I think “chocolate eating behavior” already does “whiteout the intermediate of qualia.” We’ve just confused the issue by associating “the experience I have when eating chocolate” with things generally considered “good.” Your experience of eating chocolate is just the sum of cognitive and physiological changes associated with eating chocolate. If we performed an experiment where you were subjected to a pain stimulus but then we subtracted, one by one, the various physiological and cognitive aspects of pain, I think you would be convinced that there isn’t a pain qualia per se (that it is rather the sum of these aspects and no one of them is more or less pain-proper than the other).
Robin Brandt,
I think “chocolate eating behavior” already does “whiteout the intermediate of qualia.” We’ve just confused the issue by associating “the experience I have when eating chocolate” with things generally considered “good.” Your experience of eating chocolate is just the sum of cognitive and physiological changes associated with eating chocolate. If we performed an experiment where you were subjected to a pain stimulus but then we subtracted, one by one, the various physiological and cognitive aspects of pain, I think you would be convinced that there isn’t a pain qualia per se (that it is rather the sum of these aspects and no one of them is more or less pain-proper than the other).