Abstract
According to some representationalists (M. Tye, Ten problems of consciousness, MIT Press, Massachusetts, USA, 1995; W.G. Lycan, Consciousness and experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1996; F. Dretske, Naturalising the mind, MIT Press, Massachusetts, USA 1995), qualia are identical to external environmental states or features. When one perceives a red rose for instance, one is visually representing the actual redness of the rose. The represented redness of the rose is the actual redness of the rose itself. Thus redness is not a property of one’s experience but an externally constituted property of the perceived physical object. In this sense, qualia are out there, in the external world. Here, I argue that the main representationalist arguments to this effect, if successful, establish no more than a symmetrical supervenience relation between representational content and qualia, and that a supervenience relation alone (albeit symmetrical) doesn’t suffice for identity. This supervenience thesis between qualia and representational content leaves open the question as to the essential nature of qualia.
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Notes
This refers to sensory modality-based imaginations or mental representations
Notably, there is a difference between panprotopsychism and panpsychism. According to the latter, everything is conscious down to sub-atomic level. On this view, there is something that it feels like to be an electron or a proton. On Chalmers’ panprotopsychism, electrons or protons are proto-conscious, they do not possess consciousness. Proto-conscious properties collectively constitute consciousness in the right kind of system.
In more detail, the approach to qualia that Dennett rejects is the approach in which qualia are ineffable, private, subjective and intrinsically conscious. He does not reject the view that pains for instance, exist. The view he rejects is that pains are private, ineffable and essentially conscious He writes ‘don’t our internal discriminative states also have some special “intrinsic” properties, the subjective, private, ineffable properties that constitute the *way things look to us* (sound to us, smell to us, etc.)? No. The dispositional properties of those discriminative states already suffice to explain all the effects: the effects on peripheral behaviour (saying “Red!”, stepping the brake, etc.) and “internal” behaviour (judging “Red!”, seeing something as red, reacting with uneasiness or displeasure if, say, red things upset one). Any additional “qualitative” properties or qualia would thus have no positive role to play in any explanations, nor are they vouchsafed to us “directly” in our intuition. Qualitative properties that are intrinsically conscious are a myth, an artifact of misguided theorizing, not anything given pretheoretically’ (1991b, p. 40).
There are several different variants of supervenience that one may adhere to. It all depends on how we are to take the ‘cannot’ as it occurs in ‘there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference’. We might take for instance, ‘cannot’ to mean ‘cannot as a matter of logic’ or ‘cannot consistently with the laws of nature. The weakest form of supervenience (weak supervenience) is the claim that physical identicals within one world must be mentally identical. The strongest supervenience claim (strong or logical/metaphysical supervenience) is the claim that any two physically indistinguishable organisms in any worlds must be identical with respect to their mental properties.
We must note that the point is that they share some but not all their properties. It may be that we can speak as if they are identical in some contexts but not in others. By Leibniz Law of identity, x is identical to y if and only if everything true of x is true of y.
There are representational states which do not have correctness conditions. Wishing for example, that p cannot be said to have truth conditions but arguably it is a representational state. Of course, the contents of such representational states still have correctness conditions but the attitude borne to that meaning cannot be said to be true or false.
Except, of course, if one is a Russelian representationalist.
I should also note that most commentators in the field use interchangeably the notions of ‘intentional’ and ‘representational’. Although I think that this needs further discussion I will assume that they can be used interchangeably and that they both bear the notion of ‘directedness’: of re-presenting that which is presented.
To avoid potential confusion between ‘representational’ and ‘represented’ content, I should again remind the reader that ‘representational content’ stands for what is represented on the representationalist view i.e. the external properties of the environment and not for the properties of the experience which represents the external properties of the environment (i.e. what does the representing). As we shall see in a moment, the strong representationalist (e.g. Tye) holds that we are aware only of what is represented not of what does the representing. However, even if the representationalist were to identify qualia with the property of representing those properties (given the possibility of hallucination and illusion, it seems the latter is the more reasonable) same considerations would apply.
According to V.G. Hardcastle (1995) for instance, the best neurophysiological theory might not be able to rule out a case of inverted spectra, namely a case where molecular/functional duplicates might nonetheless have inverted colour qualia.
Many philosophers have claimed that such a theory gives rise to an unacceptable “veil of perception” between the mind and the world. Most sense-data theorists are committed to the claim that sense-data are mind-dependent: objects whose existence depends on the existence of states of mind. These entities do not happily fit with a naturalistic world picture according to which the world is entirely physical in its nature, everything there supervenes on the physical, and is governed by physical law. Moreover, the postulation of private mental objects faces further problems such as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1953) private language argument.
A century ago, Franz Brentano claimed that intentionality is the distinctive characteristic of mental phenomena and that every mental state is intentional. Ordinary relations cannot hold between existent and non-existent objects but the mind can contemplate non-existent objects and states of affairs. The non-existent objects needn’t be immaterial substances (Russelian sense data for instance), they can be non actual or non-existent physical things.
Lycan writes ‘The great difficulty about qualia was in locating them ontologically. (Of what, exactly, is the greenness inhering in Bertie’s after-imaging experience a property?) And that is what is accomplished by the specifically representationalist part of strong representationalism, not by the functionalist part. The functionalism accounts for the visualness and perhaps other broadly-speaking-phenomenal properties of the experience, which is important, but locating the greenness was the crucial work’ (2006, accessed on 15/11/06, my emphasis). This of course, is by no means uncontroversial. Prima facie, positing a non-existent intentional object to solve the problem of locating qualia ontologically will certainly raise eyebrows. Lycan (1996) for instance, argues that intentional inexistents are best thought of as denizens of other possible worlds. They exist, just not here in the actual world. It appears though, that this response does not help. Take for example the case of the phantom pain in one’s missing limb. The painfulness of one’s phantom pain is actual, existing in the here and now. Likewise, when one has a hallucination of redness, there is a certain actually existing property that one is aware of, in virtue of which his experience has the qualitative character that it has. (Cases of illusion and hallucination pose serious problems to the representationalist argument from transparency of experience – see section V for discussion). I will not however, develop this point any furher and nor will I explore the range of the possible reprersentationalist maneuvers here. My aim is to show that the strong representationalist has not managed to locate qualia ontologically on different grounds.
Notably, Lycan (2006) takes Tye to be one of the proponents of his view.
And elsewhere: ‘the qualities of which we are aware are not qualities of experiences at all, but rather qualities that, if they are qualities of anything, are qualities of things in the world (as in the case of perceptual experiences) or of regions of our bodies (as in the case of bodily sensations) (2003b, accessed on 19/09/06). According to Tye, ‘in the case of perceptual experiences, the items sensorily represented are external environmental states or features’ (1995, p. 137)
Note that there’s a difference between Lycan’s and Tye’s account of experience: According to Tye, first-order mental states are experiences (such that there’s something it’s like for one to be in them) in virtue of being disposed or poised to bring about higher-order states (beliefs) about them, whereas according to Lycan, first-order mental states are experiences in virtue of being the target of a higher-order state/perception via the operations of a faculty of ‘inner sense’ (higher-order perception theory). But the fact that Lycan’s account of experience is higher-order as opposed to Tye’s first-order is not important here. What matters is that on both accounts, qualitative properties can be represented both consciously and unconsciously and a certain functional role (however construed) accounts for the fact that in some cases (conscious representations) we experience those properties i.e. there’s something it’s like to have them.
However, I couldn’t possibly state here all possible representationalist arguments and their variations to prove this point. See Tye (2008) for an overview and discussion of the main arguments for strong representationalism In addition, I will not question how states like that of elation, depression, pleasure and orgasm can be features of presented objects and not of ourselves. My point here holds even if one holds that α) and β) are true across the board so that even the aforementioned states are representational.
Recall the exchanges between Russell/Ayer and Austin. Traditionally, one of the main problems of perception is whether these properties are properties of physical objects or some sort of mental entities – sense-data. See Howard Robinson (1994) for an excellent discussion.
I will leave out of the discussion Tye’s much stronger claim that ‘we attend to the external surfaces and qualities and thereby we are aware of something else, the ‘feel’ of our experience’ (2000, pp. 51–52). The point is that even if one accepts that the qualitative character of the experience is wholly representational this does not explain by itself (or in effect) what it is like to undergo a certain state with a certain qualitative character. It appears that some further argument is necessary. What’s more, Tye claims that one is aware of the fact that her mental state is representing certain qualities but she is not aware of the experiences themselves. But if one is aware that her mental state is representing such and such qualities or that she undergoes a mental state with such and such qualities why not say that there is something in addition to the representational properties, namely introspective awareness? What explanation is given for the fact that in this case one is consciously undergoing a certain mental state (supposing that we accept that all its properties are representational)? In other words, the awareness of undergoing a certain mental state is left unexplained. However, for my present purposes, I will ignore these complications.
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Platchias, D. Representationalism, Symmetrical Supervenience and Identity. Philosophia 37, 31–46 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9121-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9121-0