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Dr Edmond Wright 
In view of the excellent arguments that have been put forth recently in favour of qualia, internal sensorypresentations, it would strike an impartial observer - one could imagine a future historian of philosophy- as extremely odd why so many philosophers who are opposed to qualia, that is, sensory experiencesinternal to the brain, have largely ignored those arguments in their own. There has been a fashionableassumption that any theory of perception which espouses qualia has long since been overcome by anumber of 'formidable' objections, in particular, the Homunculus/Infinite Regress Objection, theSolipsism Objection, Austin's Illusion/Delusion Objection, the Ludicrousness-of-Colours-in-the-BrainObjection, the Indirect-Realist-has-to-assume-Direct-Realism Objection, the Impossibility-of-Comparing-Internal-with-External Objection, the Impossibility of Intrinsic Experience, and severalmore minor varieties of these. It is uncanny how they continue to be repeated, indeed, with a kind ofautomatism, evidenced by the fact that none of those who repeat them appear to have taken note ofthe answers to the objections. Indeed, they only appear to refer to those philosophers with whom theyagree: it has long been insisted upon in the study of rhetoric that one of the weakest things to do in anargument is to ignore the main points made by one's opponent:[it is] the wisest plan
to state Objections in their full force 
; at least, wherever there doesexist a satisfactory answer to them; otherwise, those who hear them stated morestrongly than by the uncandid advocate who had undertaken to repel them, will naturallyenough conclude that they are unanswerable. It is but a momentary and ineffectivetriumph that can be obtained by manœuvres like those of Turnus's charioteer, whofuriously chased the feeble stragglers of the army, and evaded the main front of thebattle (Whateley, 1828, 175)Some philosophers have specifically noted how prone anti-qualia people are to attacking imaginaryopponents: J. B. Maund complains of their failure to flesh out their arguments by reference to thepositions actually being taken (Maund, 1993, 45-6); Jonathan Harrison accuses the anti-qualia cohortof 'learning about Sense-Datum Theory from its critics without reading the work of Sense-Datumtheorists themselves' (Harrison, 1993, 20). It is not too much to say that it has become something of ascandal in philosophy that there should be such a blinkered response. One can hardly open anintroduction to philosophy today without being taken through the old Objections as if they still retainedtheir force. One wonders how many sceptical undergraduates are being led to question thissupposedly received opinion among their mentors.The distinction between the uninterpreted field and what can be selected from it is perhaps one of themost fruitful to have been made in recent inquiries into the nature of the mind. It can be found inneurophysiological research: John R. Smythies speaks of the essential distinction now being drawnbetween phenomenal and epistemic perception (Smythies, 1993, 208). In philosophy the field-and-representation distinction was perhaps first adumbrated by C. D. Broad when he spoke ofperceptions that were attended to and those which were not: 'A sensum is not something that exists inisolation; it is a differentiated part of a bigger and more enduring whole, viz., of a sense-
field 
, which isitself a mere cross-section of a sense-
history 
' (1923, 195). If his technical terms look daunting, abetter view of their interpretation can be gained if a thought-experiment of J. R. Smythies (1956,
r Edmond Wrighthttp://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/elw33/articles/qualia.html1 of 1725/07/2009 7:11 PM
 
40-42) is taken into consideration: taking up the idea that a television system might be usefully appliedas an analogy to the perceptual system, he imagined a situation in which a population of persons werewearing, unbeknownst to themselves, the equivalent of 'virtual reality' hoods, with the difference thatthe input to those hoods came from two miniature cameras set in front of them. He was able to usethis illustration to argue convincingly that those agents would be able to interact in the world withoutany difficulty, even though they only had an indirect causal access to the continuum existing aroundthem. Apply the situation to what Broad said: the 'sense-field' can be taken to be the screens of thecathode-ray-tubes; the 'sense-history', the sequence of changes upon those screens; a 'sensum' anarea actually picked out on that screen. The field/representation distinction can be readily detected,for it is possible to distinguish the actual state of the phosphor cells on the screen from what theobservers take themselves to be seeing on it. Furthermore, if one were to make the input on thosescreen something purely abstract in the painter's sense, a phantasmagoria of computer-generatedimagery, the wearer (unaware that he is wearing the 'virtual reality' hood) would be exposed tonon-epistemic imagery. This is a demonstration of the empirical possibility of non-epistemic experiencethat has been commonly denied in current philosophy (Rorty, 1980, 154; Davidson, 1989, 170;Harman, 1990, 39-40; McDowell, 1994, 24-45). One of the very latest books on the philosophy ofperception begins with the declaration that ' a sensation of red is first and foremost a sensation of an
object 
that is red' (Clark, 2000, 2).A significant advance was made by J. B. Maund (1975), who was the first to point out the logicalconfusions that arise if one tries to use the same descriptive terms of the screen as of what isselected from the screen; it would be like trying to describe the state of the phosphor cells on theTV-screen by means of the terms used to describe what can be seen on it. As ordinary TV viewerswe have no immediate way of referring to the states of the screen except by speaking about whatthings appear on it, even though one can actually get close to the screen and observe the criss-crossmatrix, and, if one attends closely enough, one can ignore what the screen is ostensibly representing.Only a neurophysiologist will be able to describe the visual field at that level: for the ordinary observerthe field will remain ineffable. The inability to acknowledge this distinction, which the TV Analogymakes plain, has led some to use the ineffability-for-the-observer as an excuse for dismissing thenotion of an inner field as occult, when in principle it could be scientifically described.There has been resistance to the TV Analogy, but this is due to a misunderstanding of what criteriaare relevant in the metaphor. As will be argued below, within his theory, TV screens are not reallycoloured, so that
pictorial 
resemblance is not being claimed; nor could they exist within a brain witheyes in front of them, but that is not being claimed either. The only relevant criterion is their presentinga display which is structurally isomorphic to conditions at the input, that is, in some not necessarilydirect ratio,
though being different in character, it varies concomitantly with the input 
. In the case ofTV screens, the
un 
coloured state of their phosphor cells is indirectly isomorphic to the
un 
colouredinput of light-rays into the camera: in the case of human sensing, the
coloured 
state of the neuraldisplay is indirectly isomorphic to the
uncoloured 
state of the light-ray input into the eyes.In the 80's Virgil C. Aldrich was also concerning himself with the logic of representation. He drewattention to the fact that in a picture there are two aspects to consider, what one sees in the pictureand the body of the picture itself. In an important article (Aldrich, 1980) he took up the same distinctionmade by Maund, that between the field in which the picture appears and the field of the picture itself.Aldrich was using the argument against that type of physicalism that rejects phenomena, for heconcluded that, since the thrust of physicalism was towards a single field, it could not logically copewith the notion of such a distinction. This correctly points to the problem of how the supposed causalpath between 'object' and perceiver is to be described, for Aldrich shows that there is anepistemological break between stimulus and response. This is why he is consistent in arguing that inthis 'primary field' (1980, 52) there is no given
perceptual 
awareness. It is rather that the intention of
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the observer must be taken into consideration when the actual sorting out of what is to constitute arepresented object is examined, an assertion that recalls Roy Wood Sellars' dictum that the physicalexistent is not an object in its own right, but is made so by 'the selective activity of the percipientorganism' (1919, pp. 418-19). This is precisely the same as what Aldrich argues (1980, 56). Clearlysuch an assertion is relevant to the whole issue of how representations can be 'about' anything. Thisdisposes of those who believe that the supporter of qualia must hold to an
Object 
-Causal theory ofPerception, when all that need be proposed is a 'whole input/whole-field' causal theory, ignoring at thesensory level the selection-of-entities process, the perceiving itself, which may
or may not 
be beingapplied.The question of sentience (or 'qualia', secondary qualities, sensa, the phenomenal) is moving to theforefront of discussion. Nicholas Humphrey's attempt to explain consciousness (1992), for example,has the merit of trying to give the sensory its proper place, whereas Colin McGinn in criticizing himbelieves that there is little sense in trying to consider how the visual field could be inspected, for hethinks that it would be a matter of examining one's retina from the inside (1992, 18). There has beenmuch consideration, particularly in the philosophy of mind, about what can be said in defence offunctionalist and computationalist positions if qualia do exist, but little about the arguments for andagainst them. Even Thomas Nagel's defence of the subjective (1981) is largely about the difficulties ofleaving phenomenal aspects out of the philosophy of mind than an attempt to address their place in thestructure of perception.As regards the common objections themselves, they can all be shown to be attacking the wrong targetas far as the present theory is concerned. The keys to overturning them lie in
(1) holding to thesensory fields being in a non-epistemic state which is structurally isomorphic to inputconditions at the sensory organs, providing bare,
non-mental 
evidence in which natural signscan be detected
(see 'sensing as Non-Epistemic' for an explanation of the terms 'non-epistemic' and'structurally isomorphic') and
(2) seeing 'common' perceptions as the projected co-ordination ofdiffering motivated selections from the differing non-epistemic evidence within each person'sbrain
(see 'Perceiving as Epistemic'). Let us go through the objections one by one.
(I) The Homunculus/Infinite Regress Objection (including (II) the objection that a pictorialresemblance between input and sensory display is impossible)
This is a very old objection. It was first mooted by the 19
th
-century philosopher Hermann Lotze (Lotze,1884, 492-3). It claims that any theory which proposes that there is a sensory visual presentation inthe brain is doomed to an infinite regress. The argument then goes, if there is a screen in the brainupon which a picture of the outer world is displayed, there would have to be another viewer of thepicture, a homunculus with his own set of eyes and therefore another screen in
his 
head,
ad. inf.
(for amodern statement of this view see Gilbert Ryle 1966/1949, 203). There have been additions to thisargument: Alan Millar (in a talk to the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, 1995) and Zenon Pylyshyn(2002) ask how the inner observer could move his eyes over the picture to inspect various parts of it;J. K. O'Regan and A. Noë ask how there could be 'red neurons' in the brain (O'Regan and Noë, 2002;also for the same kind of question Dennett, 1992, 28; Tye, 1992, 159; Kirk, 1994, 9-10)). This is noadvance on the question put over a hundred years ago by F. H. Bradley to Thomas Case, 1888),namely, 'when I smell a smell, I am not aware of the stinking state of my own nervous system' (seePrice, 1961, 127). Pylyshyn also asks how there could possibly be a physical surface in the brain tomatch the physical surfaces outside.To take vision as our example. The colour registration in the brain 'structurally isomorphic' to thelight-ray input at the sensors, that is, it is 'differentially correlated' to it, not necessarily in direct ratio(Sellars, 1932, 86). This implies that sensory phenomena of any kind are utterly
unlike 
what triggers
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