As far as I can tell, no, he instead means how things feel, e.g. the pleasure / pain / neutral triangle continuum above. Here he summarises his Principia Qualia like so:
PQ begins by considering a rather modest question: what is emotional valence? What makes some things feel better than others?
This sounds like the sort of clear-cut puzzle affective neuroscience should be able to solve, yet all existing answers to this question are incoherent or circular. Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is an example of the kind of quantitative theory which could in theory address valence in a principled way, but unfortunately the current version of IIT is both flawed and incomplete. I offer a framework to resolve generalize IIT by distilling the problem of consciousness into eight discrete & modular sub-problems (of which IIT directly addresses five).
Finally, I return to valence, and offer a crisp, falsifiable hypothesis as to what it is in terms of something like IIT’s output, and discuss novel implications for neuroscience.
As far as I can tell, no, he instead means how things feel, e.g. the pleasure / pain / neutral triangle continuum above. Here he summarises his Principia Qualia like so: