Qualia
The discussion of qualia in the philosophy of mind arises from the idea
that there may be a kind of qualitative knowledge which we have as conscious
beings which cannot be reduced to physical facts capable of being represented
quantitatively. E.g. we know what it is like to smell burning paper,
and it seems that no collection of physical facts about paper, burning,
and our sense organs and brain, could be equivalent to that, since we might
know all those facts, without knowing what it is like to smell the burning
paper.
This discussion tends to assume that the problem of the qualitative
arises only in a limited way in relation to the phenomenon of consciousness..
In these pages, we are exploring the claim that the problem is much more
general.
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