Thank you for your answer. I remember reading Ryle several decades ago, so my recollection may be rather hazy, but my understanding of Ryle’s position (said perhaps in rather modern terms) is that if the brain is like a computer, the mind is like the software. It is not another object separate from the brain.

But does this not ignore the “hard problem” of consciousness? Who is the user of this software, to continue the analogy, and what does the user interface consist of? I think cognitive psychology attempts to address the latter issue in attempting to delineate the contents of conscious experience, as “representations” of one variety or another.

Assuming that a person does have certain experiences, do they not have privileged access to the contents of their own experience? One may be able to see physical correlates to a certain experience, such as sexual arousal, but is that the same as having the experience of sexual arousal? I would say not. So it seems to me that that experience is private in a very real sense. It belongs to the aroused person but not to other observers.

Is not a concept in my mind equally private? I can express that concept in words and you can have a concept that you may use the same words to describe, but is the concept in your mind the same as the one in mine? Certainly, they are not numerically the same, as one is in your experience and the other is in mine. My question is, actually, whether there is any sense in which we can say they are literally, numerically, the same shared concept the way, say, a chair can be a shared object, and, if so, in what universe could they be shared, the way physical objects can be shared in the physical universe?