Abstract

This chapter examines Frank Jackson's argument for dualism. It argues that transitions between media involve information-preserving transformations of vehicles of content that convert the output of one medium into something that can interact computationally with the states of another. Just as the contents of observations have to be expressed symbolically before they can be fed into the computational apparatus of a physical theory, and English sentences have to be rendered in French before they can be combined in inferences with French expressions, phenomenal states have to be converted into an inferentially articulated form before they can interact with the machinery of thought. So conceived, the transition from experience into thought involves little more than a simple transformation of vehicle.