Occurrent Perceptual Knowledge
Occurrent Perceptual Knowledge
Matthew Soteriou
Philosophical Issues(Forthcoming)
One of O’Shaughnessy’s central concerns in Consciousness and the World is that of providing an analysis of the state of wakeful consciousness – “that vastly familiar light that appearsin the head when a person surfaces from sleep or anaesthetic or dream” (2000: 68). As part of this enterprise he attempts to articulate the respect in which “anyone who is conscious [i.e. awake] is endowed with epistemological powers particular to that state” (6). There are many strands to O’Shaughnessy’s distinctive development of the idea that those who are consciousare “‘in touch’ with Reality”in a way that those who are unconscious are not. In this paper I take as my point of departure just one of them – his discussion of the connection between being conscious, having experience, and awareness of the passage of time.
O’Shaughnessy claims that “experience puts us in touch with time” (66). It “guarantees a direct confrontation with the passage of time” (51), and moreover, according to O’Shaughnessy, this makes possible “a special cognitive relation to the present moment, not accessible to non-experiencers” (50). O’Shaughnessy uses the term ‘experience’ to pick out all of those aspects of mind that make up ‘the stream of consciousness’, so for O’Shaughnessy not all experiences are perceptual. In what follows I shall be focusing my discussion on perceptual experience. I shall be concerned with a respect in which conscious perceptual experience provides us with a distinctive form of conscious contact with time, which in turn makes possible a ‘special cognitive relation to time’.
My aim in this paper is to show how issues in the ontology of mind are relevant to the account that should be given of the distinctive respect in which conscious perceptual experience ‘puts us in touch with time’. In particular, I shall be arguing that the correct account of the respect in which conscious experience makes possible a ‘special cognitive relation to time’ will depend on claims about the ontology of perceptual experience and claims about the ontology of perceptual belief. These ontological claims, it will emerge, are ofsignificance to our understanding of the relation between perceptual experience and perceptual belief – our understanding of the way in which a distinctive form of conscious cognitive contact with the world depends upon our conscious perceptual experience of the world.
I shall start with O’Shaughnessy’s discussion of his claim that “the experiencing subject stands in a special to time not discoverable in those not experiencing”(section 1). One thing that will emerge from that discussion is the importance that O’Shaughnessy attaches to the idea that “experience guarantees a direct confrontation with the passage of time”. How should we understand the claim that when we have conscious perceptual experience we are thereby aware of ‘the passage of time’? I shall pursue this question by first highlighting certain aspects of the temporal phenomenology of perceptual experience (section 2). Consideration of these aspects of the temporal phenomenology will lead to a proposal about the ontology of perceptual experience (section 3). This proposal, I shall argue, accommodates a respect in which we can be said to experience ‘the passage of time’ when we have conscious perceptual experience (section 4).
The sort of conscious contact with time that we have when we undergo conscious perceptual experience need not be a purely experiential affair. It can be accompanied by a temporally aligned cognitive counterpart, e.g. when we notice, continue to look at, and attentively watch, something that we experientially encounter. I shall argue that a correct account of the ontology of perceptual belief is of crucial importance to an account of such cases (section 5). This account of the ontology of perceptual belief involves claims about the relation between perceptual experience and perceptual belief that are of significance to the epistemology of perception.
1
In his attempt to uncover “a special relation to time guaranteed to an experiencing subject” (2000: 50), O’Shaughnessy first considers the following question: what sort of temporal knowledge can be possessed by a subject who is not having conscious experience – e.g. the sort of temporal knowledge that a subject can possess during dreamless sleep?
As O’Shaughnessy points out, there seems to be no reason to deny that a subject can retain knowledge of temporal facts during dreamless sleep – e.g. the knowledge that Descartes was born in 1596. Moreover there seems to be no reason to deny that the temporal knowledge that a subject can retain during dreamless sleep might include knowledge that has a content containing a temporal indexical. For example, consider a subject who takes a nap of ten minutes knowing that ‘Today is Tuesday’. We can imagine that if you were to wake that subject during that 10 minute interval and ask him what day it was, he would answer ‘Tuesday’, and that answer would express knowledge, and not knowledge newly acquired on waking up – so knowledge that the subject retained during sleep. O’Shaughnessy suggests that “it looks as if sustained deep unconsciousness has a tendency to destroy knowledge of one’s temporal location” (50). So perhaps a deep coma will destroy one’s knowledge of temporal facts from a temporal point of view. But a brief interval of dreamless sleep need not. As O’Shaughnessy remarks, “unconsciousness cannot as such delete all temporal perspectival knowledge” (50). During a brief period of dreamless sleep one can retain temporal knowledge directed towards the present as such.
However, O’Shaughnessy goes on to suggest that “something in the way of ‘now’ must surely be inaccessible to non-experiencers”. And he claims that “What that is, seems to be a direct consequence of their incapacity to experience the passage of time.” Of the subject taking a 10 minute nap, O’Shaughnessy writes the following:
If he fell asleep at 6.00 a.m., and awoke at 6.10 a.m., he cannot at 6.05 a.m. entertain a belief about 6.05 a.m. singled out as ‘now’. He can at 6.05 a.m. entertain a belief about 6.05 a.m., but he cannot at 6.05 a.m. entertain a belief about 6.05 am singled out purely as ‘now’. And he cannot do so, because he cannot do what an experiencer can do: pick out the present as ‘now’; and that because a non-experiencer is not conscious of ‘now’, nor therefore of a continuity of ‘now’s, which is to say, of the passage of time. (2000; 51)
We need to take care in articulating the sense in which a certain kind of ‘now’ is “inaccessible” to the sleeping subject – the sense in which the sleeping subject, in O’Shaughnessy’s example, “cannot” entertain a belief about 6.05 a.m. singled out purely as ‘now’. Suppose the subject is having a light sleep. So suppose that if, at any time during his 10 minute nap, one were to address him and ask him ‘what is going on now?’, the subject would wake up and be able to answer. The coherence of this scenario suggests that there is an attenuated sense in which it may be correct to claim that during his 10 minute light sleep the subject is in a position to refer to distinct sub-intervals of that 10 minute period as ‘now’ and make knowledgeable claims about what is going on in his environment in doing so.
However, there is a sense in which the following also seems to be true: during that 10 minute sleep, distinct sub-intervals of that 10 minute period of time are not presented to the subject as temporally present. As O’Shaughnessy puts it, the sleeping subject is not conscious of ‘a continuity of ‘now’s”. We can bring out this point by comparing a dreamless sleep situation in which a subject continues to retain some item of temporal knowledge that is to be specified in terms of a temporal indexical content (e.g. ‘The English soccer team are now playing Germany in South Africa’), with a situation in which the subject is having a perceptual experience of the same general type and character for a period of time of the same length (e.g. the continuous auditory experience of a humming sound). Over the period of time during which the subject has conscious perceptual experience, even if that experience does not change in general type and character, the subject is aware of distinct sub-intervals of that period of time – distinct sub-intervals of that period of time each of which is presented to the subject as temporally present.
This is not true of the subject who is in dreamless sleep and not having conscious perceptual experience. It is not true of the subject who, during a brief period of dreamless sleep, continues to retain his knowledge that ‘The English soccer team are now playing Germany in South Africa’. This suggests that the continued obtaining of a certain kind of dispositional state that is specified in terms of an intentional content with a temporal indexical is not in itself enough to provide one with the sort of conscious contact with time that one has when one is awake and having conscious experience. It is not in itself sufficient to make one aware of “a continuity of ‘now’s”.
O’Shaughnessy links his claim that the experiencing subject is “conscious of a continuity of ‘now’s” with his claim that “experience guarantees a direct confrontation with the passage of time”.In what follows I shall be trying to articulate the sense in which O’Shaughnessy is correct to claim that conscious perceptual experience appears to make us conscious of ‘the passage of time’. I shall be connecting this idea with a further, ontological, proposal that O’Shaughnessy makes – hisproposal that the continuity of conscious sensory experience is processive in character. First though, I want to highlight certain aspects of the temporal phenomenology of perceptual experience which, I shall argue, have a bearing on the account we should give of the ontology of perceptual experience.
2
The first aspect of the temporal phenomenology of perceptual experience that I want to highlight is what I shall call its ‘temporal transparency’. Discussions of the conscious character of perceptual experience often appeal to the idea thatperceptual experience is ‘transparent’ or ‘diaphanous’ to the objects of perception.[1] The idea is sometimes expressed in terms of the claim that introspection of one’s perceptual experience reveals only the objects, qualities and relations one is apparently perceptually aware of in having that experience. A weaker version of the claim is that when one attempts to attend introspectively to what it is like for one to be having a perceptual experience it seems to one as though one can only do so through attending to the sorts of objects, qualities and relations one is apparently perceptually aware of in having the experience. It doesn’t seem as though one can focus solely on the conscious character of one’s experience without attending to the nature of the objects of apparent perceptual awareness – the objects that one’s experience is an experience of.
A further claim we might add here is that the temporal location of one’s perceptual experience seems to one to be transparent to the temporal location of whatever it is that one is aware of in having that experience. When one introspects one’s experience, the temporal location of one’s perceptual experience seems to one to be transparent to the temporal location of whatever it is that one is aware of in having that experience. Introspectively, it doesn’t seem to one as though one can mark out the temporal location of one’s perceptual experience as distinct from the temporal location of whatever it is that one seems to be perceptually aware of. Furthermore, it seems to one as though the temporal location of one’s experience depends on, and is determined by, the temporal location of whatever it is that one’s experience is an experience of. So, for example, when one perceives an unfolding occurrence (e.g. the movement of an object across space), it seems to one as though one’s perceptual experience has the temporal location and duration of its object, and it seems to one as though the temporal location and duration of each temporal part of one’s experience is transparent to the temporal location and duration of each temporal part of the unfolding occurrence one seems to perceive.
The second aspect of the temporal phenomenology of perceptual experience I want to highlight concerns the apparent temporal extent of the objects of perceptual experience. This is best illustrated by considering our experience of events. Introspection of one’s experience seems to reveal (at least often) not only objects and their properties, but also events. In certain cases one’s introspection of the conscious character of one’s experience seems to one to require attending to the occurrence of events that are distinct from the experience itself. Furthermore, in such cases, the occurrences one thereby seems to be attending to seem to one to have temporal extension. In a given case, it may be that it doesn’t seem to one as though one is thereby attending to all of the temporal parts of that occurrence, however, it seems to one as though one cannot attend to the occurrence without attending to some temporal part of it and, moreover, some temporal part of the occurrence that has temporal extension.
If one tries just to attend to an instantaneous temporal part of the occurrence, without attending to a temporal part of the occurrence that has temporal extension, then one will fail. By analogy, in the case of one’s experience of the spatial objects one seems to be attending to in introspecting the conscious character of one’s experience, it may be that it does not seem to one as though one is attending to all of the spatial parts of the object, however, it seems to one as though one cannot attend to the object without attending to some spatial part of the object, and, moreover, some spatial part of the object that has spatial extension. Instantaneous events may also feature in the conscious character of experience (e.g. the event of an object starting to move), but when they do, it seems to one as though one cannot attend to them without thereby attending to something that has temporal extension (e.g. the object moving). By analogy, it seems to one as though one cannot attend to the spatial boundary of an object of experience without thereby attending to some spatial part of the object that has spatial extension.
The third, and final, aspect of the temporal phenomenology I want to highlight concerns the apparent continuity of conscious experience over time. Suppose you are watching the movement of the second-hand of a clock for some period of time. Suppose the movement of the second-hand seems continuous in the following respect: each successive phase of the movement of the second-hand seems to share a temporal part with some prior phase of its perceived movement. So it doesn’t seem as if there are distinct and separate episodes or events of movement to discern, which can be counted off discretely – the first, the second, the third, and so on. There’s a similar respect in which one’s experience of the movement of the second-hand seems to one to be continuous. That is to say, each successive phase of one’s awareness of the movement of the second-hand seems to share some temporal part with some prior phase of one’s awareness of its movement. It doesn’t seem to one as if there are distinct, separate and successive experiential episodes or events to discern – the first, the second, the third, and so on. Consideration of this sort of case suggests that when one undergoes a conscious perceptual experience that fills an interval of time, each sub-interval of that interval of time is filled by some successive phase of that experience, and each successive phase of the experience shares a temporal part with some prior phase of experience.
What bearing do these phenomenological observations have on questions concerning the ontology of perceptual experience? Let us start with the last phenomenological claim I highlighted, regarding the apparent continuity of experience over time. Considerations of this kind emerge in Tye’s (2003) discussion of the diachronic unity of consciousness. Tye suggests that over a period of time during which one is awake, one has just one temporally extended experience. He claims that this ‘one experience hypothesis’ finds support in the general difficulty we face in individuating experiences through time:
Consider an ordinary visual experience and suppose that it is exclusively visual. When did it begin? When will it end? As I write now, I am sitting in a library. Looking ahead, and holding my line of sight fixed, I can see many books, tables, people in the distance walking across the room, a woman nearby opening some bags as she sits down. Is this a single temporally extended visual experience? If not, why not?
… These difficulties of individuation arise once it is assumed that the stream of consciousness divides into different token experiences… that come and go. The difficulties disappear if it is held instead that each stream of consciousness is itself just one temporally extended experience. (2003; 97)
According to Tye, “A stream of consciousness is just one temporally extended experience that represents a flow of things in the world. It has no shorter experiences as parts. Indeed it has no experiences as proper parts at all”. (p. 106)
This ‘one experience’ view becomes implausible, I think, if we regard this one experience as a perceptual state of the subject. States obtain over time, and at times, in contrast to events and processes which unfold / occur / happen over time, and/or at times.[2] Moreover, it is often suggested that states with temporal extension continue to obtain throughout the interval of time over which they obtain. If we regard the hypothesised ‘one experience’ that a subject has over the course of a day as a perceptual state of the subject, then this appears to suggest the implausible view that that one perceptual state of the subject continues to obtain throughout the period of time that he is awake. Standardly, a subject will be in mental states that continue to obtain throughout the period of time that he is awake – e.g. certain beliefs, desires and intentions that he has – but in the normal course of events it will be unlikely that a perceptual state will be among them. The perceptual state of a subject that may obtain when he wakes up will not usually obtain throughout the subsequent period of time that he is conscious.