Mental Paint and Mental Latex

Abstract

The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind -maybe even all of philosophydivides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are qualia. Those who think that the phenomenal character of conscious experience goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional are said to believe in qualitative properties of conscious experience, or qualia for short. The debates about qualia have recently focused on the notion of representation, with issues about functionalism always in the background. All can agree that there are representational contents of thoughts, for example the representational content that virtue is its own reward. And friends of qualia can agree that experiences at least sometimes have representational content too, e.g. that something red and round occludes something blue and square. The recent focus of disagreement is on whether the phenomenal character of experience