Chalmers in his JCS 95 #2 article has helped promote a seemingly interminable discussion of qualia in print and on line (even in the voodoo land of #4). I think the great preponderance of discussion on qualia makes a big mistake, however, of which Chalmers is a good example. Correcting the mistake does not mean, unfortunately, that all problems go away, only that the problem of qualia is transformed, but hopefully, transformed in a way that there is some hope of coming to a resolution. I want to focus first on where the mistake is made (confining discussion to sensory qualia), and then sketch what I think is the true situation.
Chalmers says: "When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences goes along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms... What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience." (p.201, italics original)
The mistake, I think, is in overlooking that the experiencing of sensations is a purely theoretical notion, which strangely has no basis in experience itself. If a purely theoretical point makes such a hullabaloo of discussion, I say throw out the theory!
J.J.Gibson did not tire of pointing out that we never actually experience visual sensations. The color of things is on their surfaces, Gibson insists, not in our minds. Introspect as hard as you like, all you'll ever find is colored surfaces, never any visual sensations going on inside which somehow duplicate surface color in the world. (The mind is not a mirror of nature, as Rorty showed.) Same for dark, light and depth...they are all world-related, not in consciousness, not going on inside of us but out there in the world. If we listen to the sound of a clarinet with earphones, the sound is located in the world (between the ears) and there is no duplicate sensation to be found in the mind. The pungent smell of mothballs is in a part of the world we avoid getting close to.
It adds absolutely nothing (but a theoretically-based concept) to say, well, we experience world qualities. Our actual case is that we always find ourselves thrown in a world that is colored, bright, deep and filled with sounds and smells. The body, too, is part of the world and has its own qualities, painful or voluptuous as the case may be. If I smack my thumb with a hammer, the painful thumb is right there next to the nail. The pain is not in my mind, it's in my thumb, Lord knows. Pain here is more than a surface quality like color, but fills the world object. (We don't usually think of pain as being like color, a quality of the world, but the body is in the world and pain one of its irreducible (first-order) qualities, just as a homogeneously red surface can't be further analyzed with respect to color.) So all the term "experience" properly denotes is our thrownness in a world of qualities. No need to bring any consciousness in. What it's like to be the creatures we are is always finding ourselves already thrown in a world. What it's like to be a bat, who knows, but what it's like to be a human being is to find oneself encountering a world. In having made "experience" of sensations conscious or mental, Chalmers continues life for modernity, Descartes and the metaphysical tradition all the way back to Socrates.
What needs explaining is the world of qualities, not qualitative experiences. What must be accounted for is the redness of that round bulgy object over on the kitchen counter, forget about theoretical red sensations. The taken-for-granted world becomes problematic, which BTW potentially could give quite a wrench to common sense existence.
But if it's as straightforward as I make it out to be, how come discussion keeps barking up the wrong tree? Because my primrose path leads to disaster for metaphysics. Scientific description says light waves of a certain frequency are reflected from the object and reach the retina. And as I say, the object is red. (Note that to say "looks red" is to bring back conscious experience. So I say "is red," which is perfectly proper, since the surface of the tomato, after all, is red.) Electromagnetic frequency and object color nicely correlate, but science doesn't have the right categories to account for world qualities. A complete physics of water molecules and their emergent properties, for example, is categorically incongruent with water feeling wet. But if wetness is merely a sensation, then science doesn't have to worry; let the philosophers work it out. But it's the water that is wet, and there are no wet sensations in addition, and there's no stout scientific explanation of the wet quality. So there's a lot at stake here, if the problem is really that of world qualities, not mental qualia.
Behaviorists and functionalists have never faced up to the problem of world qualities. They either deny consciousness altogether or facilely give it over to machines but never see a problem in world qualities. Tom Clark's advanced version of functionalism, in which qualia are relational, seems consistent with my denial of qualia, but the problem of world qualities goes unremarked. Practical behaviorist folk and functionalists enamoured of technology confidently take the world to be unproblematic, but that's not so, once we get rid of qualia.
The world and its qualities. That's the problem. Forget qualia, zombies, and zimboes (merciful heaven).
Gordon Globus
gglobus@orion.oac.uci.edu
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