do believe that the problem of qualia, described succinctly by Joe Levine as "the explanatory gap" is the main obstacle to an understanding of consciousness. It is the focus of my thinking, but I must confess, like many others, I am at a complete loss of new ideas about it.
brgds
Paul Joseph
pjoseph@gmail.com
pjoseph@cs.uml.edu