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Kripke, Chalmers And The Immediate Phenomenal Quality Of Pain, Jessica Rae Owensby-Sandifer

Philosophy Theses

One common element of Kripke’s and Chalmers’ reactions to physicalist theories of mind is their reliance upon the intuition that concepts about conscious experiences are essentially identified by the “immediate phenomenal quality” of the conscious experience, how the experience feels from the subjective point of view. I examine how Kripke’s and Chalmers’ critiques require that concepts about conscious experiences be identified by their subjective feel and then move on to provide some ways in which this intuition about concepts of conscious experience could be wrong. Specifically, the intuition is not consistent with our intuitions about unusual cases reported by pain …