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The Phenomenal Quality of Complex Experiences

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Abstract

This paper makes and defends four interrelated claims. First: most conscious experiences are complex in the sense that they have discernible constituent structure with discernible parts that can feature as parts of other experiences, and might occur as standalone experiences. Second: complex experiences have simple constituents that have no further discernible parts. Third: the phenomenal quality of having a complex experience is jointly determined by the phenomenal quality of its simple constituents plus the phenomenal structure simple constituents are organised into. And fourth: physical descriptions can convey all the relevant information about the discernible phenomenal structure of conscious experiences. The combination of these four claims tells us that there is no further explanatory gap related to the phenomenal quality of complex experiences given that one is familiar with the phenomenal qualities of the simple parts constituting the complex experience in question, and that it is possible to acquire knowledge about the phenomenal quality of yet unexperienced complex experiences on the basis of previous acquaintances with constituent parts plus structural information. That is, the paper argues for a ‘summation’ model of phenomenal qualities.

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Notes

  1. This paper focuses on the unity of consciousness from the perspective that there is something it is like (Nagel 1974) for a subject to have a total experience that has different aspects or constituent parts.

  2. Bayne and Chalmers (2003) and Bayne (2008, 2010) are often interpreted as arguing for conjoint phenomenology, i.e. the claim that the phenomenal quality of a unified experience consists in more than the sum of the phenomenal qualities of the experiences that are unified. See e.g. Macpherson (2011) and also Tye (2003).

  3. It is an intricate and much debated issue whether components of experiences can themselves be thought of as experiences on their own right (see e.g. Tye 2003). In this paper I use terms like ‘component experience’ in an innocent way that tries to stay neutral with regard to this issue—see Fn. 10 for more clarification.

  4. Recently, Fiona Macpherson has provided reasons for favouring such a model in the multi-modal case (Macpherson 2011, pp. 454–462).

  5. For example, such a holistic view with respect to complex experiences (claiming that the complexity of an experience cannot be reduced to its elements) is often attributed to Gestalt approaches to perception (see e.g. Wertheimer 1958). See §3.1 and §3.3 for a detailed discussion of Gestalt effects.

  6. Though see Held et al. (2011) showing that the newly sighted fail to match seen with felt.

  7. The relevant concepts in question, of course, are phenomenal concepts, not ordinary language colour concepts (see Loar 1990, Papineau 2002, Fazekas and Jakab 2016).

  8. See §2.5 for a detailed discussion of why this is so.

  9. On how ‘parts’ of an experience might best be conceived of, see, for example, Lee (2014).

  10. See, for example, Prinz (2002) for a detailed discussion of the perceptual basis of concepts.

  11. Hue, saturation and brightness are discernible properties of unique hue experiences, but they themselves have no further discernible parts and they cannot occur as stand-alone experiences (one cannot have an experience of saturation without also experiencing some hue and lightness values as well; see Fazekas and Jakab 2016). They might be combined in novel ways in imagination, resulting in novel experiences like previously never seen darker or lighter varieties of a certain hue.

  12. Or their vibrations (see Turin 2006).

  13. See Jakab (2003, 2006) who argues that shape experiences are revelatory in a sense in which colour experiences are not.

  14. This moral applies mainly to visual and to a lesser degree also to haptic and auditory cases, where spatial relationships structure the experiences. In auditory experiences, spatial structure is very limited (e.g. being heard from somewhere close on the left or from far behind), and in olfaction even more so. In taste perception, the kind of physical structure that occurs in phenomenal descriptions (e.g. experiencing a certain taste on the back of the tongue) is detached from the physical structure of the objects of taste perception and is more related to the physical positions of the relevant receptors—and thus it is not revelatory in the sense discussed in the main text.

  15. See e.g. Chalmers (1996), and Fazekas and Jakab (2016).

  16. This claim about the complexity and structure of certain experiences is compatible with such structure being dynamic (Metzinger 1995).

  17. See Dainton (2000, 2008) for more examples of simple (unstructured) stand-alone experiences.

  18. Other examples, involving only basic shapes, might be the illusion or the Poggendorff illusion (Zöllner 1860).

  19. In the case of the Hermann-grid, see Baumgartner (1960) and Schiller and Carvey (2005) for explaining the mechanisms underlying the perceived illusion.

  20. See how the notion of ‘physical description’ is utilised in the literature on phenomenal concepts (e.g. Papineau 2002, 2007, Loar 1990, Balog 2009, 2012,  Fazekas and Jakab 2016). Accounting for ‘physical structure’, thus, does not give rise to any kind of epistemic—e.g. explanatory—gap (Chalmers 2003, 1996).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bence Nanay, Jacob Berger, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, Mark Sprevak and Jonas Christensen for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Funding

Supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO 12B3918N) and an AIAS Fellowship by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754513 and The Aarhus University Research Foundation.

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  1. Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, and Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Peter Fazekas

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Fazekas, P. The Phenomenal Quality of Complex Experiences. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00676-y

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