In the not-too-distant future the scientific realism debate will be absorbed into the far more ancient-and-venerable, old-and-unqualified, realism debate. The first efficient mover of this absorption will be the fact that scientific ontology is a growing and very mixed bag, including not just rocks, plants, animals, and stars, but the Higgs boson, the Big Bang, evolutionary pressures, teenage anxieties, economic growth, social trends, countries, industrial toxins, and hedge funds. Trying to hedge off these ever-stranger newcomers by such moves as castling (...) the debate within well- established, mature, basic physics is to submit to a biased umpire, with a narrow strike-zone, to get to an arbitrary first base. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Qualia, the subjectively known qualities of conscious experience, are judged by many philosophers and scientists to lie beyond the domain of scientific explanation, thus making the conscious mind partly incomprehensible to the objective physical sciences. Some, like Kripke and Chalmers, employ modal logic to argue that explanations of qualia are impossible in principle. I argue that there already exist perfectly normal scientific explanations of qualia, and rebut the arguments of those who deny this possibility.