Abstract The notion of qualia is often seen as a suspicious philosophical invention that bears no relevance to the research of psychological and cognitive mechanisms that govern our behavior. The idea of “ineffable” phenomenal qualities has been criticized, inter alia, as unscientific and empirically unsupported. Against that popular conception, it is here argued that some complex human...
It has been argued, most famously by David Chalmers, that all objects of the so-called traditional sciences (from physics to neuroscience) are analysable in structural terms, whereas consciousness has qualitative properties that are irreducibly non-structural. From that it has been concluded that consciousness cannot be explained by traditional sciences. Some illusionists have responded by...
The hard problem of consciousness has been often claimed to be unsolvable by the methods of traditional empirical sciences. It has been argued that all the objects of empirical sciences can be fully analyzed in structural terms but that consciousness is (or has) something over and above its structure. However, modern neuroscience has introduced a theoretical framework in which also the...