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72-527: Dennett's views set out in Consciousness Explained put him at odds with thinkers who say that consciousness can be described only with reference to " qualia ," i.e., the raw content of experience. Critics of the book have said that Dennett is denying the existence of subjective conscious states, while giving the appearance of giving a scientific explanation of them. Dennett puts forward a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, suggesting that there

144-415: A reductio ad absurdum argument that starts by supposing that two such systems can have different qualia in the same situation. It involves a switch that enables to connect the main part of the brain with any of these two subsystems. For example, one subsystem can be a chunk of brain that causes to see an object as red, and the other one a silicon chip that causes to see an object as blue. Since both perform

216-489: A category error . Searle argues that the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but these statements can be about what is ontologically subjective. Searle states that the epistemic objectivity of the scientific method does not preclude the ontological subjectivity of the subject matter. Thus, back pain exists, they are subjective experiences whose existence

288-449: A cooked feel is that perception seen in terms of its effects. For example, the perception of the taste of wine is an ineffable, raw feel, while the behavioral reaction one has to the warmth or bitterness caused by that taste of wine would be a cooked feel. Cooked feels are not qualia. Arguably, the idea of hedonistic utilitarianism , where the ethical value of things is determined from the amount of subjective pleasure or pain they cause,

360-532: A 'qualia-free' observer" by description alone. Edelman argues that proposing such a theory of consciousness is proposing "a theory based on a kind of God's-eye view of consciousness" and that any scientific theory requires the assumption "that observers have sensation as well as perception." He concludes by stating that assuming a theory that requires neither could exist "is to indulge the errors of theories that attempt syntactical formulations mapped onto objectivist interpretations – theories that ignore embodiment as

432-537: A different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. An example is a person learning that the game of cricket involves team spirit, and after being given a demonstration of each player's role, asking which player performs the "team spirit". Al Martinich claims that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first to discuss a propensity among philosophers mistakenly to combine words taken from different and incompatible categories. The term "category mistake"

504-546: A dispositional property, not an objective one. Colors are "virtual properties", which means they are as if things possessed them. Although the naïve view attributes them to objects, they are intrinsic, non-relational, inner experiences. This allows for the different perceptions between person and person, and also leaves aside the claim that external objects are colored. In his book Sensing the World, Moreland Perkins argues that qualia need not be identified as their objective sources:

576-416: A fourth later added), which are "functional criteria that need to be fulfilled in order for certain neural events to be associated with qualia" by philosophers of the mind: Category error A category mistake (or category error , categorical mistake , or mistake of category ) is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to

648-457: A future unified theory that respects both phenomenal qualities and scientific explanations. In his book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire , neuroscientist and Nobel laureate in Physiology / Medicine Gerald Edelman says "that [it] definitely does not seem feasible [...] to ignore completely the reality of qualia". As he sees it, it is impossible to explain color, sensations, and similar experiences "to

720-415: A key role in the evolution of nervous systems , including in simple creatures like ants or cockroaches. Llinás contends that qualia are a product of neuronal oscillation and cites anesthesia experiments, showing that qualia can be "turned off" by altering brain oscillations while other connections remain intact. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein proposed three laws of qualia (with

792-400: A normally sighted person who sees red would be unable to describe the experience of this perception in such a way that a listener who has never experienced color will be able to know everything there is to know about that experience. Though it is possible to make an analogy , such as "red looks hot", or to provide a description of the conditions under which the experience occurs, such as "it's

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864-438: A plausible explanation for there being a gap in our understanding of nature is that there is a genuine gap in nature. But so long as we have countervailing reasons for doubting the latter, we have to look elsewhere for an explanation of the former. In 1982, F. C. Jackson offered what he calls the "knowledge argument" for qualia. It goes as follows: Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate

936-582: A readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist? Dennett and his illusionist supporters, however, respond that the aforementioned "subjective aspect" of conscious minds is nonexistent, an unscientific remnant of commonsense " folk psychology ", and that his alleged redefinition is the only coherent description of consciousness. Neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman , Antonio Damasio , Vilayanur Ramachandran , Giulio Tononi , Christof Koch and Rodolfo Llinás argue that qualia exist and that

1008-446: A separate epistemological issue. American philosopher Thomas Nagel's paper What Is it Like to Be a Bat? is often cited in debates about qualia, though it does not use the word "qualia." Nagel argues that consciousness has an essentially subjective character, a what-it-is-like aspect. He states that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it

1080-503: A smell, for instance, bears no direct resemblance to the molecular shape that gives rise to it, nor is a toothache actually in the tooth. Like Hobbes he views the process of sensing as complete in itself; as he puts it, it is not like "kicking a football" where an external object is required – it is more like "kicking a kick". This explanation evades the Homunculus Objection , as adhered to by Gilbert Ryle , among others. Ryle

1152-417: A sort of universals; I call these "qualia." But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects. Confusion of these two is characteristic of many historical conceptions, as well as of current essence-theories. The quale is directly intuited, given, and is not the subject of any possible error because it

1224-543: A source of meaning. There is no qualia-free scientific observer." Neurologist Antonio Damasio , in his book The Feeling Of What Happens , defines qualia as "the simple sensory qualities to be found in the blueness of the sky or the tone of sound produced by a cello, and the fundamental components of the images in the movie metaphor are thus made of qualia." Damasio points out that "in all likelihood, I will never know your thoughts unless you tell me, and you will never know mine until I tell you." The reason he gives for this

1296-403: Is a philosophical zombie . Critics believe that the book's title is misleading as it fails to actually explain consciousness. Detractors have provided the alternative titles of Consciousness Ignored and Consciousness Explained Away. John Searle argues that Dennett, who insists that discussing subjectivity is nonsense because it is unscientific and science presupposes objectivity, is making

1368-406: Is also open to criticism on more scientific grounds, by C. L. Hardin, among others. As Alex Byrne puts it: ...there are more perceptually distinguishable shades between red and blue than there are between green and yellow, which would make red-green inversion behaviorally detectable. And there are yet further asymmetries. Dark yellow is brown (qualitatively different from yellow), whereas dark blue

1440-452: Is blue[...] Similarly, desaturated bluish-red is pink (qualitatively different from saturated bluish-red), whereas desaturated greenish-yellow is similar to saturated greenish-yellow. Again, red is a "warm" color, whereas blue is "cool"—and perhaps this is not a matter of learned associations with temperature. According to David Chalmers , all "functionally isomorphic " systems (those with the same "fine-grained functional organization", i.e.,

1512-480: Is committed to the belief that we are all philosophical zombies (if you define the term "philosophical zombie" as functionally identical to a human being without any additional non-material aspects)—adding that his remark is very much open to misinterpretation. Dennett claims that our brains hold only a few salient details about the world, and that this is the only reason we are able to function at all. Thus, we do not store elaborate pictures in short-term memory, as this

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1584-418: Is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality." Searle wrote further: To put it as clearly as I can: in his book, Consciousness Explained , Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there

1656-522: Is dependent on the existence of qualia. Since, by definition, qualia cannot be fully conveyed verbally, they also cannot be demonstrated directly in an argument – a more nuanced approach is needed. Arguments for qualia generally come in the form of thought experiments designed to lead one to the conclusion that qualia exist. The inverted spectrum thought experiment, originally developed by John Locke , invites us to imagine two individuals who perceive colors differently: where one person sees red,

1728-514: Is like for the organism." Nagel suggests that this subjective aspect may never be sufficiently accounted for by the objective methods of reductionistic science. He claims that "if we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue about how this could be done." Furthermore, "it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to

1800-425: Is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc." C.S. Peirce introduced the term quale in philosophy in 1866, and in 1929 C.I. Lewis was the first to use the term "qualia" in its generally agreed upon modern sense. There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus

1872-461: Is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies. ...I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain...Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for

1944-414: Is no single central place (a " Cartesian theater ") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain". The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies"; when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up

2016-459: Is nonphysical by assuming consciousness is nonphysical. Joseph Levine's paper Conceivability, Identity, and the Explanatory Gap takes up where the criticisms of conceivability arguments (such as the inverted spectrum argument and the zombie argument) leave off. Levine agrees that conceivability is a flawed means of establishing metaphysical realities, but points out that even if we come to

2088-460: Is not assumed to be an incorrigible report about that subject's inner state. This approach allows the reports of the subject to be a datum in psychological research, thus circumventing the limits of classical behaviorism . Dennett says that only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all: "To explain is to explain away ". The New York Times designated Consciousness Explained as one of

2160-497: Is not in doubt in medicine. And neurology, as you can see in any neurology textbook, is concerned with understanding them in order to cure them. Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective, whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ("background") criterion for mountain height, like "the summit

2232-416: Is not necessary and would consume valuable computing power. Rather, we log what has changed and assume the rest has stayed the same, with the result that we miss some details, as demonstrated in various experiments and illusions, some of which Dennett outlines. Research subsequent to Dennett's book indicates that some of his postulations were more conservative than expected. A year after Consciousness Explained

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2304-532: Is purely subjective. Frank Jackson later defined qualia as "...   certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes". Daniel Dennett suggested that qualia was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us". He identifies four properties that are commonly ascribed to qualia. According to these, qualia are: If qualia of this sort exist, then

2376-496: Is so many meters above sea level". No such criteria exist for prettiness. Searle writes that, in Dennett's view, there is no consciousness in addition to the computational features, because that is all that consciousness amounts to for him: mere effects of a von Neumann(esque) virtual machine implemented in a parallel architecture and therefore implies that conscious states are illusory. In contrast, Searle asserts that, "where consciousness

2448-405: Is that "the mind and its consciousness are first and foremost private phenomena" that are personal, private experiences that should be investigated as such. While he believes that trying to study these experiences "by the study of their behavioral correlates is wrong," he does think they can be studied as "the idea that subjective experiences are not scientifically accessible is nonsense." In his view

2520-480: Is to refute the physicalist account of the mind. Specifically, the knowledge argument is an attack on the physicalist claim about the completeness of physical truths. The challenge posed to physicalism by the knowledge argument runs as follows: Some critics argue that Mary's confinement to a monochromatic environment wouldn't prevent her from forming color experiences or that she might deduce what colors look like from her complete physical knowledge. Others suggest that

2592-461: The metaphysical conclusion that qualia are physical, there is still an explanatory problem. While I think this materialist response is right in the end, it does not suffice to put the mind-body problem to rest. Even if conceivability considerations do not establish that the mind is in fact distinct from the body, or that mental properties are metaphysically irreducible to physical properties, still they do demonstrate that we lack an explanation of

2664-484: The sensory field ; he believes this allows us to build an access to knowledge on that causal connection. In a later work he moves closer to the non-epistemic argument in that he postulates "a wholly non-conceptual component of perceptual experience". John Barry Maund, an Australian philosopher of perception, argues that qualia can be described on two levels, a fact that he refers to as "dual coding". Maund extended his argument with reference to color. Color he sees as

2736-542: The Latin adjective quālis ( Latin pronunciation: [ˈkʷaːlɪs] ) meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple —  this particular apple now". Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, and the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characteristics of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes , where

2808-600: The University of California, Berkeley, performed an experiment in which he wore special prism glasses that caused the external world to appear upside down. After a few days of continually wearing the glasses, he adapted and the external world appeared upright to him. When he removed the glasses, his perception of the external world again returned to the "normal" perceptual state. If this argument provides evidence that qualia exist, it does not necessarily follow that they must be non-physical, because that distinction should be considered

2880-421: The biological system (e.g., seeing the same color). He also proposed a similar thought experiment, named the fading qualia, that argues that it is not possible for the qualia to fade when each biological neuron is replaced by a functional equivalent. There is an actual experiment – albeit somewhat obscure – that parallels the inverted spectrum argument. George M. Stratton , professor of psychology at

2952-417: The brain or behavior. Jackson later rejected epiphenomenalism, arguing that knowledge about qualia is impossible if they are epiphenomenal. He concluded that there must be an issue with the knowledge argument, eventually embracing a representationalist account, arguing that sensory experiences can be understood in physical terms. David Chalmers formulated the hard problem of consciousness , which raised

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3024-422: The brain, necessarily implies a Cartesian dualism . He agrees with Bertrand Russell that the way images are received by our retinas, our "retinal images", are connected to "patterns of neural activity in the cortex". He defends a version of the causal theory of perception in which a causal path can be traced between the external object and the perception of it. He is careful to deny that we do any inferring from

3096-444: The central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue." What happens when Mary is released from her black-and-white room or is given a color television monitor? Does she learn anything new or not? Jackson claimed that she does. This thought experiment has two purposes. First, it is intended to show that qualia exist. If we accept

3168-400: The child asks when is the division going to appear. "The march-past was not a parade of battalions, batteries, squadrons and a division; it was a parade of the battalions, batteries and squadrons of a division." (Ryle's italics) His third example is of a foreigner being shown a cricket match. After being pointed out batsmen, bowlers and fielders, the foreigner asks: "who is left to contribute

3240-418: The color you see when light of 700- nm wavelength is directed at you", supporters of this definition of qualia contend that such descriptions cannot provide a complete description of the experience. Another way of defining qualia is as "raw feels". A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition. In contrast,

3312-454: The desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science. Within the framework of mind , or nondualism , qualia may be considered comparable and analogous to the concepts of jñāna found in Eastern philosophy and traditions . Many definitions of qualia have been proposed. One of the simpler, broader definitions is: "The 'what it

3384-473: The desire to eliminate them is based on an erroneous interpretation on the part of some philosophers regarding what constitutes science. Qualia In philosophy of mind , qualia ( / ˈ k w ɑː l i ə , ˈ k w eɪ -/ ; sg. : quale /- l i , - l eɪ / ) are defined as instances of subjective , conscious experience . The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form ( qualia ) of

3456-483: The first chapter. The first example is of a visitor to Oxford . The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library , reportedly inquires, "But where is the University?" The visitor's mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category "units of physical infrastructure", rather than that of an "institution". Ryle's second example is of a child witnessing the march-past of a division of soldiers. After having had battalions, batteries, squadrons, etc. pointed out,

3528-584: The focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing. American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce introduced the term quale in philosophy in 1866, and in 1929 C. I. Lewis was the first to use the term "qualia" in its generally agreed upon modern sense. Frank Jackson later defined qualia as "...certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes". Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett suggested that qualia

3600-419: The general problem of subjective and objective." Saul Kripke argues that one key consequence of the claim that such things as raw feels, or qualia, can be meaningfully discussed is that it leads to the logical possibility of two entities exhibiting identical behavior in all ways despite one of them entirely lacking qualia. While few claim that such an entity, called a philosophical zombie , actually exists,

3672-496: The issue of qualia to a new level of importance and acceptance in the field of the philosophy of mind . In 1995 Chalmers argued for what he called "the principle of organizational invariance": if a system such as one of appropriately configured computer hardware reproduces the functional organization of the brain, it will also reproduce the qualia associated with the brain. E. J. Lowe denies that indirect realism, wherein which we have access only to sensory features internal to

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3744-417: The mental in terms of the physical. However, such an epistemological or explanatory problem might indicate an underlying metaphysical issue, as even if not proven by conceivability arguments, the non-physicality of qualia is far from ruled out. In the end, we are right back where we started. The explanatory gap argument doesn't demonstrate a gap in nature, but a gap in our understanding of nature. Of course

3816-423: The other sees green, and vice versa. Despite this difference in their subjective experiences, they behave and communicate as if their perceptions are the same, and no physical or behavioral test can reveal the inversion. Critics of functionalism , and of physicalism more broadly, argue that if we can imagine this happening without contradiction, it follows that we are imagining a change in a property that determines

3888-411: The possibility is raised as a refutation of physicalism , and in defense of the hard problem of consciousness (the problem of accounting for, in physical terms, subjective, intrinsic, first-person experiences). The argument holds that it is conceivable for a person to have a duplicate, identical in every physical way, but lacking consciousness, called a "philosophical zombie." It would appear exactly

3960-437: The same as the original person, in both behavior and speech, just without subjective phenomenology . For these zombies to exist, qualia must not arise from any specific part or parts of the brain, for if it did there would be no difference between "normal humans" and philosophical zombies: The zombie/normal-human distinction can only be valid if subjective consciousness is separate from the physical brain. According to Chalmers,

4032-480: The same function within the brain, the subject would be unable to notice any change during the switch. Chalmers argues that this would be highly implausible if the qualia were truly switching between red and blue, hence the contradiction. Therefore, he concludes that the dancing qualia is impossible in practice, and the functionally isomorphic digital system would not only experience qualia, but it would have conscious experiences that are qualitatively identical to those of

4104-401: The same information processing) will have qualitatively identical conscious experiences. He calls this the principle of organizational invariance . For example, it implies that a silicon chip that is functionally isomorphic to a brain will have the same perception of the color red, given the same sensory inputs. He proposed the thought experiment of the "dancing qualia" to demonstrate it. It is

4176-458: The simplest form of the argument goes as follows: Former AI researcher Marvin Minsky sees the argument as circular . He says the proposition of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans cannot produce consciousness, which is exactly what the argument claims to prove. In other words, it tries to prove consciousness

4248-400: The story in which the central character is one's "self". Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying process in which multiple calculations are happening at once (that is, parallelism ). One of Dennett's more controversial claims is that qualia do not (and cannot) exist as qualia are described to be. Dennett's main argument is that

4320-456: The ten best books of the year. In New York Times Book Review , George Johnson called it "nothing short of brilliant". Critics of Dennett's approach argue that Dennett fails to engage with the problem of consciousness by equivocating subjective experience with behaviour or cognition. In his 1996 book The Conscious Mind , philosopher David Chalmers argues that Dennett's position is "a denial" of consciousness, and jokingly wonders if Dennett

4392-771: The theory of sense data , maintaining that sensory experiences involve qualia. As a dualist, Robinson held that mind and matter have distinct metaphysical natures. He maintained that the knowledge argument shows that physicalism fails to account for the qualitative nature of qualia. Similarly, William Robinson, in Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness , advocates for dualism and rejects the idea of reducing phenomenal experience to neural processes. His theory of Qualitative Event Realism proposes that phenomenal consciousness consists of immaterial events caused by brain activity but not reducible to it. He seeks to conciliate dualism with scientific methodology, aiming for

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4464-460: The thought experiment's conceivability might conflict with current or future scientific understanding of vision, but defenders maintain that its purpose is to challenge materialism conceptually, not scientifically. Early in his career Jackson argued that qualia are epiphenomenal , meaning they have no causal influence on the physical world. The issue with this view is that if qualia are non-physical, it becomes unclear how they can have any effect on

4536-466: The thought experiment, we believe that upon leaving the room Mary gains something: the knowledge of a particular thing that she did not possess before. That knowledge, Jackson argues, is knowledge of the quale that corresponds to the experience of seeing red, and it must thus be conceded that qualia are real properties, since there is a difference between a person who has access to a particular quale and one who does not. The second purpose of this argument

4608-502: The use of subjective observations is a revisitation of an old argument between behaviorists , who believed that only behaviors, not mental experiences, could be studied objectively, and cognitivists , who believed that studying only behavior did not do justice to human complexity. Neurologist Rodolfo Llinás states in his book I of the Vortex that qualia, from a neurological perspective, are essential for an organism's survival and played

4680-459: The various properties attributed to qualia by philosophers—qualia are supposed to be incorrigible, ineffable, private, directly accessible and so on—are incompatible, so the notion of qualia is incoherent. The non-existence of qualia would mean that there is no hard problem of consciousness , and " philosophical zombies ", which are supposed to act like a human in every way while somehow lacking qualia, cannot exist. So, as Dennett wryly notes, he

4752-499: The way things look to us, but that has no physical basis. In more detail: The argument thus claims that if we find the inverted spectrum plausible, we must admit that qualia exist (and are non-physical). Some philosophers find it absurd that armchair theorizing can prove something to exist, and the detailed argument does involve a lot of assumptions about conceivability and possibility, which are open to criticism. The idea that an inverted spectrum would be undetectable in practice

4824-472: The way to do this is for "enough observers [to] undertake rigorous observations according to the same experimental design; and [...] that those observations be checked for consistency across observers and that they yield some form of measurement." He also thinks that "subjective observations [...] can inspire objective experiments" and "be explained in terms of the available scientific knowledge". In his mind: The resistance found in some scientific quarters to

4896-422: The world from a black-and-white room via a black-and-white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via

4968-550: Was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us". The nature and existence of qualia under various definitions remain controversial. Much of the debate over the importance of qualia hinges on the definition of the term, and various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia. Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett , argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that

5040-409: Was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind (1949) to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind born from Cartesian metaphysics . Ryle argues that it is a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance because predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and capacities. The phrase is introduced in

5112-410: Was published, Dennett noted "I wish in retrospect that I'd been more daring, since the effects are stronger than I claimed". Since then, examples continue to accumulate of the illusory nature of our visual world. A key philosophical method is heterophenomenology , in which the verbal or written reports of subjects are treated as akin to a theorist's fiction—the subject's report is not questioned, but it

5184-435: Was unable to entertain this possibility, protesting that "in effect it explained the having of sensations as the not having of sensations." However, A. J. Ayer called this objection "very weak" as it betrayed an inability to detach the notion of eyes, or indeed any sensory organ, from the neural sensory experience. Philosopher Howard Robinson argued against reducing sensory experiences to physical explanations. He defended

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