There is nothing it is like to see red: holism and subjective experience

Modern literary interpretation in understanding the meaning of the verse ‘There is nothing like Him’

Numerous views have been expressed by commentators and writers about the literary aspect and the meaning of the Qurchr('39')anic phrase "There is nothing like Him". The sequence of the words "ka" and "like" in the holy verse, has led to two literary and semantic illusions. The literary illusion is that "ka" seems to be redundant and the semantic illusion is the word ‘like’ indirectly proves the...

Kinds and Conscious Experience: Is There Anything That It Is like to Be Something?

In this article I distinguish the notion of there being something it is like to be a certain kind of creature from that of there being something it is like to have a certain kind of experience. Work on consciousness has typically dealt with the latter while employing the language of the former. I propose several ways of analyzing what it is like to be a certain kind of creature and find problem...

If There Is Something It Is Like to Be Alife, What Is It?

In the field of consciousness studies, the phrase ‘Is there something it is like to be X?’, derived from Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (Nagel 1974), has become an acceptable way of asking whether X is conscious. It is my contention that this is a question that should be asked in the context of artificial organisms of the type studied in Alife, and especially of physically embodied orga...

What it is like to see: A sensorimotor theory of perceptual experience

The paper proposes a way of bridging the gap between physical processes in the brain and the “felt” aspect of sensory experience. The approach is based on the idea that experience is not generated by brain processes themselves, but rather is constituted by the way these brain processes enable a particular form of “give-and-take” between the perceiver and the environment. From this starting-poin...

“Not Everything That Is Faced Can Be Changed, but Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced”: A Response to Recent Commentaries