[GeorgeKangas]

The following two sentences, from the second page of the paper, are where he really nails it:

"We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence."

All of today's science is logically compatible with the absence of subjective experience, because science cannot even define what subjective experience is.

Every "definition" of subjective experience (SE, in what follows), is actually an ostension: the reader's attention is directed to his own SE. For example:

  - Perhaps nothing actually exists -- except SE.  That's the one thing that MUST exist. [Descartes]

  - "There is such a thing, as what it's like to be..." [Nagel, in the posted paper]

  - There's such a thing, as what seeing red is like: a quale.

  - Science can't rule out that a behaviorally perfect duplicate of you, could lack SE (i.e. be a zombie).
    Science can't rule it out, but maybe SE does: why would a zombie vociferously assert the existence of SE?
    Those who claim SE is an illusion, i.e. that you actually are a zombie but don't know it,
    have the burden of explaining why zombies claim to have SE.

All of these "definitions" require an audience that has SE and is able to recognize it. A scientific definition would not.

[amasad]

>All of these "definitions" require an audience that has SE and is able to recognize it. A scientific definition would not.

Not entirely true. Science is made up of language (syntax, meaning etc) and is also observer-relative.

[cassowary]

Well, that's precisely intrinsic to the problem of being subjective. You cannot objectively describe subjective experience, because otherwise it would cease to be subjective and become objective. It is reasonably probable that subjective experience will be outside of science for ever — unless we obtain so great a knowledge of the human brain that we can actually see some kind of physical change happening without a physical cause.

[eli_gottlieb]

>All of today's science is logically compatible with the absence of subjective experience, because science cannot even define what subjective experience is.

That just means science is incomplete and we are ignorant, not that subjective experience is metaphysically different from all other observed phenomena.

[cassowary]

It's compatible with both propositions. At the moment we literally have good grounds for making either conclusion, although we have plenty of weak grounds in both directions.

[disconcision]

when you say that are you making an empirical claim or a metaphysical one?