One of the main criticisms of all materialist theories is that they fail to account the qualitative aspect of mind – what it is like to be you. The term that philosophers give to this is “qualia”. For instance, it is all very well to say that brain states cause consciousness, or that functional states are caused by brain states, but these things do not tell us how the subject experiences themselves arise.

The problem with this is that our subjective experiences are the most real for us. So, we know what it is to feel pain, or to remember being at the beach, but the materialist view does not seem to include this picture. Part of the reason for this is that it is an objective or third person view (whereas the common view is subjective or first person). But does the fact that the account does not reflective common experience make it wrong?

A form of counter-argument used by materialists is to point out that what are normally thought of as qualitative experiences do not themselves have any qualities. For instance, to see a red car, the experience that you have is not “red” – we do not open up a brain and expect to find “redness”. Therefore, since these qualities cannot be found anywhere, what is there to stop us accounting for the experience in objective terms?