Abstract

Suppose that we have a complete utopian understanding of the workings of the nervous system. Would we thereby know all that there is to know about subjective sensory experience? It has been maintained that we would not and that although sensory experiences are caused by brain events, they cannot be identical with them. We shall consider three arguments that purport to lead to this conclusion and discover that each of them is defective. It will then be argued that the question of whether sensory experiences are identical with brain events is empirical, to be settled by future science. An affirmative answer requires that the phenomenology be properly regimented and shown to be isomorphic with an appropriate subset of neural processes. Although the realization of these conditions must be regarded as utopian, contemporary visual science has made progress in this direction.

© 1988 Optical Society of America