IF YOU haven鈥檛 met Mary yet, it鈥檚 time you did. Mary is a scientist working
on colour perception. She has access to the entire literature, and has
inexhaustible funding. She is, after all, a philosophers鈥� thought-experiment. We
can make her scientifically omniscient. She is a striking individual, an extreme
albino who wears only black. We have given her an environment, in fact, which is
devoid of colour. One day she is confronted with a red bus. What happens?
Mary will have predicted, in some detail, her own predicament, and it is a
complex one. At this point the philosophers come along and make life more
complicated. They lean into the experimental world and ask, 鈥淲hat is it like,
this redness?鈥�
Enter the elusive quale. A quale, William Lycan has it, is a 鈥渇irst-order
qualitative property of a phenomenal individual such as a sense datum鈥�. So this
鈥渞edness鈥� or 鈥渂eing appeared to redly is a quale鈥�, for example. Qualia, plural,
form the core of several philosophers鈥� arguments against the materialist
treatments of consciousness.
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In Consciousness (1987), Lycan argued for a materialist treatment.
In Consciousness and Experience (MIT Press, 拢29.50/$35,
ISBN 0 262 12197 2), he deals with the arguments ranged against him, and he
argues with wit and style.
It鈥檚 heavy going, as one would expect faced with conceits such as the
Inverted Earth, identical with ours except that its inhabitants have green
(Strange) qualia when I (and I presume you also) have red ones, and vice versa.
It鈥檚 worth it, though, for all students entering into this crucial philosophical
tangle鈥攁nd for the short section that hinges on the natures of
philosophers鈥� orgasms.