Yet I experience that computation as the qualia of “blueness.” How can that be? How can any computation of any kind create, or lead to qualia of any kind? You can say that it is just a story my brain is telling me that “I am seeing blue.” I must not understand what is being claimed, because I agree with it and yet it doesn’t remove the problem at all. Why does that story have any phenomenology to it? I can make no sense of the claim that it is an illusion.
As I understand it, the idea would be that, as weird as it may sound, there isn’t any phenomenology to it. Rather: according to the story that your brain is telling, there is some phenomenology to it. But there isn’t. That is, your brain’s story doesn’t create, lead to, or correlate with phenomenal blueness; rather, phenomenal blueness is something that the story describes, but which doesn’t exist, in the same way that a story can describe unicorns without bringing them to life.
according to the story that your brain is telling, there is some phenomenology to it. But there isn’t.
Doesn’t this assume that we know what sort of thing phenomenological consciousness (qualia) is supposed to be so that we can assert that the story the brain is telling us about qualia somehow fails to measure up to this independent standard of qualia-reality?
The trouble I have with this is that there is no such independent standard for what phenomenal blueness has to be in order to count as genuinely phenomenal. The only standard we have for identifying something as an instance of the kind qualia is to point to something occurring in our experience. Given this, it remains difficult to understand how the story the brain tells about qualia could fail to be the truth, and nothing but the truth, about qualia (given the physicalist assumption that all our experience can be exhaustively explained through the brain’s activity).
I see blue and pointing to the experience of this seeing is the only way of indicating what I mean when I say “there is a blue qualia”. So to echo J_Thomas_Moros, any story the brain is telling that constitutes my experience of blueness would simply be the qualia itself (not an illusion of one).
Thanks for explaining where you’re coming from.
As I understand it, the idea would be that, as weird as it may sound, there isn’t any phenomenology to it. Rather: according to the story that your brain is telling, there is some phenomenology to it. But there isn’t. That is, your brain’s story doesn’t create, lead to, or correlate with phenomenal blueness; rather, phenomenal blueness is something that the story describes, but which doesn’t exist, in the same way that a story can describe unicorns without bringing them to life.
Doesn’t this assume that we know what sort of thing phenomenological consciousness (qualia) is supposed to be so that we can assert that the story the brain is telling us about qualia somehow fails to measure up to this independent standard of qualia-reality?
The trouble I have with this is that there is no such independent standard for what phenomenal blueness has to be in order to count as genuinely phenomenal. The only standard we have for identifying something as an instance of the kind qualia is to point to something occurring in our experience. Given this, it remains difficult to understand how the story the brain tells about qualia could fail to be the truth, and nothing but the truth, about qualia (given the physicalist assumption that all our experience can be exhaustively explained through the brain’s activity).
I see blue and pointing to the experience of this seeing is the only way of indicating what I mean when I say “there is a blue qualia”. So to echo J_Thomas_Moros, any story the brain is telling that constitutes my experience of blueness would simply be the qualia itself (not an illusion of one).