Pursuant to a conversation in the The Philosophy SE Symposium, the conversation made it's way to this statement:
[Mereologically nihilistic] philosophical theory does not say that we cannot feel. For example, I can see this chair, I can touch it, I will feel tactile sensations, I will smell perfume. The essence of my question is that our sensations are still felt and it is impossible to refute this, isn't it?
According to SEP's article on mereology:
...nothing would be part of anything else and parthood would collapse to identity. (This account is sometimes referred to as mereological nihilism, in contrast to the mereological universalism expressed by (P.15i); see van Inwagen 1990: 72ff.[25] Van Inwagen himself endorses a restricted version of nihilism, which leaves room for composite living things. So does Merricks 2000, 2001, whose restricted nihilism leaves room for composite conscious things.)
If Van Inwagen's and Merricks's positions (whatever they may be) leave room for "composite conscious things" it seems generally accepted epistemological modality suggests there are possibilities of mereological theories that exclude them; by the exclusion of conscious entities, qualia would be excluded, and thus a position without sensation occurring at all.
Perhaps then, there are mereological "somethingists" which deny that sensations are felt? Or perhaps there are other nihilistic positions that reject senses, sense-data, or qualia?
In any case, are there philosophical theories that deny the ontological commitment to feeling or sensation or qualia or sense-data broadly or narrowly? Are there lines of attack or defense against it in the literature, what to me, is an intuitively dissonant notion?
