Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 93 of 138
Pain and our definitional practices
there is an asymmetry between colors on the one hand and pains and consciousness on the other, because we would lose the point of having the concepts of consciousness if we carved off the first-person ontology and redefined the words in third-person terms. In that sense the irreducibility of consciousness does not reveal a deep metaphysical asymmetry between, for example, the way color experiences relate to their causes and the way pain experiences relate to their causes, but rather an asymmetry in our definitional practices. For the definition of “pain” we care more about how pains feel to us than we do for the definition of “color.”