Visual qualia appearance properties

This is not to deny that it is independently desirable to understand the nature of qualia. It is clear that this is an important goal. I turn now to the task of constmcting such an account. Thus far, all that has been said about visual qualia is that they are appearance properties — or in other words, that they are the properties we are aware of in virtue of participating in facts of the form x looksp F to y. The goal now is to consider the issues that arise when one attempts to go beyond this starting point. 

I am concerned here only to evaluate these traditionally important views. 1 will not go on to present and defend a fifth view. The task of finding an appropriate account of appearance properties seems to me to be one of the hardest, and also one of the most important, of the problems facing the philosophy of perception. My goal in this paper is just to explain some of the issues that must be addressed in any search for a satisfactory view. 1 put forward a positive account of visual qualia in other writings. ... 

Could the first view be correct That is, could appearance properties be properties of internal, mental entities of some sort 1 think we can see that the answer is no by reflecting on the transparency of visual awareness. Visual awareness is transparent in the sense that the only objects that are presented to us in visual awareness are external, physical objects. We are not aware of internal objects of any kind. Now, this implies that any properties we are aware of in visual experience must be properties of external objects. Since we are not aware of any internal objects, we could not be aware of any properties of internal objects unless we were aware of them without being aware of them as characterizing objects, that is, as instantiated. It seems absurd to say that visual experience presents us with properties that are floating free of all objects, as mere possibilities of instantiation. Thus, transparency provides us with a reason to say that appearance properties, and therefore qualia, are properties of external objects. 

To summarize there are problems facing the main traditional views concerning the nature of appearance properties. At present, there is no clear answer to questions about the metaphysical nature of these properties — or, by the same token, to questions about the metaphysical nature of visual qualia. 

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