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Most philosophers, psychologists, and even ordinary folks, when thinking about the human mind, wonder especially about what generates the particular qualities of experience -- colors, flavors, sounds, textures, pains, pleasures, emotions, desires, appetites ... even intellectual attitudes -- constituting the human condition. Call me wacky (or, more musically, call me irresponsible), but I'm convinced that the search for real knowledge about ourselves won't be advanced much at all by answers to these questions.

No, when it comes to understanding human nature, the question of "what it's like" in experience simply doesn't matter.

The important question is this: "What job is getting done here?"

Let me illustrate with a famous worry in the philosophy of mind, the inverted spectrum problem. Some philosophers are concerned that if you and I both look at a color swatch, and both of us report that it's blue, and we both react to the things we call 'blue' in ways that indicate we experience the color blue the same way -- describing it as "cool" or "receding", say, or associating it with sky, sapphires, and expanses of water -- it still might be that our actual experience of "blue" things (what it's like for us to experience such colors) are very different from one another. In fact, there may be no way to know whether the difference is so pronounced as to be opposite: what you experience when you see something you call 'blue' is exactly what I experience when I see something I call 'red-orange'!

How, then (they wonder), can we imagine that you and I have similarly functioning perceptual systems if they produce such dramatically different results? Worse, if you and I, who share the evolutionary engineering of human perception, aren't functionally similar, how in the world could we expect members of alien or robotic races to generate any of the mental states you or I might wonder about?

I won't even go into the question of whether our color perception could be spectrally inverted like this (though I do think it's very unlikely). The point here is that this worry is based on a serious misunderstanding of perceptual function. It presumes that the job to be done is to create an impression of blue color -- a uniform "way that it's like" to experience blueness -- in our minds.

As evolutionists, this is smoke that sends us looking for a fire: a reason that individuals who came close to a "genuine" experience of blueness would survive or reproduce more successfully than others whose color experience was a bit out-of-tune. So, let's just imagine that's the case, and that having the "right" experience of colors was adaptive for our ancestors. Let's also assume that the connection between our color experiences and the optical properties of objects in our environment that cause them isn't just a coincidence. Maybe we can account for the selective advantage by saying that the appropriate qualitative experience of color helped us to respond appropriately to our environment -- to better identify food, mates, predators, etc. Could that be the whole story?

Nope. This account doesn't require that there really be a causal connection between our color qualia and biologically significant properties of our environment. Our experience can be "true blue" and yet be triggered randomly by tree leaves, apples, bananas, or kumquats. A perfect experience of blueness can't by itself help us deal with our environment.

The real evolutionary story, if our theory is correct, goes like this:

Organisms need to respond appropriately to the things in their environment, and visual perception allows them to respond aptly to certain kinds of environmental regularities. If one's ancestral environment is a jungle, then it helps if one's experience of green includes the qualities "cool and receding" -- corresponding to the fact that green stuff tends to be in the background, and also tends to take on the ambient temperature. Same for blue: sky and water being dominant background fixtures, it would be helpful if our perceptual apparatus automatically presented blue stuff as "cool and receding". True, some important "foreground" elements of our experience (bird plumage, berries, etc.) might not turn out to be either cool or receding, but we could probably rely on other cues to help us respond appropriately to them.

What doesn't matter, however, is "what it's like" to experience these colors. As long as the relations among perceived colors is appropriate (they fall along an experiential spectrum in the same order as the physical spectrum of radiation or reflection of light), the particular quality of experience doesn't matter. As long as we react appropriately to objects that radiate or reflect light in the chartreuse range, Mother Nature doesn't care what it's like for us to experience chartreuse. And if we're responding aptly to the light in our environment, then why should we care whether or not our ancestors might somehow have evolved a different, subjectively "better" way of perceiving colors?

This is the bad news for subjectivists and structuralists: "What it's like" to experience anything whatsoever, in evolutionary terms, is absolutely meaningless. It doesn't matter a whit. Functionally, variance in color experience needn't be restricted to the range of sensations you would recognize as visual. One's experience of blue-radiating stuff could be what you or I might call "avocado-flavored" -- so long as the experiential quality "avocado-flavored" fits on a spectrum (a "flavor spectrum", in this example) that locates blue/avocado between, say, green/peach and purple/celery -- and successfully fulfills the psychological role of color perception. Someone who experiences avocado flavor in such a way that it is associated from the beginning with all the cultural trappings of "blueness" would never associate it with avocados (or flavor, for that matter), and would have no idea that perhaps his experience differed from that of others!

Generating "something that it's like" to regard features of our environment is the way our senses work for us. So you shouldn't be surprised that there is something that you experience in a special way that is connected to each functionally important class of contact with your environment.

"But why is it THIS kind of experience?" you might ask. We may never know. My best guess is that if there's an answer humans can understand, it will have to do with the unique assortment of neurological connections from the functional module(s) producing the experience in question to others with which it is functionally associated.

Confused? Yeah ... me, too. But I can't explain everything!

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