Part 3: Intermezzo

We have covered an awful lot of ground in the space of a few words. Before progressing to draw implications for further study, it is perhaps advisable to pause briefly and consider what has been suggested so far. Central to the story being told is the P-world, or the "Subjective World of Phenomenal Experience", as it was tediously defined. It is very hard to talk coherently about subjective experience in a way that will make sense to others. This is so, despite the bald fact that subjective experience is all that each of us has directly available, at hand, here, and now. It has ever been so.

In a very influential essay in the philosophy of mind, Thomas Nagel posed the question "What is it like to be a bat". At first blush, the question may appear somewhat silly. Nobody could know what it is like to be a bat. And indeed, the conclusion drawn in the essay is not much more than that. The reason that the essay became so famous, I believe, is that this turns out to be a way of pointing to subjective experience. It is a way that others understand, perhaps because of an unshakeable certainty on the part of each individual that there is something that it is like to be them, if no other. That seems to me to be an anaemic way of referring to experience, and serves rather to point to the futility of language in talking about such matters.

In the first section, we moved rather quickly past the following claim:

In experience, however, the thing perceived and the perceiver are united. When we describe people having experiences, we say things like 'John saw a chair'. But the experience, which is, at that moment, constitutive of John's P-world, is neither subject nor object. It incorporates both, if you will, but there is only one thing 'happening', and this is hidden in the essentially dualistic statement which separates John and a chair.

I am making the important claim that there is a unity to present experience that does not admit of dissection into subject and object, or experience and experiencer. This is a strong claim about the P-world, and much hangs on it. There are two distinct ways to approach this claim. The first is with the analytical frame of mind with which statements of fact are normally evaluated. That can be facilitated herein, using language, in the hope that a conceptual understanding of this be reached. The second way to approach this claim is to feel it for onesself. There are many techniques for doing so, including a wide variety of meditation and mindfulness practices, all of which share the common element of becoming aware of present experience, without the distraction of narrative thought or concerns that go beyond the here and now. Unless the reader is already skilled in such methods, I can offer no help beyond anecdote.

Let us attempt the first line of attack, supplemented with the most rudimentary form of practice. I invite you, the reader, to sit down in a quiet spot, with an empty wine glass about 2 feet in front of you. Using a simple stick or pen, strike the wine glass to produce a ringing sound. Let us now ask a few questions about that sound:

Most of us will have little difficulty with the claim that the sound appears to be about two feet in front of you, right where the rim of the glass is. If that seems at all wrong to you, I would point out that an unexpected sound behind you will cause you to turn around. Sound localization is possible precisely because the sound appears to be at the vibrating source.

This may seem odd. I ask it only because language is notoriously tricky, and the simple noun 'sound' which seems to have a clear referent, may get slippy in an unhelpful fashion. For example, we may have a conceptual understanding of the sound as pressure variation in the air, or as a pattern of stimulation across the inner ear. Or we may reify the notion of the sound and think of something that could be transferred onto audio tape, moved from one location to another, and replayed somewhere else, perhaps to someone else. None of these extensions of the noun are intended here, and I want to stress that it is the phenomenal sound, or the sound as heard, that I am asking about. With that clarification, I hope it is clear that the answer will now be the same as before: about two feet in front of you. We could even be pedantic and say about two feet in front of your phenomenal body.

At this point in time it will be useful to remember that these questions are about the sound you are hearing at a specific instant. Not about some sound being heard somewhere by someone. Tap the glass again, just to make sure. My claim is that the experience of the sound is about two feet in front of your phenomenal body. Nothing more or less. Unfortunately, I do not know if this seems obvious or obviously ridiculous to you. It is a fact that we are used to talking about experience as being something ’internal’, and if pushed, the inner space referred to is usually taken to be the head. But hit that glass again and see if you can push the sound into your head. My belief is that the sound will remain where it has been all along, two feet away.

In recognizing that the phenomenal sound and the experience of the sound are the same thing, you have peered behind the curtain, and become aware, however briefly, of the unified character of experience. You will have some idea what I mean by the claim that there is a unity to experience, in which no subject/object divide exists. Furthermore, you will now see that any attempt to describe the experience in everyday terms, without the convoluted series of questions I posed above, will appear to separate the two. "You heard the sound" is dualistic at heart... Remarkably, this insight is old hat within some Eastern traditions. Here is Wei Wu Wei again:

Every sense-perception is in itself instantaneous, spontaneous, and impersonal. It is in the Present, is the Present, the only Present we ever know. But as soon as we recognise the object as perceived by us the subject, intellection has taken place, and it belongs to the Past-for the intellect only operates on what is already passed. Living it came; seized upon by th emind, it lives no longer, for the intellect only feeds on dead meat. (Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon, par 11).

And, for a little light relief, here is William James, the founder of modern psychology, and, I believe, the psychologist whose concerns were closest to those expressed herein:

Experience, I believe, has no ... inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition (From "Does Consciousness Exist?")

And no less direct, here is Edwin Holt:

Consciousness, whenever it is localized at all ... in space, is not in the skull, but is"out there" precisely wherever it appears to be. (Holt, 1912, p. 353, cited in Heft, p. 59)

This is immediate experience. It is generated by nervous systems embedded in bodies immersed in worlds that are rich in information (with the important caveat that that information is predicated upon the nature and constitution of the perceiver/actor). And present experience is not the same thing as a person.

The Dynamical Stance

The identification of the P-world as an entity in its own right is a willful act on my part. It is not our usual way of talking about our lives, but it serves to delimit present experience