Abstract
This paper resurrects two discredited ideas in the philosophy of mind. The first: the idea that perceptual illusion might have something metaphysically significant to tell us about the nature of phenomenal consciousness. The second: that the colours and other qualities that ‘fill’ our sensory fields are occurrent properties (rather than representations of properties) that are, nevertheless, to be distinguished from the ‘objective’ properties of things in the external world. Theories of consciousness must recognize the existence of what Daniel Dennett mockingly labels ‘figment,’ but this result—though metaphysically and epistemologically significant—is not incompatible with either physicalism or naturalized semantics.
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Notes
See Smart 1959.
Why properties? Why not, say, states, processes, events or relations? The main reason for this stipulation is simply that this is by far the most common usage among those who set out to define qualia. (For representative examples, see almost any dictionary or encyclopaedia of philosophy, such as Robert Audi’s definition in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Ned Block’s in the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, or Janet Levin’s in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) This assumption does have implications for my argument, but I take it that it is uncontroversial that there are such properties as those picked out by my definition, whether or not it is agreed that they are best called ‘qualia,’ and so the assumption does not illegitimately beg the question.
If you want to understand the quale experienced by a dogfish sensing an electric field, Dretske claims, the property you want to look at is the property of being an electric field: “there is no more to experiencing an electric field of type T than there is to being an electric field of type T .... T is the quale of this experience. If Mary knows what a field of type T is, she knows all there is to know about the quality of experiences of this type” (1995, 85).
See, for example, Moore 1953, 30ff.
William Seager (1991, 150–151, 208)—drawing on the University of Toronto doctoral work of Evan Thompson—notes that pigeon colour vision is subserved by four or five types of colour receptor, as contrasted with the three of human colour vision. Since we know that people lacking colour receptors see no hues, that people lacking one see only two fundamental hues, and that normal humans see three, this implies that pigeons see extra hues compared to humans. (Pigeons don’t have all the advantages, though: they have only 37 taste buds, compared to a human’s 9,000.)
This kind of account usually assumes colour (etc.) is a secondary quality, but (with some adjustments) it need not do so. Frank Jackson (1996) for example, defends an account of colour as a primary quality—as the categorical basis of its disposition to look coloured.
An imaginary colour from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.
Just what this might mean—how could qualia be properties of (parts of) perceivers?—will emerge in a moment.
That is, it also establishes that tokens of phenomenal redness need not also be tokens of ‘real’ redness.
I believe that, at least in the literature on perception and experience, this tack has never really been tried. (As Frank Jackson once put it, “it is ... quite clear that it is essential to the notion of a property that it cannot be instantiated in the absence of a bearer” (1977, 54).) Elizabeth Wolgast (1962) did argue that the best response to the argument from illusion is to insist that qualities can exist without belonging to things. However, by this it turns out that she means only they are merely “appearances” rather than “qualities possessed by things”—that is, they are not properties of external perceived objects.
Frank Jackson calls this “the most widely canvassed objection to Representationalism, that it makes the external world it posits unknowable” (1977, 141).
“I think we should grasp the nettle, and simply deny that, because we know very well what the real properties of things are, despite their sensible appearance, this implies that we are not also under illusion at the same time. It is simply that the former belief is dominant over the latter. We are deceived, although we are not deceived.” (Armstrong 1955, 99)
We should recall at this point that “misperception” can reasonably be taken to involve, not just cases of delusion, but all the possible cases of perceptual relativity outlined above—arguably, that is, most of (if not all) our perceptual experience.
However, we should think of brain states as only determining all their physical properties, as otherwise the logical supervenience of qualia follows trivially from this argument, which would be too strong a conclusion.
And perhaps also an event—see, e.g., Kim 1976.
What about visual sensations of cubes? Are we to say that when something looks cubical there has to be something cubical in the brain? The answer is: in a way, yes. This argument commits us to phenomenal shape properties (and textures, motions, smells, etc.) just as much as phenomenal colours. But, just as no brain states are red (i.e., none have the same property as certain roses, apples, post boxes and so on), similarly of course no brain states are cubic (i.e., relevantly similar to dice, sugar cubes, etc.). Further, seeing cubes seems likely to be a phenomenologically more complex matter than seeing redness; it will perhaps be decomposable into more basic phenomenal properties of two-dimensional shape and shading.
See for example, Hameroff and Penrose 1996.
Neural states do not reflect photons or disturb air molecules in the appropriate way.
For comments on versions of this material I would like to thank John Baker, Liam Dempsey, Peter Loptson, David Rosenthal, William Seager, Finn Spicer, and audiences at the universities of Calgary, Manitoba, McMaster and Western Ontario and at the Western Canadian Philosophical Association annual conference in Vancouver and Toward a Science of Consciousness III in Tucson.
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Bailey, A. Qualia and the Argument from Illusion: A Defence of Figment. Acta Anal 22, 85–103 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-007-0002-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-007-0002-0