A Clique Space models the world in which it is manifest. That was always the intention, only now, I think I'm observing the mechanisms in a near final form. The Quale class was mentioned earlier in reference to the Escher interface, but recently, I managed to merge functionality from the CommunicableQuale class into Quale class so that I could remove the CommunicableQuale class.
Anyway, I wrote some comments about what qualia are to Clique Space inside the Java source module, and have decided to create a blog that quotes them. Here they are:
- The terms "Quale" and "Qualia" appear as contentious terms in studies on the philosophy of mind. However, in Clique Space, they are used as a label for a defined structure. Because of the term's contentious history, its use here may be appropriate to some and may not be to others; I don't really care because it is ultimately just a label for a mechanism implemented in a computer language.
An instance of a quale in Clique Space represents a particular state that one or more devices connected to the Clique Space may be expressing at a point in time. Qualia are converted into signals and transmitted between Clique Space aware (CSA) devices as context when each of these CSA devices enter and leave subscriptions. A subscription represents the association of a particular quale to a particular instance of a principle. Each principle instance is uniquely associated with a particular instance of an Element. Instances of Elements are also qualia.
This Quale interface has similarities to the terms usage in philosophy. Because qualia exist independently of their subscriptions, one quale can appear in multiple subscriptions in circumstances where this modelling is appropriate.
A Clique Space quale defines a state for conveying the very abstract notion of "what it is like" to have knowledge about some sensory state. For instance, a quale with a description "Colour [Red]" may be the subject in a subscription signifying that a camera pixel sensitive to red light is active, and this same quale also could also be used in another subscription to mean that some cognitive process within a (Clique Space) mind could be imagining something coloured red. Being that the quale instance lacks a context (the task of assigning context is delegated to subscriptions, and the Context class is a proxy object which is used to convey this context from one CSA device to a neighbouring CSA device), qualia represent abstract qualities which can be shared amongst phenomena to represent common phenomenological properties.
