Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Try something for a moment. Look at the sky on a clear day, and then try to turn your attention away from the sky and onto your experience of the sky — not the blue out there, but the blueness as it figures in your own mind, the inner tint, the private quality of seeing. Take a few seconds. Most people, when they try this honestly, report something strange: they cannot find it. Attention keeps sliding back out to the sky. Reach for the experience and your hand closes on the world.

The usual reaction to this is to assume you simply did it wrong — that the inner quality is there, faint and elusive, and a more careful introspector would catch it. The bad picture running underneath that assumption goes like this: perceiving the sky involves two things, the sky and a mental image of the sky, and although we normally look through the image at the world, we ought to be able to swivel inward and look at the image instead, the way you can stop reading the words on a window and notice a smudge on the glass. On this picture the mind is a kind of inner gallery hung with colored representations, and introspection is the act of stepping back to inspect the paint.

The picture is so natural that it feels less like a theory than a description. But it is a theory, and a bad one. G. E. Moore noticed the trouble as early as 1903. When we try to introspect a sensation of blue, he wrote, the blue is the only thing we can fix on; the consciousness of it is “diaphanous,” transparent, something we see through rather than at — “as if it were diaphanous.”¹ The sensation behaves like a perfectly clean window. You know you are looking through something, because the world arrives to you and not to a stone. But the glass itself withdraws from view. The harder you stare at it, the more completely you see only the garden beyond.

Seventy years later Gilbert Harman sharpened Moore’s observation into an argument with teeth. Imagine Eloise, who sees a tree before her. When Eloise turns her attention to her visual experience, Harman argued, “she is not aware of any features of her experience” at all — she is aware of the tree, its green leaves, its brown trunk, the patch of sky behind it.² Every property she can locate by introspecting is a property she takes the tree to have, not a property of her seeing. Look for the greenness of the experience and you find only the greenness of the leaves. The experience presents the world while presenting nothing of itself. Harman’s name for this is the transparency of experience, and the point cuts deeper than a curiosity about attention. It tells us where the qualities we call “phenomenal” actually live. They are not features of an inner medium. They are features the world is represented as having.³

This is worth slowing down on, because the difference is the whole game. On the inner-gallery picture, when you see a ripe tomato there is a red patch in you — mental red, the felt quality, sitting on the inner canvas — and the tomato out there causes it. Transparency says: locate that red. Go ahead and try. The only red you will ever find by looking is the red you attribute to the tomato. There is no second red, no inner swatch, no mental paint. The redness you wanted to call the “quality of the experience” turns out to be the redness the experience says the tomato has.⁴ Tim Crane puts the thesis carefully: introspection of an experience reveals only an awareness of the objects of the experience and their properties — and never the experience as a thing with qualities of its own.⁵ What seemed like the most private, inward, undeniable fact about your mind — the felt quale, the raw blue — was never inward at all. It was the world, reported.

You can feel how much this dissolves. The old worry was that each of us sits sealed behind a screen of private sensation, forever inferring an outer world we never directly touch. Transparency removes the screen by noting that no one has ever actually seen it. The screen was posited to explain experience and then quietly promoted to the thing we experience — but introspection, asked to confirm its existence, comes back every time holding the world instead. Angela Mendelovici states the intuition about as plainly as it can be put: when we try to attend to our experience, all we ever notice are represented objects and their properties, not intrinsic features of the experience.⁶ The mind does not stand between you and the world like a pane of frosted glass. It is more like a clean window you discover only by the fact that you can see.

The strongest objection comes from Ned Block, and an honest reader should feel its pull before it is answered. Block points to cases where, he argues, you can notice something inner — where there seems to be a felt difference that no difference in the represented world will account for. Take blurry vision. Look at a sharp edge, then let your eyes go slack until it blurs. Something in how things seem to you has plainly changed. But, Block presses, the edge out there has not changed; you are not seeing the edge as being fuzzy the way a watercolor’s edge is fuzzy. So the change must be a change in the experience itself — in the mental paint — and not in what the experience represents. If that is right, transparency fails: here is a phenomenal feature you find by looking inward, exactly the inner swatch transparency said could not exist.⁷

It is a good objection, and it has a clean answer. Blur is not a smear on an inner canvas; it is a way the world is represented to you — represented less determinately. When your vision blurs, your experience stops committing to a precise location for the edge. It presents the edge as falling somewhere within a fuzzy region without fixing exactly where, the way a vague memory represents a face without settling the shape of the nose. Crane makes the move directly: the content of the blurred experience is a less determinate presentation of the world — and, he is careful to add, this need not amount to representing the world as fuzzy, the way a watercolor’s edge is fuzzy. Things can look indefinite to you without your being inclined to believe the edges out there are smeared. The indeterminacy lives in how sharply the world gets presented, not in some paint you are at last managing to notice.⁸ Run the introspective test again and the verdict holds. The thing you attend to when you “notice the blur” is still the edge, the page, the world — now presented indefinitely rather than crisply. You have found a new way the world is shown to you. You have not found the window.

This answers the case the reader is most likely to raise. It does not, on its own, dispatch every example Block marshals — the pressure phosphene, where it is harder to say what worldly object gets represented, is the genuinely hard one, and an honest defense of transparency owes it a separate treatment. But the blur case was the intuitive one, and on the intuitive one the inner swatch never shows up.

So the next time someone tells you that consciousness is the great inner mystery — the private theater, the show that only you can watch — you can offer them the small experiment you started with. Look at the blue and try to find your experience of it. What comes back is not a glimpse of the inner screen. It is the sky, again, all the way down. The mind was never the picture on the glass. It was the seeing that the glass made possible, and the reason you could never catch it staring back is that it was busy, the whole time, showing you the world.

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.

Crane, Tim. 2000. “Introspection, Intentionality, and the Transparency of Experience.” Philosophical Topics 28 (2): 49–67.

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

Mendelovici, Angela. 2010. Mental Representation and Closely Conflated Topics. PhD diss., Princeton University.

Moore, G. E. 1903. “The Refutation of Idealism.” Mind 12 (48): 433–453. (Reprinted in Philosophical Studies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922.)

Tye, Michael. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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

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Notes

1. Moore, “The Refutation of Idealism,” Mind 12 (48): 433–453 (1903); the diaphanousness passage appears in the closing pages. (The passage is often quoted from the 1922 Philosophical Studies reprint, whose pagination differs from the Mind original — cite whichever edition is to hand.) Moore’s target was idealism’s slogan esse est percipi; his diagnostic point — that the sensation of blue and the sensation of green share an element (“consciousness”) that “seems to be transparent,” eluding direct attention — outlived the polemic and became the seed of the modern transparency literature. The word “diaphanous” is Moore’s; later writers (Harman, Tye, Crane) adopt it as a term of art. ↩
2. Harman, “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience” (1990), 39. The Eloise example is Harman’s; the surrounding argument is directed against the view that experiences have intrinsic, non-intentional “qualia” — what Harman calls confusing the properties of the represented object with properties of the representing. Harman’s paper is the hinge on which the contemporary representationalist reading of transparency turns. ↩
3. This is the inferential step from a phenomenological datum (introspection finds only worldly properties) to a metaphysical thesis (phenomenal character consists in represented content). Michael Tye, the most uncompromising defender of the stronger reading, presses the datum hard: “When we are told to attend to the phenomenal character of our experience there is nowhere to look other than the external qualities, since phenomenal character just is the complex of external qualities” — there is no second place to look, no inner object that introspection might fix on instead. See Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) and Consciousness, Color, and Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), where the transparency argument carries the weight of the full identity claim. But the datum does not by itself entail the thesis — a sense-datum theorist can grant the datum and deny the thesis, treating transparency as a fact about where attention goes rather than a fact about what phenomenal character consists in — which is why the argument needs the further work done in the body and in the reply to Block below. The book treats the full identity claim (phenomenal character is representational content of the right kind) as a separate, stronger commitment; this essay defends only the transparency datum and its most natural reading, and stops short of the inference Tye runs straight through. ↩
4. The “mental paint” label for the rejected inner swatch is Block’s own (see note 7), repurposed here as the picture transparency denies. Strong representationalists (Harman, Tye, Dretske) hold that there simply is no mental paint; weaker representationalists allow phenomenal character to supervene on content without identifying the two. The essay’s framing — naturalist, non-reductive, relational — sides with the strong reading without leaning on the substance-talk (“inner red,” “the quale”) that the weak reading still half-permits. ↩
5. Crane, “Introspection, Intentionality, and the Transparency of Experience” (2000), 49–67. Crane is careful to distinguish the transparency thesis (introspection reveals only objects and their properties) from the stronger claims sometimes built on it; the body follows his statement of the thesis rather than the maximal version, which is contested even among representationalists. ↩
6. Mendelovici, Mental Representation and Closely Conflated Topics (2010), §on the transparency intuition. Mendelovici’s dissertation is useful here precisely because it states the intuition neutrally — as a report about what introspection delivers — before any theory is loaded onto it, which is the order this essay tries to preserve for the non-specialist reader. ↩
7. Block, “Mental Paint” (2003), esp. the cases adduced to show that phenomenal character does not supervene on representational content. Block’s objection is stronger than a single counterexample: it is a supervenience-failure argument. Strong representationalism (Tye, Dretske) commits to the thesis that there can be no difference in phenomenal character without a difference in representational content — phenomenal character supervenes on, indeed is identical to, content of the right kind. Block’s strategy is to exhibit a pair (actual or possible) that holds content fixed while varying phenomenal character, or varies phenomenal character with no candidate worldly difference to anchor it: blur, the pressure phosphene, the Inverted Earth scenario, perceived size constancy. A single surviving pair refutes the supervenience claim outright, since the thesis is universally quantified — which is why the representationalist cannot answer Block by accumulating successful cases but must show, in principle, that every alleged phenomenal difference reduces to a difference in what the world is presented as being like. The blur case is the most intuitive and the one most often pressed, which is why the essay answers it rather than the more technical phosphene example, where the absence of any plausible represented object makes the reply genuinely harder (see note 8). ↩
8. Crane (2000) on blurred vision as a less determinate presentation of the world rather than the determinate awareness of an indeterminate inner item. Crane is careful — more careful than a quick gloss suggests — to keep the indeterminacy in the mode of presentation rather than turning it into a represented property: the experience presents the edge indefinitely without thereby representing the edge as blurry, so the phenomenology need not commit you to believing the world has fuzzy boundaries. The reply generalizes: wherever Block locates a “felt” difference, the representationalist asks what the experience now presents the world as being like, and finds the difference there. Whether the reply covers every one of Block’s cases — the pressure phosphene is the hard one, since there may be no plausible external object represented — remains genuinely contested in the literature; this essay claims only that it handles the blur case cleanly, which is the case the reader is most likely to raise. ↩