Qualia as the Residue of Linguistic Articulation

This paper attempts to reinterpret qualia not as mysterious entities that lie beyond physical explanation, but as phenomena arising from the structural relationship between consciousness and language. Traditionally, qualia have been described as the qualitative character of subjective experience, such as “what it is like to see red” or “what it is like to feel pain.” However, this understanding often car ries the risk of treating qualia as belonging to a special domain beyond physical or functional explanation, thereby unnecessarily mystifying the problem of consciousness. In this paper, consciousness is understood as a three layer structure. The first lay er consists of bodily, affective, and parallel information processing. The second layer consists of linguistic and serial processing. The third layer consists of a self referential re access loop, hereafter called the re reference loop. Within this framewo rk, qualia are defined as subjective residues: aspects of parallel information from the first layer that cannot fully pass through the linguistic filter of the second layer, and whose untranslated remainder is dynamically retained in the third layer as “an experience happening to me.” Here, “residue” does not mean a mere leftover, but an essential aspect of experience that remains unarticulated because human experience is not originally structured in linguistic form. According to this framework, qualia are not mysterious entities existing somewhere inside the mind. Rather, they should be understood as structural phenomena arising from the interrelation of body, emotion, memory, linguistic articulation, and self reference. Through this three layer interpretat ion, the paper presents a theoretical framework for explaining the subjectivity, privacy, difficulty of full linguistic articulation, and strong sense of reality associated with qualia in terms of the structural relationship between consciousness and language.