A matter of taste

In modern philosophy of the mind an unresolved issue is the question of qualia [update: I might be wrong about this actually]. What is 'whiteness' or 'sweetness,' as such? Well, I'm not a philosopher, but one thing that has interested me over the past few years has been the genetics of taste. Not surprisingly there seems to be a strong genetic and biological component in regards to perception and preferences. For example, it has long been known that there is variation in the extent of sensitivity to "bitter," assayed via the famous PTC test. Of late it has been shown that not only are there two phenotypic variants, rather, there are three, "non-tasters," "tasters" and "super-tasters," inherited in a simple Mendelian fashion. "Non-tasters" must inherit two copies of the loss of function allele to manifest, while "super-tasters" must inherit two functional alleles, while "tasters" carry one of each, so there ...