The Senses and Their Qualia
November 9th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: Accepting the Evidence of Experience :: Referencing Qualia, Is That Transcendentalism? :: The Property, The Brainstate and the Qualia :: [nominalism] Who is Claiming that the Senses don’t Exist?
The Senses and Their Qualia
[Joe]: Who is Claiming that the Senses don’t Exist?
[Jud (earlier)]: Your above form of words suggests that you believe that
there exists a physical phenomenon (an experience) which is
ontologically different from the experiencer. Kindly explain: 1. What
form of existence do the *senses* have, as opposed to the physical
sensors?
[Joe]: you introduced the phrase ‘the senses’ into the above exchange;
so, why not tell us how you are using it; and, similarly for 2 and 4.
[Jud]: I introduce a word that has a coinage for you - not me - I refute
that the *senses exist at all - the ball is in the claimant’s (your)
court.
[Joe]: okay, so after you define phenomenon as “any state or process
known through the senses rather than by intuition or reasoning” you
claim that the senses don’t exist. if that’s your claim then you are the
claimant.
[Jud]: There IS NO scientific elimino-reductionist definition of *the
senses* as used in non-scientific transcendentalist ontological
discourse, for how can one define something that does not exist? One’s
only definitional recourse is to address the brain of the discussant who
believes that there is such a thing as *the senses.*
[Joe (new)]: ’senses’ is used as a class name for all the senses … all
the modes of sensing; including, seeing, tasting, hearing and so on. as
an abstraction, it does not exists as matergy; but, instead, has what
scholastics would call conceptual existence or what I call
experiential or phenomenological reality.
[Jud]: The question for you to answer therefore remains: Do you believe
that *the senses* actually exist as supplementary, *mental components or
features* which in addition to the ontic sensors add to, or improve, or
are essential for the capability of the feeling human entity to sense
its internal processes and external environment?
[Joe (new)]: the qualitative aspects of experience, the qualia, have the
same reality type as the phenomenological experiencer (the I-2). they
are both phenomenological. but notice: I don’t say ‘they are both
phenomenological only’. in each case the object of psycho-philosophical
inquiry is to determine *which* meta-phenomenal reality or realities
generate, produce or otherwise account for the phenomenological reality
that is the experiencer and the experience of seeing, say, an
afterimage.
[Joe (new)]: thus, relative to a linguistic frame of reference wherein
‘existent’ is the root predicate, an afterimage has phenomenological
existence; and, the question becomes what is the meta-phenomenal
existent(s) that accounts for this experience.
[Joe (new)]: the important point is that there is a difference between
the experience and the meta-phenomenal correlate of that experience. in
seeing an afterimage, I am only aware of what appears as a patch of
color. I’m not directly aware of any neurochemical events happening in
the brain at the microscopic level.
Joe
–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda
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http://what-am-i.net
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