The Sony Qualia 007 SACD was originally announced by Sony in Japan on June 10, 2003, and is only now making it to North America.
Sony Electronics announced at CES 2005 that the QUALIA 007 will be available next month for approximately $12,500.
Despite having been out for 1.5 years, there seem to be no reviews of the 007 available on the internet. I suppose that nobody could justify that level of expenditure, and/or Sony did not provide any loaners. The best data that I was able to find was this product pdf file from Sony. I’m not sure if I’m reading the specs correctly, but the unit seems to have a frequency response of 40Hz-70kHz … if so, the 007 is not quite up to SACD standards, which are 2-100kHz.
Sony’s Qualia appellation is an allusion to the ethereal properties of qualia:
Qualia include the ways things look, sound and smell, the way it feels to have a pain, and more generally, what it’s like to have experiential mental states. Qualia are experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions and, more controversially, thoughts and desires as well. But, so defined, who could deny that qualia exist? Although the existence of subjective experience is not (or anyway should not be) controversial, qualewhich is more clearly a technical term than subjective experience is more often used by those who are inclined to reject the common-sense conception of subjective experience. Here is a first approximation to a statement of what is controversial: whether the phenomenology of experience can be exhaustively analyzed in intentional, functional or purely cognitive terms. Opponents of qualia think that the phenomenology of an experience can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of its representational or intentional content (representationism); or that the phenomenology of experience can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of its causal role (functionalism), or that having a subjective experiential state can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of having a state that is cognitively monitored in a certain way or accompanied by a thought to the effect that I have that state. If we include in the definition of qualia the idea that the phenomenology of experience outruns such intentional, functional and cognitive analyses, then it is controversial whether there are qualia. This definition of `qualia’ is controversial in a respect that is familiar in philosophy. A technical term is often a locus of disagreement, and the warring parties will often disagree about what the important parameters of disagreement are. Dennett (1988), for example, assumes that it is of the essence of qualia to be intrinsic (in the sense of atomic, unanalyzable and non-relational), private (in the sense that any objective test would miss the target), incorrigible (to believe one has one is to have one) and non-physical. Dennett says there are no qualia. Hence the title of his paper, Quining Qualia. (To Quine, is to deny resolutely the existence of importance of something real or significant.) Of course, Dennett is free to use qualia as he likes, but a defender of a scientific approach to qualia (the point of view of the author of this entry) will prefer a definition of qualia that allows that science can investigate qualia, that qualia may turn out to be physical, and even that we may discover aspects of introspective beliefs about ones qualia can be mistaken. Indeed, I dont see that a scientific approach can rule out in advance that we could discover, empirically, that qualia are intentional, functional or cognitive. So I prefer to define quale as an aspect of subjective experience that cannot be shown by a priori or other armchair means to be intentional, functional or cognitive. This is an epistemic rather than a metaphysical conception of a quale. Importantly, there is nothing in the conception of qualia that I am advocating that is incompatible with the claim that a quale is a physical state, just as heat is molecular kinetic energy and light is electromagnetic radiation. An empirical reductionist thesis about qualia is legitimatewhat is not legitimate is an armchair reductive analysis of qualia (e.g. in functional, representational or cognitive terms).-N. Block (Ph.D., Harvard), Professor of Philosophy and Psychology NYU
Consult this link for a good discussion of Phenomenology.
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Today, I can’t even imagine any product from a major company being out for a year and a half with no reviews on the Internet.