Experiential awareness

I will argue for an account of awareness of qualia that promises to bring qualia into the physical fold. More particularly, I will present and defend a version of the view that has come to be called representationalism. 1 will focus on the task of developing a representationalist theory of visual awareness, but it will be evident, I think, that the theory can be generalized so as to apply to experiential awareness of other kinds as well. After explaining this theory of visual awareness, I will urge that it provides a satisfactory answer to the metaphysical problems that qualia pose. 1 will then discuss the question of where exactly qualia are to be located within our catalogue of physical properties. 

This view of qualia can also be expressed, albeit somewhat opaquely, by saying that qualia are not properties that exist independently of our awareness of them. They are properties as seen from the perspective of the systems of representation that enable experiential awareness. They are physical properties qua experientially represented ... 

Our awareness of visual qualia is experiential in nature. Now, as we saw a bit earlier, there is independent motivation for supposing that there is a distinctive system of representation that subserves experiential awareness. In view of this fact, representationalism contends, we have the right to assume that our awareness of visual qualia is essentially representational and that the representations involved in such awareness belong to a distinctive system. 

When things lookp yellow to us, we are deploying a representation that is different from all of the representations that we deploy when things lookp other ways to us, different from all of the representations that are involved in nonvisual experiential awareness, and different from all of the conceptually structured representations that science makes available. Let us say that this representation represents the characteristic phenomenal yellow. Now, of course, the mere fact that we use a special representation to keep track of phenomenal yellow could not by itself give rise to an abiding... 

Thus far I have made six claims. It may be useful to summarize them. First, I have claimed that when an object x looksp F to an observer y, / is aware of x as having a certain property, a property that is invoked by the locution looksp F. I henceforth speak of this form of awareness as experiential awareness, and I say that the properties that are objects of experiential awareness, the properties that are invoked by predicates of the form looksp F, are appearance properties. Second, I have claimed that experiential awareness is representational in character. It constitutively involves a representation of an appearance property. Third, I have claimed that experiential representations have distinctive properties that set them apart from representations of other sorts. Thus, for example, unlike conceptual representations, experiential representations are analogue or quasi-analogue in... 

In view of these considerations, it is clear that representationalist theories of experiential awareness are overwhelmingly superior to those based on... 

I turn now briefly to adverbial theories of experiential awareness. According to these theories, it will be remembered, qualia exist only as forms of perceptual awareness — ways of being perceptually aware of nonqualitative phenomena. 

I see no merit in this suggestion. Adverbialism denies that there is such a thing as experiential awareness t qualia. Instead, it maintains, qualia are ways of being experientially aware of other things. But this claim fails to acknowledge a key fact. 

This brings us to the doxastic theory of experiential awareness. This view allows that experiential awareness constitutively involves representations, but it diflfers from the view I am defending under the label representation-alism in that it claims that the representations in question are conceptual through and through. It maintains that to be aware of a quale is to make a conceptually informed judgment of a certain sort." ... 

We have already taken note of some facts that call the doxastic theory into question. Thus, as we observed earlier, experiential awareness has all of the following properties ... 

This list of diflferences could easily be extended. Experiential awareness must be distinguished from doxastic awareness. 

I discuss several other features that distinguish doxastic awareness from experiential awareness in Hill (2005). For additional discussion see Hill (2009, section 3.6). 

We have now found strong reasons for setting all of the main alternatives to representationalist accounts of experiential awareness aside. I henceforth assume that some sort of representationalist account is correct. More specifically, I assume that it is correct to say that awareness of qualia constitutively involves representations of a sort that can appropriately be called experiential. 

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