The puzzle about conscious experience is precisely that the external representational connections to the environment, although there, do not, and cannot, affect the identity conditions of experiences . The cases should not be overly fanciful, however, for then they will fail to threat a mitigated convergence thesis. Thus, if we conjure up cases that involve nomological impossibilities, the problem they will generate could be bypassed simply by urging a convergence of the phenomenal and the representational in nomologically possible worlds , rather than in all metaphysically or logically possible worlds. The cases I shall present will be ones that may perfectly well take place in the actual world. To avoid the possibility that this scenario involves a nomological impossibility, however, let us focus on the actual case of gold and fool's gold.
Gold experiences are therefore phenomenally type-identical with fool's gold experiences.
At the same time, they are representationally type-different. For the second type of case we can use the inverted spectrum scenario. Here experiences which are directed onto type-identical items in the world nonetheless feel different. Thus, a normal experience of gold feels, in a sense, yellow, but to someone who wears spectrum-inverting lenses it feels purple. Together, these cases allegedly provide a bilateral divergence of intentional object and phenomenal feel.