The relation between subjects and their conscious experiences
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The relation between subjects and their conscious experiences Henry Taylor1
The Author(s) 2019
Abstract One of the most poorly understood features of consciousness is the relation between an experience and the subject of the experience. In this paper, I develop an ontology of consciousness on which experiences are events constituted by substances having properties at times. I use this to explain the relation between a subject and her experience. Keywords Consciousness Events Ontology
1 Subjects and conscious experiences The experiences currently being had by you are yours in some important sense. No one else has that particular relation with those very experiences, and you don’t have that relation with anyone else’s experiences. But what exactly is this relation? This paper will develop an ontology of conscious experience that answers this question. In Sect. 2, I outline two claims about how we relate to our experiences, which form the data that the view developed in the paper will explain. I then (Sects. 3–4) propose a view on which experiences are events constituted by substances having properties at times, and I use this to explain the relation we bear to our experiences. I then show that this explanation is not available to someone who holds a rival view of the ontology of conscious events (Sect. 5). In Sect. 6–7 I respond to various objections. The arguments of this paper have widespread consequences, both within the philosophy of mind, and for more general metaphysics. The special, intimate & Henry Taylor [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, ERI Building, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
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H. Taylor
relation between a subject and her experiences is one of the most fundamental and immediately apparent features of consciousness, and yet it has received relatively little attention in the literature.1 The result is that our understanding of conscious experience as a whole is limited. Furthermore, a great deal of work has concentrated on the metaphysical relation between consciousness and the physical world (Chalmers 2010). However, there has been much less work on the basic ontological structure of consciousness.2 This paper takes the latter, much less researched, approach. The arguments of the paper are also considerably theoretically important for a variety of wider debates in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. For example, Martine Nida-Ru¨melin has recently argued (against mainstream assumption) that we have good reason to think that phenomenal properties are properties of subjects, and not properties of experiences (2017, 2018). As I will show below, the arguments of this paper give us additional reason to accept Nida-Ru¨melin’s view, and to reject the mainstream picture. Finally, the arguments of this paper are relevant to theories of events. I will argue that Kim’s property exemplification view of events has greater explanatory power than the Davidsonian picture when it comes to explaining the relation between a subject and her experiences. This, in
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