Objects, not brain states, are the answer

Objects, not brain states, are the answer

Michael Tye - Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Author of Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995), Consciousness, Color, and Content (2000), and Consciousness and Persons (2003)

Representationalism – the view of consciousness I advocate – has a simple, and to my mind compelling, answer to the first question. Your experience of red feels the way it does because it represents the color red. What it is for the experience to feel the way it does just is for it to be an experience representing red. Your experience of blue feels different because it represents a different color. The experience of red could not feel the way the experience of blue feels because if it did, it wouldn’t be the experience of red at all but rather the experience of blue.

How does the experience of red represent red? Answer: by itself being a brain state with the natural function of indicating the presence of the color red. Compare: the heart has as its natural function to pump blood and certain neuronal cells (known as edge detector cells) have as their natural function to indicate the presence of an edge in the visual field. On this view, you can’t really discover the ways our experiences feel by peering among the neurons. That’s the wrong place to look. You have to look rather at what the neural states represent.