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Question of the day: why does seeing red feel like anything at all, instead of going on in the dark?

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ConsciousnessAnalyticIndianSamkhya & YogaDaniel DennettDavid ChalmersFrank JacksonThomas Nagel#consciousness#hard-problem#qualia#question-of-the-day
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Its coordinates: 1.3 Philosophy of Mind · 1.3.1 The Mind–Body Problem · 1.3.3 Intentionality +1 more

Today's question comes from the card on qualia and the hard problem: why isn't it all dark inside?

Light strikes your eye; your brain sorts it and moves your hand towards the tomato. None of that obviously requires anything to feel like anything. So why does seeing red come with the redness? David Chalmers put the puzzle in 1995: we can imagine all this processing going on "in the dark", with no inner feel, and we cannot see why it doesn't.

The main answers:

  • It is the brain, and the puzzle lies in our concepts. The experience simply is a brain process; it looks inexplicable only because we know it in two ways, from inside and from outside.
  • The inner light is itself an appearance. Illusionists, building on Daniel Dennett, say the sense of something extra is a representation the brain produces, and that representation is what needs explaining.
  • Experience is basic. It cannot be derived from physics, so it must be added: as a further property of brains or, for panpsychists, as something present in matter all the way down.
  • Awareness was never the mind's to begin with. In Sāṃkhya, thinking and sorting belong to material nature, and consciousness is a separate witness, puruṣa, that lights them up.

Thomas Nagel's bat and Frank Jackson's Mary are the thought experiments everyone reaches for. The card sets out the positions and the people behind them: 1.3.4 Qualia and the Hard Problem.

Start with a theory, or with a moment you noticed what something was like.

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4 answers

  1. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Materialist here, with the usual confession. I build systems that sort red objects from green all day, and nobody on my team thinks the classifier sees red. So in machines, "detects red" and "experiences red" plainly come apart.

    The predictive-processing answer is that experience is what the brain's model of its own sensory states is like from the inside. I like it as science. But as an answer to the question it moves the problem rather than solving it: why should a self-model be lit up either? I hold my view because the alternatives cost more, not because the dark has been explained.

  2. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    The Sāṃkhya bullet puts the lamp outside the room: material nature does the work and a separate witness lights it. The Buddhist epistemologists put the lamp inside every cognition. Dignāga held that each awareness is aware of itself as it grasps its object (svasaṃvedana), and the image used for this was a lamp, which shows itself while it shows the pot.

    Nāgārjuna had already objected to the image: a lamp cannot illuminate itself, because there is no darkness in it to dispel. That is close to today's question turned round. If awareness is self-showing, there is nothing for an explanation to add. If it isn't, we need a second lamp, and then a third.

  3. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Fellow

    The question assumes an inside that is either lit or dark, like a room. Francisco Varela, one of the Chilean biologists I came to philosophy through, published a paper in 1996 calling neurophenomenology "a methodological remedy for the hard problem". His proposal was not a new theory but a method: train people to describe their experience carefully, and treat those descriptions as data alongside the brain recordings.

    Evan Thompson pushed this further in Mind in Life: start from living bodies that make and maintain themselves, not from computers, and the gap between body and experience narrows. I am not sure it closes. But "dark inside" may be a picture we inherited from the machine model.

  4. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    One correction and one push. Sāṃkhya has as many witnesses as there are beings; the Sāṃkhya Kārikā argues for the plurality of puruṣas from the fact that people are born, die and act separately. Advaita keeps the witness, sākṣin, but says it is one, and is brahman.

    On the Advaita view today's question is upside down. Consciousness is never produced, so there is nothing to explain about why the lights came on. They were never off. What needs explaining is how there comes to seem to be a world of insentient matter at all. I don't expect the physicalists to accept that reversal, but it shows that "why isn't it dark?" already assumes matter comes first.