to feel pain or to see the color red. Qualia, phenomenal feel, and the subjective quality of experience are terms used by philosophers which all make reference to consciousness. The basic idea is that when one has an experience, a pain in the foot for example, it seems theoretically possible to separate all of the neuron firings, information processing in the brain, and behavioral responses, from what will be leftthe feeling of pain (this is also called the phenomenal feel or the qualia associated with pain). Dualists disagree with both materialists and eliminativists on whether it is possible to separate consciousness from all the nerve impulses, information processing, etc., which occur in a conscious person's brain. Eliminativists such as Dennett claim that there isn't any phenomenon above and beyond all such brain processes and their interaction left to explain. Performing imaginative thought experiments might make us think that there is something other than the things going on in our bodies (some experience), but we are mistaken. This fundamental difference of intuitions immediately separates eliminativist theories from theories like Chalmers', and to a lesser extent from the sort of theory most materialists would defend. We are left with the question of how best to explain (or explain away) "consciousness"; this question is what I refer to throughout this paper as the problem of consciousness. One way in which the problem of consciousness can be viewed is to think of it as the old mind-body problem with a new set of concepts to consider. One of the most important of these in recent debate about consciousness is that of supervenience. Supervenience can be understood on many levels. Basically, it describes a dependence relation between two sets of properties. A set of higher level properties supervenes on a set of lower level properties if the higher level properties depend upon the lower level properties. Chalmers defines superven...
