Red is in your mind. It’s a sensation. It’s what it feels like inside when you’re looking at something you call red. Nothing is actually red, it’s just a verbal symbol you assign to a particular inner sensation.
I will very, very happily grant that we do not have a good explanation for how the brain creates such subjective, inner sensations. Notice I wrote “how” and not “why”.
There is no such thing as a zombie as they are usually defined, because every time you make a brain, so long as it is physically indistinguishable from a regular brain, it’s going to be conscious. That’s what happens when you make a brain that way (you can try it out by having a child). On the other hand, if we allow the definition of a zombie to be changed just a little bit, so that it includes unconscious things that are merely behaviorally indistinguishable from conscious people, then I see no problem at all with that kind of zombie. But their insides would be physically, detectably different. Their brains would not work the same way as ours. If they did, then they would be conscious.
Regular brains produce private, inner sensation, just as surely as the sun produces radiation. The right question is not why should this be so?, but how does it do it? And I grant that this is an unanswered question. Heterophenomenology is just fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go this far. All that stuff about only asking why an agent verbalizes or believes that it sees red is profoundly unsatisfying as an explanation for redness, and for a very good reason. It’s like behaviorism in psychology—maybe fine for some purposes, but inherently limited, in the negative sense. It ignores the inner sensation that we all know is there.
Now, that’s no reason to suppose that the red sensation is not explainable or reducible. We just don’t understand the brain well enough yet, so we’ll just have to keep thinking about it and wait until we do.
Red is in your mind. It’s a sensation. It’s what it feels like inside when you’re looking at something you call red. Nothing is actually red, it’s just a verbal symbol you assign to a particular inner sensation.
I will very, very happily grant that we do not have a good explanation for how the brain creates such subjective, inner sensations. Notice I wrote “how” and not “why”.
There is no such thing as a zombie as they are usually defined, because every time you make a brain, so long as it is physically indistinguishable from a regular brain, it’s going to be conscious. That’s what happens when you make a brain that way (you can try it out by having a child). On the other hand, if we allow the definition of a zombie to be changed just a little bit, so that it includes unconscious things that are merely behaviorally indistinguishable from conscious people, then I see no problem at all with that kind of zombie. But their insides would be physically, detectably different. Their brains would not work the same way as ours. If they did, then they would be conscious.
Regular brains produce private, inner sensation, just as surely as the sun produces radiation. The right question is not why should this be so?, but how does it do it? And I grant that this is an unanswered question. Heterophenomenology is just fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go this far. All that stuff about only asking why an agent verbalizes or believes that it sees red is profoundly unsatisfying as an explanation for redness, and for a very good reason. It’s like behaviorism in psychology—maybe fine for some purposes, but inherently limited, in the negative sense. It ignores the inner sensation that we all know is there.
Now, that’s no reason to suppose that the red sensation is not explainable or reducible. We just don’t understand the brain well enough yet, so we’ll just have to keep thinking about it and wait until we do.