Color, Qualia, and Attention: A Non-standard Interpretation

A standard view in philosophy of mind is that qualia and phenomenal character require consciousness. This paper argues that various experimental and clinical phenomena can be better explained if we reject this assumption. States found in early visual processing can possess qualitative character even though they are not in any sense conscious mental states. This non-standard interpretation bears the burden of explaining what must be added to states that have qualitative character in order to yield states of sensory awareness or sensory experience. I argue that the study of selective attention reveals resources that can be useful in that project. Two traditional objects are briefly considered. Acknowledgments. I thank Jonathan Cohen and Mohan Matthen for all their work organizing the color science conferences and the resulting volume of papers, and for providing very useful comments to me on this particular paper as well. Thanks also go to Valtteri Arstila, Murat Aydede, Steven Biggs, and Alex Byrne, who provided comments on versions of this paper, as well as to audiences at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, Simon Fraser University, and Rutgers University, where versions of these ideas were presented. A state of "phenomenal consciousness" is, minimally, a state of consciousness that has some kind of phenomenal character. Both clauses are open to multiple interpretations, the discussion of which can grow quite heated. For the purposes of this paper, I propose to avoid as many of those debates as possible by confining the discussion to a simple kind of mental state which all sides agree belongs to the genus "phenomenal consciousness", no matter what other species the latter might include. This simple kind might be called "perceptual awareness" or "perceptual experience": episodes in which a subject both perceives something and is aware of what is perceived or of some aspect of what is perceived. Its perceptual origin gives the episode its distinctive phenomenal character, and often that phenomenal character is the feature of which one is aware. Examples include seeing and thereby becoming aware of the red glow of the sky at sunset, or feeling the cool breeze that springs up as the sun goes down. One might also call these "sensory experiences": one experiences--becomes conscious of--some sensible feature of something that one senses. In these states one both senses something and is aware of some aspect of what one senses. The latter condition is what qualifies the members of this species as "states of consciousness". In virtue of having them one is aware of something: here, specifically, one is aware of some aspect of what one senses. One may, or may not, also be conscious of being in that state. It is possible that one is so absorbed by the sunset--the red glow of the sky, the cool breeze-that one is not also simultaneously aware of seeing the red glow, or of feeling the cool breeze. We talk of "losing oneself" in various experiences, aesthetic and otherwise, and in such cases one seems to be aware simply of what one Clark Color, Qualia, and Attention 2 sees, or what one feels; not also of the seeing of it, or of one's own internal state of sensation. So a state of perceptual awareness (as used here) is not necessarily a state of which one is conscious. Instead it is a state in virtue of which one is conscious of what one perceives. Now phenomenal consciousness is a puzzle, and intent study of neuropsychology makes it, if anything, more puzzling rather than less. Among the most startling of incongruities are the phenomena found in the "disconnection" syndromes of blindsight and hemi-neglect. Patients with various kinds of brain damage can pass many of the normal tests for seeing things and having states with phenomenal character, even though they sincerely deny seeing those things, or of being aware of any features of those things. The blindsight subject DB can pass many of the normal tests for seeing shape, orientation, and location, and for discriminating different shapes, orientations, and locations; though if the stimuli in question are presented within his scotoma, DB sincerely denies seeing the stimulus, and denies being aware of any feature of anything located within the scotoma. In pure "unawareness" mode, DB is not aware of any sensible feature of a stimulus presented within the blind field, yet he successfully "guesses" its location. shape, and orientation. These results seem to drive a wedge between the "phenomenal" and the "consciousness" parts of "phenomenal consciousness." They challenge the widely held assumption that states with phenomenal character are necessarily states of consciousness. More broadly, they pose a puzzle for anyone interested in the relations between perceptual appearance and the awareness thereof. In the first of the two conferences that prompted this volume, Larry Hardin revealed his longstanding interest in this problem. He posed (as an agenda item for conference two) the question "What does the awareness of color add if one can already make chromatic discriminations?"1 It is a wonderful question, and I propose to address it by examining some of the "disconnection" phenomena. While this essay will certainly not answer the question, I hope the energetic beating of bushes will give us some sense of the surrounding undergrowth, and perhaps flush out some of its interesting and reclusive inhabitants.