Abstract

The ASSC has challenged student members to encounter and respond to a number of questions, one of which is: “ What kind of experiences are qualia? Qualia are usually described as the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. While most people would agree that qualia refer to the quality of subjective experiences, it is often difficult to judge whether less sensory aspects of experiences should be taken to accompany specific qualia. In order for the concept to be useful for driving neuroscientific research, it is important to determine the fundamental conditions for an experience to count as a quale in a meaningful way. Are there any critical experimental protocols to determine whether a certain experience counts as a quale?” For this student, it is a short walk from a request for elaboration of putative empirical method to the revealing of paradoxical behavior by scientists. The chronic intractability of a physics of qualia is not merely a problem for scientists. The problem can be shown to arise from scientists and from our implicit, inadequately examined behavioral options handed to us by our scientific forebears as underperforming conventions in respect of what constitutes scientific evidence and what we can do with it