​Qualia: Phenomenality Without Reflection

It is necessary to pause on a phenomenon that, in the philosophy of mind, is traditionally associated with subjective experience, yet in the ontology of differentiation requires a radical rethinking. This concerns qualia—the phenomenal qualities of perception, sensation, and affect, such as pain, color, taste, fear, and touch. In classical conceptions, qualia are described as internal and inaccessible elements of subjective experience, possessing intensity, immediacy, and unique modality. However, if differentiation is taken as the ontological ground rather than a derivative of mental processes, such a reading becomes secondary and incomplete.

In the proposed model, qualia are not treated as private internal essences or residual phenomenal content of consciousness, but as a specific form of differentiation arising in an organism with stable bodily organization and a closed sensorimotor loop. At the animal level, cyclical memory, predictive orientation, and minimal subjectivity are already in place. However, the animal does not differentiate that it is differentiating. It lacks language, symbolic fixation, and conceptual apparatus. Nevertheless, it acts according to differences that are shaped into modal structures of its bodily responses. This is what qualia are: differentiation that is not recognized as differentiated.

The key to understanding qualia lies in the distinction between types of memory. In plants, memory is autopoietic: it is directed toward maintaining the organism’s own form as a differentiating structure. All external differences are interpreted in terms of their significance for the preservation of morphogenetic stability. The plant differentiates only insofar as the external contributes to or threatens its structural integrity. Animals, by contrast, possess a different kind of memory: one not directly tied to bodily form, but to differences in the environment. Yet animals do not replicate the external world internally—such memory would be excessive and functionally impossible. Instead, they differentiate selectively: only those environmental differences relevant for action are retained, fixed, and utilized.

Crucially, the animal does not differentiate the external world itself, but how it differentiates that world. The difference between two photons carries no intrinsic meaning. However, if one photon excites one receptor type and another excites a different one, a modality emerges—color. Color is not a wavelength; color is the form of differentiation of a wavelength. In other words, qualia are differentiations of differences, stabilized as bodily modalities. The organism no longer differentiates just objects, but the modes of their differentiation in itself, although it does not differentiate this act as such. For instance, in a cat (Felis catus), the perception of red versus green is differentiated modally in a way tied to behavioral relevance—such as for prey detection or danger assessment—where color becomes a difference pertinent to action.

Qualia are not representations, knowledge, signs, or symbols. They are differences emergent in the body as a result of behavioral stabilization in particular environmental contexts. Pain, for example, is not information about injury, but the differentiation of a disruption in bodily stability, encoded as a modality. Color, sound, and taste are not forms of the external, but codings of significant differences within a bodily structure capable of action. These differences are retained, repeated, accumulated, and modulate behavior, but are not externalized beyond the differentiating organism. This may be likened to a filter: the system (organism) extracts from the input signal (the environment) only those differences relevant to its state, forming a modality—a quale.

Thus, qualia are immanent differentiations of difference. Differentiation occurs not as a one-time event but as a stable form of internal behavioral organization. Yet this differentiation is not itself differentiated—it is not externalized, not conceptualized, not symbolized. The animal differentiates how it differentiates, but does not differentiate that it does so. Qualia operate as tensions, as directionalities, as internal distributions of sensitivity—but not as articulated knowledge. This distinguishes them from reflection. They should not be seen as an intermediate stage between bodily and conscious states. They are not raw material for thought, nor a preliminary layer awaiting symbolization. On the contrary, qualia are a complete and autonomous mode of differentiation, structured in the modal organization of the body. They do not anticipate the sign—they act outside it, as a form of stable coordination of differentiating reactions, organizing behavior, allowing coordination with a changing environment, accumulating differences in the form of sensory modalities, but without the capacity to externalize, designate, or transmit them.

Reflection arises when the act of differentiation itself becomes differentiated. Only at this level does it become possible to isolate a modality, recognize it as a modality, and thus begin to operate with difference independently of perception. Reflection is the differentiation of qualia as differentiation. This is no longer merely a bodily modality, but a structure in which difference can be designated, retained, interpreted, and transmitted in the form of a symbol. Thus, qualia are not consciousness, but mark its ontological threshold.

The transition to consciousness does not require the intensification of sensation but the emergence of a third level of differentiation—the differentiation of the differentiation of differentiation. This is reflection in the strict sense: the differentiation of how I differentiate. Only then do concept, name, designation, and sign arise. But prior to that, there is phenomenality—intense, structured, modal—but not recognized as such. Qualia are reflections that do not yet know what they reflect.

Thus, qualia should be understood as modally structured differentiations of difference within a stable differentiating system. They are a form in which difference already operates, but has not yet become differentiated. At this level, the animal ontology of differentiation reaches its culmination, opening the possibility of a new transition—to the symbol as the external bearer of differentiated difference.

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