The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist Analysis of the First-Person Perspective1

Before one can even begin to model consciousness and what exactly it means that it is a subjective phenomenon one needs a theory about what a first-person perspective really is. This theory has to be conceptually convincing, empirically plausible and, most of all, open to new developments. The chosen conceptual framework must be able to accommodate scientific progress. Its basic assumptions have to be plastic as it were, so that new details and empirical data can continuously be fed into the theoretical model as it grows and becomes more refined. This paper makes an attempt at sketching the outlines of such a theory, offering a representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-person perspective. Three phenomenal target properties are centrally relevant: “mineness” (phenomenal appropriation; the sense of ownership), “selfhood” (the conscious experience of being someone), and “perspectivalness” (a structural feature: phenomenal space as a whole is organized around a center, a supramodal point of view). This contribution analyzes these properties on a representational as well as on a functional level of description. The author introduces new conceptual constraints for phenomenal representations, plus two theoretical entities needed in order to understand what a first-person perspective is: “the phenomenal self-model” (PSM) and “the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation” (PMIR). A phenomenal self-model is a multimodal representational structure, the contents of which forms the contents of the consciously experienced self. It has two important features: It is the only representational structure which is anchored in the brain by a persistent functional link, namely by a continuous source of internally generated input. Secondly, large parts of the PSM are phenomenally transparent: they cannot be recognized as representations by the system itself. It is therefore caught in what might be called a “naive-realistic selfmisunderstanding”. If we now apply the transparency-constraint to the internal representation of the dynamical relations between subject and object e.g., to the representation of the system as being affected by certain perceptual objects or as being directed at a certain goal-state we arrive at complex forms of representational content. The deep representational structure of the PMIR is the es1 This is an extended and considerably revised version of a book chapter that first appeared in T. Metzinger (2000), ed., Neural Correlates of Consciousness – Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Readers interested in a more detailed treatment of the issues discussed in the text should turn to T. Metzinger (2003), Being No One –The SelfModel Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The subjectivity of subjective experience 34 sence of what makes phenomenal experience a subjective phenomenon, which is bound to the internal perspective of an individual agent.