The Mystery

John Searle turns his attention to perception — visual perception, to be precise. Perception is both the basic way that minds connect with configurations of objects and attributes in a local environment, and an epicenter for sensory feeling and experience. That is, perception is a site of both representation and phenomenology. And since the capacities for representation and phenomenology have long been taken by philosophers to be characteristic marks of the mental, philosophical questions about perception provide a window into philosophical questions about minds more generally. When it comes to the long tradition of thinking and writing about perception, Searle takes the situation to be rather bleak. He believes that the entirety of philosophical work on perception since Descartes has been bewitched by what he calls 'the Bad Argument' and, as a consequence, is unnecessary and incoherent. Yet Searle wants to not just bury philosophical theories of perception but also praise them

  This is green. This is red. And this is blue. But how can you tell that what you’re seeing as blue is the exact same thing as what I see as blue? We’ve named the colors to give us a way to communicate and reference them, but in reality, there’s no way of knowing that what you see is the same as what another person sees. Even with the small steps and the giant leaps we’ve made as a species, there is still a lot to learn about earth, life, and the human condition. There’s still everything we don’t know. On the 26th of February 2015, one picture of a dress divided the internet. While some saw it as gold and white, others saw it as blue and black. Since then, there have been a number of repetitions of the same experiment either using the same sense, in this case, sight, or even other senses, like hearing in the famous 'yanny' or 'laurel' debate. These experiments remind us that there’s no way for us to tell that you and I sense the same things. What I call red might just