careers studying brains. There is ‘something it is like’ to have a visual experience of a ripe tomato, for instance, and this is nothing at all like what you come across when you examine, by whatever means, the brain of someone undergoing the experience.
The problem of conscious qualities – the ‘qualia problem’ – is taken to be particularly vexing because it is difficult to imagine any physical discovery revealing anything remotely like qualities of familiar conscious experiences. So even if we post-Cartesians are confident that brains are the source of consciousness, an account of how this is supposed to work appears hopelessly out of reach.
Second, conscious experiences are ‘subjective’. In addition to there being ‘something it is like’ to undergo a particular conscious experience, every conscious experience is ‘like something’ only to whomever or whatever undergoes it. Your relation to the qualitative character of your own experiences is privileged, at least in the sense that there is a fundamental asymmetry between your ‘access’ to your own experiences and anyone else’s. Your access is ‘direct’, unmediated; the access of others is indirect and inferential.
These two aspects of consciousness effectively bifurcate the universe along two axes. On the one hand, conscious qualities differ from physical properties. On the other hand, conscious qualities, unlike physical phenomena, can only be apprehended from the ‘inside’, from a subjective ‘first-person perspective’. Sciences that provide our best portraits of the physical universe take up an objective perspective that is notably ill-equipped to tackle an essentially subjective domain. Science encounters conscious experience only from the ‘outside’, the distinctive subjective ‘inner’ character of experience remaining, like the horizon, forever out of reach.
"Science encounters conscious experience from the 'outside', the subjective 'inner' character of experience remaining, like the horizon, forever out of reach."
Most of the discussion of consciousness has focused on what is thought to be the special qualitative character of conscious experiences. My own view is that the water has been muddied by a tendency to conflate qualities of what is experienced with qualities of experiences. Your visual experience of a ripe tomato is an experience of something red and spherical, but it is the tomato, not your experience, that is red and spherical.
I will not pause to elaborate this point here. Rather I shall focus on the second aspect of consciousness mentioned earlier: its ‘subjective’ nature. The thought is that you are privy to your own experiences in a way no one else could be. Experiences are private, unobservable, in principle, from the ‘outside’. In contrast, goings-on inside your body, including goings-on in your brain, are observable by anyone with the right equipment. It is all well and good to suppose your experience of a ripe tomato is correlated with an occurrence in your nervous system: a neuroscientist might observe and measure the neural correlate of your experience. But it makes no sense to imagine the neuroscientist’s observing your experience.
Really? Consider what it would be for a scientist to observe your experience. If you are careful to distinguish qualities of what is experienced – the redness of a tomato, for instance – from qualities of the experience, you can see that it would be a mistake to expect a scientist observing your experience of a red tomato to observe something red and tomato-shaped. This leaves open the possibility that your experiencing the tomato is an occurrence in your brain that could in fact be observed by others.
Were that so, it would seem to undermine the powerful sense that experiences are distinctively private affairs: subjectivity sacrificed on the altar of objectivity!
Maybe not. Consider, first, the difference between something being in a given state and observations of something being in that state, and pretend for a moment that your undergoing a conscious experience is for your brain to be in a particular state. Now, imagine