Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience

Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness. Our first goal in this article is to examine whether ordinary people (viz. people without training in philosophy or in consciousness studies) and philosophers conceive of subjective experience in a similar way. Philosophers see subjective experiences as including such diverse mental states as seeing red and feeling pain, treating them as having something in common, namely that they are phenomenal—viz. that they share the second-order property that there is “something it is like” (Nagel 1974) to be in these mental states. We provide suggestive evidence that the folk, by contrast, do not conceive of subjective experience in this way. Our second goal is to explore this folk conception for its own sake. We successively consider two accounts. We first examine whether the folk treat perceptual states differently from bodily sensations or felt emotions, taking the latter, but not the former, to be subjectively experienced. This might be phrased in terms of the folk distinguishing between those states that tell us about the world 1 The first author did most of the work on this article. We would like to thank Dave Chalmers, David Danks, Tony Jack, Joshua Knobe, Jonathan Livengood, Shaun Nichols, Peter Pagin, and Philip Robbins for their comments on previous versions of this article. We also would like to thank Eric Schwitzgebel for his reply to a talk based on this article at annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 2008. Thanks also to the audiences in Santa Cruz, Stockholm, Lund, and Gothenburg.