Phenomenal consciousness is diaphanous. When we attend to the features we are aware of in experience, the only features we can attend to are external properties of our environment. And yet, somehow, this enables us to know what our experiences are like.
Normally, learning what something is like is a matter of learning about the properties that it possesses: “What is the Empire State building like? It’s tall, it has many floors, etc.”
So the natural conclusion is that learning what an experience is like is a matter of learning about its properties too.
But how can I learn about my experience’s properties by attending to the features of my environment?
Answer: Experiences instantiate the very same properties that we’re aware of in our environment. However, they instantiate them in a different, immaterial way. While objects in the world might be materially red, experiences of those objects are “qualitatively” red.
To clarify: Sometimes, adverbs are used to indicate the way that a property is possessed, rather than forming a new property-specifying expression. (Tye, 2023)
For instance, “X is necessarily F” doesn’t ascribe a further modal property over and above F. Rather, it marks the way in which F is possessed (it is possessed necessarily rather than contingently).
We can say the same thing about material redness and qualitative redness.
Objects in the world are materially red and experiences of them are qualitatively red. Those adverbs mark two different ways that the same property can be possessed (in the scholastic tradition, these ways are known as the material and immaterial mode).
So when I attend to the features that are materially instantiated in my environment, I am simultaneously aware of the properties that are qualitatively instantiated in my mind. This is because those properties are one and the same.
If we accept this sort of view, physicalism must be abandoned. No amount of physical facts imply anything whatsoever about qualitative properties possessed by experiences. Experiences would involve immaterial qualia that purely physical duplicates of our world would not include.
However, there is an alternative way to account for our knowledge of what experiences are like that is consistent with physicalism.
In experience, we are directly presented with external features of our environment. In order to respond consistently and appropriately to these features, there must be intrinsic elements of our experiences that systematically correspond to the external properties that they represent. These are needed so that our experiences cause us to respond in ways that correspond to how things are in our environment.
So, according to this alternative proposal, when we attend to the environmental features presented by our experiences, we only learn what our experiences are “like” in a derivative sense: We learn which environmental features their intrinsic elements structurally correspond to. We learn that experiences are red* and triangular* (understood as functional counterparts to the worldly properties), rather than red and triangular. (Sellars, 1960)
When Mary exclaims “Aha! *That’s* what it is like to experience a red tomato!” She is discovering that certain features in her environment are structurally analogous, within an appropriate network of elements, to intrinsic elements that characterize experiences of red tomatoes. On this view, what an experience is “structurally like” is what we are actually talking about when we talk about phenomenal character.
If we accept this alternative view, standard objections to a priori physicalism no longer pose a threat. We are free to hold that facts about what experiences are like* (in the appropriately analyzed sense) are straightforwardly entailed by the fundamental physical facts. Once we know the fundamental physical truths, we can thereby deduce whether someone is having a green* experience or a red* experience simply by determining whether the intrinsic elements of their experience functionally correspond to green things or red things.
But isn’t there still a further question about whether there is anything it is like to be in that green* or red* state? No. Once we recognize that what an experience is like* is a matter of what its intrinsic elements functionally correspond to, there is no additional problem to solve. The correct analysis of “what it’s like to experience…” reports dissolves the hard problem.
The most pressing objection to a priori physicalism is the absurdity of denying the reality of consciousness. According to their critics, a priori physicalists are forced to deny the most obvious fact in the universe: That there is something it is like to experience reality. But this critique begs the question by assuming that “what an experience is like” must be understood in terms of qualia. The a priori physicalist offers an alternative analysis of such statements that they can affirm. The obvious truth that there is something it is like to see red does not imply that the final analysis of such statements is equally apparent. The charge of absurdity only remains compelling as long as the a priori physicalist’s central contention is ignored.
Like their anti-physicalist opponents, a priori physicalists affirm the metaphysical possibility of philosophical zombies. They hold that such creatures are possible because they are actual. In my view, this proposal becomes far less strange once it is grounded in a linguistic analysis of our reports about phenomenal consciousness.
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