Are Self-Awareness and Perceptual Experience Interdependent
Joshua Bronson
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Abstract
This thesis investigates what I call the Interdependent Theory of Experience. This is the claim that self-awareness depends on perceptual experience of objects and that our experience of these objects depends on our awareness of ourselves as subjects. Chapter one introduces the key aspects of the Theory, which is a kind of transcendental argument. The theory derives from two Strawsonian theses; one regarding objectivity and one regarding the self-ascription of experience. Chapter two explores connections between the Theory and three Kantian features of self-awareness: First, as Kant and later Kaplan and Shoemaker observe, self-reference ‘as subject’ does not require self-identification; Second, there is, as Perry says, a need for ‘the essential indexical’; Third, Wittgenstein describes an ‘immunity to error through misidentification’, which is implicit in Kant. I deploy three thought experiments to evaluate the Theory. Chapter three investigates the first of these: Audio-World. The subject in this scenario has perceptual experience limited to hearing alone. The scenario appears to show that a condition of self-awareness is rich phenomenological experience. Chapter four investigates the Lichtenbergian Language Scenario, where a subject speaks a language devoid of subject specific terms. Such a subject cannot self-ascribe experiences. Yet such a subject seems capable of being aware of the world in the requisite way, suggesting the Theory is too strong. Chapter five investigates the Brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. According to the Theory envatted brains should not have self-awareness because all their perceptual experiences are false. This is implausibly strong because some amount of self-awareness seems likely. I conclude that the Interdependent Theory of Experience is false: awareness of the world and the self are separable. However, there does appear to be a deep, even fundamental, interdependence between our concepts of an external world and ourselves that is captured in a more modest conceptual version of the Theory.
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This paper is a defense of the old orthodox view that self-consciousness requires self-concepts. We will try to persuade the reader that intelligent beings lacking self-concepts are not self-conscious. The alleged cases of primitive nonconceptual self-consciousness are better understood as ancestors in the developmental prehistory of genuine self-consciousness. We distinguish three levels of subject-involvement. In the first, the representational content of experiences is subject-free and the being is merely concerned rather self-referred by its own experiences. We call this view self-concernment without self-representation. In the second level, the being is self-aware in the sense that it is the object of its own attention. The key feature of this level is what psychologists call “objectivation.” Self-awareness is not genuine self-consciousness, however, in the sense of being conscious of oneself as the subject of representations. We therefore call this level self-awareness without self-consciousness. The emerging picture is this: selves are not just the subjects of representations. Their metaphysical nature lies in their capacity to represent themselves as the subjects of their own representations.
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Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2008
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Adverbial Account of Intransitive Self-Consciousness. Abstracta Volume 8, Number 2, pp. 67–77, 2015.
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Forthcoming in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2024
The nature of pre-reflective self-consciousness—viz., the putative non-inferential self-consciousness involved in unreflective experiences—has become the topic of considerable debate in recent analytic philosophy of consciousness, as it is commonly taken to be what makes conscious mental states first-personally given to their subject. A major issue of controversy in this debate concerns what pre-reflective self-consciousness is an awareness of. Some scholars have suggested that pre-reflective self-consciousness involves an awareness of the experiencing subject. This ‘egological view’ is opposed to the ‘non-egological view’, according to which the subject is just aware of their own occurrent mental state in being pre-reflectively self-conscious. In this paper, I argue in favour of the egological view. The argument I develop is a qualified version of a line of reasoning originally provided by Rosenthal and builds on a proper clarification of the ontological status of token mental states. More precisely, I argue that token mental states are structured ‘fact-like’ entities having their subject among their constituents. Accordingly, one cannot be aware of one’s own occurrent mental state without thereby being aware of oneself. I conclude by dismissing a potential objection to my argument.
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Psyche, 2006
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Experience, meta-consciousness, and the paradox of introspection
2004
Introspection is paftdoxical in that it is simultaneously so compclling yet so elusive, This paradox emerges because ahhough expeicnce itselfis indisputablc, our ability to explicitly characterize etpe ence is ofren inadequate. Ultimately, the accurucy of introspectiw rcports d?pends on indiyi(lu.lls' imper .fect ahility to takc stock (i.e., to become tfieta-conscious) (t theb expcrience. Although there is no ideal yerdstickfor assessing introspection, examinatioh of the degrce to which seu-rcports syrtethatically .ovaty with thc cnvironmental, behal)ioural, andphrsioloeiel concoftitants ofetperience can help to establish the correspondcnce between meta"consciousness and experience, We illu:trute the viability (t,tuch an approach in three domains, imagery, mind-yunderihg, and hcdonic apprcisaL idefining both the situations in which intrcsnections appear to be accurdte and those in which they seem to diverye.from underlying experience. We conclude with a aliscussion of thc various.factors (including issues of detection, trunsformation, and substitution) that may cause met1-consciousnes! to misreprerent experience.
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