Philosophy in a Meaningless Life by Tartaglia James

Author:Tartaglia, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474247689
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

4. The transcendent hypothesis II: Introspection and perception

The notion that we have an autonomous understanding of experience goes hand in hand with the notion that we are aware of experience and the objective world via distinct faculties. Thus the distinction between introspection – through which we know conscious experience directly – and perception – through which we know the objective world indirectly – is traditionally thought of as between distinct cognitive faculties ‘used to detect different regions of reality’, as Colin McGinn puts it.9 This view fits neatly with ontological dualism, in which the regions are held to be ontologically distinct; but it is also the standard view among physicalists, who think of the regions as simply different parts of the physical world – most typically the brain, in the case of introspective awareness, or whatever part of the physical world is being perceived, in the case of perceptual awareness. Once this interpretation is accepted, it subsequently makes sense that we should have an autonomous set of concepts for understanding conscious experience; these would be the concepts based on our awareness of experiences, as opposed to those based on the distinct kind of our awareness we have of other parts of reality.10

However there is an alternative to thinking of the distinction as between types of awareness sensitive to different parts of reality. For we can also think of it as between different components of an interpretation of a unitary reality – we interpret reality as experience we are introspectively aware of, and which makes us perceptually aware of the objective world. This interpretation requires us to misrepresent experience, because our experiential concepts are shadow concepts borrowed from the objective world. Thus once we adopt the ‘different components’ view, and realize that it incorporates misrepresentation, the reasoning which leads us to conclude that experience is the better known part of reality – and which subsequently points to the idealist conclusion that reality is intrinsically experiential – is immediately undermined. For then the pertinent question is no longer ‘which part of reality is better known?’ but rather ‘under which interpretation is reality known better?’ And the answer to this is clear: not as experience, but as perceptual awareness of an objective world.

For most of our waking lives we interpret what we are directly aware of as the objective world. Thus I ordinarily think of what is currently appearing to me as I look out of the window as a tree; not an experience caused within me by a tree, but a tree.11 This everyday interpretation retreats of its own accord, however, when experience presents things with no obvious place in the objective world. Thus I am lying in bed looking up at the electric light, and find that by closing my eyes a little I can make the light extend from the bulb in a thick white line across the ceiling. Now I can no longer interpret what I am aware of as part of the objective world. The same thing occurs,

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