From Hugh Webb
Patricia Churchland claims that there is no theoretical barrier to science explaining consciousness and that philosophical arguments to the contrary are bunk (30 April, p 46). Yet she fails to explain fairly the nub of the philosophical problem and why it is wrong.
Consider trying to tell a person who has been blind from birth what it is like to see a red rose. Intuitively, no set of statements captures the peculiar property of “what it is like”, otherwise known as the qualia of a conscious state. It is uncontroversial that neuroscience may one day give us an extremely comprehensive set of statements about what goes on in our brains when we see and feel things. This is not the point. As anybody who has had an orgasm, seen a red rose or stubbed a toe will know, there is a very real difference between a set of statements about that experience and actually experiencing it.
Before we dismiss our intuitions, Churchland has to explain why science will one day allow, among other things, such a blind person to know what it is actually like to see a red rose, rather than just know a complicated set of linguistic and mathematical propositions about our brains.
Dickson, ACT, Australia
