ABSTRACT
Externalist Representationalism about Qualia (ERQ) is a very tempting position. 1 Those seemingly ineffable sounds, sights, tastes and smells that populate our stream of conscious experience are maddeningly difficult to incorporate into the realm of natural, physical phenomena. On the one hand, it's really hard to see how the reddishorange character of seeing a sunset could be reducible to, or completely explicable in terms of, the neurological processes of the visual system. How does neural flring, no matter how complex, amount to a reddish-orange experience? On the other hand, analysing the qualitative character of experience in purely functional terms presents its own difficulties. Again, how does a formal property such as occupying a particular causal role or a point in a multidimensional space, amount to the seemingly quite concrete reddish-orange character of seeing a sunset? True, both traditional functionalism and psychoneural reductionism have their adherents/ but their inadequacies are clearly felt by many philosophers.
