Abstract
In developing a theory of consciousness, one of the main problems has to do with determining what distinguishes conscious states from non-conscious ones—the delimitation problem. This paper explores the possibility of solving this problem in terms of self-awareness. That self-awareness is essential to understanding the nature of our conscious experience is perhaps the most widely discussed hypothesis in the study of consciousness throughout the history of philosophy. Its plausibility hinges on how the notion of self-awareness is unpacked. The idea that consciousness involves self-awareness has been understood in two different ways: either as awareness of oneself—the subject of experience—or as awareness of the conscious episode itself. In this paper I argue (i) that every experience concerns the subject in a very specific way, involving what I will call ‘perspectival de se representation’, and (ii) that there is no need to appeal to the experience itself in order to characterize the awareness within that experience. The view I articulate explains the subjective nature of experience without over-intellectualizing it, accommodates the phenomenology of experience, and dispels any doubt about the need to find the self in introspection.
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Notes
There is a disagreement in the literature about the kind of properties or objects that constitute the primary object of experience:
For example, whether they are low-level ones, perhaps like shape or color (Tye, 1997; Dretske, 1995), or also higher-level ones such as being an apple (Block, 2014; Di Bona, 2017; Peacocke, 1995; Siegel, 2010), or whether we represent particulars or abstract entities in experience—see Schellenberg (2018) for a recent discussion. One might also think that rather than the apple and its properties, the primary objects of experience are mental properties, which are ‘copies’ (Hume, 2008), or that they “mirror somehow” (Rosenthal, 2015) the alleged perceptible properties. We can abstract away from this interesting debate for the purpose of this paper.
This presentation merely sketches the problem and the rebuttal of the functionalist strategy requires further development that cannot be carried out here. It suffices nonetheless for the main purpose of the paper, which is to explore the pure representationalist strategy.
The idea that some form or another of self-awareness is constitutive of our conscious experience has been endorsed at some point for example by Dignaga, Dharmakirti, Shantarakshita, Mi Pham Gyatso and Sankara in Eastern Philosophy; by Aristotle, Chrysippus (the Stoic), and Carneades (the Skeptic) in Ancient Western Philosophy; by Descartes, Locke, Cudworth, Arnauld, Ried, and Kant in Early Modern Philosophy; by Fichte, Hegel, Novalis, Hölderlin, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard in the 19th Century; by Meinong, Gurwitsch, Levinas, Cramer and Pothast in the 20th Century; by most, if not all phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; and by Castañeda, Chisholm, Frank, Frankfurt, Goldman, Kapitan, Kriegel, Kripke, Rosenthal, Weisberg, Williford and Zahavi more recently.
Altered states, such as those involving meditation or drugs, and pathological cases, like depersonalization or thought insertion, have been presented as a challenge to the strategy that I explore in this paper. It is not possible to deal with the details of these different cases within the reasonable length of a single paper. I have discussed the empirical evidence derived from altered states elsewhere (Sebastián, 2020).
For example, Kriegel (2009b) and Williford (2006, 2015) endorse MSI; Sebastián (2012, 2018) endorses SI; and Zahavi (2005) SI + MSI. Different versions of Higher-Order Theories (Brown, 2015; Carruthers, 2003; Gennaro, 2012; Rosenthal, 2005; Weisberg, 2011b) can be read as endorsing one position or another depending on the details with regard to the content of the higher-order awareness and the relation between such awareness and phenomenology—see Sect. 4.
Two experiences have the same phenomenology just in case they are phenomenally indistinguishable in ideal conditions –abstracting away from the discriminatory limitations we might have. This raises interesting questions regarding interpersonal indistinghuishability (Shoemaker, 1996; Stalnaker, 2000). However, even Stalnaker (2000), who questions the coherence of interpersonal indistinguishability, acknowledges that the intuition that at least physical duplicates undergo experiences with the same phenomenology is very hard to resist. The vast majority of theories have more relaxed constraints on the requisites that two individuals must satisfy to have experiences with the same phenomenology.
Schellenberg (2018) holds a representationalist position and rejects the entailment. She thinks that veridical perceptions and hallucinations differ in content, and she accounts for the common phenomenology in terms of their contents belonging to the same content-kind. However, Schellenberg’s content-kinds play the same theoretical roles that content plays on other theories [See Torre’s (2018 pp. 183–184) discussion of the relation between Perry’s belief states and content. Beliefs states are analogous to the capacities that individuate Schellenberg’s content-kinds]. If this is correct, her rejection of the entailment between phenomenology and content is merely due to a mere choice in terminology.
The details of the relation will depend on what one takes the POE to be; see fn.3.
For a recent review see Morgan and Salje (2020).
Perry (1979) distinguishes the content of the thought from the thought-state through which such a content is accessed. In such a case the thought-state also contributes to what is conveyed by the representation which is what I have called ‘content’. Torre (2018) argues that Perry’s thought-states are indeed a form of content.
Lewis famously argues that de se subsumes de dicto; for any possible world proposition can be reduced to a centered world proposition such that the center is irrelevant to its truth value. First-person representations involve what Egan (2006b) calls ‘interesting centered worlds’; i.e., those that do not “include, for each world w, either all of the positions in w or none of them” (ibid. 112).
Note that this is consistent with the possibility that individuals differ about the ways in which they can exploit that information, or about the knowledge that they can thereby acquire–if, for example, knowledge depends also on the concepts that one possesses and they possess different concepts. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
It is worth stressing that the argument shows that phenomenal content is perspectival de se, not that any de se representation is perspectival. See below.
In perspectival de se representation the pole is a subject, but there can be perspectival representations with a different kind of pole. For example the contents of the sentences ’there is an apple here’ or ’it is raining now’, if they were to be read as being portable and not global, would be true or false depending not only of the world but also on a location and a time within the world. We can call this kind of contents perspectival ‘de hinc’ and ‘de nunc’.
An anonymous referee has suggested to me the possibility of capturing this in terms of the attitude rather than in terms of the content. A possibility that might make jeopardize the idea that this is a pure representationalist approach to the delimitation problem. This seems to be a terminological dispute regarding how to use the technical term ‘content’. I am characterizing awareness in experience solely in terms of content, and hence my use includes as part of it what others might call ‘attitude’ or ‘manner of representation’—in so far as they make a difference in the information that the state conveys. For example, authors like Chalmers (2004) or Egan (2006a) consider the possibility that experiences in different modalities concern exclusively the same POE and that differences in phenomenology are captured in terms of the attitude—e.g. seeing rather than touching—, calling this form of representation “impure”. Leaving aside whether there is really any good reasons to appeal to something like an attitude in the case of awareness in experience (Montague, 2022), it should be clear that awareness in the experience of seeing and touching the POE are different. These experiences convey different information—e.g. that the subject is in different relations to the POE—; and in this sense, the content of such information is different. The pure representationalist approach that I am defending in this paper is one that solves the delimitation problem in informational terms: conscious experiences convey information which would be expressed with a sentence along the lines of ‘I am in such-and-such a state’, and which should be read as portable and not global. There is no reason to think that this kind of information is conveyed by unconscious states as we are about to see.
Rosenthal (2002) also notes that there is no distinctive quality associated with the self-awareness and he argues that we would expect there to be one if the form of awareness were not a thought. I fail to appreciate the force of his argument and I see no reason to postulate a different quality associated to something common to all experiences—see Sebastián (forthcoming) for further discussion.
Musholt (2013) argues that self-consciousness requires conceptual capacities. However, she defines self-consciousness as the ability to think ‘I’ thoughts, which she thinks requires self-reference and, in turn, the deployment of concepts. This is compatible with the claim that the experience entails non-conceptual perspectival de se representation—as she acknowledges in a discussion of what Recanati calls ‘implicit representation’.
Just as perspectival de hinc representation is not a matter of representing a particular location—see below.
If Musholt (2013) is right and the capacity to form ‘I ’ thoughts requires self-reference, then there are also good reasons to think that these thoughts are not pespectival representations in so far as reference contributes to content, because the reference of your ‘I’ thought and mine are not the same.
Some authors (Peacocke, 2014; Recanati, 2007, 2012) have indeed argued that precisely non-conceptual forms of de se representation, as those present in experience, ground the possession of the first-person concept. This concept can then be deployed in thought, independently of the instantiation of a non-conceptual de se representation.
INITIAL has to be endorsed by any HOR theory that is intended to be a theory of phenomenal consciousness–what Block (2011) calls an ‘ambitious’ HOR theory.
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Acknowledgements
For discussion and comments I am very grateful to Paloma Atencia-Linares, Enrique Aramendia, Marc Artiga, David Chalmers, Daniel Druecker, Santiago Echeverri, Manuel García- Carpintero, Anna Giustina, Ekain Garmendia, Marta Jorba, Uriah Kriegel, Andrew Lee, Martin Lin, Azenet Lopez, Ricardo Mena, Azul Santibañez, Elizabeth Schechter, Pepa Toribio, Josh Weisberg, Ken Williford, my students at the SCC-PhiLab and two anonymous referees. Ancestors of this paper were presented at the meeting of the ASSC22 in Krakow, the V ALFAn meeting in Villa de Leyva, the SSPP18 in San Antonio, and the workshop ``The subjectivity of experience: its nature and its role in cognition'' at UNAM. I am very grateful to the audience of these events for their helpful contribution and feedback. Financial support for this research was provided by DGAPA projects IN400520, IN400221 and IG400219.
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Sebastián, M.Á. First-Person Perspective in Experience: Perspectival De Se Representation as an Explanation of the Delimitation Problem. Erkenn 89, 947–969 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00564-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00564-4