一个写于脑上之谜

A Riddle Written on the Brain

红光落在你眼睛上的感觉与观看《纽约客》上的一幅漫画的体验有相同之处。感觉的现象品质与笑话的好笑性(funniness)两者都是你关于外部事件属性的主观"看法",它们分两个步骤出现。对感觉而言,(1)脑通过一种内化的、评价性的反应对来自身体感官的信号做出回应;(2)心智读取这一反应并将像什么样的感觉(what it’s like)表征为主观的红色属性。对笑话而言,(1)漫画家创造了一个巧妙的图画;(2)你的心智对此图画心领神会,并将像什么样的感觉(what it’s like)表征为滑稽可笑的主观属性。这是一个刻意紧缩的类比,它有助于阐明现象意识的本质及其神经相关物,并揭示出"难问题"是一个概念错误。

The sensation of red light falling on your eyes is similar to the experience of looking at a cartoon in the New Yorker.With two steps to arise,the phenomenal quality of sensation and the funniness of a joke are both properties of your subjective about external events.With sensations,(1)your brain responds to signals from bodily sense organs with an internalized evaluative response;(2)your mind reads this response and represents“what it's like”as the subjective property of redness.With jokes,(1)the cartoonist creates a funny drawing;(2)your mind takes in the drawing and represents“what it's like”as the subjective property of funniness.This is a deliberately constrictive analogy which helps elucidate the nature of phenomenal consciousness and its neural correlates,and exposes the“difficult problem”as a conceptual error.