2 - QUALITATIVE EVENT REALISM

Summary

The main outlines of QER can be set out in the following response to our Basic Question.

Besides the reflectance profiles, light waves, retinal changes, neural events, and behavioral responses reviewed in Chapter 1, normal cases in which a person sees a red apple will involve the apple's looking red to that person. An apple's looking red requires a distinctive kind of conscious occurrence – a red experience – that is something in its own right, and not reducible to behavioral responses, or dispositions to behavioral responses, or brain state bases of such dispositions. Experiences are caused by neural events, but are not identical to or reducible to them or to any other material events. Experiences are constituted by phenomenal qualities; indeed, phenomenal qualities occur only in experiences and are the essence of consciousness in the most fundamental sense of that term.

An initial motivation for realism about experiences should already be evident and can be summarized as follows. Something is happening in afterimage cases, and that something is very similar to part of what goes on in seeing. “Experiences”, and “ways in which things look (or, appear)”, are more or less well-established ways of talking about this kind of something. Differences among experiences cannot consist simply in how experiences are related to different kinds of perceived things, for there are various kinds of experiences in afterimaging, illusions, and dreams but no perceived things to which they stand in the right relations.