Abstract
Many philosophers hold that phenomenally conscious experiences involve a sense of mineness, since experiences like pain or hunger are immediately presented as mine. What can be said about this mineness, and does acceptance of this feature commit us to the existence of a subject or self? If yes, how should we characterize this subject? This paper considers the possibility that, (1) to the extent that we accept this feature, it provides us with a minimal notion of a subject of experience, and that (2) the phenomenological subject of experience, as it is represented in conscious experience, is the organism. While many philosophers agree that the metaphysical subject of experience is the animal, this claim is much less widespread, maybe even counterintuitive. The argument for this claim alludes to the structure of phenomenal consciousness and to recent work in cognitive science concerning the embodied character of consciousness and cognition. To illustrate the problems of current controversies, not only several recent rejections of a subject of experience are critically discussed, but also Hume’s famous rejection of a subject is criticized making use of epistemological aspects from Kant’s philosophy of mind. The final section situates the present discussion in the context of recently popular predictive coding accounts of perception and perceptual experience.
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Notes
Some philosophers prefer to use the notion of “qualia” in this context, but since this term is more problematic than useful it will be ignored in this paper. See Dennett (1991) for a criticism of the coherence of this notion in contrast to the acceptance of the subjective impression that it feels like something to experience a sound or taste or smell. While there may be widespread disagreement about how to explain this subjective feeling, most philosophers of mind at least accept that there is something to be explained with respect to phenomenal consciousness. This minimal agreement of the majority is the starting point of this paper—Work on this paper was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation for the research project "Situated cognition. Perceiving the world and understanding other minds". I am grateful for valuable discussions of earlier drafts with Krys Dolega, Luke Roelofs, and Rob Rupert, and for the helpful and constructive comments by an anonymous reviewer.
The history of philosophy is filled with variations on this theme and with multiple ways of cashing out the notion of mineness, ranging from Kant’s treatment of the unity of apperception to Sartre’s pre-reflective self-awareness. Although we will return to Kant, this is not the place to reconsider all accounts from the history of philosophy in great detail.
In his discussion of the nature of the self against the background of the Buddhist tradition, Matt MacKenzie is equally looking for a “middle way” between the “reductionist fictionalism” about selves held by the Abhidharma school of Buddhism on the one hand and “the substantialism or ātman and Cartesian ego theories” on the other (MacKenzie 2010, 84).
Blanke and Metzinger are primarily interested in exploring the differences between such global ownership and its possible breakdowns (in autoscopic phenomena like out-of-body-experiences: seeing a second own body in extracorporeal space) and ownership merely of a body part and its possible breakdowns (in cases of somatoparaphrenia or the rubber hand illusion). I won’t discuss these phenomena any further. The upshot of their argument is that minimal phenomenal selfhood does not require agency; a passive experience of owning a body is sufficient.
Note that this problem also arises for Rosenthal’s (2005) higher-order theory, since he does not say why a given unconscious representation (of the blue sky, say) and a co-occurring non-inferential unconscious higher-order thought (representing the first-order representation) be states of the same subject. In conversation, Rosenthal pointed out that this should be treated as the “default” case, but it is surely not a sufficient explanation.
It is possible that the disagreement between Zahavi and Slors and Jongepier is merely verbal, since at certain points Zahavi is satisfied to drop the notion of a minimal self in favor of the notion of the subjectivity of consciousness (2014).
Here, the term ‘representation’ is the translation of the German word ‘Vorstellung’ which is a very general term in Kant’s theory. In the Critique of pure reason, he draws the following distinction: “The genus is representation in general (repraesentatio). Under it stands the representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception that refers to the subject as a modification of its state is a sensation (sensatio); an objective perception is a cognition (cognitio). The latter is either an intuition or a concept (intuitus vel conceptus).” (B376f) Consequently, the term ‘representation’ does not create any problems through the transfer from Kant’s theory into the present intellectual context in which it is common to treat (most or all) mental states as representations. No commitment to Representationalism as a theory of phenomenal consciousness follows or is intended.
For a recent acknowledgement and investigation of Kant’s notion of “spontaneity” with respect to the contemporary cognitive neuroscience of consciousness see Hanna and Thompson (2014).
Searle (2001a) argues against Hume for the existence of a self in the context of his discussion of rational action and of freedom and neurobiology. He argues that while mental capacities like perception do not require to postulate a self, the fact that we have the phenomenal experience of freedom at various points in a decision-making process leads us to postulate such an entity, namely, an “irreducible non-Humean self”. He admits such an entity “with the greatest reluctance” (2001a, 79–96). Actions do not simply happen to us, Searle argues, and we act for reasons which have to be consciously appreciated as such. Only agents can act in this way and “something is an agent […] if and only if it is a conscious entity that has the capacity to initiate and carry out actions under the presupposition of freedom” (2001a, 83). Neither a Humean bundle of experiences nor a notion of the self as ‘center of narrative gravity’ (Dennett 1991) are sufficient to capture this, Searle argues. Consequently, “‘self’ is simply the name for that entity which experiences its own activities as more than an inert bundle” (2001a, 93). Combined with Searle’s view that consciousness is ontologically subjective and thereby irreducible, it seems that this irreducible ontological subjectivity must also hold for the self. But while this would seem to be incompatible with Searle’s biological naturalism, according to which consciousness with all its features is caused by and realized in the brain (cf. Schlicht 2007), he also declares that there is “no metaphysical problem of the self” (2001b, 510f).
Schlicht (2015) contains a more detailed discussion of this issue.
For a discussion of this issue in Kant’s critical philosophy see Schlicht (2016).
Edelman and Tononi (2000) have suggested that this state is supported by a neural pattern comprising large areas of the thalamo-cortical system.
On the brain-stem level, these structures include the nuclues tractus solitarius, the parabrachial nucleus, the periaqueductal gray, the area postrema, hypothalamus and superior colliculus. In addition, some cerebral structures like the insula and anterior cingulate cortex constitute the proto-self (cf. Damasio 2011, 191). While the neuroanatomical details do not concern us here in this philosophical investigation, it is important to note that this perspective on the self is anthropocentric and (mostly) based on indirect evidence from lesion studies in relation to pathological conditions of patients that have to do with the loss of the sense of self.
According to Damasio, this happens primarily via interaction with the world which results in object representations etc.
Tye’s (1995) PANIC-theory alludes to a specific way objects have to represented but has difficulties distinguishing conscious from unconscious representations. Rosenthal (2005) therefore introduces an additional higher-order thought that must represent the first-order representation. But this move introduces various problematic possibilities of misrepresentation. By refraining from introducing a representational relation, the present proposal avoids all these shortcomings.
It is interesting to note that Nagel (1969), in criticizing Fodor’s mechanistic theory of intentionality, argues that “perhaps we shall have to fall back on the idea of an organism or organismic system”, but also advocates that we should see first whether the concept of a “person” is indeed a “dying notion”. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this passage.
Kirchhoff and Froese (2017) discuss the connections between this kind of autopoietic enactivism and the predictive coding framework via Friston’s (2010) “free energy principle”. According to Lamb and Chemero (forthcoming), autopoietic systems form a subclass of dynamical systems. Both the free energy principle and the principles of dynamical systems theory apply to a greater class of systems than only to organisms.
Given that Damasio supports his distinctions by extensive discussions of pathological cases, it is noteworthy that this sense of self (in the act of knowing) is what’s absent in diseases like akinetic mutism. absence seizures and others, where core consciousness is momentarily suspended (although patients stay awake). Patients in this condition remain ‘embodied selves’, according to Damasio, but their first-person experience is gone. Since it depends on core consciousness, extended consciousness is also impaired here. In other less dramatic cases like amnesia or aphasia, core consciousness remains but only varieties of extended (or autobiographical) consciousness are impaired.
Swanson (2016) discusses the roots of the predictive processing paradigm in Kant’s philosophy of perception.
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Schlicht, T. Experiencing organisms: from mineness to subject of experience. Philos Stud 175, 2447–2474 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0968-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0968-4