This is really reaching but imagine you could take all the conscious memories and experiences of all humans starting from Cro-Magnan and Neanderthal minds and then every modern human up until now and compressed them into one model with some super advanced Clarketech computer; would we be able to make a (semi)accurate “map” of human qualia?
Also, with the collective experiences of every human who ever lived; would it be useful in answering the big questions that a lot of us wonder about?
Bold of you to assume that all experiences of one person would be compatible/comprehensible to anyone else. Many qualia only have meaning within the context of memories, beliefs, abilities and structure and methods of mind which perceives them. Or it might be more accurate to say that qualia are composed of different combinations of those.
As such, accumulating all memories and experiences into one place, even if you were to merge similar ones, would leave some qualia which only exist in reference to a limited subset of said memories and experiences, which themselves may be unrelated and not translatable to any other than themselves (though still analysable, but not necessarily meaningful). By definition, such qualia would be subjective to these memories.
Until very recently, nobody had seen the color olo. I would presume there are other sensations that have not yet been experienced in isolation.
And, no, I don't think it would answer a lot of philosophical questions. The hard ones are less about what then why or how.
Yee, if we could somehow create an accessible record of human experience, we could create an objective qualia map.
If such could be done, it would be revolutionary in the field of philosophy of consciousness/mind. We could for example actually experience what it is like to be a bat(man) using our map or what was it like to be a serf/baron in medieval Europe.
I think it's just called history.
