I heartily agree with this. Subjective experience is private precisely because of physicalism — we can’t occupy the minds of others because we don’t occupy their bodies. That makes the science of consciousness hard and limited. It doesn’t make qualia nonexistent.
Perhaps something to add to the conversation is the color magenta. It doesn’t exist in a rainbow. It only exists in the minds of animals with 3 color cones who can see that plants (or paints) reflect 2 non-consecutive bands of light. So, we can’t objectively recreate magenta using prisms and white light. We need to interrogate subjective experience to understand this vividly imagined color.
For more on that, see the bottom of my post on an evolutionary response to Hume’s missing shade of blue:
It's funny how such a common sense and science based perspective ends up being called illusionism. I guess it shows how pervasive that kind of Cartesian inner theatre perspective is.
It feels mysterious only if you forget just how powerful the brain is, and how long it has been evolving for.
I cannot grasp how anyone can believe that empiricism will one day explain consciousness or even prove it exists. The problem seems to be that intentional consciousness is presumed to be all there is to consciousness, since few people bother to take a scientific approach and actually study what they're speculating about.
I heartily agree with this. Subjective experience is private precisely because of physicalism — we can’t occupy the minds of others because we don’t occupy their bodies. That makes the science of consciousness hard and limited. It doesn’t make qualia nonexistent.
Perhaps something to add to the conversation is the color magenta. It doesn’t exist in a rainbow. It only exists in the minds of animals with 3 color cones who can see that plants (or paints) reflect 2 non-consecutive bands of light. So, we can’t objectively recreate magenta using prisms and white light. We need to interrogate subjective experience to understand this vividly imagined color.
For more on that, see the bottom of my post on an evolutionary response to Hume’s missing shade of blue:
https://www.evphil.com/blog/an-evolutionary-response-to-humes-missing-shade-of-blue
Thanks for the comment! It's great to see philosophers who take evolution seriously.
It's funny how such a common sense and science based perspective ends up being called illusionism. I guess it shows how pervasive that kind of Cartesian inner theatre perspective is.
It feels mysterious only if you forget just how powerful the brain is, and how long it has been evolving for.
I cannot grasp how anyone can believe that empiricism will one day explain consciousness or even prove it exists. The problem seems to be that intentional consciousness is presumed to be all there is to consciousness, since few people bother to take a scientific approach and actually study what they're speculating about.
Great response to Keith Frankish. You and I are on the same page!
This is great, Walter. I don't think we agree on what exactly we can discover, but I'm:
1. Totally against those who wave away the Hard Problem'
2. In full agreement with your penultimate paragraph here. (Not counting the italicized paragraphs ;-)