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Abstract:
Spectral inversion arguments have been used for many
purposes. I shall here focus on a version of the argument
purporting to show that even an explanatory relationship between
qualitative experiences and brain processes-let alone an identity
of one with the other-is unintelligible. For instance, Joseph
Levine (1983) argues that although mental processes and physical
process might in fact be identical, we can never have scientific
grounds for supposing them to be so:
Let's call the physical story for seeing red 'R' and
the physical story for seeing green 'G'. . . . When we consider the
qualitative character of our visual experiences when looking at
ripe McIntosh apples, as opposed to looking at ripe cucumbers, the
difference is not explained by appeal to G and R. For R doesn't
really explain why I have the one kind of qualitative
experience-the kind I have when looking at McIntosh apples-and not
the other. As evidence for this, note that it seems just as easy to
imagine G as to imagine R underlying the qualitative experience
that is in fact associated with R. The reverse, of course, also
seems quite imaginable.
Levine argues that, in the absence of an intelligible connection
between seeing red and the 'R' story and seeing green and the 'G'
story, we can never be entitled to take seeing red to be identical
with having neural processes R. The very possibility that somebody
could have had the same physical constitution and display the very
same behavior that she does now and yet have seen as red what she
now sees as green (and, generally, for the same set of stimuli,
experiencing all colors as interchanged with their actual-world
complements) is sufficient to show that no physical story can ever
capture what it is to experience a color.
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