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Abstract
The subjectivity of conscious experience is a central feature of our mental life that puzzles philosophers of mind. Conscious mental representations are presented to me as mine, others remain unconscious. How can we make sense of the difference between them? Some representationalists (e.g. Tye) attempt to explain it in terms of non-conceptual intentional content, i.e. content for which one need not possess the relevant concept required in order to describe it. Hanna claims that Kant purports to explain the subjectivity of conscious experience in this way. This paper examines this claim in some detail in the context of a more general criticism of this kind of attempt to explain subjectivity and proposes a different reading of Kant that also leads to an alternative account of subjectivity independent from content.
Notes
1 To say that a creature is conscious simpliciter is also a way of saying that it is awake or alert. A creature may be in any one of a hierarchy of different states of vigilance, like being fully alert, being in a dreamless sleep, or being in a vegetative state, in coma, or drowsy or anaesthetized (Dehaene et al., 2006). In contrast to phenomenal consciousness, this notion of consciousness only applies to creatures, not to states.
2 Here, object is understood in a broad sense. Following Crane (2001), the term ‘intentional object’ just provides an answer to the question what a certain mental state is about.
3 For an overview of the recent debate see Metzinger (2000).
4 All other differences between normally sighted people and blindsight-patients that he mentions have to do with the content of the representation.
5 Carruthers (2000: p. 157ff) works out the following argument in greater detail.
6 Jacob and Jeannerod (2003) present evidence that one cannot simply identify ventral stream processing with conscious and dorsal stream processing with unconscious representations, since some patients with a damaged dorsal pathway still weren’t phenomenally conscious of what they ‘saw’ (based on their unimpaired ventral pathway processing).
7 Although D. F. of course consciously posts the letter in the slot, it is counterintuitive to suppose that D. F. is phenomenally conscious of the representation guiding her grasping action. As Kelly (2002) observes, she ‘can’t draw the slope of the slot on a piece of paper or even rotate her hand into the correct orientation without at the same time moving it toward the slot. She seems, in other words, not to be able to represent the orientation of the slot at all except by means of posting the card through it’. Based on D. F.’s case, Kelly claims, ‘that motor intentional activities constitute essentially bodily understandings of their objects’.
8 Cf. Horgan and Tienson (2002). Tye’s claim that there is nothing it is like to have a belief shows that he does not make the distinction, proposed by Kriegel and others, between qualitative and subjective character. But the representationalist should in general also allow for phenomenally conscious conceptual mental representations. I can consciously perceive a triangle as a triangle, say. But in order to be able to be in this perceptual state, I need to possess the concept ‘triangle’. This makes the perceptual state partly conceptual.
9 See Byrne (2001a, 2003) for further discussion of Tye’s theory with regard to his use of the notion of non-conceptual content.
10 References in the text are to Kant (1781/1787), A signifying the first edition, B the second.
11 ‘Es dient dazu, alles Denken als zum Bewusstsein gehörig aufzuführen.’
12 In his 2005 paper, Hanna discusses split-brain patients as providing evidence against the unity of consciousness as a condition of phenomenal consciousness. He thinks that these patients show that it is fragile and can break down easily. In these patients, the corpus callosum is cut such that the main connection between the two hemispheres is severed, resulting in largely independent information processing in the two hemispheres. Due to lateralization, information presented in the right visual field is processed in the left hemisphere and vice versa. After the information-flow is interrupted, most mental representations are computed ‘intra-hemispherically’ (Colvin and Gazzaniga, 2006: p. 182) such that neither hemisphere receives the information processed in the other. That’s the reason why Hanna thinks these patients show that the unity of consciousness is a ‘fragile achievement’. However, the view put forward here can accommodate the split-brain behaviour quite nicely, once we acknowledge that the disconnection of the hemispheres may make an integration of the relevant representations processed in the right hemisphere impossible such that they remain unconscious. Bayne (2008) has argued persuasively that we do not need to treat this phenomenon as a breakdown of the unity of consciousness or invoke two centers of consciousness (Pucetti, 1981; for criticism see also Schlicht, 2007).
13 Though pointing in the right direction, one may still be dissatisfied with Van Gulick’s claim in the quotation above that the relevant sense of self-awareness should be reflexive. As far as I can see neither he nor any other defender of a higher-order theory has argued for this claim. On the other hand, there is a rich tradition arguing that the notion of reflection simply cannot capture the very basic sense of self-consciousness. For various reasons, other authors, including Kant and Husserl, have characterized the relevant form of self-consciousness as pre-reflexive. Extensive arguments to this effect have been put forward in contemporary debates, this is not the place to pursue this problem any further (Zahavi, 1999, Schlicht, 2007, Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008: pp. 45–68). Metzinger (1995) already pointed out that integration of content into a global state is an important feature of conscious experience.
14 Thus the analogy to Kant’s theory only goes so far, since not only the empirical models but also Van Gulick’s HOGS-model are supposed to be naturalistic accounts, while Kant’s isn’t. The purpose here was merely to clarify Kant’s general idea and make productive use of it in an original modified model.
15 A more elaborate argument against attempts to explain phenomenal consciousness in terms of content can be found in Vosgerau et al., 2008.
16 I would like to thank Ned Block, Kristina Engelhard, Dietmar Heidemann, Thomas Metzinger and Robert Van Gulick for various valuable discussions.