HOT CHILLIES

The Scoville Heat Unit is a measure of chillies: the higher the number of units the hotter the chilli. The unit is named after Wilbur Scoville who invented it in 1912. By this standard a habanero chilli is hotter than a scotch bonnet, a cayenne not as hot as a Thai chilli.

At first the measurement was based on the subjective judgement of the taste. People would report how hot the different chillies tasted to them; as a result of their responses the chillies would be ranked in order of hotness.

But asking people how they rate a taste on a scale is not a very scientific method of measurement. Better to have an objective test with the evidence in public, available to be checked by anyone who might doubt it and registered in documents in an official way.

That is one of the troubles with consciousness when considered from the standpoint of science. You cannot put it into a test tube, beside a Geiger counter, on scales to be weighed, alongside a ruler; you cannot insert a thermometer into it. You cannot actually measure the something-it-is-like quality of the taste of a chilli. So, since you need public measurements to meet the standards required for science, you have to measure something else.

What can be measured is the number of capsaicinoids present in the chilli. Capsaicinoids are a class of compounds found in plants in the capsicum family which includes chillies. 

But when the caspsaicinoid measurement has been taken and logged, do we now have a record of the taste, of how hot it actually is to the person consuming it? I don’t think that we do. And the  reason I would offer for this failure is the gulf between the physical, the quantitative and the non-physical, the qualitative.

We can certainly find a correlation between the number of capsaicinoids present in the chilli and the verbal reports of those eating them. But what any amount of reporting will not reveal is whether two people who, say, agree that a habanero chilli registers at point 8 on a hotness scale of 1 to 10, are actually having the same taste experience.

Consciousness does not seem to be accessible to any quantitative measuring. It is quite distinct from the things that are material, that are available in the public domain to provide public measurable evidence.