I was re-reading Chapter 4 of Frances Egan’s Deflating Mental Representation, which presents her approach to the philosophy of perception. I was thinking about what it would imply for the debates about the “hard problem” of consciousness.
I recommend the chapter (and the rest of the book) and won’t do adequate justice to it in this note. But briefly, the account (labeled “External Sortalism”) is a update of the classic position called “adverbialism”. It proposes that the content we attribute to perceptual experiences is merely a “gloss”: we take the concepts we use to describe the world and re-deploy them to also describe our experience of that world. We use “red” and “round” to refer to a tomato and our experience of the tomato.
An upshot of this view is that we do not discover metaphysically meaningful experiential properties (aka phenomenal properties or qualia) when we introspect (the notion sometimes called “revelation”). Experience is real and we can say that experience has a qualitative character. But the details we impute to it result from applying a model that uses the categories drawn from our conceptualization of the external world (red, green, round, square, etc.).
But It got me wondering: what does even the minimal conclusion—that experience has a qualitative character—say about the mind-body problem? Not a whole lot, because it doesn’t speak to the other dimension of the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”, which is why there is subjective perceptual experience to begin with. It does not license dualism or panpsychism. On the other hand, even if you think, as I do, that the subjective/agential character of conscious experience will succumb to a naturalistic explanation, then we are left with the following: we can rule out a notion of physicalism that denies the world has any qualitative character (i.e. it can be exhaustively and satisfyingly explained by formal or mathematical treatment). Of course, “physicalism” doesn’t need to be committed to this, although most of the time this issue is not confronted head-on (Daniel Stoljar has what I found to be the clearest discussion of how this plays out when trying to offer positive definitions of physicalism).