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iii This dissertation develops and defends a detailed realist, internalist account of qualia which is consistent with physicalism and which does not resurrect the epistemological ‘myth of the Given. ’ In doing so it stakes out a position in the sparsely populated middle ground between the two major opposing factions on the problem of phenomenal consciousness: between those who think we have a priori reasons to believe that qualia are irreducible to the physical (e.g. Na-gel, Chalmers, Jackson), and those who implicitly or explicitly treat qualia as contentful but non-phenomenal physical properties (e.g. Dretske, Lycan, Armstrong, Tye). I present a minimal, non–question-begging definition of “qualia ” and then use this defini-tion in a reformulation of the argument from perceiver relativity which shows that qualia must, at least in humans, be properties of states of the central nervous system. That is, brain states do not simply indicate the colours (for example) of external objects—they instantiate phenome-nal colours. Since brain states are not coloured in the same way as are external objects, I argue that to token phenomenal property F must be to be the first-person phenomenal sensation of F.