Just to clarify, I don’t really consider my position to be eliminative towards green, only that what we are talking about when we talk about green ‘qualia’ is nothing more than a certain type of sentient experience. This may eliminate what you think you are talking about what you say green, but not what I think I am talking about when I say green. I am willing to say that the part of a functional pattern of neural activity that is experienced as green qualia is identical to green in the sense that people generally mean when they talk about seeing something green. But there is no way to separate the green from the experience of seeing green.
Do you think that green is something separate from or independent of the experience of seeing green? Do you believe that seeing green is some sort of causal relationship between ‘green’ and a conscious mind similar to what a content externalist believes about the relationship between intentional states and external content? I don’t understand why you believe so strongly that green has to be something beyond a conscious experience.
ETA: For a position that I believe to be more extreme/eliminativist than mine, see Frank Jackson’s paper Mind and Illusion, where he argues that seeing red is being in a representational state that represents something non-physical(and also not real), in the same way that someone could be in a representational state representing a fairy.
From that paper:
Intensionalism means that no amount of tub-thumping assertion by dualists (including by me in the past) that the redness of seeing red cannot be accommodated in the austere physicalist picture carries any weight. That striking feature is a feature of how things are being represented to be, and if, as claimed by the tub thumpers, it is transparently a feature that has no place in the physicalist picture, what follows is that physicalists should deny that anything has that striking feature. And this is no argument against physicalism. Physicalists can allow that people are sometimes in states that represent
that things have a non-physical property. Examples are people who believe that there are fairies. What physicalists must deny is that such properties are instantiated.
I think he is basically saying that if you can imagine the concept of something that isn’t physically real (like a fairy), why couldn’t you have a state representing redness, even though redness is not physically real? Or, for an example involving something ontologically unreal, one could have beliefs about the vitalist’s élan vital even though it is not made of any ontological entities from the physical universe, so why not have conscious states about red even though it has no place in physical ontology. I’m not sure I agree with his belief that colors can’t be considered to have physical ontology, but he seems to agree with you on that point.
Just to clarify, I don’t really consider my position to be eliminative towards green, only that what we are talking about when we talk about green ‘qualia’ is nothing more than a certain type of sentient experience. This may eliminate what you think you are talking about what you say green, but not what I think I am talking about when I say green. I am willing to say that the part of a functional pattern of neural activity that is experienced as green qualia is identical to green in the sense that people generally mean when they talk about seeing something green. But there is no way to separate the green from the experience of seeing green.
Do you think that green is something separate from or independent of the experience of seeing green? Do you believe that seeing green is some sort of causal relationship between ‘green’ and a conscious mind similar to what a content externalist believes about the relationship between intentional states and external content? I don’t understand why you believe so strongly that green has to be something beyond a conscious experience.
ETA: For a position that I believe to be more extreme/eliminativist than mine, see Frank Jackson’s paper Mind and Illusion, where he argues that seeing red is being in a representational state that represents something non-physical(and also not real), in the same way that someone could be in a representational state representing a fairy.
From that paper:
I think he is basically saying that if you can imagine the concept of something that isn’t physically real (like a fairy), why couldn’t you have a state representing redness, even though redness is not physically real? Or, for an example involving something ontologically unreal, one could have beliefs about the vitalist’s élan vital even though it is not made of any ontological entities from the physical universe, so why not have conscious states about red even though it has no place in physical ontology. I’m not sure I agree with his belief that colors can’t be considered to have physical ontology, but he seems to agree with you on that point.