Is qualia the same among different people?

 It is said that we can't know for certain if one person's experience is the same as another's. For example, just because two people name the same color "red" does not mean that they experience the same thing.

But, I'd like to poke some holes in this idea. Of course, we cannot reach certainty at this point, since we do not understand exactly how the brain generates our experience (or how they correlate). But the way to induce is to piece together small pieces to form a picture, rather than to prove a theory beyond a shadow of a doubt. You cannot prove that which you have not yet discovered, and the process of discovery has to be understood as vitally important, for us to allow its precarious nature to exist within our mind.

So if we take this principle of induction as valid, and apply it here, let's consider the reasons why it is reasonable to expect that our qualia (conscious experience) IS actually the same, or very similar.

For starters, we can observe the general nature of living things within the same species. We have genetic variations, but there are certainly more things in common than differences. We all have the same organs that perform the same functions. We all have the same structure of a brain that develops similarly. Yes, there are variations, but compare a human being to a leaf or a rock, and it is immediately clear that we are more alike than different.

We also know that consciousness emerged later on in evolution, and not right from the start, which means that consciousness is a result of evolution, perhaps a likely result (maybe even inevitable), but still, it is a process which is subject to all the principles of evolution, just like other processes, such as breathing or moving.

Therefore, our consciousness can be judged the same. Do different people have different legs? There are variations, but essentially, they still work the same and produce the same function. Same thing goes for all other things, such as the immune system, circulatory system and so on.

I think this makes it LIKELY that this is also true of consciousness and of the brain.

And so this means that while there may be slight variations in the "red" qualia, it is far more likely that it is the same rather than different. Just like the lungs of human beings are more the same than different.

Also, I think it helps us understand out own consciousness better, as a process which undergoes selective pressure to produce survival and reproduction (or to carry on the genes).

OK so. "smart intellectuals" may put you on the stand and remind you that "oh no, you cannot be certain that your red is the same as the other person's red, and don't jump to conclusions blah blah blah", but the INDUCTION way of thinking would suggest putting more weight on all the "common sense" factors that may be hard to name, that suggest that there is no bloody reason why evolution would work so hard to produce a solution that works, only to modify it drastically among the individuals of the same species. Right. So screw the skeptic intellectuals and their methodologies.

OK, that's what I wanted to say, only without aiming at starting a war with anyone. Red is red. More or less.

Energy limits and its effect on the origin of life

We know that there's a connection between the emergence of life and *energy*. And some have speculated that energy is the cause that life emerges.

I don't think that energy is the cause, it's a necessary condition. But here is what I realized: It is very useful to ask what *limits* the amount of energy in an environment that sustains life. Are there upper and lower limits, and if so - what is the reason for those?

OK so the lower limit is easy when we think of the extreme of 0 Kelvin (absolute no movement). Obviously if there is no movement, there can be no life, because nothing can replicate, nothing new can get created.

How about the upper limit? Well, we know that living things (at least as we know them on earth), get scorched by fire or by the sun. However, we also see that different living things can handle different levels and types of energy depending on the environment in which they develop. Deep sea creatures can withstand high pressure, and land creatures have better tolerance for UV light than underground dwellers. In fact, we NEED a certain amount of light energy in order to exist. Too much energy from the sun and we burn up.

If you expose a living thing to more energy than it can process while maintaining its shape, it breaks down. And so life is a thing that organizes itself around being able to absorb the energy in its environment in order to create and re-create its physical composition.

So in theory, if there were a combination of self replicating molecules that could use an intense amount of energy to create more of their molecular structure - we could have life that exists in higher energy environment. However, when we reach a point where the energy causes covalent bonds to break, then no molecule formation is even possible. And that would be a theoretical upper limit.

Also, there may not BE that many combinations for the basic building blocks that answer all the criteria that life requires to originate. And if RNA/ DNA are the only possibility (along with the variety of proteins and other structures that they generate), then it would be their specific properties that determine the upper limit on energy that can sustain life.

So, energy is a necessary component for the phenomenon of life, but it is not its cause.

Oh, one more thing: Energy fluctuation is not good for living things, because we evolve to optimally process a specific set of conditions. When you start to "rock the boat" too much (making it too cold or too hot, too much external pressure or not enough), then things begin to fall apart. Not because life under those conditions is not possible, but because this specific living thing has not evolved in that environment.