The Qualities of Qualia

Cognitive factors correlating with the metacognition of the phenomenal properties of experience

The awareness of the phenomenal qualities of one's experiences can be considered as an instance of metacognition. Although some people take qualia (sensory qualities such as the redness of red) as salient features of phenomenal experience, others have expressed views that doubt or deny the central importance of qualia. How do such cognitive heterogeneities occur? What parameters influence them?...

Qualia, Qualities, and Our Conception of the Physical World

What is it like to see a bat? A critique of Dretske’s representationalist theory of qualia

This paper critiques the representationalist account of qualia, focussing on the Representational Naturalism presented by Fred Dretske in Naturalizing the Mind. After laying out Dretske’s theory of qualia and making clear its externalist consequences, I argue that Dretske’s definition is either too liberal or runs into problems defending its requirements, in particular ‘naturalness’ and ‘mental...

Against Pure Representationalism about Qualia: The Case of Intransitive Bodily Sensations

Pure qualia representationalism, as I construe it in this paper, is the view that all qualia can be accounted for in terms of the representational content of sensations. This view is motivated by naturalism about qualia. I argue against this thesis by showing that so-called intransitive bodily sensations such as pains, tickles, itches, orgasms, etc., are intransitive precisely because their qua...

Consciousness and Reflective Consciousness

An interactive process model of the nature of representation intrinsically accounts for multiple emergent properties of consciousness, such as being a contentful experiential flow, from a situated and embodied point of view. A crucial characteristic of this model is that content is an internally related property of interactive process, rather than an externally related property as in all other ...