Types of Qualia
According to Claude there are 17 modalities of human consciousness.
Vision — color, shape, depth, motion
Audition — pitch, timbre, volume, spatial location
Olfaction — smell, deeply tied to memory
Gustation — taste (sweet, salt, sour, bitter, umami)
Touch / Somatosensation — pressure, texture, vibration, temperature
Proprioception — sense of limb/body position in space
Vestibular sense — balance, acceleration, gravity
Interoception — hunger, thirst, heartbeat, nausea, breathlessness
Nociception / Pain — sharp, burning, aching; both informational and affective
Pleasure / Hedonic tone — positive felt quality, not just absence of pain
Inner speech — internal monologue, "hearing" words without sound
Visual imagery / Mind's eye — "seeing" without visual input; varies from vivid to aphantasia
Emotion / Affect — fear, joy, sadness, anger; irreducible felt quality
Volition / Sense of agency — felt sense that you initiate actions
Temporal experience — felt flow of time, duration, "now"
Conceptual / Abstract thought — non-verbal, non-imagistic understanding (grasping that 7 is prime)
Intuition / Felt sense — pre-articulate, holistic, meaning-laden signal ("something feels off")
All of them are qualitatively distinct. You can’t describe what any of these are to a person that also do not possess them. You can’t explain sound to a fully deaf person, or colour to a truly blind person. It can’t be decomposed into simpler entities that they’ll understand. These are discrete, countable, and there are exactly seventeen of them.
I don’t believe for a second that this exhausts all possible qualia types. A more interesting question is, are there only finitely many distinct modalities of consciousness, or are there infinitely many of them?