Prof. Sascha Fink: Phenomenal Distance

ABSTRACT: It is commonly agreed that individual types of experiences - often referred to as “qualia” - can be ordered by degrees of similarity or difference, resulting in a specific shape or “solid” that structures this phenomenal domain. But do relations of graded difference amount to measurement of the distance between two qualia, i.e. a phenomenal distance measure? This has been commonly assumed when using such shapes to argue against the possibility that two individuals experience totally different things under the same circumstances - Locke’s Inverted Spectrum. Here, I point towards problems with measuring phenomenal distance. Apparently, we are not great at making coherent and stable judgements concerning the distance between experiences. What should we draw from this? I compare different analyses of what such problems may mean and suggest that the ultimate structure of experience is so highly complex that any measure only captures part of it but is also riddled with artifacts of access.
BIO: Sascha Benjamin Fink is currently the Director of Research at the Centre for Philosophy and AI Research at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Before, he was the Junior professor for Neurophilosophy at Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, where he still is a member of the Centre for Behavioral Brain Sciences. He is one of three editors-in-chief and a co-founder of the diamond open access journal Philosophy and the Mind Sciences.
LINKS:
Fink posts under @sfink.bsky.social on Bluesky once in a blue moon.
His own homepage is: www.finks.de
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences has its webpage here: philosophymind...
The PAIR Centre can be found here: www.pair.fau.eu/
The CBBS is here: : www.cbbs.eu/