Study notes: What Phenomenal Intuition Gets Right

Kammerer argues that those processes do not satisfy the phenomenal concepts through which we think we recognize them, so their phenomenality is an illusion. The essay proposes that phenomenal intuition can correctly present a concrete representational occurrence and its distinctive character. The mistake is taking that recognizable character to have a simple, uncomposed nature. What is accessible without a presentation of its complexity need not be simple. The earlier essay put too much weight on a slide into property language. Experiences can have properties, and an occurrence can have an intrinsic character. The better diagnosis is a slide from distinctness to simplicity. One argument survives: if the regulation through which an experience is undergone partly constitutes it, removing the regulation does not leave the same phenomenal occurrence.

The experience is the vehicle in its constitutive organization. It is not a further event the vehicle supports, and not an abstract content promoted into concrete existence. Inferring the represented shape of the vehicle is a content–vehicle confusion. The difference that matters is content-tracking: relations among the vehicles mirror relations among the objects, which Shepard and Chipman called second-order isomorphism. An experience of a circle can stand closer to one of an ellipse than to one of a square with nothing in it round. What must track the content is the causal structure of the organization, not where its components sit. Intrinsic means fixed by the structure within the occurrence’s boundary, constitutive regulation included. It does not mean a categorical nature beneath structure, of the kind Russellian monists posit.

An organization could reproduce our input–output profile and cognitive efficacy, phenomenal judgments included, while lacking the regulatory coupling. A recurrent process might be unfolded into a feedforward cascade with no persistent carrier for corrections to act on. Or a component might replay a recorded input history. Such a system would deploy phenomenal concepts and nothing would satisfy them. Substrate is not the issue: a simulation that reproduces the constitutive causal pattern, with the right counterfactual dependencies, realizes it. Cognitive equivalence leaves open whether the pattern obtains and what its exact character is. If a cognitively specified organization had an automorphism exchanging its red and green pathways, the description would give corresponding positions and no constitutive difference between the occurrences. The realism therefore says some organizations have what phenomenal concepts track and others could have the illusion without the presence.

The organization can select a vehicle through what distinguishes it, with no separate symbolic address saying which internal item is meant. The target is the concrete occurrence. Attention does not retrieve an abstract content, or a description that could be generated in the occurrence’s absence. The distinctive activity participates in the processes that select, maintain, assess and regulate it. The analogy does not claim that every associative memory has experiences: a hardware content-addressable memory selects by matching, and that is not phenomenality. And availability is not current focal attention. An occurrence can be maintained without being selected for a judgment or report. This gives a naturalistic sense in which an occurrence reveals itself, without revealing every constituent.

On Kammerer’s Meta-Cartesian account, the Cartesian Device characterizes certain states as primitive direct evidence: self-presenting, self-revealing, infallibly presented, with a simple nature captured by the representation of it. He builds on Pereboom’s primitivist hypothesis. The Evidence-by-Resemblance Mechanism redeploys a sensory concept such as RED in a metacognitive concept, and uses similarity between representations as a proxy for similarity between referents. Applying the scheme to the state itself helps generate the apparent self-revelation. Kammerer distinguishes these architectural and implementation hypotheses from the further claim that phenomenal concepts are unsatisfied. The first two are neutral between realism and illusionism. The essay’s departure: actual regulation through distinctive vehicles might support successful recognition without his resemblance relations. Its project is to minimize how much of phenomenal thought must be treated as fabrication.

The constitutive complexity is not presented in recognizing an experiential character, so the character is taken to have none. The system addresses the occurrence as one presence and treats unity of access as evidence of simplicity in what is accessed. The inference is invalid: a complex activity can be available as a unit.

• Armstrong’s headless woman: not seeing her head is taken for seeing that she has none.
• Kant’s Second Paralogism: the formal unity of the “I think” is taken for a simple substance.
• Drescher’s gensyms: tokens a program recognizes by identity without inspecting what distinguishes them. Their features are “merely hidden, not absent.”

Drescher puts the distinguishing features in the implementation, hidden from experience. The essay says the distinguishing structure is what the character consists in. What stays unpresented is its decomposition. The presented character is rich, where a gensym has no structure beyond its identity.

Mereological: no parts. Definitional: no account, only a name or acquaintance. Homogeneous: uniform at every grain. Relative: no parts under a given analysis. A presentation can deliver relative simplicity, as when a red patch is available with no presented parts. Absolute simplicity says that what is presented is all there is. No presentation shows that by lacking presented parts. It would need a further clause, and that is all, which is the first half of Pereboom’s primitiveness. The criterion: features of a presentation make a difference to what it enables the system to discriminate and do. Discrimination, similarity orderings and attention proceed identically with or without the clause. So distinctness, similarity and much fine-grained character belong to the presentation. Exhaustiveness belongs to the uptake.

Vision presents surface colors as simple, homogeneous qualities, which Chalmers calls Edenic colors. The early modern relocation moved those qualities from surfaces into the mind. That transfers a feature of represented content to the representing occurrence, the confusion of the red circle. Once simplicity resides in experience there is nowhere further inward to put it, which is one reason it is harder to set aside there than for colors. First reply to Kammerer: the proposal does not locate the mistake in an inference. Uptake can be a default characterization supplied automatically, as impenetrable as a perceptual illusion. Second: his counterexample, the belief about one’s own name, is not available through a distinctive character presented without parts. The dispute narrows, since in Kammerer’s mechanism too primitiveness is supplied by the metacognitive concept. The question is whether that characterization is core to the concept of experience.

On the identity proposal an actual experiential occurrence cannot fail to exist or to be a representational vehicle, even when its content cannot be reconstructed. That is the metaphysical security of presence. An assertion of experience does not guarantee its target: a phenomenal concept can misfire, and its deployment is a concrete process that need not be experiential. The four: an experience’s being present, its being available to attention, its being successfully recognized, and its being correctly described in every respect. A system could misclassify a present occurrence, fail to attend to it, or claim an absent one. The position needs only that some recognitions concern an occurrence and correctly characterize aspects of it. The essay first draws this separation where Kammerer challenges Brown, who at one point connects undergoing an experience directly with knowing what it is like.

Each shade can be indiscriminable from its neighbor while the ends of the series are distinct. If looking the same were sameness of character, sameness would fail to be transitive. So some indiscriminable experiences differ in character. Raffman argues that discrimination of shades far outstrips our capacity to identify or remember them. The exact character is not represented in any form available to memory, comparison or report. It is present: undergone, not claimed. Nothing is judged at this grain, so there is nothing there to be infallible about. A substrate replacement that preserves cognitive function need not preserve exact character, though it plausibly preserves type. Chalmers’s fading and dancing qualia arguments rely on changes a rational subject should notice. Experience is ineffable because it is finer than concepts, memory and report, not because it is simple.

The objection concerns constitution. If the regulatory involvement is part of what the occurrence is, removing it changes the occurrence. Preserving a local activity pattern or the content does not preserve the constitution. The relevant withdrawal is loss of constitutive regulation, not a lapse of focal attention or report. Regulation is not access: fine-grained character goes beyond what report, memory and comparison can use, and not beyond the regulation in which the vehicle has that character. Detachment can therefore mark the boundary of the occurrence. What cannot be removed without changing it is constitutive. The corrections: the essay keeps the claim that phenomenality is constituted in the undergoing and abandons a general objection to properties. And it replaces a sweeping rejection of qualitative character with an explanation of why complex character is mistaken for something simple. It grants that a defender could accept the causal changes and deny their constitutive significance.

Frankish: a weak illusionist needs a concept of phenomenality stronger than quasi-phenomenality yet weak enough for physical explanation. He doubts anything fits: “What phenomenal residue is left, once features such as privacy, intrinsicality, and ineffability have been stripped away?” Kammerer: a weak illusionist who denies all the features in phenomenal concepts differs from the strong illusionist only verbally.

• The account strips little away. Presence and intrinsic character (structural sense) are kept, ineffability largely, direct apprehension partly. Privacy is mixed. Infallibility and simplicity are rejected.
• Its phenomenality and Frankish’s quasi-phenomenality differ in extension. The constitutive pattern can be present without triggering introspective representations, and the triggering can occur without the pattern.
• Kammerer’s own test remains: whether the rejected features are core to phenomenal concepts. If simplicity belongs to the uptake, rejecting it is like discovering that water is not an element.

If similarity and distinctness belong to the presentation and are realized as content-tracking structure, a complete description of the vehicles entails that an experience of red is more like one of orange than one of green. Truths stated with recognitional concepts are available only to a system that has undergone the occurrence, which is what Mary lacks. Exact character outruns even those concepts. So an epistemic gap remains and the position is type B. Chalmers’s objection assumes that phenomenal concepts reveal the full nature of their referents, leaving no difference between appearance and reality. If the clause and that is all belongs to the uptake, that difference exists. Recognition fixes its referent through presented character, and the referent’s constitution is discovered, as water’s was. The hard problem reduces to an ordinary a posteriori identity and a gap in access the theory predicts.

It must still be shown that phenomenal recognition gets right what the essay says it does, and that the mistake about simplicity can be corrected without losing its target. Psychological burden: Kammerer argues that fallacy accounts do not explain the persistent difficulty of positively understanding physical phenomenal consciousness. The account must make a complex occurrence’s recognizability intelligible and explain why the temptation to simplicity remains. The missing destination for relocated simplicity is part of an answer. Scientific burden: specify the organization well enough to tell experiential regulation from associative retrieval, nonmental cognition and nonphenomenal mental activity. For color, the vehicles’ causal structure at the constitutive stage should realize the similarity geometry experience presents. If the proposed organization turned out to track only access, the identification would need revision. Kammerer also allows that the quasi-phenomenal kind might be fixed by realization, in which case the dispute turns on the status of primitiveness.