In one of my recent pieces on Dennett and Wright, Steve Esser offered the following interesting comment; with his permission, I’m repeating it:
On Wright’s notion of subjective awareness as a kind of extra epiphenomenal stuff, I’ve come to agree this is wrong. But I am also one of those who read Dennett’s Consciousness Explained a number of years ago and came away thinking “no, not quite”. First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus, is a different beast than the other things we explain scientifically (i.e. from an “objective” stance). The fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know — there is no reality without it. So, I don’t think we have the whole story solved yet.
I agree with the first and last sentences, and while I too have reservations about some of Consciousness Explained, I suspect that my issues are different from Steve’s.
“First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus”… OK, stop right there. I don’t believe that there is any such thing. It is that cognitive apparatus which converts raw sensory stimuli into experience. No cognitive apparatus, no experience. Here I use the word experience in the sense of “the apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind”, with the emphasis on apprehension. Some people use experience as an opposite of thinking; for example one dictionary defines it as “the feeling of emotions and sensations as opposed to thinking”. I deny the distinction implied here: for me, all experience involves the processing by cognitive apparatus of internal and external stimuli. To the extent that these stimuli do not involve cognition, they are sub-conscious: inaccessible, and therefore not experienced.
I’m not sure what Steve means by subjective here. The dictionary provides a wealth of possibilities, some of which are essentially question-begging (since they would define the experience as, e.g. “Particular to a given person”). Later he puts objective in quotes and couples it with science, so perhaps subjective is intended to mean unscientific – but that, too, seems to beg the question. I tend to use first person, as Steve does too, because I view the objective/subjective dichotomy as a (mostly) social construct.
Ultimately Steve’s assertion that “First-person experience is a different beast” seems to rest on his view that “the fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know — there is no reality without it”. What does prior mean here? A precondition? I can perhaps understand an instrumental relationship between experience and knowing – thought experiments about sensory deprivation and brains-in-vats seem pertinent – but how does this justify the claim that experience is a “different beast”? Eating is “prior” to digestion, but both are amenable to scientific inquiry. (I’m afraid I don’t understand the “no reality” comment at all.)
Ultimately I think Steve seems to be arguing for the familiar “uniquely privileged” viewpoint: that there is something about first-person experience that is real – accessible to the individual concerned – but is intrinsically inaccessible to scientific, “objective” inquiry. It seems to me that such a radical claim must be either a matter of faith (mysterian), or must be explicable in terms of the known properties of individuals and brains. If one backs off from the claim of intrinsic inaccessibility, first-person experience presumably moves into the realm of the empirical – which is how I view it.