Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Here is a small experiment you can run without leaving your chair. Find something red in the room — a book spine, a mug, the apple you keep meaning to eat. Look at it. Now do something slightly odd: stop looking at the red thing and try instead to look at your experience of it. Not the apple. The seeing of the apple. The reddish quality that you would have sworn, a moment ago, was sitting there in your mind like a smear of paint on an inner canvas.

Try, and notice what happens. You keep sliding off. Every time you reach for the experience itself, your attention lands back on the apple — its glossy skin, the particular red of it, the way the light catches one shoulder of the fruit. You can attend to the apple all day. The experience of the apple turns out to be strangely uncatchable. It refuses to sit still and be inspected. You aim at the seeing and you hit the seen.

Most of us carry a picture of the mind that makes this little failure surprising. On that picture, perceiving works in two stages. The world sends its signals inward, and somewhere behind the eyes they get rendered into a private display — an inner show, with reddish qualities painted onto it for the mind to look at. The apple out there causes a patch of red-feeling in here, and consciousness is the spectator in the dark, watching the patch. Philosophers have a polite name for the patches: qualia, the felt qualities of experience, supposedly the intrinsic what-it’s-like-ness of seeing red. The reason the hard problem of consciousness feels so hard, on this picture, is that nobody can explain how grey neural tissue produces the glowing inner red. The explanatory gap yawns exactly where the inner paint is supposed to hang.

It is a vivid picture, and almost everyone has it. It also makes a prediction — and that is the useful thing about it. If experience really were an inner display with its own painted-on qualities, then turning your attention inward ought to reveal them. You should be able to do the experiment above and succeed. You should catch the red patch in the act of being red.

You can’t. And you are not the first to fail.

In 1903, the young G. E. Moore tried the same experiment and reported the result with admirable bluntness. “When we try to introspect the sensation of blue,” he wrote, “all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous.”¹ Diaphanous — see-through, like clean glass. The blueness is right there to be examined; the experiencing of the blueness is not. You look for it and your gaze passes straight through to the colour of the sky. Moore was not denying that he was conscious. He was reporting, honestly, that the consciousness itself would not show up for inspection, no matter how he angled the light.

Nearly a century later, Gilbert Harman turned Moore’s observation into a weapon. He asked us to imagine Eloise, who is looking at a tree. “When Eloise sees a tree before her,” Harman wrote, “the only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the presented tree.”² The greenness she finds when she introspects is offered up as a property of the tree — out there, on the leaves — never as a property of her experience. The experience has no green of its own to show her. It is the window; the tree is the view. And a clean window, doing its job, is precisely the thing you do not notice.

Michael Tye has spent decades pressing this from an observation into an argument, and the argument deserves to be felt at full weight.³ Run the experiment across every sense, he says — vision, hearing, the ache in a tooth, the warmth of a room, even a mood — and the result never changes. Every quality you can lay hold of presents itself as a feature of the world, or of your body, or of the scene before you. None of it presents itself as a feature of the experiencing. So either there are hidden inner qualities that introspection systematically fails to find — which would convict our experience of a strange, total, lifelong error about its own nature — or there simply are no such inner qualities, and the whole inner canvas was a theoretical invention we never needed. The first option asks you to believe that the one thing you have the most intimate access to has been hiding from you the entire time. The second asks you to believe Moore. Tye takes Moore.

Here is the move that makes this more than a debunking. Transparency does not make your consciousness disappear; the red of the apple has not gone anywhere, and neither has the vividness of seeing it. What changes is where the redness lives. The phenomenal character of your experience — what seeing red is like — turns out not to be an inner quality at all, but a matter of how your experience presents the world: as containing a red surface, out there, at arm’s length.⁴ The feel of the experience just is the world it shows you, presented in a certain way. Nothing is subtracted. The inner theater closes, and you discover you were never in the audience — you were looking out the window the whole time. That is the real reason the experiment fails. You can’t find the seeing because the seeing was never an object in the room with you. It was your view of the room.

Now, the honest part. Not everyone grants this, and the most serious resistance comes from Ned Block, who has spent his career insisting that something real gets left out.⁵ Block points at the awkward cases. Press your eyes shut and you see drifting blobs of colour — phosphenes — that are plainly not features of any tree. Stare at a bright window, look away, and a glowing afterimage floats across the wall, attached to nothing out there. Take off your glasses and the world goes blurry, though the world itself has not changed. Surely these are qualities of experience as such — mental paint, splashed across an inner surface, exactly the residue transparency was supposed to have explained away. If even one case has genuine inner paint in it, the clean window cracks.

It is the best objection there is, and answering it well means first conceding what Block gets right. The easy move would be to say the afterimage simply presents a coloured patch out there on the wall, the way the apple presents red out there on its skin — and Block would reject that move, correctly. The floating disc has a funny, unplaced quality. It does not sit on the wall the way a real decal would, and you know it doesn’t; that is part of what makes afterimages feel uncanny. Grant him the disanalogy. The question is what the funny quality shows. The representationalist’s answer is that it shows your visual system misrepresenting — offering up an apparent coloured region while failing to pin it to any definite place in the scene, because there is no surface there for it to belong to. That unanchored, not-quite-located character is exactly what you would expect from an experience that is about the world and running with nothing to lock onto: a defective representation, not a sample of inner paint. The afterimage still reaches outward; it just closes on nothing.⁶ And blurry vision, as Tye notes, is not the presenting of a blurry inner smear. Seeing a sharp edge blurrily is representing that edge with less precision — your experience declines to specify exactly where the contour falls — which is a different thing from seeing an edge that is itself blurry. Take off your glasses and you don’t gain an inner blur; you lose worldly detail. The “residue” Block reaches for, examined closely, keeps turning out to be one more way of being about the world, including the ways of being wrong about it. The window can be smudged, fogged, even cracked. A cracked window is still something you see through, not something you see.

So go back and try the experiment one more time, now that you know how it ends. Look at the apple. Reach for the seeing. Feel your attention slide, as it must, back to the red. That slide is not a failure of concentration. It is the datum this whole picture is built on, hiding in plain sight, available to anyone with an apple and a free minute. The hard problem asked how the brain produces the inner glow. The better question is why we were ever so sure there was an inner glow to produce. Look for the seeing, and you find the seen — which was, all along, the world, handed to you so cleanly you mistook the gift for a screen.

References

Block, Ned. 2003. “Mental Paint.” In Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, edited by Martin Hahn and Bjørn Ramberg, 165–200. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Byrne, Alex. 2001. “Intentionalism Defended.” The Philosophical Review 110 (2): 199–240.

Harman, Gilbert. 1990. “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience.” Philosophical Perspectives 4: 31–52.

Moore, G. E. 1903. “The Refutation of Idealism.” Mind 12: 433–453.

Tye, Michael. 2000. Consciousness, Color, and Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tye, Michael. 2002. “Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience.” Noûs 36 (1): 137–151.

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Notes

1. Moore, “The Refutation of Idealism,” 446. The full sentence reads: “the moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous.” Moore’s own purpose was a refutation of idealism, not a theory of phenomenal character; the diaphanousness remark was a passing phenomenological report that later representationalists made central. Tye reproduces the passage as the historical anchor of the transparency argument in Consciousness, Color, and Content, 45–46. ↩
2. Harman, “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,” 39. The Eloise example is widely reproduced; the wording quoted here follows Harman’s text as cited in Block, “Mental Paint,” and in Averill and Gottlieb’s discussion of the two readings transparency can bear. Note the dialectical role: Harman deploys transparency specifically against the friend of qualia who thinks introspection acquaints us with intrinsic, non-intentional features of experience. ↩
3. Tye, “Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience,” 137–151. Tye distinguishes a weak transparency thesis (we are not introspectively aware of intrinsic features of experience over and above represented features) from a strong one (there are no such features). The argument from transparency to representationalism turns on the second step — the claim that positing introspectively inaccessible intrinsic qualities convicts experience of a systematic error no good theory should tolerate. Critics including Stoljar and Kind have pressed whether the inference from “we don’t find inner qualities” to “there are none” is valid; the project’s view is that the burden has been met because the posited qualities do no explanatory work the representational content does not already do. ↩
4. This is the relocation, not the elimination, of phenomenal character — and the move that separates the present view from eliminativism about consciousness. On the strong representationalist reading the project endorses, phenomenal character is numerically identical to representational content of the right world-directed kind (Tye, Consciousness, Color, and Content, esp. chs. 3–4). What it is like to see red consists in representing a surface as having a certain reflectance-property, under the right embodied conditions — not in instantiating an inner red. The phenomenology is fully preserved; only its address changes, from an inner screen to the represented world. ↩
5. Block, “Mental Paint,” 165; the “greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind” framing opens that chapter, though the line itself originates in his earlier “Mental Paint and Mental Latex” (Philosophical Issues 7, 1996). The chasm divides those who hold that phenomenal character is exhausted by representational content from those who hold that experience has intrinsic, non-representational features — the “mental paint.” His phosphene and afterimage cases are the canonical hard cases for transparency, precisely because they appear to present qualities with no worldly bearer. The objection is taken here at full strength because the careless version of representationalism really does stumble on it. ↩
6. Byrne, “Intentionalism Defended,” argues that afterimages and phosphenes carry intentional content — they represent, falsely, that a coloured region is present in the perceiver’s environment — and so fall under the representationalist account rather than refuting it. Block’s rejoinder is that an afterimage does not phenomenally seem environment-located the way a perceived surface does; the representationalist grants the disanalogy and reads it as defective, unanchored content (an experience purporting to present a coloured region while failing, under degraded conditions, to fix it to a place) rather than as non-representational inner paint. On blurry vision, Tye (“Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience”) distinguishes representing an edge indeterminately (seeing it blurrily) from representing an edge as itself indistinct (seeing it as blurry); only the latter ascribes blurriness to the world, and neither requires an inner blurry object. The residue Block reaches for keeps resolving into a mode of world-directed representation, including the misrepresenting ones. ↩