Let me sketch a way that I think things may have gotten confused. We begin by having words for things we experience in the world, such as colors and wetnesses and distances: 'blue', 'sticky', 'close', etc.. However, we can be mistaken about things, and systematically biassed in various ways, and so on. This leads us to distinguish the world as it is, in fact, from the way the world seems to be, and to admit the possibility of error. But now there is a difficulty in how to express such an error. Suppose my hands are pink but by a trick of the light they look grey. Surely my hands ARE pink, but to say that they SEEM grey is not lying: it accurately reports a mistaken impression that I have. One can imagine an argument: My hands are grey! - no, theyre pink. -They seem grey to me! - Maybe they do, but then your not seeing them accurately -Well, Im seeing SOMETHING accurately! Are you telling me that you know better than I do what I see? You accusing me of lying? -NO, no, Im sure you really are having a grey-hand-experience, if thats what you say you can see.
But now we have taken a dangerous step. As soon as we start to talk about the experiences as real things in themselves, all kinds of problems start. Clearly we must avoid the homuncular fallacy of saying that we see our seeings and hearing our hearings and so on. We might just say we expereince all these qualiar things, but that also leads to fallacy, since the experiencing of an experience is presumably another experience, and we spiral into bluenessnessness of bluenessness of blueness of blue. So if we allow talk of experiences de re, we dont experience them: rather, we *have* them, or they are *part of* our experience, or some other such locution. Ordinary language has no guards against this confusion: it seems as natural to say that we experience blue as it does to say that we experience the seeing of blue. (After all, what else could one do with an experience, except experience it?)
This then raises the question of what IS this odd relationship between us and our experiences? It would seem to have be both much more intimate and more secure than between us and the world we see: we don't hear or see or anything else these 'experiences', we just *have* them. They are all we have, in fact: our senses can only deliver expereinces, and we now have to re-engineer reality from these private bits and pieces. That reconstruction could be wrong and our 'perceptions' faulty: but there cannot be any doubt about the actual experiences. We KNOW them; and moreover we know them TOTALLY: there can't be any other, nonexperiential, aspects to them that could be detected some other way. It follows therefore that they cannot be identified with any neural event inside our brains, since we don't know very much about those at all.(This argument from Henry Stapp) This ontological category has acquired an almost magical security. These things are irreducibly mental, irreducibly private, known only to ourselves, known utterly, and playing therefore (almost by definition) no functional role. All in marked contrast with the other, solid, stuff out there: a different world!
But this entire mystery may be simply the result of having made one small ontological error. Suppose there are no experiences! Let me quickly explain; this is not to say that we do not experience, or are mere zombies, or are not conscious: only that to talk of experiences as actual individual things may be a mistake. When I see a blue sky, what I see is a color, not the experience of a color. There is no blueness of blue: there are simply blues, and we see them. We may think we see blue when we don't, or imagine blues that arent there, etc., but those situations can be accurately described without referring to experiences as objects.
Exprience-talk is harmless provided we understand it as mere shorthand. My hands looked grey - that is, they looked they way they would have done had they really been grey - even though in fact they are pink. But there is no need, I think, to be tempted along the ontological path it suggests into the Qualiar Bog.
Comments?
Pat Hayes
jcs-online
menu