Phenomenal experience and four-dimensionalism

2013

The paper’s main target is strong and reductive “representationalism”. What we claim is that even though this position looks very appealing in so far as it does not postulate intrinsic and irreducible experiential properties, the attempt it pursues of accounting for the phenomenology of experience in terms of representational content runs the risk of providing either an inadequate phenomenological account or an inadequate account of the content of the experience.

Normativity in Perception: Phenomenological, Analytic and Psychopathological Perspectives, 2015

"There is much debate over what the content of perceptual experience consists of, but let us assume that we at least perceive entities of one kind or another, regardless of whether or not perception incorporates more fine-grained classifications, such as ‘bus’, ‘carving knife’ or ‘electron microscope’. The content of perception is arguably not restricted to what we perceive, however. Something else to consider is ‘presence’, by which I mean the sense that a perceived entity is ‘here, now’. In this paper, I will sketch an account of what the perceptual experience of presence consists of and then show how this account can cast light upon the nature of hallucinatory experiences. Before I get to that though, it is important to further clarify the issue. Although the term ‘presence’ may be familiar, it is used in various different ways, and the question I address by invoking the term is seldom considered. On one interpretation, perception does not always incorporate a sense of something as ‘present’: when I see what appears to be a person behind a tree on a dark evening, there might be a degree of uncertainty. But this concerns what is experienced as present, not the fact that some state of affairs, however indeterminate, is experienced as present. What I want to address is the sense that perceptual experience gives us access to something that is ‘here, now’, regardless of how confident we are about what exactly it is. What would perceptual experience be like without presence? Perhaps we would still perceive things perfectly well but fail to recognise them as perceived. The phenomenological role of presence might thus be construed as an epistemic one: it is a means by which we identify perceptual experiences as perceptual. But I regard presence as constitutive of perceptual experience; the sense that one is accessing something ‘here, now’ is inextricable from what it is to encounter something perceptually. Put crudely, it feels like something to perceive, which distinguishes it from remembering and imagining. This, I suggest, is largely a matter of our experiencing entities as present. My subject matter is distinct from a range of issues concerning the relationship between perception and perceived objects, such as whether an experience even counts as perceptual when it arises without an appropriate stimulus. I am concerned exclusively with the structure of experience: what does the experience of presence consist of, regardless of whether or not what seems to be present is actually present? Others have used the term ‘presence’ in similar ways, but it is not always clear what aspect of experience it refers to. For example, Seth, Suzuki and Critchley (2012, pp.1-2) define “perceptual presence” as “the subjective sense of reality of the world and of the self within the world”, and take this to be a “constitutive property of conscious experience”. However, it is important to distinguish a localised experience of some entity as ‘here, now’ from a more enveloping experience of being immersed in a world, in the context of which entities are encountered as ‘here, now’. My principal aim in this paper is to show how the former presupposes the latter, and to offer an account of what this experience of being ‘immersed’ in a world consists of. To do so, I will reflect upon disturbances in the experience of presence, which serve to reveal something of its structure. My discussion will proceed in three stages. First of all, I will argue that disturbances of presence centrally involve changes in the experience of anticipation and fulfilment. Second, I will describe the anticipation-fulfilment structure of experience in more detail by drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s work Experience and Judgment. I will show how this structure is presupposed by the ability to experience things as present or otherwise, and equally by the possibility of belief. Appealing to Husserl and also to the later Wittgenstein, I will suggest that the ‘is’ of existence is equivocal – there is something we must already have ‘accepted’ in order for the ‘is’ / ‘is not’ distinction to be intelligible to us. Finally, I will show how the resulting account allows us to understand otherwise intractable experiences that are not occurrences of perception, belief or any other kind of established intentional state. Rather, they involve different and – for many of us – unfamiliar kinds of intentionality, which are symptomatic of alterations in the sense of immersion in a world. To illustrate this, I focus specifically upon experiences of auditory-verbal hallucinations, and suggest that many such experiences do not simply involve taking something that is not present to be present. There is a change in one’s sense of what it is to be present and thus an experience that differs in structure from perception. "

Consider two deeply appealing thoughts: first, that we experience external particulars, and second, that what it’s like to have an experience – the phenomenal character of an experience – is somehow independent of external particulars. The first thought is readily captured by phenomenal particularism, the view that external particulars are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of experience. The second thought is readily captured by phenomenal generalism, the view that external particulars are never part of phenomenal character. Here I show that a novel version of phenomenal generalism can capture both thoughts in a satisfying fashion. Along the way, I reveal severe problems facing phenomenal particularism and also shed light on the mental kinds under which experiences fall.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2005

Recent philosophy of mind has tended to treat "inner" states, including both qualia and intentional states, as "theoretical posits" of either folk or scientific psychology. This article argues that phenomenology in fact plays a very different role in the most mature part of psychology, psychophysics. Methodologically, phenomenology plays a crucial role in obtaining psychophysical results. And more importantly, many psychophysical data are best interpreted as reporting relations between stimuli and phenomenological states, both qualitative and intentional. Three examples are used to argue for this thesis: the Weber-Fechner laws, the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet effect, and subjective contour figures. The phenomenological properties that play a role here do so in the role of data that ultimately constrain theoretical work (in this case theory of vision), and not as theoretical posits.

Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness, 2006

Psychology was originally formulated as the science of the psyche, i.e. the subjective side of the mind / brain barrier. However time and again it has been diverted from this objective in the supposed interest of scientific rigor. The Behaviorists proposed to transform psychology to a science of behavior, and today the Neuroreductionists propose to transform it to a science of neurophysiology. In the process they attempt to deny the very existence of conscious experience as valid object of scientific scrutiny. However the subjective conscious experience is a primary source of evidence for the nature of the representation in the brain. I propose a quantitative phenomenolgy to express the dimensions of conscious experience in information theoretic terms. This approach leads to interesting observations of the properties of phenomenal perspective, that clearly reveal the phenomenal world as an internal rather than external entity.