NOT FOR CIRCULATION
OUTSIDE N.E.H. SUMMER SEMINAR: DRAFT ONLY
From CONSCIOUSNESS AND PERSONS:
UNITY AND IDENTITY
MICHAEL TYE
CHAPTER 1: THE UNITY
OF PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE AT A TIME
1) It is very
widely supposed in both philosophy and psychology that the senses function as
largely separate channels of information which generate different
sense-specific impressions or experiences.
For example, I see some flowers, a fence, two squirrels, and in seeing
them, I undergo visual experiences.
Listening to a nearby bird singing, I hear melodious sounds and in so
doing, I am the subject of auditory experiences. Finding a broken egg on the ground, and smelling its pungent
odor, I experience olfactory experiences.
Placing a chocolate in my mouth and tasting its sweetness, I have
gustatory experiences. Running my
fingers over the bark of a tree and feeling its roughness, I experience tactual
experiences.
2) So,
according to the received view, if I am using all five of my senses at a given
time, I undergo five different simultaneous perceptual experiences at that
time, each with its own distinctive sense-specific phenomenal character. This generates one version of the Problem of
the Unity of Conscious Experience. How
is it that if I am undergoing five different simultaneous perceptual
experiences, phenomenologically, it is as if I were undergoing one? How is it that the five experiences are
phenomenologically unified?
3) Suppose that
at midday a winetaster is tasting a Cabernet Sauvignon. He sees the red wine in the wineglass
beneath his nose, as he brings the wine to his lips. He smells the rich bouquet of the wine, as he tastes its fruity
flavor in his mouth; and in tasting it, he experiences the liquid touching his tongue
and the back of his mouth. Perhaps, as
he does this, he flicks a finger against the glass, thereby producing a
high-pitched sound. One way to describe
the winetaster’s phenomenal state is to say that he has an experience of a
certain colored shape AND further he has an experience of a certain smell AND
in addition he has an experience of a taste AND... etc. But intuitively, this is
unsatisfactory. It misses something
out: the unity of these experiences.
There is something it is like for the winetaster overall at midday, as
he brings the wine to his lips and smells and tastes it. There is a unified phenomenology. How can this be, if, in reality, he is
undergoing five separate experiences?
Of course, for each of these experiences, there is something it is like
to undergo the experience. But there is
also something it is like to have these experiences together. And that remains to be accounted for.
4) Here is
another example. Holding a ripe apple
in my hand, I experience a red surface and I experience a cold surface. These experiences aren’t experienced in
isolation, however. They are
experienced together. This is part of
the phenomenology of my experience overall.
There is a unity in my experience.
In what does this unity consist, given that I am subject to two
different token experiences, one visual and one tactual?
5) Phenomenal
unity is not simply a matter of the relevant experiences being directed upon a
single object in a spatially localized region.
For one thing, in the winetaster case, although the wine he sees is in
the glass, the wine he tastes is in his mouth.
For another, the phenomenological unity of experiences to which I am
referring can occur even with experiences directed upon widely separated
objects. Standing by the railing of a
ship and smelling the sea air, as I look at the ship’s wake in the ocean, I may
hear the sound of a tugboat on my left some distance away. Again, my overall experience is
unified. It forms a seamless phenomenal
whole within which smell, sound, and various visual qualities are phenomenologically
present.
6) The
phenomenal unity of simultaneous experiences is also not a matter of their
being actual or potential objects of the subject’s attention. Allowing for the moment that subjects can
attend introspectively to their experiences[1],
intuitively the unity of simultaneous experiences can exist even without the
attention, just as the experiences can.
Walking along a lane filled with leaves, you see many more leaves than
you notice. If your attention is
grabbed by one large, yellow and brown, star-shaped leaf, you do not cease to
see the other leaves. They do not
vanish from your visual experiences.
They simply recede into the phenomenal background. Likewise, if some nesting birds nearby take
flight and your attention is caught by one shrill sound in particular. The other sounds are still there -- your
auditory experience still encompasses them phenomenally -- even though your
attention is focused on one sound in particular. As you direct your attention appropriately, the phenomenal unity
of the visual and auditory experiences is revealed or disclosed -- as you
notice the shrill call of the bird while staring at the star-shaped leaf, say
-- but intuitively the unity is not created by that attention. It is there beforehand, unnoticed.
7) This point
also undermines the view, popular historically, that unity is imposed on the
different sense experiences by thought.
The Kantian suggestion that experiences are unified by the capacity of
their subjects to think of them as their own fails to come to grips with the
obvious fact that unity is there in the experiences, whatever their subjects
can or cannot think. It is certainly
true that without the relevant concepts, a person cannot recognize that there
is phenomenal unity and thus, in these circumstances, he or she is ‘blind’ to
it. But the unity itself is not a
cognitive matter. It perhaps is also
worth noting that Kant’s proposal fails to do justice anyway to the case of
split brain patients who are certainly able to self-ascribe their perceptual
experiences, but whose experiences, after the commissurotomy, are disunified
(at least in certain special experimental situations).
8) If there really is something it is like to
undergo all the sense-specific experiences together at the same time -- if
there really is a phenomenological unity--, then there must be an encompassing
experience, one that includes the other experiences within itself. That experience is the bearer of the total,
unified phenomenology.
9) Note that
this experience cannot just be a conjunction of the five modality specific
experiences. The conjunction of two
experiences isn’t itself an experience at all.
The maximal experience must be a new experience, one that unifies the
other experiences into a single phenomenological whole. As Bayne and Chalmers put the point in a
recent discussion:
At any given time, a
subject has a multiplicity of experiences...
These experiences are distinct from each other... But at the same
time,.... they seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing
state of consciousness.
..... this encompassing
state of consciousness .... can be thought of as involving at least a
conjunction of many more specific conscious states... But what is important, on the unity thesis, is that this total
state is not just a conjunction of conscious states. It is also a conscious state in its own right. (forthcoming, p.
000 )
10) That experiences bundle together to form
overarching experiences is a view that has counterparts, of course, within each
sense. For there is phenomenal unity
not just across senses but within them too.
Thus, Wilfrid Sellars (1968, p. 000) remarks:
A sense-impression of a complex is
a complex of impressions.
Likewise,
Sydney Shoemaker (1996, p. 177) says:
...the visual experience of
a spatially extended thing is a synthesis of visual experiences of parts of
that thing.
11) Seen from this vantage point, the problem of
the unity of conscious experience, as it applies to the case of simultaneous
perceptual experiences, is, first and foremost, to give an account of the
nature of the unifying experience in relation to the other experiences.
II
12) The
problem, stated in this way, is threatened by an infinite regress. If what it is like to undergo the overall or
maximal experience is different from what it is like to undergo the component
sense-specific experiences, E1-E5, then there must be a unifying relation
between the latter experiences that is itself experienced. The experience of the unifying relation is
not itself a sense-specific experience.
But it is an experience nonetheless; for if there were no experience of
the unifying relation, then there would be nothing it is like to have the
sense-specific experiences unified.
There are, then, it seems, six experiences: the five sense-specific ones
and the experience of unity. However,
the maximal experience isn’t just a conjunction of experiences. It is a genuinely new unified experience
with its own phenomenology. So, what
unites the six experiences together? It
seems that there must be a further unifying relation that binds the
experiences. This relation, however,
must itself be experienced. For the
unity is phenomenal. And now a regress
has begun to which there is no end.
13) There is also a real question as to whether
there is a maximal, unifying experience in the first place. For consider three simultaneous unified
experiences, e1, e2, and e3. If the
unity or experienced togetherness of any two experiences requires that there be
a unifying experience, then the unity of e1 and e2 requires a further
experience E that includes them. Since
E is unified with e3, another experience E’ is now required. But E’ is also unified with E; so a further
experience, E’‘, that includes E and E’ is needed. And the unity of E’‘ with E and E’ necessitates yet another
experience; and so on without end.
14) Another pressing difficulty is that we are
not introspectively aware of our experiences as unified; for we are not aware
of our experiences via introspection at all.
This needs a little explanation.
Suppose that you have just entered a
friend’s country house for the first time and you are standing in the living
room, looking out at a courtyard filled with flowers. It seems to you that the room is open, that you can walk
straight out into the courtyard. You
try to do so and, alas, you bang hard into a sheet of glass, which extends from
ceiling to floor and separates the courtyard from the room. You bang into the glass because you do not
see it. You are not aware of it; nor
are you aware of any of its qualities.
No matter how hard you peer, you cannot discern the glass. It is transparent to you. You see right through it to the flowers
beyond. You are aware of the flowers,
not by being aware of the glass, but by being aware of the facing surfaces of
the flowers. And in being aware of
these surfaces, you are also aware of a myriad of qualities that seem to you to
belong to these surfaces. You may not
be able to name or describe these qualities but they look to you to qualify the
surfaces. You experience them as being
qualities of the surfaces. None of the
qualities of which you are directly aware in seeing the various surfaces look
to you to be qualities of your experience.
You do not experience any of these qualities as qualities of your
experience. For example, if redness is
one of the qualities and roundness another, you do not experience your
experience as red or round.
If your friend tells you that there are several
ceiling-to-floor sheets of glass in the house and that they all produce a
subtle change in the light passing through them so that things seen the other
side appear more vividly colored than is usually the case, as you walk gingerly
into the next room, you may become aware that there is another partitioning
sheet of glass before you by being aware of the qualities that appear to belong
to nonglass surfaces before your eyes.
You are not aware of the second sheet of glass any more than you were
aware of the first; but you are now aware that there is a sheet of glass in the
room by being aware of qualities apparently possessed by nonglass surfaces
before you.
Visual experiences are like such sheets
of glass. Peer as hard as you like via
introspection, focus your attention in any way you please, and you will only
come across surfaces, volumes, films, and their apparent qualities. Visual experiences are transparent to their
subjects. We are not introspectively aware of our visual experiences any more
than we are perceptually aware of transparent sheets of glass. If we try to focus on our experiences, we
‘see’ right through them to the world outside.
By being aware of the qualities apparently possessed by surfaces,
volumes, etc, we become aware that we are undergoing visual experiences. But we are not aware of the experiences
themselves.[2]
This is true, even if we are
hallucinating. It is just that in this
case the qualities apparently possessed by surfaces, volumes, etc before our
eyes are not so possessed. The
surfaces, volumes, etc do not exist.
15) Introspection, on the view just presented,
is importantly like displaced perception or secondary seeing-that, as Fred
Dretske (1995) has observed. When I see
that the gas tank is nearly empty by seeing the gas gauge or when I see that
the door has been forced by seeing the marks on the door, I do not see the gas
tank or the forcing of the door. My
seeing-that is secondary or displaced.
I am not aware -- I am not conscious -- of either the gas tank or the
forcing of the door. I am aware of
something else -- the gas gauge or the marks on the door -- and by being aware
of this other thing, I am aware that so-and-so is the case.
Similarly, in the case of introspection
of a visual experience, I am not aware or conscious of the experience
itself. I am aware that I am having a
certain sort of experience by being aware of something other than the
experience — the surfaces apparently outside and their apparent qualities.[3]
16) What is true above for the case of vision is
true for the other senses. For example,
we hear things by hearing the sounds they emit. These sounds are publicly
accessible. They can be recorded. Similarly, we smell things by smelling the
odors they give off. They too are
publicly accessible. You and I can
both smell the foul odor of the rotting garbage. Odors, like sounds, move through physical space. We taste things by tasting their
tastes. One and the same taste can be
tasted by different people. Some tastes
are bitter, others are sweet. When we
try to introspect our supposed experiences of hearing, smelling, and tasting,
the qualities of which we are directly aware are qualities we experience as
being qualities of sounds, odors, and tastes.
It seems very natural to suppose that among these qualities are the
following: pitch, tone, loudness, pungency, muskiness, sweetness, saltiness,
sourness. But be that as it may, the
important point is that when we introspect, the particulars we come across, if
any, are sounds, odors, and tastes — the owners, if such exist, of the
qualities we find in introspection. We
do not come across, in addition to these things, token experiences of hearing,
smelling, and tasting. Nor do we come
across any overarching or maximal token perceptual experience either.
17) If we are
not aware of our experiences via introspection, we are not aware of them as
unified. The unity relation is not
given to us introspectively as a relation connecting experiences. Why, then, suppose that there is such a
relation at all?
.
18) These
points serve to remind us that one way to respond to a philosophical problem is
to challenge the problem itself instead of accepting it, on its own terms, and
trying to solve it.
III
19) Consider the following example (from Parsons
1970) as a way of beginning to get at what seems to me wrong. Suppose that this statement is true:
(S1) Jones writes illegibly and Jones
writes painstakingly.
It does not
follow that
(S2) Jones writes illegibly and
painstakingly,
at least on one
natural reading of (S2). For if Jones
writes illegibly but not painstakingly with his left hand and painstakingly but
legibly with his right, then (S1) is true but (S2) false. In this case, there is an event of Jones’
writing illegibly and there is an event of Jones’ writing painstakingly, but
these are two distinct events. There is
no event of Jones’ writing both illegibly and painstakingly. So, (S1) does not entail (S2), but (S2)
clearly does entail (S1). Given the
event of Jones’ writing both illegibly and painstakingly, there is, of course,
the event of Jones’ writing illegibly.
For the latter is the very same event as the former under a less broad
description. Likewise for the event of
Jones’ writing painstakingly.
20) In the case where (S2) is true, there is a
kind of unity to Jones’ writing.
Illegibility and painstakingness are combined together in a single
instance of writing. That unity is
lacking in the case that (S1) is true and (S2) is false. But where (S2) is true, there aren’t two
different writings, one painstaking and the other illegible, which somehow are
unified together to produce a third, overarching writing that includes
them. There is just one writing that
may be described in more or less encompassing ways.[4] To suppose otherwise is to create a new
pseudo-problem: the problem of the unity of the event of Jones’ writing
illegibly and painstakingly.
21) Here is
another example. Suppose it is
lunchtime and I have a sudden and strong desire for a pint of beer with a ham
sandwich. In having this desire, of
course, I have a desire for a pint of beer.
It is also true that I have a desire for a ham sandwich. But patently I don’t have three sudden
desires here. Nor is it the case that
having a desire for a beer together with a desire for a ham sandwich just is
having a desire for a pint of beer with a ham sandwich. I might want a beer and also want a ham
sandwich while finding the idea of having the two together repellent.
My sudden desire for a pint of beer with
a ham sandwich is a single desire that can be described in multiple ways. The description ‘desire for a pint of beer’
is incomplete, but unlike the description ‘desire for a pint of beer alone’, it
is not inaccurate.
22) These
remarks apply mutatis mutandis, I want to suggest, to the problem of the unity
of conscious experience, as it is usually conceived. There aren’t five different or separate simultaneous experiences
somehow combined together to produce a new unified experience. Nor are there are multiple simultaneous
unified experiences within each sense.
To be sure, if I am the winetaster, the statement
(S3) I have an experience of a bright
red shape and I have an experience of a fruity taste and I have an experience
of a cassis odor.....
Is true. And, given that the case is one of
phenomenal unity, the following is true too:
(S4) I have an experience of a bright
red shape and a fruity taste and a cassis odor...
Moreover, (S4)
entails (S3). But there is just one
experience here, an experience that can be described less fully as my
experience of a bright red shape or as my experience of a fruity taste, etc.
23) On this
view, there really are no such entities as purely visual experiences or purely
auditory experiences or purely olfactory experiences, etc in normal, everyday
consciousness. Where there is phenomenological unity across sense modalities,
sense-specific experiences do not exist.
They are the figments of philosophers’ and psychologists’
imaginations. And there is no problem,
thus, of unifying these experiences.
There are no experiences to be unified.
Likewise, within each sense: there are not many simultaneous visual
experiences, for example, combined together to form a complex visual
experience. There is a single
multi-modal experience, describable in more or less rich ways.
24) ‘Stuff and
nonsense’, you may say. ‘The proposal
is empirically false. Visual
experiences are known to arise in the visual cortex, auditory experiences are
known to arise in the auditory cortex, and so on. In the winetaster case, it is surely undeniable that visual
experiences are tokened in the winetaster’s visual cortex, as he views the wine
he is tasting, experiences of just the same phenomenal type as those that would
have been tokened in that cortex, had the situation been the same but his other
senses blocked from any information. Of course, these experiences exist!’
25) By way of reply, let us for a moment indulge
in the fiction that there are purely visual experiences in everyday
consciousness of the external world. In
these experiences, shape and color are unified. If, for example, I view a green square, my visual system
represents the greenness and the squareness in separate places in the brain;
but these qualities aren’t experienced as separate. They are experienced as qualities of a single thing. I have an experience that is object-unified,
as we might say, even though its physical basis is disunified.[5] What is the relationship between the
experience and its physical basis? The
answer I favor is that the experience, assuming there is one, is constituted by
a certain combination of separate and largely independent physical events in
the visual cortex, but it is not token identical with that combination. This answer gives the experience a physical
nature; moreover constitution is the relation that bonds macro-events and
micro-events, macro-states and micro-states, macro-objects and micro-objects
generally.
Consider, for example, a single cloud in
the sky. The cloud is an aggregate of
water droplets. The ‘is’ in the last
sentence is not the ‘is’ of identity.
The cloud in the sky could survive the loss of a few of its constituent
water droplets (if, say, a highly localized strong gust of warm air were to
cause them to evaporate). Not so any
aggregate of water droplets that contains them. The loss of those droplets would destroy the original
aggregate. So, the cloud has a modal
property the aggregate of water droplets lacks, that of possibly surviving the
loss of such-and-such droplets. It
follows by Leibniz’ Law that the cloud is not identical with any aggregate of
droplets. In general, ordinary, everyday macro-objects are not identical with aggregates
of their parts, since the former differ in their modal properties from the
latter. My car, for example, might have
had a different carburettor, but the aggregate of its actual parts could not
have failed to contain the actual carburettor. The car, thus, is not
identical with the sum of its parts.
The relationship rather is one of constitution or composition.
One need not resort to modal properties
to make the above points. Actual
properties will do in some cases. The
clay that constitutes a pot exists before the pot does. The lump of silver that is melted and formed
into a coin exists before the melting process, but the coin does not. The clay is thus not identical with the
pot; the lump of silver not identical with the coin.
Likewise for macro-events. Consider the eruption of Mount
Vesuvius. Intuitively, that very
eruption might have spewed forth an imperceptibly smaller amount of lava. Had it done so, the micro-events taking
place in the spatial region of Vesuvius’ eruption would have been minimally
different and thus the aggregate of those events in that counterfactual
situation is not the same as the actual aggregate. The eruption, therefore, has a modal property that the underlying
cluster of micro-events lacks, and the former is not identical with the latter.
Alternatively, consider all the micro-physical events that
compose the emergence of North America (Burge, 1986). Imagine that these events are embedded within a much larger land
mass, so that in the counterfactual situation there is no such thing as North
America and its emergence. Then the
aggregate of micro-events has the property of possibly existing without North
America; but the event of North America’s emerging does not. That event is not identical with the
aggregate. The aggregate constitutes
the emergence of North America in actual fact, but the relationship is not one
of identity.
26) Consider next the
following example. A large chunk of
clay is used to make a statue at time t.
The clay constitutes the statue without being identical with it. Suppose counterfactually that at time t’,
where t’ is later than t, an artist cleverly removes much of the clay without
remolding it so as to leave behind a small clay pot. In the counterfactual situation, the clay that remains
constitutes a pot at t’. But in the
actual situation it does not. In actual
fact, no clay is removed. There is, in
actual fact, no tiny pot within the statue.
There is only the statue.
Within the aggregate of lumps of clay composing the statue,
there is a smaller aggregate of clay lumps that in a certain counterfactual
situation composes a pot. In actual
fact, the smaller aggregate does not compose a pot. Indeed, it does not by itself
actually compose or constitute any ordinary thing. Rather that aggregate together with the
remaining aggregate form a larger aggregate that composes the statue.
27) I hope that the
relevance of all of this is becoming clear.
On my view, at the given time the winetaster is subject to a single
experience that represents the color of the wine, the sound of the wine-glass,
as it is flicked, the smell of the wine, and so on. This experience is constituted by a combination of largely independent
physical events going on in separate regions of the brain. Within that combination of events, there is
a cluster of events (call it ‘C’) occurring in the winetaster’s visual
cortex. In the extraordinary counterfactual
situation in which the winetaster’s nonvisual senses are all blocked, so that
no nonvisual information gets in, the winetaster is left with a purely visual
experience. And in that
counterfactual situation, C, in the absence of the other pertinent actual
physical events, constitutes a visual experience. But it does not follow from this that in actual fact C
constitutes a purely visual experience.
In actual fact, C (wholly) constitutes no experience at all. There is just one unified experience the
winetaster undergoes, and C, in conjunction with the relevant events in the
auditory cortex, the olfactory cortex, etc, constitutes that.
28) Perhaps it will be
replied that in the example of the statue and the pot, the aggregate of lumps
of clay that counterfactually constitutes the pot is in the actual world a
purely arbitrary part of the statue, with nothing to mark it out from any
number of other arbitrary parts of the statue.
However, the cluster of physical events I have labelled ‘C’, is a
nonarbitrary part of the relevant totality of physical events, a token of a physical
type with a definite functional role, namely to generate a conscious visual
experience with a certain visual unity.
29) This begs the
question. I grant that C is a token of
a physical type P whose role in a normally functioning brain is to endow the
conscious experience of the subject with a visual phenomenology. But that is certainly compatible with
denying that P’s role is to generate in the brain a token experience with an
exclusively visual phenomenology. To
suppose that P’s role is the latter is to take for granted the truth of the
view I am opposing.
30) Furthermore, the fact
that C is a nonarbitrary part of the whole combination of physical events
constituting the experience is not to the point. Suppose events E1 and E2
together actually constitute event F.
Suppose E1 could have occurred without E2 and further that had E1 done so, it would have (wholly)
constituted event G. Still, this is no
guarantee that E1 actually constitutes G.
For example, my arm and hand movement relative to Smith and Smith’s arm
and hand movement relative to me constitute a certain fight. Smith’s movement might have occurred without
my movement. Had it done so, it would
have constituted an act of aggression on the part of Smith. But in actual fact that act of aggression
does not exist. In actual fact, Smith’s
arm and hand-movement relative to me is a counterpunch; for I hit Smith first.
Thus, just as Smith’s arm and hand movement might have
constituted an act of aggression although in reality it does not, so too the
cluster of events, C, might have constituted a purely visual experience but in
reality it does not.
31) Suppose now that the
counterfactual situation I have envisaged for C becomes a reality. As the winetaster tastes the wine, some extraordinary
neural malfunction causes the events other than C that constituted the
winetaster’s experience prior to the malfunction to cease. Before the malfunction, on the proposed
view, C does not constitute a purely visual experience. After the malfunction, it does. This, it may be charged, is strange. Why the radical change in what C does?
32) The answer, as earlier,
is that there is no change. But before
and after the malfunction, C does the same thing: it endows the conscious
experience of the subject with a visual phenomenology. The difference is that before the
malfunction, the experience of the winetaster does not have a purely visual
phenomenology; after the malfunction, it does.
33) Consider next the
following example. Suppose I hear a conversation
on my left, as I look at a bed of roses laid out in front of me. Intuitively,
my auditory experience — that very experience — could have occurred without my
visual experience. On my account,
however, that isn’t possible. So much
the worse, it may be said, for my account!
34) Too fast, I reply. When I try to introspect my auditory
experience, I fail. As noted earlier,
what I actually come across are the sounds and the auditory qualities the experience
represents. By being aware of those sounds,
I am aware that I am undergoing an auditory experience. But I am not aware of the token vehicle of
that content. The sounds I experience
could have existed without my visual experience of the roses. Moreover, I could certainly have undergone
an experience that represented those sounds (or sounds just like them) without
also representing the colors and shapes of roses. That, I suggest, is all that untutored intuition requires here,
once we are clear on what introspection does and does not reveal. And it is perfectly compatible with these
claims that I am the subject of just one experience, an experience that is
audio-visual in character.
35) But what if my auditory
experience goes on longer than my visual experience? Then my auditory experience has a temporal property my visual
experience lacks, and there cannot be a single experience after all.
36) I grant that I can
experience a sound that continues, in my experience, after I experience
anything visually. But this is all in
the content of the experience.
Initially, what I experience is that a sound with a certain pitch and
loudness is accompanied by a certain color and shape. As time goes on, the experienced content changes. No longer is any shape or color
represented. The sound is represented
on its own. This certainly shows that
the represented sound is not the same as the represented shape or color. But it does not show that there is more than
a single experience at a time.
I do not deny, of course, that difficult questions arise
concerning the individuation of experiences through time. Is the experience I undergo initially -- an
experience with an audio-visual content -- the same as the experience I undergo
after the color and shape cease? Is
there one experience here with a less rich content through time? Or is the audio-visual experience replaced
by a second purely auditory experience, phenomenally just like the first in its
auditory dimension? Hard questions of
individuation through time arise for everyone, however. They are discussed further in Chapter 4.
37) Here is a further
worry. Seeing something entails the
presence of a visual experience. I
cannot see X unless X looks some way to me; and for X to look some way to me,
it must cause in me a visual experience.
So, to return to the example of the winetaster, since he is seeing the
wine in the glass, he must be subject to a visual experience. However, on the account I am adopting, his
experience isn’t really properly classified as visual at all.
38) It is indeed true that
X cannot look some way to person P unless X produces in P an experience with a
visual phenomenology. But the
phenomenology of P’s experience need not be purely or exclusively visual. It can be partly auditory, olfactory,
gustatory, and tactual too. If a visual
experience is understood to be an experience with a visual phenomenology, then
the winetaster, as he sees the wine in the glass, is subject to a visual
experience. It’s just that that very
experience has a phenomenology that is
auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactual as well.
39) Still, it may be complained, on the
one-experience view, no explanation is possible for why the beliefs formed
directly on the basis of experience are about how things look or how things
taste or how they smell, etc rather than about some combination of these. My response is to deny the datum. We can know directly that the object looks
red and is apparently emitting a loud sound, just as we can know directly that
the object looks red and looks round. We
have the ability to attend all at once to qualities, the experience of which
(in some cases) requires the use of different senses. Indeed, it is the exercise of this ability that leads us to think
that there is such a thing as synchronic unity in perceptual experience in the
first place. In everyday life, we say
things like “The drink looks creamy and it tastes sweet” and “The exhaust
smells noxious and it sounds loud.” The
beliefs these remarks are no less cautious or direct than the belief expressed by,
e.g., “The card looks square and silvery in color.”
IV
40) If the view of experience I have been
defending is correct, then in ordinary, everyday perceptual consciousness,
there are no sense-specific experiences to be unified. So, the problem of unity stated earlier
dissolves. I do not wish to deny,
however, that synchronic phenomenal unity is real.
41) The core intuition,
lost in the usual way of stating the problem of unity, is that, in normal
cases, simultaneously experienced perceptual qualities — the loudness of a
sound, the smoothness of a surface, the sweetness of a taste, the pungency of a
smell — are experienced together and thus are phenomenologically unified. These qualities are not qualities of
experiences. They are qualities that,
if they are qualities of anything, are qualities of things experienced. Consider, for example, the case in which I
experience a loud noise and a bright flash of light. The loudness of the noise is unified phenomenally with the
brightness of the flash.
Phenomenal unity is a relation between qualities represented in
experience, not between qualities of experiences.
42) Specifically,
phenomenal unity is a matter of the simultaneously experienced perceptual
qualities entering into the same phenomenal content. The perceptual experience a normal perceiver
undergoes has an enormously rich, multi-modal representational content -- a
content, part of which is nonconceptual, abstract, and appropriately poised.[6] This part, its phenomenal content, is
present not only in veridical cases but also in cases of illusion and
hallucination. It is this content that
endows the experience with its phenomenal character (Tye 1995, 2000).
43) A consequence of the above position is that
phenomenal unity goes with the closure of perceptual experience under
conjunction with respect to the unified qualities. Thus, in the case mentioned in (41) in which the loudness of a
sound is phenomenally unified for person P with the brightness of a flash of
light, the statements
P has an experience of
a loud sound
and
P has an experience of a bright flash
jointly entail
P has an experience of a loud sound and a bright flash.
When there is disunity,
perceptual experience is not closed in this way. Cases of simultaneous phenomenal disunification all involve
multiple perceptual experiences at a time and multiple phenomenal
contents. Such cases are highly
abnormal. Where they occur, as, for example,
with split brain patients, there are simultaneously experienced perceptual
qualities entering into different phenomenal contents (each of which is a
content experientially represented by the relevant subject at the given time).[7]
44) Perhaps it will be
replied that hallucinations and illusions are not highly abnormal; yet they
sometimes involve disunified experiences.
Recall Macbeth’s remark, “Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle
towards my hand? Come, let me clutch
thee. I see thee still, yet I feel thee
not.” Macbeth’s visual experience
represented to him a certain colored shape, which he identified as a bloody
dagger. His tactual experience, when he
went to touch it, informed him that nothing was there. Here, it may be said, there are two
experiences, one tactual and one visual, that Macbeth underwent at the same
time; for a single token experience cannot have an inconsistent content.
Likewise, in the case of the straight stick in water that
looks bent. Touching the stick, it
feels straight. Touch and vision are thus
at odds with one another.[8] Again, there are two simultaneous
experiences. And again, the subject’s
perceptual experiences are disunified.
45) These cases, despite
how they may initially seem, are not cases of phenomenal disunification. In the case of Macbeth, his experience by
sight and touch was directed upon a single region of space by his hand. This was part of the phenomenology of his
experience overall even though what touch told him led him not to trust his
sight. Similarly, as one looks at the
stick in water and touches it with a hand, it certainly seems to one that the
stick one is seeing is the same as the stick one is touching. This, it seems to me, is part of the
phenomenology of one’s overall experience.
To be sure, touch tells one something different about the shape of the
stick than vision[9]; and
they can’t both be right. But why
shouldn’t a single experience have an overall content that is internally
inconsistent? Given the complexity of
the processing that underlies the production of experience, it should not be surprising
that in some cases a content of this sort is produced.
There are plenty of examples of experiences with inconsistent
contents. View the “impossible figure,” shown below.
INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE
Here each set of steps is
seen as ascending to the next, even though this is impossible. Another example is the so-called “waterfall
effect,” which involves an illusion of movement (originally of a body of
water). The most dramatic version of
this is obtained by staring at a rotating spiral figure. While rotating, the spiral seems to
expand. But after it is stopped, the
spiral seems to contract, while also seeming not to get any smaller.
46) There remains one final objection I want to
discuss to the one-experience view.
Consider the experience of a red square next to a green triangle. That experience, like all other perceptual
experiences, has accuracy conditions.
As such, it is a representation.
And intuitively, that representation is complex. For anyone with the capacity to have an experience
of this sort thereby has the capacity to have an experience of a green square
next to a red triangle. The obvious
explanation for this connection between capacities is that the two experiences
are complex representations sharing the same representational parts. The experience of a red square next to a
green triangle at time t thus has a component representation at t representing
a red square and a component representation at t representing a green triangle. These representations, it may be insisted,
have as much a right to be called “experiences” as does the overall
representation of which they are parts.
Indeed, it may be urged, on the theory developed in Tye 1995
and 2000, it cannot be denied that the component representations are experiences. For, according to that theory, any
perceptual state with a poised, abstract, nonconceptual representational
content is a perceptual experience.[10] And the content, red square, it may be
insisted, is just as poised as the overarching content that includes it. Each content stands ready and available to
make a direct difference with respect to what is believed, if attention is
appropriately directed. Furthermore,
what is true in this single modality case will be true mutatis mutandis in
inter-modal cases too.
47) Consider again the lump
of clay that is a statue. Had that lump
of clay been seamlessly embedded within a larger lump of clay which formed a
cube, say, it would not have been a statue.
The statue of the earlier example is constituted by a lump of clay that
is maximal (that is, not contained within other, larger lumps of clay). The advocate of the one-experience view can
maintain that experiences are, in this way, like statues. Experiences are maximal PANIC states (states
having a poised, abstract, nonconceptual content). So, even if some proper parts of experiences are representations,
they are not themselves experiences.
With this elucidation, the objection dissolves.
48) It is worth adding that
it is not entirely clear anyway whether the experience of a red square next to
a green triangle really does contain a part that represents a red square and a
part that represents a green triangle.
Clearly, the overall representation contains parts that would represent
a red square and a green triangle respectively, were they not contained within
the overall representation, but it could be insisted that these parts are
not themselves representations, given
their actual situation. In the case of
sentences, some parts, namely words, are surely representations. But it is not so clear that any parts of
pictures are. For some representations,
there is arguably a maximality constraint; for others not.
49) That completes my
discussion of the unity of perceptual experience at a time. I turn next to the case of bodily
experience.[11]
NOTES
[1]. I don’t believe
that this is really possible. For more,
see (14) - (16) below.
[2].This claim is one that the sense-datum theorists would have
endorsed, although they would have insisted that the things apparently outside
are really immaterial surfaces or sense-data rather than physical
surfaces. After all, sense-datum
theorists were at pains to distinguish the act of sensing from the thing
sensed. G.E. Moore is the modern father
of transparency.
[3]. There are
dissimilarities. In typical cases of
seeing-that, background beliefs play a role in generating the propositional
state of awareness. This is not so in
the case of introspection. For more
here, see Tye 2000, Chapter 3.
[4]. Not everyone
accepts this claim. On the view of
events elaborated by Jaegwon Kim (19xx) and Alvin Goldman (19xx), the event of x’s F-ing G-ly
is a complex entity consisting of x and the property of F-ing G-ly. This has the consequence that at the time at
which (S2) is true, there are four relevant simultaneous events: Jones’ writing
painstakingly and illegibly, Jones’ writing painstakingly, Jones’ writing
illegibly and Jones’ writing.
Intuitively, however, events do not individuate in this hyper-fine-grained
way.
[5]. I am not suggesting
here that object-unity is the same as phenomenal unity. See paragraph (5) earlier.
[6]. For an elucidation
of what it is for a content to be nonconceptual, abstract, and poised, see Tye
1995, 2000. For further critical
discussion and replies, see the web symposium on Tye 2000 at www......
[7]. For a discussion of
split brains, see Chapter 5. In my
view, it is a mistake to suppose that the perceptual consciousness of split
brain subject is always divided after the commissurotomy. Indeed, it is a mistake to suppose that even
in the highly specialized circumstances in which split brain subjects typically
behave anomalously, their consciousness is invariably divided.
[8]. Actually, what
really happens is that when one feels the stick, it no longer looks bent: touch
corrects vision. But this does not
matter for present purposes, so let us ignore it.
[9]. See ibid.
[10]. I do not deny that
perceptual experiences sometimes have conceptual contents too.
[11].
Versions of this chapter formed the basis for talks at Oxford, Yale, the
University of Texas at Austin, the University of St. Andrews, the Royal
Institute in London, the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and
the Tucson 2002 Consciousness Conference.