The use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent higher categories like lemon or umbrella?

I think my view is rather more radical than Pete Mandik's. Both of us want to show that colour perception doesn't transcend what can be conceptualized, but I don't think he goes so far as to deny that it doesn't involve different responses to all the discriminable surfaces.

A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

After all, in supporting phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I don't think that introspection is powerful enough to resolve the specific issue about how many colours you can see.

The use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent higher categories like lemon or umbrella?

Schrödinger's cat has a 50% quantum chance of coming out of the box alive and a 50% quantum chance of coming out dead. If you got in the box with it, the same would apply to you. So you really don't want to do that.

The 'phenomenal concept' issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say, that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn't available to a blind person?