The Senior Common Room was unusually quiet.
Professor Quillibrace was reading a journal article with the expression he reserved for arguments that had survived publication but perhaps not much else. Miss Stray was looking out of the window. Mr Blottisham was standing beside the fireplace, holding forth.
“Let us begin with something quite uncontroversial,” said Blottisham. “Suppose I stub my toe.”
“An admirable beginning,” said Quillibrace.
“I feel pain.”
“Presumably.”
“And that pain is not simply the physical damage to my toe. Nor is it merely the neural activity that follows.”
“Agreed.”
“Excellent. So we have established that there is something it is like to experience pain.”
Quillibrace lowered his journal.
“No,” he said.
Blottisham frowned.
“No?”
“You have established that you feel pain. You have not yet established that there is a something called ‘what it is like’ in addition to the pain.”
“But surely the pain has a phenomenal character.”
“Perhaps.”
“Then surely that phenomenal character is what it is like to experience the pain.”
“Perhaps.”
“And therefore—”
“Not so quickly.”
Miss Stray smiled.
“I think Professor Quillibrace is objecting to the nouns.”
“The nouns?” said Blottisham.
“Yes. You began with an ordinary sentence: ‘I feel pain.’ Then you introduced ‘what it is like’, then ‘phenomenal character’, and now you appear to have arrived at an object called ‘the phenomenal character’.”
“I have merely made explicit what is implicit in the experience.”
“Have you?” asked Stray.
Blottisham looked from one to the other.
“Of course. If I feel pain, there is something that the pain feels like.”
“Certainly,” said Quillibrace.
Blottisham brightened.
“And that is the quale.”
Quillibrace sighed.
“There it is.”
“What?”
“The additional thing.”
“But I haven't added anything!”
“You have changed the grammar.”
Blottisham stared at him.
“I have done no such thing.”
“You began with a verb: I feel pain. You have now produced a noun: the quale of pain. That may be perfectly legitimate. But it does not follow that because we can give a noun to something, we have discovered another entity.”
Stray turned from the window.
“Perhaps an example would help. If I say that a rose is red, I can ask what it is like to see the rose as red. But I do not thereby discover a small object called ‘redness-as-experienced’ somewhere inside my head.”
“But something distinguishes seeing red from seeing blue.”
“Certainly.”
“And that difference is real.”
“Certainly.”
“Then why not call it a quale?”
“Because calling it a quale doesn't tell us what sort of thing it is.”
Blottisham looked triumphant.
“But that is precisely why philosophers have the concept!”
“Then the concept may be useful,” said Stray. “The question is whether we have quietly changed its status.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“There is a perfectly respectable weak use of quale. It can mean something like: ‘the distinctive character of this experience from the subject's point of view’. I have no objection to that.”
“And the strong use?”
“The strong use treats the quale as an additional ingredient of reality—something which has somehow to be added to the physical description.”
Blottisham folded his arms.
“And what is wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” said Quillibrace. “Provided you can establish that the ingredient exists.”
“But surely the experience establishes it!”
“No. The experience establishes the experience.”
There was a brief silence.
Blottisham looked mildly offended.
“That sounds suspiciously circular.”
“Only because you have made the experience and its description into two things.”
“I have not.”
“You have. You say: there is the physical event, there is the experience, and then there is the phenomenal character of the experience. What precisely is the third item?”
“The way the experience feels.”
“Which is?”
“The way the experience feels.”
Quillibrace looked at Stray.
“Progress.”
She laughed.
Blottisham ignored them.
“Look. If I burn my finger, there is tissue damage. There is neural activity. There is behaviour. And there is the fact that it hurts.”
“Indeed,” said Stray.
“Then surely the hurting is something.”
“Yes,” she said. “But notice what you have just said.”
“What?”
“You said it hurts.”
“Yes.”
“Not I perceive the quale of hurt.”
Blottisham paused.
Quillibrace returned to his journal.
“Language,” he murmured, “has survived another attack.”
Blottisham glared at him.
“I am not convinced. Suppose I say that the pain is experienced as burning. Surely the burning quality is not identical with the neural description.”
“Of course not,” said Quillibrace.
“Then there must be something more.”
“Why?”
“Because the descriptions are different.”
“That does not follow.”
Stray nodded.
“A description of an event is not the event itself. But neither is a different description necessarily evidence for a different thing.”
Blottisham considered this.
“So you are saying that first-person description tells us nothing?”
“Quite the contrary,” said Stray. “It tells us something important. It tells us how the event occurs for the organism experiencing it.”
Quillibrace looked up.
“And that may be precisely where we have gone wrong.”
Blottisham raised an eyebrow.
“How so?”
“We have become so accustomed to asking what the experience contains that we have forgotten to ask what kind of relation an experience is.”
“Relation?”
“Between organism and world,” said Stray.
Blottisham shook his head.
“That sounds dangerously metaphysical.”
“It is less metaphysical than inventing an object called a quale.”
Quillibrace smiled.
“Much less.”
Blottisham paced across the room.
“But there remains the undeniable fact that pain feels like something.”
“Undeniable,” said Stray.
“And that something is not captured by saying merely that tissue has been damaged.”
“Not by that description alone.”
“Then we have a genuine explanatory problem.”
“Perhaps,” said Quillibrace. “But first we should be careful about what the problem is.”
Blottisham stopped.
Quillibrace closed his journal.
“We began with a perfectly intelligible statement: I feel pain. Somewhere along the way, that became: there is something it is like to feel pain. Then: that something has phenomenal character. And finally: there is a quale.”
He looked at Blottisham.
“Perhaps the question is not yet how this quale is produced.”
Stray finished the thought.
“Perhaps we should first ask whether we have discovered anything new at all.”
Blottisham frowned.
“You are suggesting that the quale is a grammatical accident?”
“Not quite,” said Stray.
Quillibrace smiled.
“Let us say that it may be a grammatical achievement that has been mistaken for an ontological discovery.”
Blottisham considered this for a long moment.
Then he smiled.
“Very well. But I have one question.”
“Yes?” said Stray.
“What, then, does it feel like to be conscious?”
Quillibrace reopened his journal.
“Oh dear.”
Miss Stray laughed.
“Perhaps we should have tea first.”
“I shall require coffee,” said Blottisham.
“Then,” said Quillibrace, “we have undoubtedly reached philosophy.”
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