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On the Representational Theory of Perception

Experience represents the world, not as photography does, but in the way that language does: by symbolic convention. (Significantly, the person of a viewpoint takes its name from language.) And the subjective experience of qualities such as color, smell, taste, touch, and auditory tone emerge from sensory input in a way analogous to how meaning emerges from the inchoate babble of syllables.

RELATED TAGS: [representing/representation of the world, symbolic/linguistic/semantic representation, grammatical person(hood), qualia, experiential quality(ies), emergentism, representational theory of perception/cognition]