Modal Structuralism and Color
It is like something to have sensory experiences, and differences in this what-it’s-like, in this phenomenal consciousness, are called differences in “qualia.” Exploration of the modal structure of the superworld in earlier chapters is necessary groundwork for a plausible and novel account of how our neurophysiology is sufficient to account for the kinds of nonveridical qualia involved in our sensory experience, a physicalist account of at least the basic features of the naïve experience explored in this book. That is the focus of this chapter. Its core idea is that the apparent modal structure of such qualia as those involved in our experience is due to the actual modal structure of the neurophysiology that constitutes that experience. This chapter develops an initial sketch of this idea by treating the case of color. The robustly metaphysical modal structure apparently present in our experience of color is in fact a reflection of the much more mundane difference between activated and merely potentiated features of our neurophysiology.