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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Thomas Nagel's 'what it is like' argument establishes that the qualitative character of subjective experience is constitutively inaccessible from any third-person or intersubjective standpoint.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The epistemic gap between reports and experience doesn't establish metaphysical inaccessibility; we learn subjective facts through testimony and inference.
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    • 2.Future neuroscience might bridge the explanatory gap by revealing how physical processes constitute qualitative properties, not merely correlate with them.
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    • 3.Nagel conflates the difficulty of third-person access with its constitutive impossibility; some truths are hard to access but not inaccessible in principle.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Only the subject experiencing pain knows what that pain feels like; neuroimaging shows brain states but not subjective sensation itself.
      ?

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    • 2.Translation between first-person experience and third-person description always loses something essential about qualitative character.
      ?

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    • 3.No amount of physical information about color wavelengths explains what red looks like to a conscious observer.
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