What
is the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience, and the
content of the experience? [1]
Galen Strawson Unfinished draft
________________________________________________________
‘Eventually meditators…come to
see that the perceiver is only the subject side of a momentary experience, an
aspect of the perception or thought itself’.[2]
________________________________________________________
1 Introduction
2 Subjects of
experience—thick, traditional, thin
3 Terms and
assumptions
4 ‘[E = S:C]’
5
The Subject thesis: polarity
6 ‘[E = S = C]’?
7 ‘The thoughts
themselves are the thinkers’
8 Pause
9 Object and property
10 [E = S = C]
11 Conclusion
_________________________________________________________
1 Introduction
Assume that materialism is true and consider Louis, a representative human being. Louis is part of physical reality. Everything about him is a wholly physical phenomenon, including, of course, his conscious experience, and all the experiential qualitative[3] character that it has for him as he has it. No remotely realistic version of materialism can deny the existence of the experiential qualitative character of experience, so understood.[4]
I call the part of reality that consists of Louis the Louis-reality—the L-reality for short. The notion of the L-reality is rough, for as a concrete physical being Louis is enmeshed in wide-reaching physical interactions, but it is serviceable and useful none the less.[5]
Consider one of Louis’s experiences, and suppose for simplicity that it is a sharply delimited, uninterrupted, two-second-long episode that is preceded and followed by a period of complete unconsciousness on Louis’s part. Call this event of experience ‘e’, call the subject of this experience ‘s’, and call the overall experiential content of this experience ‘c’—where by ‘experiential content’ I mean ‘narrow’ experiential content, purely ‘internal’ content , ‘phenomenological’ content, whatever you prefer to call it.[6] My question is:
What is the relation between e, s and c?
I have called the subject of e ‘s’ rather than ‘Louis’ in order not to beg any questions. It may seem obvious that s = Louis, but there are different views of what subjects of experience are, and equally of what Louis is, considered as a subject of experience at a given time, and some combinations of these views about Louis and about what subjects of experience are have the consequence that s is no more identical with Louis than Louis is identical with his left hand.
What is the relation between e, s and c? Certain things seem clear immediately. There cannot be an experience without experiential content, and there cannot be an experience without a subject of experience. I take these to be necessary truths, true without any possible exception. Taking ‘Ex’, ‘Sx’, and ‘Cx’ stand for ‘x is an experience’, ‘x is a subject of experience’, and ‘x is an experiential content’ respectively, one can express these two truths as follows:
(1) [$xEx Þ $yCy]
(2 ) [$xEx Þ $ySy].
‘Þ’ has modal force, strong as you like.
Introducing ‘Oxy’ for ‘x is the content or subject of y’ one can expand (1) to
{1} [$xEx Þ [$yCy Ù Oyx]]
and (2) to
{2} [$xEx Þ [$ySy Ù Oyx]]
Some have said—they have appeared to say—that there can be an experience without a subject of experience; they have appeared to doubt (2), which I will call the Subject thesis. But this view is crazy, on its most natural reading, for ‘an experience is impossible without an experiencer’.[7] It is ‘an obvious conceptual truth that an experiencing is necessarily an experiencing by a subject of experience, and involves that subject as intimately as a branch-bending involves a branch’.[8] This is not a ‘grammatical illusion’, as some have proposed, but an evident—inconcussible—metaphysical truth. There cannot be experience without a subject of experience because experience is necessarily experience for—for someone-or-something. Experience necessarily involves experiential ‘what-it-is-likeness’, and experiential what-it-is-likeness is necessarily what-it-is-likeness for someone-or-something. Whatever the full story about the substantial nature of this experiencing something, its existence cannot be denied.
Descartes gets this exactly right in his Second Meditation. He points out that he can know that he exists as thinker or subject however wrong he is about his substantial nature. As he explicitly says, he might for all he knows at this point in his argument be nothing more than his body.[9]
Descartes’s point is secure even if individual-substance-suggesting noun phrases like ‘an experiencer’ or ‘a subject of experience’ or ‘someone-or-something’ have the potential to mislead. There is nothing in Buddhism that challenges it when it is understood as it is here. One could express it paradoxically by saying that if per impossibile there could be intense pain-experience without any subject of that experience, mere experience without any experiencer, there would be no point in stopping it, because no one would be suffering.[10] Later on I will consider the suggestion that the word ‘subject’ can be happily replaced by ‘subjectivity’.
(1) and (2) are true, then, obviously true, although (2) can be read in ways that make it less obviously true, or even false, as will emerge. And so also, no doubt, are
(3) [$xCx Þ $yEy]
(4 ) [$xCx Þ $ySy]
and
{3} [$xCx Þ [$yEy Ù Oxy]]
{4} [$xCx Þ [$ySy Ù Oyx]].[11]
Evidently there cannot be experiential content—actual, occurrent experiential content—without there being (an) experience of some sort. Equally evidently there cannot be experiential content without there being a subject of experience. (4) is in effect a version of (2) and is in any case entailed by (2) and (3).
(3) and (4) can be questioned, on at least one reading. For it is
arguable that there are occurrent but unexperienced experiential contents.[12] I will put this interesting issue to one side, however, and take ‘experiential content’ to mean ‘experienced content’, so that (3) and (4) are trivially true. This issue is not important at the moment, because the question that interests me is not whether experiential content can possibly exist without (conscious)[13] experience existing. It is rather this: given an experience, which must have content, and must have an experiencer (= (1) and (2)) , what is the relation between that experience, its content, and its subject?
With (1)-(4) in place, two possible entailments remain
(5) [$xSx Þ $yEy]
(6 ) [$xSx Þ $yCy][14]
and if either is true the other is,[15] but both are plainly false given the most common understanding of the notion of a subject of experience, according to which a subject of experience can exist at time t without any experience existing at t.[16] There is, however, a way of conceiving of subjects of experience which has the consequence that (5) and (6) are both true, and it is I think very valuable to have this conception to hand if one wants to get a clearer view of the metaphysics of conscious experience or subjectivity.
I am now going to change—simplify—my terminology. Given that all of (1) to (6) are true, once one has the right conception of the subject of experience in place, and that my main concern is with the relation between an experience, its subject (haver) and its content, I will take ‘E’, ‘S’ and ‘C’ stand for any individual, arbitrarily selected experience, its subject (or haver) and its experiential content. The general version of the question about the relation between e, s, and c is then this:
What is the relation between E, S and C?
(1)-(6) are replaced by
[1] [E Þ C]
[2] [E Þ S]
[3] [C Þ E]
[4] [C Þ S]
[5] [S Þ E]
[6] [S Þ C].
[1]-[4] are as trivial as ever, [5] and [6] will now be defended.
2 Subjects of
experience—thick, traditional, thin
Many find it natural to say that human beings and other animals considered as a whole are subjects of experience. I will call this the thick use of the term ‘subject of experience’. The thick use is automatic for most experimental psychologists and analytic philosophers, who may not easily see (or remember) that it is neither mandatory nor even particularly natural.
In spite of this orthodoxy, many (including many analytic philosophers) still have a tendency to think that the subject of experience properly or strictly speaking is some sort of inner mental entity or presence: ‘the self’, or some such thing—something essentially distinct from, not identical with, the human being considered as a whole. This has long been the traditional use of the term ‘subject of experience’ in philosophy, and I will call it the traditional use. It comes extremely naturally to us, given the character of our experience, and its apparent naturalness is quite certainly not just some artefact of philosophical or religious speculation.
Some who favour the thick use agree that the traditional use is natural, but think that it is pernicious, and in some way anti-materialist. I think it may be misleading, although it can be taken in ways that make it sensible, but it is certainly not anti-materialist. This, however, is not my present topic.[17]
So far, then, we have two uses of the term ‘subject of experience’:
[A] the thick whole-creature use dominant in present-day analytic philosophy and experimental psychology
and
[B] the traditional use according to which a subject of experience is an inner mental entity of some sort.
As ordinarily understood, [A] and [B] both allow—assume—that a subject of experience may and standardly does continue to exist even when it is not having any experience: whether you think that human subjects of experience are whole human beings or whether you think they are inner mental entities you are likely to allow (although Descartes, notably, does not) that they can continue to exist during periods of complete unconsciousness or experiencelessness—in periods of truly dreamless sleep, say. I (hereby) take this assumption to be built into [A] and [B], and it is this that prompts the third use of the term ‘subject of experience’,
[C] the thin use according to which a subject of experience does not and cannot exist at any given time unless there is experience at that time.
The thin use stands opposed to both [A] and [B] precisely because they both build in the assumption that a subject of experience can be said to exist in the absence of any experience.
—Why shouldn’t they?
It seems overwhelmingly natural to do so.
Perhaps it does. But to limit oneself to [A] and [B] is to run the risk of begging a central question. Many are so accustomed to [A] and [B], and to the idea that they exhaust the options, that they cannot take [C] seriously. And yet [C] simply makes explicit one natural use of ‘subject of experience’: according to which there (obviously) cannor be a subject of experience, at a given time t, unless some experience exists at t for it to be a subject of, at t.
[C] is necessarily true according to Descartes. He holds that the soul or self or subject of experience cannot exist in the absence of experience or consciousness. But does so for special metaphysical reasons—because he holds (or so it seems to me) that the subject is in some sense wholly constituted of experience or consciousness. I think he may well be right about this, but for the wrong reasons.[18]
How does all this apply to Louis—to the L-reality? Those who favour [A], the thick use, find one subject in the L-reality. The same goes, no doubt, for those who favour [B], the traditional use.[19] But those who favour [C], the thin use, and who concur with the standard view that the life of a human being regularly involves periods of complete experiencelessness (periods of dreamless sleep, for example), must find many subjects in the L-reality (considered over time).
Some will feel confident that this multiplicity tells against [C], but I think this is terminological habit or prejudice; and whether or not there turn out to be many subjects in the L-reality, on [C]’s way of counting (it is, for one thing, an unsettled empirical question whether there are any periods of complete experiencelessness in the life of an ordinary human being), [C] may be a very useful notion to have in play when attempting a sound metaphysics of consciousness. I think [C] is crucial, and from now on when I ask about the relation between experiences, subjects, and contents I will be concerned only with thin subjects, and only with human thin subjects, unless I specify otherwise. Nothing I say will challenge any of the very many true things that have been said about subjects of experience by those who favour the thick use of ‘subject of experience’.
Are thin subjects
persons? If you wish. In philosophy, the sense of the word ‘person’ is not
clearly fixed independently of theory. Certainly longevity is not decisive: if
a creature qualitatively identical to me during two seconds of my life exists
for just two seconds, that creature is a person. There may also be creatures
who live lives as complex as ours in two seconds.
I take thin subjects to be inner mental entities of some sort (the initial definition does not explicitly exclude the possibility that a thin subject existing for two seconds, say, is a time-slice of a whole human being having a two-second-long experience), but this certainly does not decide the issue against their being persons. Some think it an evident truth that persons are whole human beings; but it is only a terminological preference. And many find Henry James’s usage natural when he writes, of one of his early books,
I think of...the masterpiece in question...as the work of quite another person than myself...a rich relation, say, who...suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship.[20]
James knows
perfectly well that he is the same human
being as the author of that book, but he does not feel he is the same person as the author of that book.[21]
Are thin subjects things that can be said
to speak English and know French and algebra? Certainly,
in every sense in which you can be said to these things at any given time.
Are we thin subjects? In one respect, of course, we are thick subjects, human beings considered as a whole. In this respect we are, in being subjects of experience, things that can yawn and scratch. In another respect, though, we are, in being subjects of experience, no more whole human beings than hands or hearts: we are thin subjects. In this respect we are, in being subjects of experience, no more things that can yawn or scratch than eyebrows or thoughts. There is nothing anti-materialist about this view.
But ‘What then am I?’[22] Am I two
different sort of things, a thin subject and a thick subject? This is
ridiculous. Who—or what—speaks when Louis says ‘I’?
Well, ‘I’ is not univocal.[23] We move naturally between conceiving of ourselves primarily as a human being considered as a whole and primarily as some sort of inner mental entity. [[I will say more in an Appendix.]]?
3 Terms and assumptions
To introduce the notion of a thin subject is not—not yet—to make any assertion about the nature of reality that can be sensibly disputed. It is simply to introduce a certain way of talking about something whose existence is not in question. The way of talking may be disliked or thought unhelpful. Attachments to linguistic and theoretical habits can be as intense as attachment to dietary prohibitions, and can incorporate a conviction that other habits (of linguistic or theoretical idiom, or diet) are intrinsically wrong. True—but the phenomenon I refer to in speaking of thin subjects is indisputably real and utterly commonplace. It is the subject of experience understood in precisely the sense in which it is true to say that there is a subject of experience in the L-reality only when (and whenever) there is experience in the L-reality. To claim that this is an unnatural or perverse way to section reality even when doing metaphysics is simply to reveal one’s habituation to those natural notions of the subject of experience that allow that a subject of experience can persist through times of experiencelessness. The thick or traditional use is certainly more basic in ordinary thought, but this is no reason to disallow the thin use.
The existence of thin subjects is not an assumption, then. I am making certain assumptions: I have assumed that materialism is true, and I am now going to assume that human thin subjects are relatively short-lived entities. I am going to take it, in other words (and contrary to Descartes), that it is an empirical fact about the human process of consciousness that it is non-continuous in a certain way. I believe, in fact, that it is non-continuous in such a way that there are many subjects of experience in the L-reality in any normal waking day. Others, perhaps, believe that it is continuous in any waking day but interrupted at night.
An outright temporal gap in consciousness in the L-reality is obviously sufficient for non-continuity, but is not necessary, on the present view: an experientially unitary period of experience or ‘pulse’ of thought (in William James’s terminology) may succeed another in a temporally seamless way and yet count as a discontinuity for the purposes of counting subjects.[24]
Let me also register my view (it is as much a terminological decision as an assumption) that subjects of experience are happily thought of as objects, even when they are thinly understood, as here. Let me make this conditional: if one is going to talk of objects at all in one’s metaphysics, then it is I think not hard to show that thin subjects have at least as good a claim to be called objects as anything else.[25] For very briefly, [i] all concrete reality is substance (this view will be supported by the discussion of the object/property distinction in §9); [ii] whatever objects or individual substances are, they are physical unities of a certain sort; and [iii] there are no more indisputable physical unities than subjects of experience.[26]
That said, I think matter is best thought of as what one might call ‘process-stuff’, and that all physical objects are best thought of as processes, even if the converse is not true. And I take it this to be true on a three-dimensionalist (3D) view of objects as much as on a four-dimensionalist (4D) view.[27] We have to combat an intense staticism in our thought about matter and objects. Matter is essentially dynamic: essentially in time and essentially changeful.[28] All reality is process, as Whitehead was moved to observe by his study of twentieth-century physics, and as Heracleitus and others proposed long ago. Perhaps we would do better to call matter ‘time-matter’, or at least ‘matter-in-time’, so that we never for a moment forget its essential temporality. We think of matter as essentially extended, but we tend to think only of extension in space—something that can, we intuitively feel, be given to us as a whole at an instant. But space and time are interdependent. They are aspects of spacetime, and all concrete spatial extension is extension in spacetime.[29]
It follows from this interdependence alone, I think, that there is no ontologically weighty distinction between objects and processes given which objects are not truly said to be processes, although there is for many purposes a perfectly respectable distinction to be made between them. ‘From this alone’: there is in fact no need to invoke the spacetime of relativity theory, for even if relativity theory is false in its account of the essential interdependence of space and time there is no metaphysically defensible conception of a physical object—a ‘spatio-temporal continuant’, as philosophers say—that allows one to distinguish validly between objects and processes by saying that the latter are essentially dynamic or changeful phenomena in some way in which the former are not.[30] The source of the idea that there might be some metaphysically deep distinction between objects and processes lies in natural everyday habits of thought that are ordinarily harmless and indeed useful, and yet are disabling—almost perfectly unhelpful—in certain theoretical contexts. It seems to me that we philosophers continue to be very severely hampered by this habit of thought even when we have, in the frame of theoretical discussion, fully agreed and, as we think, deeply appreciated, that objects are entirely creatures of time, process-entities.[31] Later on I will pick up a similar point about the distinction between objects and properties.
Certainly the brevity of human thin subjects should not count against their claim to be objects, and, hence, physical objects. ‘The prejudice that the real is the persistent must be abandoned’,[32] and the everyday human temporal scale has no special validity. If W-particles and Z-particles are fundamental particles then they will presumably count as objects in almost any serious materialist metaphysics that countenances objects at all, and they are considerably more ephemeral entities than thin subjects; and 10–34th of a second, a very short time by human standards, ‘seems by the standards of early-universe physics as interminable as an indifferent production of Lohengrin’.[33]
Thin subjects certainly exist, then, and are to be counted among the objects, on the present scheme of things; although objects are processes, wholly constituted out of time-matter, process-stuff, and although ‘subjectivity’ may turn out to be helpful alternative to ‘subject’, in certain contexts, by the time I have finished. I take it, as a materialist, that all thin subjects are entirely constituted out of process-stuff in the brain. Cerebral process-stuff is constantly being recruited or corralled into one transient subject-constituting (and, equally, experience-constituting) piece or synergy of process-stuff after another. This, I propose, is what the conscious life of a human being consists in. (I will say more about ‘synergy’ shortly.)
My (empirical) bet is that thin subjects last for a maximum of about three seconds, in the human case,[34] with many being much shorter. I think that there is always some complete interruption of consciousness in any longer period of time, although this is not phenomenologically accessible to most people in normal life. There may either be a straightforward temporal gap, as already remarked, or there may be a new experience, with a new subject, following seamlessly on from the previous one. The next experience may even overlap the previous one temporally, as one recruitment or neurons gathers pace and peaks in consciousness before the previous one has died to nothing.[35] There is no particular difficulty in the idea (whether or not it happens is an empirical issue).
These experiences—these experiences-with-subjects—are I propose primitive unities (they are of course physical unities, on the materialist view). They are ‘indecomposable unities’, in William James’s terms, in the sense that no subpart of one such experience-with-subject can be said to be itself a whole experience-with-subject.[36] One experience-pulse means one subject. If overlap of the sort just imagined occurs in the L-reality then there are for a brief time two experiences-with-subjects in the L-reality; this is what the consciousness of Louis consists in, at this time. But neither of the two (thin) subjects that are numerically distinguishable at time t on this view of experiences as successive neuronal recruitments is aware of there being two subjects at t; nor is Louis the whole human being considered as a (thick) subject of experience aware of this at t. The phenomenology of experience may be and usually is of continuous experience.[37]
I will elaborate this view as I go along. Let me stress that ‘thin’ carries no implication of brevity. The basic definition of thin subjects allows that they might last for hours or days, even if they cannot do so in our case. In some creatueres they might cease to exist only when very rare periods of complete experiencelessness occur—only in dreamless sleep, say. One could even suppose, with Descartes (on one reading), that thin subjects are immortal.
—So what is the relation of a thin subject to a
human being? What is the relation of this putative thin subject s
in the L-reality to Louis the human being?
I take it that it is a completely straightforward part-whole relation, like the relation between Louis the whole human being and one of his toes or transient spots. s is a spatiotemporally bounded piece of process-stuff which one may call ps, Louis considered as a whole is also a spatiotemporally bounded piece of process-stuff which one may call pL, and ps is ontically distinct from pL in the way in which any (proper) part of an object that is itself correctly thought of as an object (a cell, a hand, a finger, depending on your view) is ontically distinct from the larger object of which it is a part. s is also not ontically distinct from Louis in any sense in which such a part of Louis is not ontically distinct from Louis.[38]
I take [s = ps] to be a simple identity claim, not a constitutive identity claim—if, that is, a constitutive identity claim is one that allows that the constituter can possibly exist in the absence of the constitutee, or conversely. On this view, neither ps nor s can exist without the other—unlike the statue of Pegasus and the lump of bronze out of which it is made (to take a familiar example), on most accounts of the relation between them. s could not possibly have consisted of anything other than the particular synergy of process-stuff ps and ps could not possibly have existed without s existing.[39]
In the same spirit I take it that the identity conditions of subject-constituting synergies of process-stuff are a strict function of their parts, in whatever sense they have parts: add or subtract one single subject-constituting ‘particle’ or ‘string’ or ‘field’ or ‘physical simple’ or ultimate, as I will call the ultimate constituents of reality, whatever they are, and you no longer have the same synergy or the same subject.[40]
This decision runs contrary to common intuitions about the conditions under which something (e.g a subject of experience) can be correctly said to remain the same thing. I will consider some counterfactuals later.
I hope the word ‘synergy’ does some work against the staticist tendencies of our natural picture of objects. It is not wrong, nor even particularly unclear, to say that s (or e) consists of a piece or bit or segment of process-stuff, for the essentially temporal, dynamic nature of what is in question has already been strongly marked by the term ‘process-stuff’. But a piece of process-stuff could be dynamic in every part (every piece of physical process-stuff is dynamic in every part, every atom is essentially in internal uproar) without necessarily being synergetic in any very interesting way, let alone synergetic in the way required for it to be a subject or an experience.[41] It is the synergy of process-stuff ps that constitutes—is—s. It is not as if the piece of process-stuff, involving 1010 ultimates, say, already wholly constitutes s, and it is then a further fact about ps that it is synergetic in a certain way. It is a portion of synergetic process-stuff that constitutes/is s—the physical object that is the subject of experience.
Imagine a connectionist’s customized set of party lights. Switched on for a few seconds, each light flashes in a pattern that depends on the other lights’ state of activation. The object that corresponds to s (or e), in this analogy, is not the set of lights conceived as something you can put away in a box for next year (which we naturally think of as an object). Nor is it the set of lights considered as a few-seconds-long temporal slice of the thing that you can put away in a box for next year (a rather peculiar object, by our ordinary lights). The object that corresponds to s (or e) in this analogy is: the-set-of-lights-in-the-process-of-flashing.
One might try to mark the point by repeating that thin subjects are dynamic entities, but that already concedes too much to the staticism of our ordinary thought about objects; for all physical objects are dynamic entities (there is an awful lot going on in a stone). The analogy draws whatever force it has from the contrast between the natural staticist picture of the set of lights and the ‘dynamic’ entity that consists of the set-of-lights-in-the-process-of-flashing-for-three-seconds, but really all objects are best conceived on the model of the set-of-lights-in-the-process-of-flashing-for-three-seconds—as essentially processual entities made of process-stuff.
I labour the point because I want to establish its banality. There are areas of metaphysics in which it is very important to cultivate the intuition of process in thinking about matter.
—In that case, why
bother with the solid staticist word ‘object’ at all, or the strongly
substantial/substantival-sounding word ‘subject’? Why not fall back into a
world—or vocabulary—of Russellian ‘events’ or Whiteheadian ‘occasions’?
First because there is no reason why one should not take the words ‘object’ and ‘subject’ with one into the processual outlook, realigning them to mean more clearly on their faces what they have meant (referentially speaking) all along. Second because there are positive reasons why one should take these words with one—rather than leaving them behind as specious rallying points for bad intuitions.
4
‘[E = S:C]’
So much for preliminaries. Thin subjects certainly exist. Human thin subjects certainly exist. As remarked, I think they last for a maximum of about three seconds. They have as good a claim to the title ‘physical object’ as anything else. Like all other physical objects they are essentially spatiotemporal, essentially dynamic entities. Like all other physical objects other than individual ultimates they are constituted of collections of ultimates. They are synergies of process-stuff of a certain very special sort, involving special macroelectrical (electrochemical) goings on.[42]
We may now repeat the question:
What is the relation between E, S and C?
The first thing to do is to add
[5] [S Þ E]
and
[6] [S Þ C]
to [1]-[4], to give the full house of [1]-[6]. Together [1]-[6] entail
[7] [E Û S Û C],
which, particularized to the case of e, a single experience in the L-reality, gives
[7L] [e Û s Û c].[43]
I take it, as before, that [7] and [7L] have modal force, but there is a sense in which ‘Û’ is not very informative. If [7] is true it would be good to know more about what makes it true. It would be good to know more about the metaphysics of the situation.
My first proposal is that we may and should move on from [1] and [2]—the obvious thesis that every experience has some experiential content, and the equally obvious Subject thesis that experience has to be experience-for someone-or-something—to the thesis that an experience consists of a (thin) subject entertaining—having, living—a content. I propose to write this as
[8] [E = S:C]
where ‘:’ has some kind of strong intimacy-intimating function whose force (over and above ‘Û’) remains to be determined. [8] then, is formed on the model of the general connection schema
[7] [E Û S Û C];
it replaces the first ‘Û’ in [7] by identity and the second by some as yet unspecified metaphysical intimacy.
5
The Subject thesis: polarity
One thing that seems correct about [8] is that it conveys the sense in which any experience comports an irreducible polarity. I will expound this a little, and consider in passing a couple of doubts about the Subject thesis. I will use the plural-accepting, count-noun form of the word ‘experience’ for talking of experiences as things that may have non-experiential being as well as experiential being,[44] and reserve the phrase ‘experiential phenomena’ and the plural-lacking form of the noun ‘experience’ to refer precisely and only to the concrete phenomenon of the qualitative character that experiences have for those who have them as they have them where this phenomenon of qualitative character is considered wholly independently of everything else.[45]
With this provision one can distinguish three modes of characterization of the portion of reality that concerns us when we are concerned with mental phenomena. First, mode 1, the experiential mental mode of characterization. In this mode we designate and describe experiential phenomena as just defined. I will call it the experiential mode for short, because ‘mental’ is redundant.
Mode 2 is the non-experiential mental mode of characterization. In this mode we designate and describe non-experiential phenomena that are none the less mental phenomena, whether dispositional (beliefs, preferences, knowledge of language, and so on) or occurrent (unconscious thought processes, and so on). This mode hardly concerns me here, and I mention it for completeness.
Mode 3 is the non-experiential non-mental mode of characterization. In this mode we designate and describe non-experiential, non-mental features of the portion of reality that concerns us when we are concerned with the existence of experiential phenomena, e.g. the being of the brain in so far as it is correctly characterizable by current physics and neurophysiology.[46]
Consider, in the framework provided by these three modes of characterization,[47] Louis’s experience e: his current experience of looking at St Paul’s Cathedral, say, on the north side of the River Thames, from the Globe Theatre on the South Bank. If one wants to give a truly compendious account of the being of e it seems that one will have to mention many things. It seems that one will have to mention [i] those of e’s causes that need to be cited in a full account of its intentional content (St Paul’s Cathedral, the River Thames, and so on). And one will have to mention [ii] those features of the brain activity that constitutes the being of e that are correctly characterizable in non-mental, non-experiential terms (e.g. the terms of physics and neurophysiology). At this stage one is in mode 3, the non-experiential non-mental mode of description.[48]
Actually [i] is not right, on the terms of this paper. It is right given a broader conception of what an experience is, but e is by definition (p. 00) an experience narrowly conceived (in the semi-technical sense of ‘narrow’). Its content c is narrowly conceived. So none of the things that are part of the intentional content of experiences broadly conceived need to be mentioned in mode 3 given my present purposes.
Nor, so far as [ii] is concerned, does the non-mental non-experiential being of any things—ultimates—that are not directly constitutive of e. I take the ‘process-stuff’ idiom to allow one, in talking of e (= pe), to refer to a portion of reality—e—in a very specific way that excludes any and all process-stuff that is not directly constitutive of e, part of the being of e; and I take it that to do this is to exclude things like myelin-constituting ultimates that may naturally enough be supposed to be part of e on a more inclusive view of what an experience is. The process-stuff idiom allows intensely fine-grained demarcations of portions of reality (I hope that the account of the object/property distinction given in §9 will make this idea more easier to grasp). It allows one to separate off just the process-stuff that directly constitutes e from everything else in the neuronal complex that is a candidate for identification with e on a blunter view of things which lets in myelin-constituting ultimates, cell-wall-constituting ultimates, blood-sugar-constituting ultimates, and so on (always assuming that nature in her ingenuity has not somehow found a way to put even these things to work as consciousness-constituting elements in those synergies of process-stuff that are experiences).[49]
It remains true, nevertheless, that the ultimates that are directly constitutive of e will have non-mental non-experiential being as well as experiential being, given the standard materialist view that every experiential or experience-constituting reality also has some non-experiential reality. This non-mental non-experiential being will therefore be picked up in mode 3.
Moving to mode 1, the experiential mode, one drops reference to the non-experiential being of those ultimates that are directly constitutive of e. One strips one’s account of e of any reference to anything that is (a) constitutive of e’s existence, considered as a whole, and (b) non-experiential. One does this in order to focus on one particular and indubitably real feature of the being of e: its experiential being.
Is such exclusive focusing really possible, or legitimate? Is it possible for materialists who take it that experiential phenomena are entirely a matter of brain activity, and, further, that all brain activity has some non-experiential being? Certainly, for it does not follow, from the fact (if it is indeed a fact) that e must have non-experiential being in addition to experiential being, that one cannot consider the experiential phenomena that e involves in isolation, or just as such. One can. One can consider e’s experiential nature quite independently of any non-experiential or non-mental causes or being that it may have, restricting oneself entirely to the experiential mode of characterization. I will mark this by saying that one may restrict oneself to considering ee, where the subscript ‘e’ is short for ‘experiential’.
Having marked out this object of enquiry, ee, one can ask the following question:
Given that ee exists, what else must exist?
Call anything non-experiential that must exist if ee exists ‘N’. What is N? One radical group of idealists holds that ‘N’ denotes nothing.[50] A second group of idealists holds that ‘N’ denotes certain immaterial but partly non-experiential phenomena.[51] Materialists hold that ‘N’ denotes various non-experiential physical phenomena. And so on.
Many philosophers will be inclined to refer to their favoured candidate for N—the soul, the body, the brain—when answering the question of what the subject of experience is,[52] but the Subject thesis completely bypasses all these metaphysical differences. It points out that one has to grant that the subject of experience must exist, given that e exists, even when one keeps strictly to the experiential mode of characterization and so considers only ee. One has to grant that the subject of experience must exist before one has made any other assumptions about the nature of reality.
—But mice presumably
have experience, and we are not bound to say that there is anything as grand as
a subject of experience—a Subject of Experience—in
their case. A mouse considered as an integral experiential-and-non-experiential
whole may perfectly well be called a subject of experience. But when we give an
account of what must exist if a particular mouse experience m
exists while restricting ourselves to the
experiential, and considering only ee,
we do not have to talk of a subject of experience at all. Nor should we do so.
When we limit ourselves to the experiential, we need and should speak only of
experience, or of experiential content. That is all there is to be found, so
far as the experiential is concerned, in the case of the mouse. And by itself
it does not give us grounds for asserting the existence of anything else at
all—such as a Subject of Experience.
Oh but it does. Take any particular experience E. Even when one all one has assumed to
exist is Ee /it
seems that / it seems that one can already know that what
exists, given that Ee
exists, is complex in a
certain respect. Ee
may be complex in virtue of its content: it may be experience as of seeing,
simultaneously, a complicated array of different colours. But even if Ee does not involve any
complexity in this way—perhaps it is just uniform experience of green—it seems
that one is already in a position to assert—to know—that what exists, given
that Ee exists, is and
must be complex in a certain respect. Surely Ee
cannot possibly exist without the polarity of experiencer and experiential
content? Where there is experiential content there is necessarily experiencing, and where there is experiencing
there is necessarily an experiencer—a
subject of experience. This is the apparently irreducible polarity that, so
far, seems well expressed by
[8] [E = S:C].
Some may want to replace the individual-substance-suggesting word ‘subject’ by the word ‘subjectivity’, even after a repetition of earlier assurances that (in good Second-Meditation style) the Subject thesis makes no claims whatever about the ultimate substantial nature of the subject, and certainly doesn’t claim that the subject can be known to be something ontologically distinct from E or indeed Ee. That’s fine, although I’m not prepared to allow the replacement of ‘subject’ by ‘subjectivity’ in the Subject thesis unless it is allowed in return that ‘subject’ can also be correctly used. This is quite certainly only a matter of terminology (it may be that some Buddhists will find the point very hard to allow, given their time-honoured terminological habits). For the basic point surely remains untouched: Ee must still involve some sort of irreducible complexity or polarity in involving the phenomenon of subjectivity, on the one hand, and the phenomenon of content, occurrent particular content, on the other.
Well, perhaps the point is not entirely untouched; perhaps it does not seem quite so luminously evident after the substitution of ‘subjectivity’ for ‘subject’. That’s fine by me, for in the end, I do not want it to be untouched at all. And to say that it is provable that any experience comports some sort of irreducible polarity, and that this can be known to be so even when one restricts oneself to the experiential mode of characterization, is not yet to say that one can prove irreducible, full-on ontological plurality a priori from the mere existence of Ee.
—I don’t know what you
mean by ‘full-on ontological plurality’, and this is all wrong in any case.
Experiential content is all that can
be truly discerned when one is restricted to mode 1, the experiential mode of
characterization. The subject of experience cannot be discerned. This is what
Hume took such pains to show us.
Hume did no such thing,[53] but let’s leave him out of this. The first point to make is that even it were true that experiential content is all that can be discerned when one is restricted to mode 1 it would still be true that the subject can be known to exist if Ee is known to exist.[54] Granted that the subject is not itself a wholly experiential phenomenon, in the sense of an experiential-content phenomenon (surely—obviously—it cannot itself be just a bit of content?), we can still know that it exists, even when restricted to mode 1, and even when the resources of mode 1 are conceived as narrowly as they are in this objection. For if there is an experience of pain, then—once again—there must be something, some whatever-it-is, that feels the pain. There cannot be just experiential content—if to say this is in any way to suggest or imply that there is not also a subject of experience (occurrent subjectivity). The point, once again, could not be more simple: an experience is necessarily experience-for. We must discern at least this much structure in the world when it is said that there is an experience (e.g. of pain), even if we think that reality is purely mental. The Subject thesis does not depend on the traditional idea that an experience, being a process or event, necessarily requires some sort of substance that is in some way distinct from it, in which it can go on or occur. It holds good even if one proposes that there is nothing but process, ‘pure process’, indeed pure mental process, in the universe. The fact that one can know that the subject of experience exists even when one restricts oneself to considering the experiential being of experiences, and does not speculate in any way about their non-experiential or non-mental being, is a direct consequence of the necessary ‘for-ness’ of experience.
The necessary for-ness of any (arbitrary particular) experience E is not itself any part of the experiential content of E. It is not, I take it, something that is necessarily apprehended in some manner by the entity whose experience E is, when E occurs. Equally, representation of the subject of E needn’t be part of the experiential content of E, although (contrary to Ryle, and the ancient ‘the eye cannot see itself’ analogy) I think it can be.[55] The fact remains that the necessary for-ness of experience requires us to acknowledge the existence of the subject of experience when saying what must exist given that E exists—even when considering E just as Ee—i.e. just in its experiential being. It is natural for some, given their terminological preferences, to think that Buddhist meditation, or indeed any remotely successful practice of meditation, however secular, shows the noun-phrase ‘the subject of experience’ to be irredeemably excessive. But there is no reason to accept this; it is only a terminological attachment. My reply to those who want to replace ‘subject of experience’ by ‘subjectivity’ is that the force of the phrase ‘subject of experience’in its present use (this is an explicit terminological ruling) is such that the existence of subjectivity entails the existence of a subject of experience.
6
‘[E = S = C]’?
Before I was interrupted (before Hume was misrepresented) I was proposing that we can know that reality is complex in a certain way even if all we know is that a given experience E exists, even when considering E just as Ee. It seems that there is a respect in which experience involves an irreducible polarity—the polarity of subject of experience and experiential content—and this polarity seems well enough represented by
[8] [E = S:C].
It is not, however, clear that we can know that this polarity involves some sort of genuine ontological plurality—a real distinction, as opposed to a merely conceptual distinction, as Descartes might have said. For there is a real distinction between two phenomena—so that genuine ontological plurality is in question—if and only if they can possibly ‘exist apart’, and a merely conceptual distinction between them if and only if they are distinct but cannot possibly exist apart, like trilaterality and triangularity.[56] And when we confine our attention to thin subjects, as here, it seems quite unclear that the actual subject S of any given actual experience E can exist apart from E, even in thought. For this reason I am not claiming that the allegedly irreducible subject:content polarity of any experience proves the existence of irreducible ontological plurality. (Some may think that counterfactual speculation can quickly pull them apart; but I am going to deny this.)
Well, is there or is
there not irreducible ontological plurality?
This issue now has to be addressed. It is very difficult—it includes, for one thing, all the perennial problems raised by the distinction between object and property—but I will now attempt it, returning to e, Louis’s particular experience.
What more can be said about the relation between e, s and c in the light of the biconditional template
[7L] [e Û s Û c]?
I have already proposed that
[8L] [e = s:c]
is informative and true as a version of [7L]. The colon-designated relation is admittedly murky, but at least it seems clear that we cannot develop it into identity and say that
[9L] [e = s = c].
The subject cannot, surely, be the content. Even if there is some sense in which it is best to say that the subject of the experience is just the (necessary) subjectivity of the experience, still the subjectivity cannot, surely, be the content.
That remains to be seen. In the meantime, it may be suggested that the colon in [8L] is too appositional, and too separatist. And perhaps it is also too egalitarian, suggesting full equality of ontological status across the double dots—so that there is no difference between s:c and c:s. Perhaps it would be more graphic to write [8L] as
[10L] [e = s{c}],
the curly brackets representing not only the fact that c is essentially something for s, and essentially belongs to s,[57] but also the idea that c is somehow included in s in such a way that its being is at least partly constitutive of the being of s. On this view c is, as it were, the body or flesh of s, without which s (the thin subject) could not exist, and would be nothing. s, we feel, cannot simply be the same as c, but s is nothing without c—not just utterly empty, but non-existent. s could not possibly exist apart from c.[58]
Shifting terms, we may say
that the existence of s is the existence of ps,
a synergy of process-stuff: that [s = ps]. And
whatever else it is or is not, the existence of c is (given materialism)
nothing over and above the existence of some process-stuff which we may call pc:
[c
= pc].[59]
The question is then this: what is the relation between ps (= s)
and pc
(= c)?
What is the relation between the process-stuff that is (wholly constitutive of)
the being of s and the process-stuff that is (wholly constitutive of) the
being of c. This is, I think, a powerful question.
—This is lovely, but I
don’t really follow. I really don’t follow. It looks as if the main achievement
of the colon and curly brackets is to dramatize our uncertainty about the
metaphysics of the relation between s and c. The meaning of ‘=’, by
contrast, is very clear.
I agree. ‘=’ has an agreeable clarity. It would be nice to have more of it. And perhaps
[9L] [e = s = c]
is not as crazy as it sounds. Perhaps it is worth asking what sort of a case can be made for [9L], at least—to examine where and how, exactly, it hits incoherence, if it does.
The central strangeness is the identification of s and c. How can the subject be the content? But is the intuition that s cannot be the same as c as sound as it is strong? Perhaps it feeds off some elision or blurring of the difference between qualitative-identity considerations and numerical-identity considerations; or between type identity and token identity; or between contents considered as abstract particulars and contents considered as concrete, occurrent particulars. One needs to bring the question ‘What is it, actually, for concrete, occurrent, experiential content to exist?’ before one’s mind, again and again, if necessary, in order to put this speculation to the test.[60]
Clearly we must allow that two numerically distinct subjects S1 and S2 can entertain or have qualitatively identical contents. Equally clearly we must insist that if they do then there will of necessity be two numerically distinct contents C1 and C2 (it is only contents in this concrete sense that are at issue in this paper, occurrent contents, living contents, as it were.) Now when, keeping this vividly in mind, we reflect on the point that a subject of experience S cannot possibly exist at time t unless there is some experiential content C for it to be the subject of, at t, and the proposal in the penultimate paragraph that this is because C is in some way constitutive of the very existence of S, it can begin to seem that there is after all no obvious asymmetry between c and s. If it is granted that c is indeed partly constitutive of the very existence of s, if it is granted that this is the root reason why
[6L] [s Þ c]
is true, then the claim that s is partly constitutive of c—this being the root reason why