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ABSTRACT
Naïve realists have a motive to but have thus far been unable to offer compelling reasons for positing an external constraint on the occurrence of the consciousness involved in perfect hallucinations. If the occurrences of such consciousness were confined to abnormal perceptual contexts, the possibility of perfect hallucinations would have no bearing on the nature of the consciousness involved in cases of perception. On the other hand, it is unclear why the character of the perceptual context should matter constitutively to the occurrence of the sort of consciousness involved in perfect hallucinations. Supposing (reasonably) that such consciousness does not consist in an awareness of the environment, it is puzzling why the latter should be a certain way for the former to occur. I propose a solution to this puzzle, which helps secure the naïve realist approach to perception. Perfect hallucinatory experiences issue from exercises of the perceptual system operating in a second, defective mode – complementary to the normal one, whose exercises issue in an awareness of the environment.
Acknowledgements
The material included in this paper was presented at events in Sofia University and Shandong University. I owe a big gratitude to Keith Allen, Matt Soteriou and Mike Martin for stimulating discussions on the topic of philosophers’ hallucinations, to Dominic Alford-Duguid, Roberta Locatelli and Keith Wilson for their encouragement and written comments on various versions of this paper, and to a number of reviewers, who helped me significantly sharpen the argument. My research for the paper was supported by a Humanities and Social Sciences General Research Project of the Chinese Ministry of Education, titled ‘Perceptual Experience: Beyond the Mainstream Intentional Approach’ (21YJA720001).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Versions of the view have been proposed by Campbell (Citation2002), Johnston (Citation2004; ms), Fish (Citation2009), Brewer (Citation2011), Langsam (Citation2011), Logue (Citation2012), Soteriou (Citation2013) and Kalderon (Citation2017).
2 Cf. Martin (Citation2002), Crane (Citation2006), Hellie (Citation2007), Pautz (Citation2010), Soteriou (Citation2016, Ch. III) and Langsam (Citation2017).
3 Some (Byrne Citation2009; Tye Citation2015) deny that there are introspectible aspects to experiences, whose explanation brings in the perceptual relation. According to them, in having an experience all one seems to be aware of is the world. But this is implausible: we seem to be aware of properties of our experiences, e.g. their duration (Soteriou Citation2010), even if such properties are necessarily tied to apparent properties of the apparent items (viz., the apparent duration of apparent events).
4 Keith Wilson suggested to me that the proponent of this response may take themselves be making a conceptual claim, standing in no need of empirical support. The idea would be that somehow our concept of phenomenal consciousness rules out that perfect hallucinations would be phenomenally conscious (a similar argument can be found in Masrour Citation2020). But unless one maintained (implausibly) that only relational episodes can be phenomenally conscious (which seems to leave out sensory imagery, moods and thoughts), they must acknowledge that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is permissive enough to leave open the possibility of conscious experiences arising in the matching hallucinatory cases.
5 Ali (Citation2018) and Logue (personal communication) propose that the empirical predictions on which this response to the Challenge would hinge would be a virtue rather than a vice for naïve realism. But what I see as a problem is not that naïve realism ends up hinging on empirical predictions, but that it ends up hinging on predictions that are against the odds.
6 See Snowdon (Citation2005, 299–301).
7 If it were, then I would agree with Fish (Citation2009, Ch. V) that POSSIBILITY should not be taken seriously by naïve realists.
8 As Robinson (Citation1994, 157) puts it, it seems to us that in the hypothetical cases the relevant brain state would perform its ‘usual cognitive function’: by which I take him to mean that in both cases the state would be involved in perceptual processing.
9 For a similar diagnosis, see Robinson (Citation2013).
10 One might attempt an alternative explanation of the basis of the POSSIBILITY intuition, on which the hypothetical scenarios would be naturally construed as involving exercises of the capacity to sensorily imagine. I examine the proposal that the experiences involved in perfect hallucinations might be sensory imaginings in the next section. For the time being, I want to remark that it is prima facie puzzling that some sensory imaginings should share the same neuro-physiological basis with perceptions. Consequently, the causal stipulations involved in the specification of perfect hallucinations should make it seem less, rather than more, plausible that conscious experiences would occur in such cases.
11 As on Allen’s (Citation2015) view, discussed below.
12 See Martin (Citation2004, 58), Dorsch (Citation2013, 188), Hellie (Citation2013, 161).
13 It has been suggested to me that there are many cases in which the occurrence of one sort of psychological state requires the non-occurrence of another. For example, loving someone requires not hating them, and vice versa. But clearly there is an explanation of the mutual exclusivity of such psychological states: the attitudes involved in loving and hating are incompatible.
14 See Moran (Citation2019, 11–12). Snowdon defends the externalist strategy in a similar way: ‘Although this conception is obscure, and I am not claiming that it is ultimately defensible … it enables the argument [against naïve realism] to be evaded … although it agrees with some of the basic premises' (Snowdon Citation2005, 303).
15 For example, Martin's negative epistemic conception of hallucination appeals to a primitive sort of subjective indiscriminability. For criticisms of this aspect of Martin's view, see Farkas (Citation2006) and Siegel (Citation2008).
16 This reading is supported by Allen's appeal to Sartre's analysis of the imagination (Allen Citation2015, 3). The paradigmatic form of imagistic consciousness is taken by Sartre to represent inexistent objects (Sartre Citation1940, 24–25). Here is an attempt by a commentator to illustrate this aspect of Sartre's view:
‘It might be objected that we can also imagine things we know to exist, as when I visualize Barack Obama. But even here, it is plausible that my imaginative experience itself represents-as-non-existent what it represents; it is just accompanied by an overriding belief that the imagined object in fact exists … If we try to abstract away from the accompanying beliefs, we recognize that imagining Obama in itself represents-as-non-existent that which is imagined. As I close my eyes and picture him, the Obama hovering just there on the other side of the desk is something I am aware of as unreal; the real Obama is in the house talking to more important people’ (Kriegel Citation2015, 258).
17 Pace Kriegel, in the described case it is a lot more natural to describe the subject as visualizing a possible state of the real Obama, rather than a state of an inexistent counterpart of Obama.
18 One way of specifying the proposal is that there is more to the nature of perception than the primitive relation of awareness. Another is that while the nature of perception may be exhausted by such a primitive relation, the obtaining of the relation in our case is metaphysically dependent on the obtaining of a physical process – which can be described as an extended cognitive process.
19 That said, I am sympathetic to Allen's proposal that most ordinary hallucinations amount to defective sensory imaginings. But it is perfect hallucinations I am after.
20 Specifically, naïve realists denying that the cognitive processing enabling the perception of an item is selectionist (e.g., Beck Citation2019a) are compelled to admit that there is a sense of phenomenal character, tied to a special type of introspective access, on which the phenomenal character of the perception ends up not being constituted by the item perceived. So they must deny that introspection can guarantee that the awareness relation is taking place when it does (see Beck Citation2019b, 11–12; Mehta Citation2021, 15). But such an introspective guarantee is a key explanatory advantage of naïve realism (see Martin Citation2004, 65–66).
21 See Campbell (Citation2002, 108); Johnston (Citation2004, 151); Fish (Citation2009, 140); Logue (Citation2014, 45).
22 Moreover, the indistinguishability of such states from the corresponding presentations could not be due to a factor extrinsic to the state: for example, to limitations in one's introspective capacity. If this were the case, since the output would be ideally subjectively distinguishable from perceptual consciousness, the failure would be introspective, not perceptual.
23 In fact, this is probably the most natural view of what we know about hallucinatory consciousness: we do not know what it consists in exactly (intentional directedness, awareness of sense-data, a kind of subjective indiscriminability) but we seem to know it does not consist in an awareness of external items.
24 Similarly, in a spontaneous hallucination, the occurrence of a life-like experience would cover over the fact that one would not be interfacing with anything.
25 This way DPV vindicates Johnston's opening quote. Perfect hallucinations would be cases in which one's perceptual system malfunctions, even if nothing is wrong with one internally. In fact, DPV is only the view that does so. On a common-factor view, the perceptual system would not be malfunctioning in such cases, its proper functioning would just not be guaranteed to result in selection. And on perceptualism about the causally-matching cases, the perceptual system would not be malfunctioning, either, as it would be delivering the result.
26 See Campbell (Citation2010), Soteriou (Citation2016, Ch. II), Eilan (Citation2017).
27 Robinson (Citation1994, 157).
28 There is a related worry that DPV might violate the principle that the same effect should be produced by the same immediate cause. But DPV respects this principle. The sameness of the neurophysiological effects of the same sort of proximal stimulation is fully consistent with there being a fundamental difference in the cognitive processing at play in a pair of such cases (given that in both the processing would not be fully constituted by the downstream neuro-physiological states and events).