Summary |
Inverted spectrum arguments seek to refute physicalism or functionalism about qualia by showing that, even when all the relevant physical (or functional or intentional or behavioural) facts are held constant, the facts about qualia can still vary, and hence that the phenomenal must be over and above the physical (or functional etc.). The argument trades on the widely, though not universally, accepted fact that at least one of our modes of sensation--usually taken to be colour sensation--has at least one axis of symmetry, such that our colour sensations could be inverted along that axis of symmetry while leaving all the relations between those colour sensations unaffected, and so (arguably) leaving unaffected all of our dispositions with respect to those sensations. |