>>14348161>But if you put both hands in cold water, and focus on one hand, you would experience more cold in that hand.The implication was that you wouldn't do that; instead you would focus on both hands and feel which of the sensations was of a greater degree. In fact, I just went to my kitchen and performed the experiment I described to make sure I wasn't bullshitting. I was perfectly able to feel both temperatures at once and feel the contrast between them, which produced a sense of asymmetry. If you doubt this you can try it yourself.
>And if you focus on something else entirely, you may even stop experiencing cold.Well, of course. That would be further evidence that it can be quantified. It is like a real object that is present or absent.
>You can't measure how much cold exactly there is in your consciousness.You're assuming that it needs to behave like a scalar number in order to be quantifiable. But it's probably better to think of "qualia" as being discrete values that form a partially ordered set (for example):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_setThey seem to follow the constraints of being transitive and anti-symmetric. For example, if feeling of warmth A is warmer than feeling of warmth B, and feeling of warmth B is warmer than feeling C, then feeling of warmth A must be warmer than feeling of warmth C (this can be tested in the same manner that I described earlier). For antisymmetry, it's clear that two different simultaneous sensations cannot both feel more intense than each other.
To my mind, this means that consciousness is quantifiable, since it is dictated by consistent logical rules.
