Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

I recently read the essay by China Miéville “Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism” which is all about criticizing Marxism and its ontological materialism for often not taking the “hard problem of consciousness” seriously. He claims its impossible for metaphysical materialism to account for consciousness. How is it possible to go from dead matter to living thought, from quantity to quality? It’s my contention that this answer is largely provided within materialist semiotics, the topic of my recent essay collection. In my book, I explain precisely how perceptrons and neural nets in general show how you can go from Boolean binary logic to the logic of the sign, and I also say that ideas in the mind are signs. What I did not do, however, because I did not consider it a matter of primary importance, was explicitly articulate what the connection between these things was with consciousness. Since this has been raised as an omission in Marxism, I will briefly do that articulating here in the hope that the strength of the materialist semiotics framework can become more well known among Marxists for answering philosophical problems such as these.

To get straight to the point, I will attempt to show how one can construct “qualia” as phenomenal experience from the materiality of a signified, with neural nets being a toy example of such material signifieds. This argument could have been put together by anyone familiar with Saussurean structuralist linguistics and artificial intelligence since the 1960s, but, as far as I’m aware, has not been presented for the dual reason that Saussure, whose twosided sign is more fundamental than Pierce’s threesided version, did not consider ideas as signs but rather ideas and other mental constructs like memories of experiences as the signifieds internal to signs, and also because structuralist linguistics fell out of favor in academia in the 80s and 90s due to attacks from Chomskyian linguistics and post-structuralism. If someone else has made this argument before, I would love to be pointed towards it, as I’m sure more intelligent thinkers could do it better, but as I have not seen it before, I am compelled to stick my neck out on these virgin, unexplored grounds.

Qualia is essentially a word for phenomenal experience, here I’ll refer to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.¹

When I say that ideas are signs, I also mean that qualia are signs. Some people object to this level of extrapolation of linguistic, communicative frameworks to internal states of the mind, however the information theoretic reasons that signs have meaning also apply to all thoughts and experiences. A sign has meaning by comparison to things that it’s not. Saussure in his “Course in General Linguistics” shows effectively how the differentiation of a given spoken word from other words is what allows us to assign a meaning to it, if a word begins to be pronounced in two different ways in different contexts then this difference in pronunciation can take on a conceptual difference². But this logic also applies to signifieds, individual meanings must be differentiated from each other in order for them to be connected back to signifiers. Philosophers obsessed with qualia often ask things like what gives the red of a rose its redness. From a semiotic perspective the answer is ready at hand: the redness of a rose comes from its differentiation from green and black and blue and all the other colors of all the other objects and their associated textures, smells, etc. Search your feelings and you’ll know it’s true, imagine a rose right now, how do you know it’s a rose in your mind? People might produce a more or less fuzzy and three dimensional projection of a rose in their mind, but no matter how sharp it is, the qualities the mental construct has are present on a spectrum where the other positions of that spectrum are other possible characteristics of objects. Green vs woody stems, red petals vs white ones, thorns vs fuzz, and so on.

Why do we need differentiation between things to experience and imagine things? For the same reason you can’t send a message without differentiation. The cyberneticist Ross Ashby gives the example of a woman who is trying to pass a message to her husband in prison when she gives him a cup of coffee, if they have a set of pre-established codes, any aspect of the coffee could be used to pass on a message, such as the temperature, level of sugar and milk. A prison warden trying to prevent such a message being passed could interfere with it by specifying all the qualities of the coffee himself, if the coffee can only be in one specific state, then no message can be passed from the woman to her husband. When someone asks you to picture the redness of a rose, how does your mind know which specific set of phenomenal experiences to draw upon? After all, if you’re reading this, you must have been alive for more than a few years now, and have many possible memories to draw upon. In order for the mind to draw up memories and other information relevant to our current context, those memories and experiences must be differentiated from each other, otherwise you would recall all of it all the time and there would be nothing specific about the redness of red compared to any other experience. In order for the philosophers of the problem of hard consciousness to mean anything in their proclamations, this differentiation is necessary.

Without knowing anything about the science of matter and physics this allows us to get at a very important fact, any subjective experience implies an objective world, a substance outside of the experience of that thought. To understand why, consider that by virtue of experiencing the specific redness of the rose, and not every other experience in your memory, there must be a mapping between qualia, between signs, which your conscious mind is not privy to. If someone shouted a bunch of random words which you then visualize the reference of, like dog, car and TV, you begin thinking something which was not already on your mind before the interjection, suddenly all the related memories and sensations come flooding back, more or less intensely. How did you know to recall those specific sensations? It can only be because the mapping of those sensations exists without your awareness of it. This is even true if we leave the realm of explicit memories and enter the world of purely “present tense” experience. When you look at the room around you you’ll only be able to identify objects by differentiating them from the rest of the room, how do you make the choice of how and where to make that differentiation? The mapping of that division and the relationships used to create it doesn’t exist in your conscious awareness, nor could it except as an abstraction. As Lacan said, the unconscious is structured like a language. It, our unconscious mind, is a set of correlations and anti-correlations which exists behind our backs but is ready at hand to provide meaning to any given experience. This set of correlations and anti-correlations which make up a signified is the substance which all specific expressions of thought and language rest on, and specifically it is a substance, it must exist objectively in order for the subjective, the specific experience of the redness of red, to exist.

This is why a P-zombie, a person materially identical to a conscious human but without qualia, cannot exist. If experience implies a separate substance to create the network of signifieds that back that up, then a copy which duplicates all the specificity of a being’s substance will include this substance that carries the signifieds. Some may argue this substance is not matter, but if it is truly a substance that exists outside of the subject then it can in principle be scientifically understood in the same way as matter. An argument from the other direction, the direction of consciousness, could be that even if a person has the substance of signifieds, they could just as well speak of the redness of red while not actually experiencing it. Not so. If a person is indeed correlating and anti-correlating the visual input to all the other visual and other inputs, then they have the experience of the redness of red when they speak of it, whether they are aware of it or not. Consciousness may require self reflection, but qualia, as the pure experience of something, does not. After all, if someone experiences a hallucination which makes them experience ego death and lose their sense of self, they will still speak of the strange experience afterwards, if they can indeed speak of it. Similarly, in dreams we have experiences even if we’re not actually aware we’re having them.

Now that we’ve established that ideas and qualia are signs, we can examine how one can build it in a lab. Here, the perceptron is the qualia machine par excellence. A perceptron, much credit to its name, takes in external signals and adjusts a set of numerical weights which manipulate the magnitude of the signal it receives such that the signal could be categorized into distinct classifications, essentially creating a system of signs from scratch where each classified input is the signified and the output is the signifier. The classified input is directly analogous to phenomenal experience, and indeed the machine was inspired by biological sensory systems. Certainly, a simple perceptron in its original configuration isn’t going to have as many or as complex correlations making up its signifieds as humans, but many cutting edge AI systems often built on the same foundations (the multilayer perceptron) are getting close. For those who might object that qualia is merely these set of connections between inputs because observing the connections won’t get you an understanding of the redness as red, is too abstract and intellectual, I would say that of course, qualia is not just the connections themselves, but the connections when tied to specific inputs. Hence the redness of red is specifically created by visual input and the differentiation of that input. This could even include the noise and limits of the specific input medium. But that doesn’t change the fact that the perceptron, indeed, has qualia.

Philosophers like Nick Land have suggested that artificial intelligence is not a subject, but a pure object, a thing in itself, a noumena in Kant’s language. But he misunderstands that to the extent AI can have intelligence, it must have negativity in the same sense that humans do to produce signifieds. This is the negativity of meaning being created by comparisons to all other objects rather than existing positively in the object itself. This is the very same meaning which resides in the neural net and even the most basic digital computer, what is the bit, the 1 and 0 pair, other than negativity distilled? The 1 is only yes or TRUE by not being 0 or FALSE. In this way we can even speak of the phenomenology of computer file systems, or even primitive bacterial life. Any and all systems of signs that process an input according to a preexisting code necessarily have qualia, and share the sort of negativity which philosophers have so long restricted to the human subject. Your dog has qualia, your phone has qualia, your infection has qualia. Qualia is nothing special, nor is going from quantity to quality, as the perceptron handily shows. The hard problem of consciousness should have been dismissed over 50 years ago, we had the know-how, but for some reason all the pieces of the puzzle got buried into obscurity while these thought experiments proliferated.

1. Tye, Michael, “Qualia”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/qualia/>.

2. “Once sound change has created a regular phonetic difference between two series of terms contrasting in value, the mind seizes upon this material difference and endows it with significance, making it a bearer of the conceptual difference” Ferdinand De Saussure, Roy Harris, and Bloomsbury Publishing. (1916) 2016. Course in General Linguistics. London Etc.: Bloomsbury.