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ABSTRACT
This paper treats of phenomenal consciousness and its relation to an organism’s capacity to be hedonically perturbed by its environment. This paper offers an empirically informed, phenomenologically descriptive conceptual analysis of subjective character in terms of an organism’s ability to feel with its body. The subjective character of phenomenal consciousness is at least partially constituted by embodied affect, that is, by our ability to feel what is happening on and inside our living bodies. It is in virtue of our being able to feel with our bodies that our experiences disclose the world as seeming a certain way for us. I call this the “affectively embodied perspectival view” of subjective character (AEP).
Disclosure statement
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Notes
1. I use “constitution” as a way of saying that what it is to be phenomenally conscious is to be affectively perturbed by one’s world. I hedge with “at least partially” in order to acknowledge that there might other processes that are also constitutive of subjective character.
2. As will be clear in what follows, this lack of engagement is changing (see, Tsakiris & De Preester, Citation2019 for an important set of interdisciplinary chapters in this direction). In the philosophically oriented sciences of mind, there are many excellent contributions (see, Damasio, Citation2018 for a creative and sophisticated discussion). My purpose here is to bring some degree of argumentative precision and analytical clarity to the issue.
3. The term “subjective character” originally comes from Thomas Nagel (Citation1974), but my usage follows Kriegel’s (Citation2009), which is slightly different from Nagel’s. Nagel uses “subjective character” as a synonym for “phenomenal character”. I use “subjective character” to refer to that aspect of phenomenal character that makes it the case that the contents of experiences are manifest for me from an embodied first-personal perspective.
4. While arousal and valence are normally used to describe emotional affects, these properties are also present in sensory affects and especially homeodynamic affects, which directly inform the organism about its state of arousal via a felt valence. See Carruthers (Carruthers, Citation2018) for an argument that valence is a natural kind that obtains across all affective states.
5. Innervation is the process of providing nerve energy to muscle tissue.
6. I use the locution “physically realized” as a metaphysically agnostic catch-all for the relation of the physical to the mental. I assume this relation is causal in some respect. The precise semantic values of these realization terms is an important topic in its own right. However, I leave such a project to the side.
7. A note on the terms “homeostatic” and “homeodynamic” is in order. “Homeostasis” emphasizes the fact that an organism survives by aiming for a steady-state that allows it to maintain balance in the face of perturbations. This balance is what “stasis” refers to. Self-regulation is “homeodynamic” because perturbations born of self-world contact are constant. Perfect balance is asymptotic, there are always minor fluctuations in the internal milieu of the organism. Persistence is achieved when those fluctuations occur within a permissible range of excitation; organismic stability is really meta-stability. The organism is not aiming at a steady state but at preservation of dynamic flexibility that keeps it robust across a variety of self-world interactions. Therefore, I use “homeodynamic” to refer to this form of bodily affect. It is a more accurate description of the regulatory micro-dynamics of the organism. See, Corcoran and Hohwy (Citation2019) for a summary of theorists who distinguish between homeostasis and allostasis in order to emphasize the anticipatory activities of an organism over and above real-time self-regulation. Damasio (Damasio, Citation2018, ch. 3) argues for an expanded understanding of homeostasis. I leave such debates to the side here because of space constraints.
8. Much of the recent work in cognitive science more generally, and affective neuroscience and the psychology of attention more specifically, have been dominated by the predictive processing model (PP; Clark, Citation2015; Hohwy, Citation2013). For a representative piece of recent work applying the PP framework specifically to the nature of bodily affect and subjectivity, see, Allen and Tsakiris (Citation2019). I have serious doubts about this framework for the affective sciences. I do not have the space to justify these doubts systematically. But briefly, see, Ransom et al. (Citation2020) who argue that PP is not an adequate model for thinking about how affects guide attention to our environment. They argue that, “Affect-biased attention is not straightforwardly explained by the PP treatment of exogenous or endogenous attention, and it provides cases where precision expectations will be low but attention nevertheless ought to be directed to an object because of potential rewards or punishments. This suggests that in order to accommodate affect, PP theory must relinquish its claim that it provides a complete explanation of brain functioning” (9). Further, De Preeser (De Preester, Citation2019) points out that as a model of subjectivity, neural representationalism (of which PP is a species) about bodily affect makes the mistake of treating the body as an object, thus missing the very phenomenon under investigation (the affectively embodied subject). Specifically, the idea that, “ … the brain topographically represents bodily states is unfit for thinking about the coming about of subjectivity. The reason is that representation implies objectification – and thus the irreparable disappearance – of subjectivity” (293).
9. Note that this distinction is operating at the level of kinds of thoughts. Our capacity to think of ourselves in different ways is distinct from the different ways in which we experience our bodies as objects or subjects (Christoff et al., Citation2011; Mandrigin & Evan, Citation2015).
10. Unless otherwise noted, I use “affects”, “feelings”, and “sensations” interchangeably.
11. The perceptive reader will note that by helping myself to the language of attention here that I have potentially begged the question. I address this objection in §3.4.
12. I use the metaphor of the furnace intentionally. It is meant to denote the fact that the organism is constantly transforming parts of its environment into energy that it then uses to construct and maintain itself in the face of a changing milieu.
13. Taylor (2021) argues that when we understand that homeodynamic self-regulation, and its accompanying interoceptive sensations, are a core source for the phenomenal character of experience that this yields the conceptual possibility – and empirical actuality – of something he calls “solipsistic sentience”. The idea is that an organism can experience its living body without having any experiential sense of what the world outside their body is like. If this is right, then this would constitute an objection to my claim that experience is world-involving. I don’t think this view works for two reasons. First, Taylor builds into his view a problematic conviction that perception gives us information about our environments and affect gives information about the organism, and that this distinction is strict (Taylor, Citation2020, p. 1). He then claims that some creatures could experience their own bodies without having any exteroceptive information. He thinks this entails a lack of environmental awareness on the basis of a borrowed distinction from Burge (Citation2010) that distinguishes between mere sensory registration and full blown perception (Taylor, Citation2020, p. 3). On this view, only by having full-blown perception can an organism count as experiencing its environment. I disagree with this assessment. Even a creature that only has sensory registration must maintain some differential sensitivity to its environment in order to coordinate its actions as homeodynamic information fluctuates. Such fluctuations only occur in response to perturbations from the environment. Even in the absence of full-blown distal, exteroceptive, conscious representation in perception, one’s living body must rub up against its world in a proximal way, stimulating the semi-permeable boundary of the system, giving it a sense of how to move in response to what’s “out there”.
14. Gabor patches are a construct used in vision research to analyze early vision; they are small black and white bars in various orientations. They are often used to provide subjects with a visual fixation task while probing other parts of their cognitive and emotional functions while keeping their vision focused on the patch.
15. “A single cardiac cycle consists of two main phases. In the systolic phase the heart contracts and ejects the blood to the great vessels that leave the heart, increasing the activity of arterial baroreceptors (pressure sensors) and providing information about the strength and timing of each heartbeat to the brain. In the diastole phase the heart expands while being filled and baroreceptors are quiescent” (Herman & Tsakiris, Citation2021, p. 104).
16. It might come off as a trivial truism that infants can’t survive without the loving touch of their caregivers. But understanding this empathic relation as a constitutive feature of the living systems ability to “mentalize” it’s own homeodynamic self-regulation processes is a further insight worth exploring here.
17. My thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to be clearer about this issue.
18. The literature on this topic is expansive and I cannot treat of it fully here. For one of the main criticisms of Block’s approach to phenomenal overflow, see, Cohen and Dennett (Citation2011) For a novel argument in favor of phenomenal overflow that does not fall afoul of most of the typical criticisms, see, Smith (Citation2019). For a reconstruction of James’s view on bodily feelings and their relation to the overflow debate and to questions about the epistemic role of phenomenal consciousness, see, Smith (Citation2021).
19. Cited by Schwitzgebel (Schwitzgebel, Citation2007, p. 9).
20. I will continue to develop this point in my responses to subsequent objections considered below.
21. Note, that in claiming that we are our bodies I am not endorsing the so-called “mind-body identity” theory of consciousness (Smart, Citation1959). On the view I am defending, consciousness isn’t type-identical with some physical, behavioral, or functional property of the body. That is, I am not reducing phenomenal consciousness to the merely physical and functional properties of the body understood as an object. On my view, the body is thoroughly phenomenal; it is not just an object, but an experiential subject in virtue of its being the lived vehicle of perception and feeling.
22. See Carruthers (Carruthers, Citation2018) for an opposing view.
23. Cf., De Vignemont (Citation2019) who distinguishes between the physiological, phenomenological, and introspective levels of analysis for interoceptive sensations. He would characterize this conflation as occurring between the phenomenological and introspective levels.
24. Considering its controversial status, in acknowledging my friendliness to enactivism, I do not wish to fully endorse it, as I think my view can still be adopted by those who reject enactivism.
25. I am grateful to Evan Thompson and Anand Vaidya for feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees who provided extremely helpful reports that vastly improved the quality of this work.
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Notes on contributors
Sean Michael Smith
Sean M. Smith received his Ph.D. from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 2018. Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research is in Indian Buddhist Philosophy and the Philosophy of Mind.