Appearance/reality distinction

Now if there were an appearance/ reality distinction associated with visual qualia, we could simply say that we have trouble locating C in the physical world because the appearance it presents to us fails to reveal its true nature. That is, we could explain away the apparent difference between C and all physical characteristics. Unfortunately, however, it seems inappropriate to distinguish between C as it appears to us and C as it is in itself. C is the ostensibly qualitative characteristic that is affiliated with facts of the form V looksp yellow to y. Since there is no appearance/reality distinction that is associated with these facts, how could there be an appearance/reality distinction that is associated with C ... 

In general, it seems, when an object looksp a certain way to us, we are aware of a characteristic that we cannot be aware of in any other way. No other form of experience reveals it to us. Moreover, when we experience it, we are not aware of it as having a microphysical nature of any sort or as determining relationships of similarity of the sort that arise from microphysical structure. Accordingly, we sense that it is different from the characteristics that science describes. And we are unable to explain this sense of difference away by invoking an appearance/reality distinction. 

Representationalism maintains, in other words, that the properties we call qualia do not really have the properties that we take to be constitutive of qualitative character. They only seem to us to have such features because of the peculiarities of the representations in virtue of which we are aware of them. Moreover, if they seem to us to have individual natures that are different from the natures of all physical characteristics, this is because, and only because, they are represented in a unique way. Representationalism adds that we are unable to see beyond these apparent differences, and to appreciate the ultimate identity of the properties we call qualia with certain physical properties, because it is not apparent to us, from the perspective of common sense, that our awareness of them involves representations. Folk psychology does not reveal that representations are constitutively involved in facts of the form x looksp F to y. Accordingly, it does not occur to us that our awareness of the properties we call qualia might be governed by an appearance/reality distinction. We think that it is necessary to take our experience of qualia at face value. 

Now let us turn to consider the special case of the characteristic phenomenal yellow. Is it possible to identify phenomenal yellow with some other characteristic, say, C If we are to do so, there must be a way of explaining how it is possible to grasp phenomenal yellow experientially without appreciating its identity with C. This means that we must invoke an appearance/reality distinction of some sort. But folk psychology does not recognize a distinction between appearance and reality in this case. It fails to register the representational character of our awareness of phenomenal yellow, and by the same token, it fails to support any ambitions that we might have to identify phenomenal yellow with another characteristic. 

As far as I can tell, there is only one theory of experience that provides a satisfactory way of dealing with this problem - representationalism. Rep-resentationalism maintains that our awareness of the characteristics we call qualia essentially involves representations and that the representations in question are different in a variety of respects from the representations that are involved in other forms of cognition. Because of the distinctive features of these representations, it maintains, the properties they represent seem to us to have special features, such as intrinsicness and simplicity, and seem to us to have individual natures that are not captured by scientific accounts of experience. Despite our impressions to the contrary, representationalism asserts, our awareness of qualia is governed by an appearance/reality... 

A distinctive feature of these metrics is that they can be stacked along the whole product supply chain. In this way, ecological bottlenecks can be identified readily. For example, a chemical product that might appear as benign for the environment, could involve, in reality, highly toxic materials in some intermediate steps of manufacturing. 

LESSON There appear to be actual dimensions within every human psyche in which archetypal forces live out a distinctly separate reality from ego perception. The energy they represent is available for conscious use by the ego. 

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