ABSTRACT

Imagine that you are admiring a sunset from the top of a hill. What kind of properties does such a typical conscious experience involve? Let us begin with the simplest, most atomic sensory components of your experience. Your color vision allows you to enjoy an incredible pallet of different tints and shades: The sky and the clouds near the western horizon bum in purple as the red-orange sun slowly sinks behind the skyline. If you look further up, you can see how the shades of the dusk sky change from purple to violet, to light blue, and eventually to very dark, velvet blue, revealing the first diamond-like stars against the dim background. Maybe you can hear the sound of the waves and the screech of seagulls from the distance and smell the salty air rising from the ocean. The rock on which you are sitting feels hard and still slightly warm, but the chilling wind sends cold shivers down your spine and, eventually, you feel how you are getting goose pimples all over your skin. It is exactly these kinds of basic sensory components of experiences-defining the elemental ways things appear to a subject-that philosophers call qualia.