No One Knows You Better Than You Do.
Does this knowledge prove that you are conscious?
Taking stock of yourself is something other than what one frequently does. Why bother, one might say. But, recently, it came to my mind concerning why I may be so out of breath all the time. I am the only one who knows how I feel. Describing the feeling to a doctor is not the same as feeling it.
To my great surprise, some research revealed gobs and gobs of philosophical writings on knowing yourself. For example, have you ever heard of qualia? What are qualia? They are impression about how things are.
Definitions of qualia have had different meanings over time. Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, was identified in the Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2020–05–, four properties of qualia, even though he denies their existence:
- Ineffable — they cannot be communicated or apprehended by any means other than direct experience.
- Intrinsic — non-relational properties that do not change depending on contact with other things.
- Private— all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
- Direct or immediately apprehensible by consciousness — to experience a quale is to know when one encounters it and all there is to know about it.
Look at the quale (singular for qualia) of viewing red and how the description of the color might sound to a blind person. The describer would not be able to relate his red perception so that a non-seeing listener might know everything there is to know about red, such as we who have instantaneous recognition. Red looks hot, or the experience occurs when you encounter a light of 700 nm (nanometer)wavelength. You and I recognize red without any further description.
There are many examples of qualia. Take the perceived pain of a headache, wine taste, or an evening sky's redness. Compare these experiences after they occur to focus on what you feel as they happen. Our five senses, taste, touch, hearing, seeing, and smelling, are all quales, personal, and individual, and we know everything about each at once.
Consciousness is when one adds language to sense, ideas, meanings, and exposure to our feelings. Our consciousness is unique from someone else's. Acknowledgment of our singularity makes us a compilation of our quales.
Semantic memory refers to the general world knowledge that humans accumulate from birth onward and is different from Episodic Memory. For instance, semantic memory might contain identifying information about a cat, so once we find the word, all cats are immediately recognized. Contrasting episodic memory, we might remember a specific memory, petting a particular cat. We can add new concepts by applying our new knowledge to things learned in the past.
Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, describes schema. He conceptualizes, for example, a pre-natal Schema that might include rudimentary concepts like sucking when something touches a baby's lips. Or a schema referring to every man as DADA before the child has developed the idea that one particular man is DADA to exclude all other men. Schemas grow as our intellect widens and we can apply new learning to existing schema. If we have no place to attach new memories, they will quickly disappear. Try reading Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity without any training in physics. You may understand it while reading it, but it feels as if you never read it a half-hour later because you may not have the schema to which you can attach it.
Doctors may administer x-rays, blood tests, years of study, and actual practice, telling you "you are fine," but you know if you are anything but Okay. Friends can listen to your complaints but have no idea how you feel. You are a private lagoon, as impossible to describe as the color red. The old saw of walking a mile in another's shoes must be revised. Each individual is unique. Even walking two miles won't help.
Our private and intrinsic quales and semantic memory limit our doctor's effectiveness. They do their best to eliminate our source of discomfort, but they don't feel what we feel and know everything we know about ourselves. Our survival job is to analyze and interpret every deeply buried aspect of our being to share with doctors to keep us alive and well.
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
― Bernard M. Baruch