Friday, June 12, 2009

Wide assessment quote about the experiential world

T"In "The World of Qualia," Matjaž Potrč makes the case for the
intriguing claim that qualia -- construed as reflexive acts of
inner-directed awareness built into perceptual acts of outer-directed
awareness -- are "the cement of the experiential world" (114). The
argument is subtle, and Potrč leans heavily on an inadequately
explained distinction between the "experiential world" and the
"physical world." Presumably, his idea is that the experiential world
is the world as my thoughts and experiences represent it as being,
where these thoughts and experiences are taken as perceptual acts of
outer-directed awareness with reflexive acts of inner-directed
awareness (his qualia) built into them. The physical world, meanwhile,
is what my thoughts and experiences must correctly represent in order
to count as veridical. If this interpretation is fair, though, I do
not understand why qualia so understood count as the relevant sort of
cement, why thoughts and experiences need such a cement to unify them,
and why Potrč's qualia, which on his view are just another sort of act
of awareness, do not also need a cement of their own for unification."


This is the quote from the recent NPDR review of Edmond Wright The Case for Qualia MIT 2008 book. I thnik that the reviewer is right in requiring elaboration of the experiential world and physical world relation. This however I have dome at other occasions, by developing contextual assessment of truth as indirect correspondence. Reviewer's presupposing of truth as direct correspondence relation urges him to shift away from the dimension that indeed provides qualia as the cement of the experiential world. Abandoning his wide take on the situation allows a smooth reply to his worries.

The picture shows Terry Horgan in Slovenian countryside, June 2009. Terry agrees that we should use the notion of experiential world in our ongoing project.

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