qualia (Sonnet 18 and Zombies)

"Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or
the redness of an evening sky." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

"Zimboes think^Z they are conscious, think^Z they have qualia, think^Z
they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this
lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever
discover!" -- Daniel Dennet,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

"When philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably
underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up
imagining something that violates their own definition" -- Daniel
Dennet, at ibid.

"As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely
those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is —
and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and
summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some
single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that
this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition
of resources." -- Marvin Minsky, again in the Qualia article

...

The quote from Minsky makes me think that the "discretized" world
of Qualia can itself be painful, perhaps even capturing (as well as can
be imagined), a sort of essence of hurting, after all.

What I mean is: it is quite painful either to feel that others aren't "real",
and possibly even more painful (and disturbing) to feel or imagine
the irreality of one's own inward existence.  However, the "instrumental"
nature of Qualia seem to be a step precisely in the irreal direction of
think^Z -- "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", and so forth.

In other words, the simple mechanics of "judging" or "evaluating" (as
via an integral, for example), even just of "the thinginess of things" --
the self-same clumsy summarising and representing -- what might
be called "grasping thought" -- *are* Qualia, *are* pain, and *are
also* the key move to zombieism.

As an application: judging things/others to be irreal (i.e. to be zombies),
whether this is true or not, effectively infects one with zombieism.
It would be absolute insanity for a human to *embrace* this move...
and yet... taking a look at Sonnet 18, there are certain clear attractions
or, shall we say, enticements...

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.