Abstract

According to a familiar modern view, color and other so-called secondary qualities reside only in consciousness, not in the external physical world. Many have argued that this “Galilean” view is the source of the mind-body problem in its current form. This paper critically examines a radical alternative to the Galilean view, which has recently been defended or sympathetically discussed by several philosophers, a view I call “anti-modernism.” Anti-modernism holds, roughly, that the modern Galilean scientific image is incomplete – in particular, it leaves out certain irreducible qualitative properties, such as colors – and that we can solve (or dissolve) the hard problem of consciousness by accepting these properties as objective features of the external physical world. I argue, first, that anti-modernism cannot fulfill its promise. Even if the outer world is resplendent with primitive colors, color experience remains a mystery. Second, I argue that the theoretical costs of accepting irreducible colors in the world are enormous. Even if irreducible colors in the world could dispel the mysteries surrounding consciousness, the theoretical benefit would not be worth the cost. If the problems of consciousness and color require that we posit irreducible properties somewhere, it would be far more plausible to accept irreducible phenomenal properties on the side of the subject, and to reject irreducible colors on the side of the object.