6 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
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Comment by thisthinginabag at 16/01/2020 at 22:56 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It’s not just an argument from lack of imagination.
As Gregg Rosenberg argues, facts about the physical world are quantitative structures of ‘bare difference’ and can’t entail facts about qualitative experience:
The skeptic maintains that facts about bare difference are always consistent with the absence of experience, because qualitative contents are not merely structures of bare difference. If we consider that our taste space, for instance, contains different tastes and that our color space contains different colors, the relevant premise is that these tastes and colors are contents instantiating a structure of difference relations, not structures instantiated merely by difference relations.
Of course the skeptic knows that we can catalogue the differences between different colors and different tastes along relevant dimensions. If we do this, we can surely abstract out a content-free difference structure. The skeptic’s objection is to the further move of analyzing conscious qualities into these abstract patterns of difference between them. Rather, our acquaintance with the phenomenal qualities yields information about them as contents occupying slots within these difference structures. Reification of the difference structure as basic ignores the grounding of those differences in each specific case and so ignores the content instantiating those structures.
Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 22:55 UTC
-2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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