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    The Sad Case of Mr. Clapgras

    Category
    Tools For Thinking About Consciousness
    Description

    In short, although Clapgras does not complain about any problems of color vision, and indeed passes all standard color-naming and color-discriminating tests with, well, flying colors, he has undergone a profound inversion of all his emotional and attentional reactions to colors. What has happened to Clapgras, Dr. Chromaphil tells his amazed and skeptical colleagues, is simple: he’s undergone a total color qualia inversion, while leaving intact his merely high-level cognitive color talents—his ability to discriminate and name colors, for instance, the talents a color-sensitive robot could have. Here is the main weakness in the philosophical methods standardly used in these cases: philosophers tend to assume that all the competences and dispositions that normal people exhibit regarding, say, colors, form a monolithic block, invulnerable to decomposition or dissociation into independent subcompetences and sub-dispositions. This handily excuses them from addressing the question of whether qualia are to be anchored to some subset or specific disposition.

    Person
    Resource Datasbase
    Source

    Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps