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Hello!  I'm the director of the Qualia Structure project, Nao Tsuchiya.

Our Qualia Structure project started in April 2023 and will continue till Mar 2028. 

How much of our subjective worlds are shared?

This problem of the subjective world used to be a philosophical question.

On the other hand, it is also a practically important issue, in that people with different subjective worlds make up our society.

Historically, this subject, the content of consciousness, and qualia, were considered non-scientific.

In the tradition of behaviorism, many scientists focus on observable actions from the outside. Behavioristic thinking is wide-spread, extending to the humanities and natural sciences.

Even in the recently established scientific study of consciousness, the issues related to qualia have not been the direct target of the study.

Our Qualia Structure has raised the flag against this.

We established a paradigm that characterizes qualia from relationships, inspired by a mathematical theorem called Yoneda's Lemma, in category theory.

We used the idea inspired by Yoneda's Lemma and measured the similarity of color qualia. Combined with a new algorithm, called optimal transport in the field of machine translation, we demonstrated that structures of color qualia could be well-matched among  individuals within typical color experience or within atypical color experience (e.g., red-green colorblind) but not between typical and atypical people.

We plan to expand this idea further and conduct research on emotional qualia. We also plan to apply this idea throughout development.  Structural approach to the brain and its informational structure is important. We are also interested in the analysis of qualia structures through the lens of language, culture, and society. We hope that our new paradigm of understanding qualia through relationships will lead to various new collaborative research in the future.

(There are so many ideas that I'm worried about whether they can all be tested in a finite time!)

By doing so, we aim to lead the third generation of consciousness research on an international level. Ultimately, we want to contribute to the development of a new understanding of human beings by deepening the understanding of others. For the next five years, we hope that researchers who are interested in our work will participate in our project in various forms! 

Thank you for your interest and we sincerely appreciate for your support.

Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Oct 12, 2023