The Explanatory Gap: The Responses of Horgan and Papineau Essay

She argues the reader can conceive of feeling the pain from the pinch while being disembodied and, because conceivability equals possibility, it is possible to feel pain without a physical state. For disembodied pain to be possible, sensations like pain cannot be identical to physical states. Therefore, physicalism must be false. (113) Gertler posits that thought experiments like hers are useful only when the concepts they involve are made clear and unambiguous. Both the concepts of the physical and of pain, she asserts, are not subject to lack of clarity or comprehension. (114) Since we have a “sufficiently comprehensive” understanding of these two central concepts in the thought experiment, the conceivability test provides justification for what is possible. If what we can conceive can be possible, then conceiving of disembodied pain, having satisfactory understanding of what pain means, results in the possibility of disembodied pain.

(1) The first question is dealing with the causal or functional role of phenomenal qualities: Under the assumption that seeing is based on cortical information-processing, the question arises, whether the phenomenal qualities of visual perceptions have a function with regard to this processing, in the sense that the intentional content of visual perceptions depends not only on their intentional, but also on their phenomenal qualities. Is it true, as among other authors Frank Jackson and Steven Pinker claim, that phenomenal qualities are only epiphenomena, not having any function for information-processing? (1)

The understanding on the knowledge of other minds has provided a puzzle known as the inverted spectrum. This possibility has emerged as an important challenge to functionalist accounts of qualia. Functionalism is committed to defining mental states in terms of their cause and effects . By identifying sensory events with casual roles, however, functionalism appears to be missing qualitative aspects all together. The topic of spectrum inversion has often been raised as a contradiction to functionalism, as well as other materialist theories about consciousness. These negates to functionalism show that even when all the relevant physical facts are held constant, the facts about qualia can still vary, hence that the phenomenal must be over

In the paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Frank Jackson presents the concept of Qualia and the knowledge argument in order to prove physicalism false. Jackson 's knowledge argument introduces a thought experiment about a neuroscientist called Mary. His thought experiment is designed to refute physicalism by showing that there is non-physical knowledge in the world. However, there are many flaws in Jackson 's thought experiment that lead to its ultimate failure in proving that physicalism is wrong, such as its appeal to a misleading intuition, the ambiguity of its premises, and the assumption that it is possible to gain all physical knowledge of color from a colorless room.

Consciousness is not tangible, quantifiable, or physical. Varghese writes, " the I, the center of our consciousness and unifier of our experiences, makes us see things from a first-person perspective unlike anything else in the physical world." (p. 19) The first part of the book is focused on building an experiential case for life after death based on near-death experiences, after-life visitations, and the practically universal belief in an afterlife.

In this paper, four important features of qualia will be made explicit. From these, we will examine two specific features of qualia (privacy and immediate apprehensibility) which Dennett attempts to debunk in his article, Quining Qualia. His reasoning – in the form of intuition pumps – will be critiqued, and a rejection formulated.

Firstly, Flanagan examines one of the claims in Jackson’s Mary’s room thought experiment. When Mary is first in the room, Jackson claims that she collects all the physical information there is about color and color perception. Contrarily, Flanagan says that Mary is missing a key aspect of the physical information, that of experience. To distinguish between what Mary does and does not know, Flanagan proposes two types of physicalism. First, he presents metaphysical physicalism which says that everything that exists is physical. In addition, he presents linguistic physicalism which proposes that “everything physical can be expressed or captured in the languages of the basic sciences: ‘completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology.’” Linguistic physicalism is the complete physical knowledge that Jackson speaks of, to say that Mary knows everything about color in the way that the physical sciences can offer it to her. However, Flanagan disagrees that this is all physicalism has to offer, he states that “there is no reason to think that there will be some expression in the basic sciences that will capture or express what it is like to experience red.” Flanagan states that to know what the qualia of seeing red is, one must have the experience of “seeing something red.” This argument aims to demonstrate the falseness of Jackson’s first statement that Mary knew

In this paper, I will consider whether experiences of secondary qualities can fit into the theoretical framework of functionalism. I will begin this discussion by thoroughly explicating functionalism and the threat posed to it by secondary qualities. I will then consider Nida-Rümelin’s inverted qualia argument and will contend that it employs a false conception of color perception. Finally, I will argue that experiences of secondary qualities may be analyzed through the functionalist model only after Lewis’ stipulation of the appropriate population is redefined.

In order to reconciling a functional view with a physicalist approach particularly with a kind of Identity Theory, can be claimed that Place suggest something similar in the article “Is consciousness a brain process? Place argue that the properties of the cloud or their consistency “seem to be implied by many of the functions performed by clouds…” (Place, 1956/1970, p.46) in other words if the ’state’ of the cloud is one that generate hails, then is arguable suppose that such causal role or state in the cloud have certain causes and effects determined by its properties, indeed, Place remain in the field of properties, for instance, Place suggests that the consciousness process can be accounted “in terms of the know properties of the central nervous system” (Place, 1956/1970, p.48), moreover, if those properties [the properties of the nervous system] generate the brain process that shall be accounted as the experience in the subjective report, this shall be done only under the condition that according to Place the “[the experience] is the process which normally occurs when he is observing an actual moving

The Qualia objection in philosophy helps justify my answer by explaining the idea of the mind-body problem. The term Qualia is used through experiences. For instance, I believe Helen cannot see accurate colors like I can because I have seen them before and she has not. In the Qualia objection, it helps prove my answer by stating that it is through first hand experience and through actually visualizing an object that you can then visualize the object in your mind because you

Even though humans may share extremely similar experiences, their perceptions ultimately are not exactly alike and the differences are unexplainable in language, but are expressed in feeling. Different backgrounds distorts reality for people in many ways. They can only feel unexplainable emotions for themselves also known as “qualia,” raw feelings that are unable to be transcribed into language also known as the “explanatory gap.” For example, two people are playing golf and they both get a hole in one. One person who has a life of being lucky may perceive this experience as another day of luck for him. The other person sees this as a result of his hard work, practicing hard for this moment. Both experienced a hole in one with different perception, clouded by the

98). What was easiest to perceptive first-hand, was the incorporation of color schemes and uses to portray a specific meaning. Some art pieces were filled with a variety of colors and hues that positively overwhelmed the subject. One of my favorited works, The Stowaway Peers Out at the Speed of Light, created by James Rosenquist, complicatedly used both bright and dark hues in such a way, it created an image that imitated the sight of speed. Although the lithograph was intended only to see, there was an illusion as if the colors could or produce sound caused by the intricate designs. This experience is known as, synaesthesia, where a particular sense creates a feeling of a different sense (King, 2016). Another valued museum piece that inflicted this experience was with the Chanticleer, produced by Jim Waid. The acrylic painting was large and abstract with paint thick paint forming textures and patterns within the strokes; while there is no clear way to smell a painting, I felt as if the vivid colors sent off a soft, “painty”

The International Association for the Study of Pain defined pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” (Unk, 2007). Pain being described such as this allows us to see that pain is a perception, not unlike seeing or hearing. Pain is the most common reason that people seek medical attention but pain is very hard to define because it is subjective. Pain perception is the process by which a painful stimulus is relayed from the site of stimulation to the central nervous system (Freudenrich, 2008). In order to determine if pain is a perception of the mind or if it is biological we must first understand how the process of pain works.

"The taste of beef, such as a steak, produces a rich blue," and “Mango sherbet appears as a wall of lime green with thin wavy strips of cherry red. Steamed gingered squid produces a large glob of bright orange foam, about four feet away, directly in front of me." this sublime description by Day, a professor at National Central University in Taiwan describes his neurological condition called synesthesia.1 Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sense is automatically accompanied by a second sense. There are many different types of synesthesia ranging from grapheme-color synesthesia, associating letter and numbers with colors, to spatial sequence synesthesia, associating numerical sequences to points in space.

Physical events differ from mental ones due to the fact that conscious mental situations are reserved to the subject, who has a favored access to them.