In short, although Clapgras does not complain about any problems of color vision, and indeed passes all standard color-naming and color-discriminating tests with, well, flying colors, he has undergone a profound inversion of all his emotional and attentional reactions to colors. What has happened to Clapgras, Dr. Chromaphil tells his amazed and skeptical colleagues, is simple: he’s undergone a total color qualia inversion, while leaving intact his merely high-level cognitive color talents—his ability to discriminate and name colors, for instance, the talents a color-sensitive robot could have.
Here is the main weakness in the philosophical methods standardly used in these cases: philosophers tend to assume that all the competences and dispositions that normal people exhibit regarding, say, colors, form a monolithic block, invulnerable to decomposition or dissociation into independent subcompetences and sub-dispositions. This handily excuses them from addressing the question of whether qualia are to be anchored to some subset or specific disposition.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
