Abstract
The phenomenal character of conscious experience has long been regarded as the major problem for physicalist accounts of consciousness. In recent years, defenders of physicalism have typically been relying on the so-called Phenomenal Concept Strategy (PCS) to avoid dualism. In this paper, we argue with PCS that cognitive-physicalistic explanations can account for the peculiarities of phenomenal character. However, we think that the conceptual features PCS investigates are not the genuine causes of the special characteristics of phenomenal consciousness but only symptoms, which can themselves be explained in terms of the features of the sensory-perceptual representations underlying conscious experiences, namely that some, but not all, of these states are representationally unstructured.
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Notes
‘Atomism’ is a loaded term. See Sect. 4.2 for a detailed discussion of what we mean by representational atomism.
Throughout this paper, the term ‘physical-functional concepts' stands for what is often called “physical concepts” or “material concepts” (cf. Papineau 2002, 2007). These concepts are either role concepts, which refer by describing some causal or other role, or directly physical concepts which identify their referents in terms of some intrinsic physical feature (mass, charge, etc.)—(Papineau 2002, p. 48).
The other account that comes to mind is Aydede and Güzeldere (2005).
It is exactly this feature, the capacity to carry information from one use to another, which clearly distinguishes perceptual concepts from demonstratives—demonstratives never carry information about the entity picked out by a previous use (cf. Papineau 2007, p. 115).
Papineau holds that subjects can detach the body of information originally attached to a particular sensory template, and store it in a non-perceptual ‘file' which accumulates information about the same entity as the original perceptual concept, but allows for non-perceptual thoughts about that entity. Thus when the novice chicken sexer thinks, flipping the pages of a book about chicken biology ‘I wonder if that cute little thing I saw today is in here' she may not at the same time re-create the day-old-chick in her imagination. Papineau calls perceptual concepts stripped of their sensory templates perceptually derived concepts (Papineau 2007, pp. 118–119).
On Papineau's account, if two distinct perceptual concepts involve the same sensory template, then their phenomenal character is the same. (Papineau 2007, pp. 117–118).
Papineau claims that just as it is possible to derive non-perceptual files from perceptual concepts it is also possible to derive non-perceptual files from phenomenal concepts. Such files store and accumulate information about certain experience-types, without also including a sensory template. Since the phenomenology goes with the sensory template, such derived files have no phenomenology. Similarly to perceptually derived concepts, these files might be called phenomenally derived concepts. They make it possible for subjects to think thoughts like ‘I am not now having such-and-such an experience', i.e. to think about experiences in a non-phenomenal way.
To what extent imagery supports perceptual recognition is an issue that is empirically testable. The general paradigm would be to give verbal descriptions to subjects with the instruction to imagine what is being described, and then asking them to choose the imagined object from a set of actually presented alternatives.
Amodal in the sense that “their internal structures bear no correspondence to the perceptual states that produce them”, and arbitrary in the sense that an amodal symbol “has no systematic similarity” to the perceptual state that produces it (Barsalou 1999, p. 578).
Here are a few quotes from Barsalou and Prinz on constructing novel perceptual symbols: “No one has ever experienced a real Cheshire Cat, but it is easy to imagine a cat whose body fades and reappears while its human smile remains” (Barsalou 1999, p. 592). “One can simulate a chair never encountered, such as a pitted lavender chair” (Barsalou 1999, p. 594). “Sometimes […] proxytypes already exist in long-term memory, and sometimes they must be constructed. If one reads a news report about a dog that is 5 feet tall, one probably constructs a new representation on the fly” (Prinz 2002, p. 149–150).
Cf. Prinz’ commitment that conscious experiences are intermediate level perceptual representations made accessible for working memory by attentional mechanisms (Prinz 2000, 2012). Papineau also thinks that the phenomenal character of conscious experience is closely related to the relevant sensory templates. As he puts it: “the phenomenology […] goes with the sensory templates involved” (Papineau 2007, p. 118).
Shape experiences in general have constituent structure. Visual experiences of virtually all shapes have discernible parts or aspects that can be undergone on their own, that is, independently of other parts of the same experience.
Note also that the shape of a uniformly coloured area is irrelevant to colour structure: unique hues are unstructured colour experiences regardless of the spatial distribution they might take in particular cases.
The experience of composite hues (e.g. orange) might be regarded as a perceptual mixture of two other colour experiences which are plausibly its constituents (namely red and yellow, in the case of orange). Cf. Boynton (1997) and Tye (2000, pp. 162–165). However, this view is not generally accepted (Hardin 1988, p. 43; Thompson 2000, p. 171; see also Jakab 2000, 2006).
In the auditory domain pure sine-wave tones are good candidates for being atomic sensory representations. They have features like loudness, pitch and timbre. None of these are constituents as they cannot occur as standalone experiences. Loudness and pitch are dimensional positions. Timbre seems more complex than a single sensory dimension. It arises from representing the overtones of a fundamental frequency, still all the overtones that contribute to timbre are not discernible one by one. A trained musician may be able to list the keys that sound in a piano chord, but not those frequencies that determine the characteristic timbre of a violoncello as opposed to a piano.
Our proposal—accounting for the problematic features of phenomenal consciousness in terms of certain characteristics of perceptual representations in general, and for phenomenal atomism in terms of representational atomism in particular—is very close to the strategy that has recently been advocated by Christopher Hill (2009, 2014). Though similar in spirit, the two views nevertheless differ in important aspects that are essential to our approach. In Sect. 5.3 we shall discuss this difference, and further clarify and defend why unstructured representations play a crucial role in the puzzles concerning phenomenal consciousness.
Hill does not provide a detailed analysis of this difference between perceptual and conceptual representations, however, he discusses the possibility that perceptual representations might be analog and partly iconic (Hill 2014, pp. 202–203).
Thanks for an anonymous referee for stressing this point.
One might want to object by emphasising that although Papineau does cite Prinz’s (2002) approach, on his account perceptual (and phenomenal) concepts invoke a sensory template plus an attached body of information. Papineau does not specify the format of this attached body of information explicitly, but he does discuss the possibility of detaching this body of information from the sensory template, and calls the remaining structure that enables thinking about its referent without imagining the referent a non-perceptual file (Papineau 2007, p. 119). On the face of it, this is in stark contrast with the Barsalou–Prinz framework, where all knowledge is perceptually grounded and abstract concepts are complex simulation (Barsalou 1999; Prinz 2002). Papineau’s file-talk is reminiscent of the major competitor of the Barsalou–Prinz approach, namely the Fodor-Pylyshyn framework. Thus, the objection is that simulation being an essential mechanism of the Barsalou–Prinz approach has no consequence whatsoever for Papineau’s own view. However, we think that the crucial claims of our analysis are equally true even within the Fodor–Pylyshyn framework. Fodor accepts that perceptual prototypes exist (1998, 2008), and that they can be attached to concepts (as parts of the associated files), although they are not constitutive of them. In addition, concepts may also be added abstract information couched in Mentalese. This abstract knowledge can in some cases guide imagery resulting in novel perceptual prototypes. According to Pylyshyn, conceptual combination in mental imagery is accompanied by information about how the represented things look (Pylyshyn 1984, 2002, 2003, 2006). So simulation does play an important role in the Fodor–Pylyshyn framework as well, and allows for acquiring complex perceptual prototypes form abstract knowledge. Note that this type of simulating the look of something is only possible if the perceptual prototypes associated with the concepts mentioned in the description constitute the perceptual prototype of the object to be simulated. This is exactly the feature that we call having representational structure. Therefore, those looks that correspond to representationally unstructured perceptual prototypes cannot be simulated in this way. For a more detailed discussion of having representationally unstructured perceptual templates within the Fodor–Pylyshyn framework, see Fazekas (2011).
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Jesper Kallestrup, Andy Clark, Bence Nanay, and an anonymous referee for their helpful commentaries on earlier versions of this paper.
Funding
This work was supported by the FWO Postdoctoral Fellowship 1.2.B39.14N and the DFF - EU MCA - COFUND Mobilex Grant 1321-00165 (PF).
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Fazekas, P., Jakab, Z. The sensory basis of the epistemic gap: an alternative to phenomenal concepts. Philos Stud 173, 2105–2124 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0599-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0599-6