Day 3: The Qualia Problem: What It's LIKE to Understand

Jasmine: "The dragon was scary." Alex: "No it wasn't! It was cool!" Jasmine: "It WAS scary. The words made me feel scared." Alex: "Those exact same words made me feel excited!"

And then Jasmine said something that stopped her teacher cold: "Maybe we're reading different books even though the words are the same."

Eight years old, and she'd just stumbled onto one of philosophy's biggest problems: qualia.

The Thing We Can't Explain

Qualia is the "what it's like-ness" of experience. The redness of red. The pain of a pinprick. The joy of understanding. It's the actual felt experience of something, which is completely different from knowing facts about it.

You can know that red light has a wavelength of 700 nanometers. You can know it's the color of blood and roses. You can know it often symbolizes passion or danger. But none of that tells you what it's like to SEE red.

Reading has the same problem, except worse.

When I read the word "ocean," something happens in my consciousness. Not just recall of facts (big, salty, wet). An actual experience floods in – the feeling of sand between toes, the sound of waves breathing, that specific kind of tired you get from swimming in waves, the way horizon makes you feel small but free.

But when Tommy reads "ocean," something completely different might happen. Or – and this is the heartbreaking part – maybe nothing happens at all.

The Kid Who Could Read Everything and Understand Nothing

Nathan could decode anything. ANYTHING. Give him a medical journal, he'd sound out every word perfectly. Pronunciation? Flawless. Fluency? Smooth as butter. Comprehension tests? Passed them all.

But something was missing.

When we read "The dog was happy to see his owner," Nathan could tell me the dog was happy. He could identify "happy" as an emotion. He could even infer the owner had been gone.

But when I asked, "Have you ever felt like that dog?" he looked at me blankly. "Felt like a dog?"

"No, felt that kind of happy. That someone-you-love-is-finally-home happy."

More blank staring.

Nathan could process words perfectly. But the qualia – the actual experience of meaning – wasn't happening. He was reading words the way a scanner reads barcodes. Input processed, information extracted, but no actual experience generated.

Why Some Kids Say Reading is Boring

When kids say reading is boring, we assume they mean the stories are boring, or sitting still is boring, or they'd rather be playing video games.

But what if reading genuinely IS boring for them because the qualia isn't happening?

Imagine if every time you looked at a sunset, instead of experiencing beauty and awe and that bittersweet end-of-day feeling, you just thought: "The sun is at a low angle creating longer wavelengths of visible light."

That would be boring as hell.

For some kids, that's what reading is. Words trigger definitions but not experiences. They're getting the information but not the qualia. They're watching a movie with the screen turned off, only getting the audio description.

The Difference Between Knowing and Feeling

Here's where it gets really interesting (and kind of disturbing):

We test reading comprehension by asking kids to extract information. "What color was the butterfly?" "Where did the family go?" "What happened first?"

But we never test whether they're experiencing the story. We never ask: "What did it feel like when the butterfly landed on her hand?" "How did your stomach feel when the family got lost?" "What happened in YOUR body when you read that first part?"

We're testing information transfer, not meaning-making. We're checking if they can decode and recall, not if they're actually experiencing what they read.

No wonder some kids ace reading tests but say they hate reading. They've learned to extract information from text, but nobody ever showed them how to experience it.

The Transmission Problem

So here's the million-dollar question: How do you teach qualia?

How do you show someone what it's LIKE to understand something, not just to know it?

You can't just explain it. I can't tell Nathan, "When you read 'happy,' you should feel a warm, light feeling in your chest." That's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen.

But – and this is why human teachers are irreplaceable – you CAN transmit qualia through shared experience.

When I read "The waves crashed against the rocks" and I unconsciously make a whooshing sound, when my shoulders tense slightly at "crashed," when my voice carries the rhythm of waves – I'm not just reading words. I'm experiencing them. And that experience is contagious.

Kids watch me experience words, and slowly, mysteriously, they learn to experience them too.

Why Some Kids Get It and Others Don't

This used to drive me crazy: Two kids, same background, same instruction, same everything. One becomes a reader who gets lost in books. The other technically reads but never enjoys it.

Now I think I understand: They're developing different types of reading. One is developing reading with qualia – rich, experiential, felt reading. The other is developing reading without qualia – accurate but empty, like a perfect translation by someone who doesn't speak the language of experience.

And here's the thing: We don't know how to reliably produce reading with qualia. We know how to teach decoding. We know how to build vocabulary. We know how to teach comprehension strategies.

But how do you teach someone to generate experience from symbols? How do you teach consciousness to bloom meaning from marks on a page?

The Beautiful Readers Who Can't Pass Tests

Then there's the opposite problem – kids like Maya.

Maya reads slowly. She struggles with multisyllabic words. Her fluency scores are below grade level. But when Maya reads, she EXPERIENCES everything.

Read her a description of a forest and she'll tell you she can smell the pine. Read about someone being embarrassed and her cheeks turn pink. She doesn't just read stories; she lives them.

But Maya fails our comprehension tests. Not because she doesn't understand – because she understands too much. Ask her "What color was the girl's dress?" and she'll say, "Well, it was blue, but it was the sad kind of blue, like when the sky is trying not to rain, and it made me think of my grandma's funeral dress, and..."

"Just blue, Maya. The answer is just blue."

We're punishing kids for having too much qualia, for experiencing too deeply, for meaning-making that goes beyond information extraction.

The Day I Realized I Was Teaching Wrong

Years ago, I was teaching "The Giver." We got to the part where Jonas first sees color, and I was explaining how the community had eliminated color to maintain sameness.

Sarah raised her hand: "But how did they experience things without color?"

"They just saw in black and white," I explained.

"No," she insisted. "HOW did they experience it? Like, what was it like for them? Did gray feel different from how we feel it? If you've never seen color, is gray even gray?"

And I realized: Sarah was asking about qualia. She wasn't asking for plot information. She was asking about the actual experience of consciousness in a world without color.

And I'd been answering the wrong question. For years, I'd been teaching the what but not the what-it's-like.

Creating Qualia-Rich Reading

Instead of just asking "What happened?" I would want to ask:

• "What did that feel like in your body when you read it?"

• "If this scene was a feeling, what feeling would it be?"

• "What does this word taste like?"

• "What memory does this remind you of?"

They're learning to generate qualia from text, to have experiences, not just decode information.

The Consciousness Problem

Here's what really bends my mind: We don't actually know how consciousness generates qualia. We don't know why electrical signals in the brain become the felt experience of understanding.

It's like magic. Actual magic. Symbols on a page become electrical patterns in the brain become the actual experience of meaning. And somehow, through the mysterious process of teaching and learning, we pass this magic from one consciousness to another.

"When you read 'happy,' don't just think about the definition. Remember your happiest moment. Feel it. Now read the sentence again."

Why This Matters More Than Everything Else

If kids are reading without qualia, they're not really reading. They're decoding. They're information processing. But they're not doing the thing that makes reading magical – generating experience from symbols.

This is why some kids who are "good readers" (technically proficient) never become readers (people who choose to read). They've learned to process text but not to experience it. Reading gives them information but not meaning, facts but not feelings, knowledge but not understanding.

And we're so focused on the measurable parts – fluency rates, comprehension scores, lexile levels – that we're missing the only part that really matters: the actual experience of meaning-making.

Tomorrow's Experiment

Qualia circles.

We're going to read one sentence. Just one. Maybe "The old woman walked slowly through the snow."

Then we're going to spend ten minutes just experiencing it. What does "old" feel like? Not what does it mean – what does it FEEL like? What does slowness feel like in your body? What's your qualia of snow?

We're going to share our experiences, not to get the "right" answer (there isn't one), but to show each other that words can generate infinite different experiences. That Jasmine was right – we ARE all reading different books even when the words are the same.

And maybe, just maybe, Nathan will start to feel something. Maybe Maya will realize her deep experiencing is a gift, not a problem. Maybe all of them will understand that reading isn't about extracting correct information from text.

It's about consciousness creating experience from symbols. It's about qualia blooming from squiggles on a page. It's about the magic of meaning-making that no machine can do because no machine has the what-it's-like-ness of understanding.

That's not just reading. That's consciousness itself, awakening to its own capacity to generate meaning.

And that's why your struggling readers aren't broken. They just haven't learned to generate qualia yet. They haven't discovered that reading is experiencing, not just processing.