Word Count : 9 , 980 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 don’t 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 affectivity. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness. 1 The first author did most of the work on this paper. 2 Our first goal in this article is to show that ordinary people (viz. people without training in philosophy or in consciousness studies) and philosophers conceive of subjective experience in a markedly different 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. We show 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 outside our skin (the products of the external senses) and those states that tell us about ourselves from the skin in (the products of the internal senses). Rejecting this first account, we argue for an alternative hypothesis: For the folk, subjective experience is tightly linked to affectivity. As a result, people distinguish between states that are essentially affective (such as feeling pain or anger), those that are not affective (such as seeing red), and those that have both salient affective and a non-affective components (such as smelling banana). Our third and last goal is to investigate the philosophical implications of the divergence between ordinary people’s and philosophers’ conceptions of subjective experience. We argue that our findings cast some doubts on whether there is a hard problem of consciousness to be solved and, at the very least, call for philosophers to provide a better justification for the reality of this problem. We begin in Section 1 by briefly characterizing the philosophical conception of subjective experience. In Section 2, we discuss the shortcomings of recent work in psychology, philosophy, and experimental philosophy that investigates folk intuitions related to consciousness. We conclude that this work is poorly designed to investigate whether philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience similarly. In Sections 3, 4, 3 and 5, we aim to rectify this situation by examining people’s judgments about perceptual experiences, bodily sensations, and felt emotions. In Section 6, we examine the philosophical implications of our findings about the folk conception of subjective experience. 1. The Philosophical Conception of Subjective Experience For most contemporary philosophers, subjective experience is characterized by its phenomenality. There is, of course, much disagreement in the literature about what phenomenal consciousness is. Still, according to one standard line (and the one we will be interested in), mental states such as seeing red, feeling pain, hearing a C#, feeling anger, etc., all share the second-order property that it is like something to be in these states. What it is like to be in pain is distinct from what it is like to see red, but for both states, there is something it is like to be in them. “Phenomenal consciousness” refers to this second-order property. As Ned Block puts it (1995, 227): “Phenomenal consciousness is experience; what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something ‘it is like’ (Nagel, 1974) to be in that state.” Similarly, John Searle (1994, xi) holds that it is one of the “simple and obvious truths about the mind” that “[w]e all have inner subjective qualitative states of consciousness.” Finally, Chalmers writes eloquently (1997, 10): The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.... This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations... mental images... the felt quality of emotion.... What unites all of these states is that there is