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I'm wondering if there have been any studies exploring Qualia through altered mind states (like dreaming). From my own experience:

  • lucid dreams:

    • I definitely experience qualia in dreams. Color, emotions, although details are often missing, so I might experience "treeness" without being able to identify individual leaves and branches.

  • non-dreaming sleep

    • I suspect "we are still there", its just that we are not pondering anything and thus not storing any memories. I say this because I had an external stimulus (from the real world) while I was asleep, but not dreaming. That gave me something to think about and it felt like "I was there" while I believe I was still in a non-waking state (can't claim this with absolutely certainty)

  • general anesthesia

    • I do not believe "I was there". When I woke up, it seemed as if minimal time had passed. The experience is NOT the same as a nap.
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    I'm not sure what you're looking for. I'm sure you'd find a lot of studies about sleep within neuroscience (but that's not philosophy). Neuroscience generally supports physicalism (at least in as far as one can try to come up with testable claims that would differentiate physicalism and non-physicalism, though non-physicalism leans heavily on untestability). Other than that, none of these seem to have any specific bearing on philosophy of mind. Commented Apr 27 at 3:20
  • That isn't a good question for our site- just Google it. Commented Apr 27 at 8:26
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    Why do you have only one category of dream – lucid dreams? I have subjective experiences in dreams, but that does not make them lucid. Although I am aware, I am not aware that it is a dream, until waking. FWIW, apart from landscape, colour, sound, people (some of who are known to me, some not) someone held my hand in a recent dream, and I felt their grip/touch. Commented Apr 27 at 9:28
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    I also don't know what answerable question you are asking? Dreams are certainly fascinating. I have had dreams of 'places' not even remotely like places I have been to, and then again months or years later. The mind seems able to construct plausible scenes and hold them unconsciously for indefinite time. I have also had dreams a month before a trip to a new place and recognized very specific, unremarkable things from the dream. Commented Apr 27 at 10:30
  • I’m voting to close this question because this is fundamentally empirical psychology. Should be moved over to psychology stack exchange. Commented Apr 27 at 19:23

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We remember that we experienced something--by definition qualia--whenever we remember having experienced something.

This does not prove (imply etc.) that when we don't remember having experienced anything, we did not.

The interesting question then is whether we necessarily memorise what we experience something, when we do. The fact that we don't remember does not prove that we did not memorise, because it might be that we memorised and then forgot.

It should be the job of cognitive scientists to try and prove that we memorise every time we experience something, if we do. I also have no idea how they could do it.

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Qualia in dreams and hallucinations have been frequently used as part of an argument for idealism. There have also been various discussions of what kind of existence dream objects have. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dreams-dreaming/ for a discussion.

Also, there has been some work exploring the metaphysical implications of psychedelic and near-death experiences. There is a video by Bernardo Kastrup that discusses it, but I can't find it now since there are so many videos that he's in. The gist is that it's hard to justify the assumption that such experiences are caused by brain activity because first-person reports suggest that the experiences are extremely vivid and intense, yet there is little or no brain activity going on at the time, as measured by instruments.

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