Are Qualia a Pseudoproblem? Consciousness Scientists Reconsider the Role of Experience

Qualia, the felt qualities of experience that have anchored decades of debate about consciousness, may have exhausted their usefulness as a scientific concept. That is the provocative question raised by an editorial published in Frontiers in Psychology on 28 October 2026, which introduces a Research Topic titled “The end of qualia. Do we still need phenomenology in the science of consciousness?” The editorial, authored by Michela Balconi, Valentina Cardella, Richard Greene, Riccardo Manzotti, Gianfranco Pecchinenda, Pietro Perconti and Silvano Zipoli Caiani, gathers ten contributions that approach the question from sharply different metaphysical and methodological positions, and it argues that the time has come for a systematic reassessment of what qualia still do for consciousness science.

The editorial’s argument begins with an acknowledgment of qualia’s historical achievements. Qualia brought into focus whether explaining the availability of information for reasoning, verbal report and the control of action would suffice to explain conscious experience. A science confined to what philosophers call access consciousness would have to justify that restriction and explain what became of the experiential dimension. In this sense, the debate about qualia helped establish experience as something any adequate account of consciousness must address. Alongside this contribution, however, qualia acquired a second role: they became central to a challenge to physicalism, because the qualitative side of consciousness appeared to possess features that even a complete physical description would necessarily leave out.

The editorial is careful to separate two things that have often been conflated. Criticism of physicalism does not itself entail skepticism about a science of consciousness. Nevertheless, the difficulty of explaining experience has frequently been interpreted as evidence of a principled limit to scientific explanation. On that reading, qualia identify something science is constitutionally unable to explain, and the explanatory gap becomes a reason to doubt the prospects of the entire enterprise. The Research Topic asks whether this second role may have run its course. A concept can help make a problem visible while eventually constraining the ways in which it can be investigated, and the editors ask what explanatory work qualia still perform today, which assumptions associated with them remain productive, and which deserve reconsideration.

Several of the ten contributions reopen the metaphysical architecture of the problem. Sanfey treats the simultaneity of observer and observed as both the source of the hard problem and a bridge between subjective and physical descriptions, assigning conscious presence a causal role that sequential observation cannot capture. Rail and Selby identify five invariants of experience, namely situated spatiality, temporal and multimodal integration, intentionality, and pre-reflective selfhood, and seek their formal unity through what they call the “symintentry” hypothesis. Gärtner and Cordovil challenge the demand that consciousness reduce to microphysical properties, arguing that strict microphysical grounding is problematic even in physics and chemistry, so phenomenal consciousness may not be scientifically exceptional. The editorial notes that these proposals disagree sharply, but that each rejects the assumption that the only alternatives are reductive microphysicalism and an isolated phenomenal realm.

The pressure on qualia becomes explicit in Loginov’s analysis of David Chalmers’s Moorean argument against illusionism. Chalmers’s argument holds that the existence of experience is as certain as common-sense certainties like the existence of external objects. Loginov counters that the claim that experience possesses an irreducible qualitative character is not an ordinary common-sense certainty analogous to Moore’s claim. It depends, he argues, on a specialized philosophical vocabulary, while ordinary descriptions of experience remain open to functional interpretation. This move strikes directly at the epistemic foundation on which the reality of qualia is often said to rest, suggesting that the certainty philosophers report may be an artifact of the technical language they use rather than a datum about the world.

A stronger eliminativist case is advanced by Manzotti and Perconti in a paper titled “Quining Qualia Again: Ten Reasons.” Its cumulative arguments target epiphenomenality, the regress of an inner observer, the empirical undetectability of qualia, their epistemic redundancy, the unreliability of introspection, linguistic reification, phenomenal immediacy, and the cultural survival of residual dualism. Crucially, the paper does not deny that something appears. What it denies is that appearing is correctly described by positing private inner properties. Instead, the authors propose that experience is the world as it exists in relation to a living body, a relational view that dissolves the inner theater rather than populating it. Other contributors revise rather than eliminate the concept: Harris recasts qualia as “query acts,” dynamic processes in which predictive systems interrogate sensory input, preserving privacy and subjectivity while connecting phenomenological intentionality to predictive error coding, and Gomez argues that the traditional focus on color overlooks the more fundamental problem of experienced spatiality, which the hard problem may already presuppose.

The strongest practical answer to the Research Topic’s subtitle question comes from Troncoso and colleagues, whose empirical study combines a face-to-face encounter with micro-phenomenological interviews, intersubjective validation and quantitative analysis. From this combination they identify four temporally unfolding structures of embodied response to another person’s suffering, ranging from relational disengagement to compassionate balanced support. The study demonstrates that first-person evidence need not be treated as an incorrigible inventory of private contents. Carefully elicited reports can disclose diachronic, bodily, motivational and inter-affective organization that conventional questionnaires miss. In this work, phenomenology functions as a revisable empirical method rather than a foundational doctrine, offering a concrete model of how disciplined inquiry into experience can contribute to consciousness science even as its conceptual vocabulary changes.

Two further contributions broaden the relational and methodological picture. Luo’s mirror-induced origination hypothesis models mental self-consciousness as an evolutionary transformation produced through recursive encounters among brain, body, perceptual attributes and mirror image, an eight-stage model whose eventual empirical fate remains open but which treats self-consciousness as an achievement rather than a primitive inner given. Von Schulz, drawing on the cultural-historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky, supplies a historical warning against reducing psychology to stimulus and response, arguing that cultural-historical and theoretical interpretation are needed to understand human experience without forcing a choice between idealism and materialism. Together with the empirical and metaphysical contributions, these papers frame the collection’s central task: deciding whether qualia support explanations or merely generate questions that research can pursue.

The editorial closes with a possibility stated in explicitly Kuhnian terms. It may be that the problem of qualia was, in the end, a pseudoproblem in Thomas Kuhn’s technical sense: a puzzle produced by a paradigm rather than found in nature. For Kuhn, normal science does not simply meet its problems; it makes them, because a paradigm decides in advance what counts as a legitimate question, what an answer should look like, and which leftovers must be explained away. On this reading, qualia were never a datum. Nobody has ever run into a quale the way one runs into a rock, a color or a pain; what we run into is the red apple, the sour lemon, the music in the room. The quale enters the picture only afterwards, when a metaphysical assumption has already split the world into a physical side stripped of every quality and a subject who must put those qualities back, privately and on the inside. The editorial traces that assumption to the seventeenth-century separation of subject from object that Galileo, Descartes and Locke turned into the default settings of modern thought.

If that diagnosis is right, the history of qualia looks less like the stubborn resistance of a mystery and more like the familiar course of a paradigm in crisis, with anomalies piling up, ad hoc hypotheses multiplying, from epiphenomena and emergent properties to proto-experiential dust spread through the cosmos, and a vocabulary growing more refined as it moves further from any possible test. Some questions are never answered; they are dissolved. Nobody measures the Earth’s velocity relative to the ether anymore, and nobody weighs phlogiston. The same could happen to qualia: if we stop assuming a subject closed off from the world, with experience locked inside the skull like a private film, the question of how the brain produces qualities may turn out to have no object. What would remain is not a smaller mystery but a different task, explaining how the world, in the right physical circumstances, becomes the world we experience. The editorial presents this as a quieter but more radical outcome than winning or losing the qualia debate, and suggests the Research Topic may contribute to that shift, after roughly half a century spent trying to naturalize something the world never contained. The problem would not be solved; it would simply be taken off the agenda.

Subject of Research: An editorial introducing a Research Topic of ten contributions reassessing the role of qualia and phenomenology in the science of consciousness.

Article Title: Editorial: The end of qualia. Do we still need phenomenology in the science of consciousness?

Article References: Balconi, M., Cardella, V., Greene, R., Manzotti, R., Pecchinenda, G., Perconti, P., & Zipoli Caiani, S. (2026). Editorial: The end of qualia. Do we still need phenomenology in the science of consciousness?. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 2016636. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.2016636

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.2016636

Keywords: consciousness, qualia, phenomenology, illusionism, hard problem, physicalism, micro-phenomenology, self-consciousness, Chalmers, Kuhn, Editorial, still