More phenomenal content!

My previous post generated no counter-examples, just a claim that I had changed the subject. It is possible that I was insufficiently clear, so I'll start by stressing something I may not have stressed sufficiently.

The point of the depth perception case was to show that within a single subject, phenomenal characteristics seem to track force and vivacity; something's seeming to be at arm's length depends on how strongly my various ways of perceiving depth are pushing me to believe it's at arm's length, and doesn't depend on which of the various ways is active.

Conversely, absences of phenomenal content track absences of force. For example, blindsight is sometimes mentioned when the topic of phenomenal consciousness comes up; this involves the absence of qualia, but seemingly the acquisition of information via the visual system. It could thus support arguments that qualia are inessential to the functions of perception. But those with blindsight are merely better than chance at identifying features of the visual field they claim not to perceive; they come nowhere near being as good at this as those with normal sight, and in general the information they receive through blindsight has far less influence on them than the information a normally sighted person receives through ordinary visual perception (trivially, nothing they perceive leads them to make comments on what they're seeing, but there are lots of other ways in which the influence is weaker or absent as well). Thus, it is quite easy to account for this phenomenon on my theory; these people get very little force and vivacity from stimulation coming through their eyes, so they don't get anything like our usual perceptual qualia.

To take another case where the role of awareness, its associations and effects, track its phenomenal feel, consider learned abilities to perceive. Words we recognize sound different from words in a foreign language; listening to them feels different. Similarly, a trained musician's experience of a symphony or a wine expert's experience tasting a wine is different from that of a novice (or so such people report, comparing their experiences to before they acquired their expertise). Again, the training changes what the awareness does, and it ends up feeling different.

It is, of course, open to someone to steadfastly insist that no matter how closely differences in phenomenal feel track differences in the functional activity of the mind, there's still a distinction between the feel and the functional activity. But it seems to me that at some point it becomes unreasonable to keep insisting that there just have to be two different things here.

Still, I suppose I'm biased. It just seems obvious to me that consciousness does something, so for me the question is what does it do, and any defects in any functional account merely indicate that we haven't quite gotten the function right yet. I have difficulty wrapping my mind around views which take seriously the possibility that consciousness could be functionally inert. But one must be able to take that seriously in order to take zombies seriously, and lots of people seem to be able to do that. I confess I don't know what it would be like to be able to do that.