“Self-awareness: acquaintance, intentionality, representation, relation”
My response to Galen Strawson
Professor
argues in Self-awareness: acquaintance, intentionality, representation, relation that “All conscious experience involves self-awareness”, and therefore self-experience. I agree with Strawson that “all conscious experience involves a subject of experience.” I disagree with the claim that the subject of experience can be experienced. Whatever is experienced, is the object of experience, a something. The subject is the logical counterpart of the object, therefore not identical with the object, therefore identifying the object as the subject implies contradiction. Experience necessarily involves a subject, but is also necessarily not of the subject but for the subject or with the subject. I argued along these lines in You Are not Self-aware. In this article I argue that Strawson fails to prove that the subject can be experienced, but the contrary position can be formally proven.Strawson begins the relevant argument with an allegedly uncontroversial premise: when a subject experiences something, that subject has that experience, which he formalises in the ontological sense of having a property, and therefore being a part of the subject's identity:
[13] When s has F-experience, having F-experience is a property of s.
I contend that it does not follow from subjective experience that the experience is had in the ontological sense, as opposed to the associative sense of something happening to or with the subject. When something happens to a hammer, that something is not therefore a property of the hammer. If having a property were nevertheless meant/defined to imply that that the bearer of that property is being experienced when the property is being experienced, then the argument aiming to prove that the bearer is being experienced would be assuming the conclusion from the start rather then proving it. It is evident that Strawson's interpretation of the premise [13] is indeed question-begging, but I grant that this is not of itself fatal to his thesis:
[14] In having the property of having F-experience, s has experience of the property of having F-experience.
We can further formalise the above definition by codifying the recurring terms: 1) let f(..) signify the function of ‘having experience’; 2) let F signify a particular type of experience: F-experience. It is assumed, based on the context in Strawson, that every instance of f(..) is meant to be a property and also implies something having that property, hence all references to ‘property’ or ‘having the property’ are formally trivial and may be omitted. This results in the following formula:
f(F) → f(f(F))
Since it is unclear whether Strawson uses the naked term ‘experience’ to mean just ‘F-experience’ or some other type of experience, two interpretations are possible:
a) Having F-experience implies having F-experience of having F-experience
b) Having F-experience implies having G-experience of having F-experience
If (b) then f(f(F))=f(G), therefore f(F)→f(G) and f(F)=G, which is question-begging (assumed from the start rather than proven). If (a) then F=f(F), therefore F is not-F, therefore contradiction. Strawson is evidently aware of the well known problem/inconsistency of a function that takes “itself” for an argument (see Wittgenstein's Tractatus at 3.333 and Kowalik 2020) and he dispenses with this problem by definition, declaring that no higher-order operation is meant: “It [experience of experience] is in fact equivalent to ‘experiencing is experiencing’, which has, like all tautologies, the virtue of being certainly true.” Curiously, Strawson asserts that ‘experience experiencing’ is just ‘experience is experience’ but ‘dance dancing’ is not ‘dance is dance’, apparently also by definition. I will not focus on this peripheral claim since it does not affect the conclusion. Strawson is free to define his terms however he likes, provided he is consistent in their use.
The sense of ‘experience is experience’ is that of strict identity: it cannot be the case that experience of x is experience of not-x, because contradiction, therefore experience of x is just experience of x, or formally, f(x)=f(x). This clarification is crucial if the identity of the object or the content of experience is in question, and not just the sense of the term ‘experience’.
Strawson continues:
[15] experience of a property’s being occurrently instantiated by a thing is experience of that thing.
We can further formalise this proposition by using x to signify ‘a property’s being occurrently instantiated by a thing’ and y to signify ‘that thing’, and retain the function f(..) to signify ‘experience of’, which takes as an argument the content of experience:
f(x) = f(y)
For this functional identity to hold it is necessary that x is identical to y, therefore ‘a property being occurrently instantiated by a thing’ must be identical to ‘that thing’. It is not logically necessary for this identity to hold: the background of a mountain is not the mountain, and the falling of a hammer is not the hammer, and the perceiving of a falling hammer is not identical to the falling hammer. Consequently, the conclusion of the argument does not follow:
[16] in all experience, a subject of experience experiences itself.
The conclusion [16] is not proven. It also does not follow that ‘a subject of experience experiences itself’ in any experience. Moreover, it can be proven a priori, on account of the subject-object distinction, and on account of the inconsistency inherent in the idea of direct self-reference, self-relation or self-representation, that it is logically impossible for a subject of experience to experience itself. A subject, a consciousness, cannot relate to itself by itself, but conceives of the Self non-experientially, only in terms of properties/experiences of other beings of the same kind, who also conceive of themselves only in terms of properties/experiences of other beings of the same kind. The model of consciousness as an intrinsically reflexive multiplicity is properly summarised in Theory of Reflexive Consciousness.
I warmly invite professor
to respond to this analysis either in the comments below or by posting on his page.
Consciousness is a bit like that: the experiencing subject can never fully “photograph” itself—it’s always the one taking the picture, never the picture itself.