🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep28.005156.11177@sophia.smith.edu> orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke) writes:

>RH:
>>>Show me a point of difference between my conscious experiences and the
>>>cor[r]elated physical events in my brain.
>
>DC:
>>Just about anything -- e.g. the blueness of my blue-experiences.
>
>It would be useful to me if you could expand on this a bit.  For
>certainly the experience of 475 nanometer electromagnetic radiation
>has to feel like something to us (since we "feel" everything we
>experience), and we happen to label this something blueness.  Are you
>seeking an explanation of why blue light isn't experienced as,
>say, pain?  For that I think we would have to turn to the evolutionary
>development of the brain.

Precisely what needs to be explained is why that radiation "feels"
like anything at all -- i.e. why that all physical processing is
accompanied by an experiential feel -- so your parenthetical
explanation here won't do.  There is also the secondary question
of why it feels like *that* rather than like *this* -- it seems
perfectly coherent that our blue experiences and red experiences
could be systematically inverted, for instance.  Even when all
the physical facts are in, it seems arbitrary why one kind of process
is accompanied by this experience, and another kind by that one.
As I said in another post, evolution won't do as an explanation,
as it will only get you as far as the current physical details.
Evolution is irrelevant to the question of why *this* physical
sructure gives rise to *this* experiential feel.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."