I’m returning to this blog after taking several weeks off. Ironically, I stopped writing posts because I was too busy working on a book about consciousness, Your Living Mind: The Mystery of Consciousness and Why It Matters to You. The book should be out this summer.
In my last post I talked about the debate between externalists and internalists. When we speak of conscious experiences, are we talking about our own states of mind or are we talking about things in the outside world that we’re consciously perceiving?
And could it be both? Could one and the same experience tell us about both the outside world and our own minds? Obviously it’s possible to detect two or more things by focusing on the same item. Think about a TV newscast. By watching it, you are monitoring (1) its content (what it’s telling you about world affairs), (2) the screen images which help convey this content, and (3) with old low-resolution TVs, the dotty little pixels that make up these images.
So a single stream of stimuli can tell us about several different things. Could it be that a multiple-detection process of some sort is occurring in consciousness? Perhaps sensory experiences are in some sense both inner and outer states (or processes). Even so, we run into trouble if we use this approach to answer the basic question, what are conscious experiences made of? Contrast these two claims:
❁ Seeing a giraffe gives me information about both what’s happening inside of my head and what’s happening in the outside world. I can tell that I am perceiving this animal in a certain way (seeing it clearly or fuzzily, for example), and I can also tell that there’s a giraffe in front of me.
❁ The stuff that I detect when I pay attention to the experience of seeing a giraffe is both the giraffe itself and a visual experience of that beast.
The second claim, which says what this experience is, just sounds silly. Tall spotted creatures and mental events in human heads are very different kinds of things. How could one thing actually be both of these? Compare: “I now see a red shape on my TV screen. This shape is both a screen image of a fire truck and the fire truck itself.” It seems more fitting to say that I’m seeing a screen image which I imaginatively experience as a fire truck.
If this tall creature I see IS both a visual state and a humongous mammal, we must be dealing with two different senses of “is.” So in what ways could this experience be something inside of the experiencer, and in what ways could it be something out there in the world? What do you think?
Roger Christan Schriner
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The Mystery of Consciousness, and Why It Matters 