Fundamental constraints on theories of phenomenal experience

A central, non-negotiable constraint on any account of phenomenal awareness or experience is that it must be intrinsic to the experiencer, rather than depending on an outside interpretation of its structure or function. When applied to computational accounts of phenomenal awareness that are based on dynamical systems theory, this constraint raises a serious conceptual challenge, namely, the need for an intrinsic definition of the “system” in question. In this extended abstract, we discuss some of the issues arising from this challenge. 1 Fundamental constraints on theories of phenomenal experience Phenomenality — the quintessence of first-person experience — cannot be a matter of attribution or ascription: it must be intrinsic to the experiencer. The distinction between attributed and intrinsic properties of informational systems has been drawn in the past. For instance, in their tutorial introduction to the Information Integration Theory of qualia, Balduzzi and Tononi (2009, p.2) write: “From the perspective of an external observer, the camera chip has a large repertoire of states. From an intrinsic perspective, however, the sensor chip can be considered as a collection of one million photodiodes with a repertoire of two states each, rather than as a single integrated system with a repertoire of 21,000,000 states.” A forceful statement of the principle of intrinsic phenomenality has been offered by Fekete and Edelman (2011, p.811): “[. . . ] Activity [the dynamics of the experiential system] being the realization of experience, it is not supposed to require any further interpretation. In other words, activity must impose structure on experience intrinsically, or not at all.” The insistence on phenomenality being intrinsic is what leads one to seek explanations rooted in dynamical systems theory — a move that can also be motivated on independent grounds, both empirical and philosophical (see, e.g., Skarda and Freeman, 1987; Freeman, 2007 and the contributions in Edelman, Fekete, and Zach, 2012). As Fekete and Edelman (2011) discuss at some length, identifying phenomenality with the dynamics of the experiencer (rather than, say, with its instantaneous states; cf. Smart, 2004), in addition to solving a host of conceptual problems, makes phenomenality intrinsic. Simply put, by computing its future given its past and any external influences, a dynamical system by definition serves as its own interpreter. To do that, it needs time, which is why phenomenality is not a state but a process (Edelman and Fekete, 2012). ∗Extended version of an abstract submitted to the 17th Conference of the Association for Scientific Study of Consciousness, 2013. †To whom correspondence should be addressed. Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601, USA. ‡Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5281, USA.