Qualities Unbound
Physics explains why things do what they do by identifying their powers, abstracting from things’ qualitative natures. The silence of physics on the qualitative nature of things does not mean that physics eschews qualities thereby marginalizing qualities of conscious experiences along with all the rest. Accepting that properties, including the properties of quarks and leptons, are empowering qualities opens the way to the possibility of understanding of how conscious experiences might comport with the universe as characterized by physics. The distinctively private, subjective character of conscious experiences—and the ‘first-’ versus ‘third-person perspectives’—are taken to be expressions of the difference between an agent’s being in a given state and someone’s observing the agent’s being in that state.