[KingMob]

You are still missing the point, and talking about everything BUT the disconnect between objectivity and subjectivity. I don't know how many times I have to mention the Hard Problem in the comments before people address it in their responses.

Yes, subjective experience is unique, based in neural architecture, color-blindness, experience, etc, etc etc. All of that is irrelevant to the essay.

> The real point is that the subjective experience of a color like red is not some absolute thing tied to the neural inputs for "red", since the experience is the same even when those inputs change

Not the real point of the essay at all. Please, just go read up on the Hard Problem.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

That's not really what Nagel is talking about - the paper is about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of using reductionism to explain some things such as subjective (conscious) experience.

Note that at the beginning of the paper Nagel says "Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life ...". His starting point is a willingness to accept that higher order animals are indeed conscious, and that by extension it is indeed like something to be them.

If you want to discuss the hard problem, then you are talking about the wrong paper, and should be reading Chalmers (or Kirk's earlier "Zombies v. Materialists") not Nagel. However, Nagel is of course right, and the p-zombie is a non-sensical construct. If you have a sufficiently advanced cognitive apparatus then of course you can reflect on your own mental life - of course it "feels like something".

[KingMob]

"the paper is about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of using reductionism to explain some things such as subjective (conscious) experience"

...uh, what else do you think the Hard Problem IS?

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Absolutely slays me that the commenters here don't even recognize it when rephrased.