Bill,
To argue that experience is private and that, therefore, we cannot explain it, is question-begging. It's like saying God is a mystery, so we can never understand the Divine nature.

To make it worse, you contrast the ineffability of private experience with explanations that "work in the public world, where we can all agree on what we are talking about". But if science is based on the experiences and observations of scientist, which on your account are "disconnected" with public events, how does science explain anything at all by observing the results of experiments?


This is basically the problem of qualia inversion which is often used to show that behaviorism is false. We might both call the cardinal red but there is no way for either of us to know what is it like for the other one to "see" red. That fact that we both use the word "red" to describe what we see does not entail that the phenomenal appearance of the same cardinal to different observers is necessarily identical. Thus, phenomenal properties do not supervene on behavior.


Nor do qualia seem to be identical to anything "physical". This is why I proposed in my other comments here that we need an ontological explanation of consciousness.


-dcd