Technical Metaphysical Interlude: does what we experience exist?

In my thesis, I defined a principle I called PEPE,The Principle of the Experienced Particular Existent. This principle is that what we experience exists (and is something in particular - but that's not important right now). If this is right, then if we experience something when we are imagining, then this 'something' exists.*

But is this right? Is there anything wrong with saying that what we experience doesn't exist? (and isn't something in particular - but that isn't important right now).

I called my principle a principle because I don't think there is anything obviously contradictory in denying it. It doesn't seem to me to be incoherent to say that what we experience doesn't exist. But at the same time I think that, when pressed, this is not what we tend to say.

How would we be pressed on this? Consider the following: someone turns up, shaken, late at night, soaking wet from walking through fields of heavy rain, and says:

'I'm sorry. It's so late. I had this experience. It - I seemed to experience - it was - was - like - it wasn't like I saw something, or heard or - it wasn't like anything physically touched me, or any sort of sense-perception..But, tonight, you must believe me' - and he twists his sleeves in his fingers, looks up at you, scared, hopeful - 'I experienced the presence of God.'

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you do. Do you believe that you can have some awareness of God? Perhaps you do. Say this, however, take this viewpoint: you do not believe in God.

If you are an atheist - you must be an atheist to run this - an agnostic might concede the possibility - my hunch is that you will say to him: 'look - calm down - here, have this vodka and lime.** I know you're overwhelmed for now, but, although it seems that way, you did not experience the presence of God.'

Does that seem right to you? And do you think that your intent is clear to the listener? Or could you say, without causing any extra confusion, or for the listener to not have to actively interpret what you're saying: ''you experienced the presence of God alright but God does not exist'.

Because we tend to speak the first way, I think that, when we talk about 'experience', we mean that we are consciously aware of something, there is something apparent to us; there is something phenomenological going on. But we do not often refer to 'experiencing' as experiencing, typically. We refer to it as seeing, hearing, or doing something of which we are conscious, e.g., experiencing running a marathon, jumping from a plane, scratching off the charcoal from burnt toast.

My example above suggests another point about experience: we refer to an experience as only an 'experience' when we mean the most general form; we aren't referring to a particular kind of experience, e.g., to seeing a bright light, hearing a low rumbling, remembering the taste of honey, or reciting the ten times tables 'in our heads'. I think we only refer, in ordinary conversation, to experiences in cases of being unable or unwilling, or of being unsure how, to specify the kind of experience further. For whatever reason, we can't say we are seeing, feeling, imagining, or only thinking. It's just we are experiencing. That's all we can say.  

-------------------------------------

But there might be another way of using 'experience', especially if we are talking about being conscious in experiencing. Perhaps when we talk about experiencing something, 'something' needn't exist. Or, even more, what we experience needn't even seem to exist.

For example, if I imagine a unicorn, I experience the unicorn - but I also definitely experience it even if it doesn't exist and I know it doesn't. That's just what it is to imagine unicorns.

Once I say that, I no longer say anything more: I imagine a griffin and so I experience furriness, eagle-head-shape-ness - but no problem: whether I experience it or not, the furriness needn't exist or even seem to.

I got this idea from a conversation with Julia Jansen: she didn't see why I would think in the following way: we experience a mental image when we imagine something. What we imagine isn't necessarily what we experience - actually, anyone is more likely to say that it isn't. What we imagine is, e.g., a griffin, and whatever we say here, it doesn't seem right at all to say that we experience a griffin. But why, Julia wondered, would anyone bring images into this story? When I imagine a griffin, I just imagine something that doesn't exist - and, so we could say here that I am experiencing something that doesn't exist as not existing. But this doesn't mean we have to say, really, we experience something that doesn't exist or we experience something else that does exist. The former is like saying you really experience a God, though there is a non-existent God; the latter is saying you experience an image.

Julia is an expert in phenomenology, which we might very roughly call the philosophical examination of appearances, or how things appear to us, or an examination of consciousness from the first person perspective. This isn't exactly accurate, there is a  lot more too it, and different versions of it from different founders, each version different to the others, e.g., Husserl's phenomenology is more ideal than Heidegger's phenomenology,  who is fascinated with the sense of our being always conscious in time , while Merleau-Ponty constantly reiterates the compelling idea that we are always experiencing the world from a body.

The development of the phenomenological method comes in stages(I am not sure it is right to say it is done). But a significant beginner of it, a 'father' some might say, is Edmund Husserl. Husserl's description of the phenomenological method is, to my mind, the best example of what phenomenology is. In particular, there is epoche, the 'suspension of belief 'by someone about the reality, idealism or unreality of what is presented to them 'in consciousness' (as is often added - though I'd assume it anyway, if it weren't mentioned). To suspend belief is not to doubt the reality of what you experience; following thinking of Descartes, Husserl considers doubt to be disbelieving in something. Suspending belief is not believing or disbelieving it. Husserl thought you were free to do this, no matter what you were presented with it.

Give it a go. 

Get back to me when you do.

The point about this method is that you examine what is presented to you without necessarily believing it is real or not, and you do so in order to get at invariant features of consciousness, 'rigid data', and thus ultimately to develop a science of first-person consciousness of the world.

I think that's it, anyway, although I am often frustrated in my understanding.  (It reminds me of the pyrrhonian sceptic view, that one does not believe anything except appearances, does not assent to anything except to which she is a forced to consent to. I don't think this is a coincidence). The point I take, anyhow, is this: When you describe what we experience, you don't just presume what you experience is as you have assumed it to be. To do so is to remain in what Husserl has called 'the natural attitude', an attitude you are supposed to bracket off. Away from that attitude, and instead in the phenomenological attitude, you don't assume that what you are presented with is either illusory or real. You simply describe it as it appears to you.Back to the ancient sceptics again: I do not know if honey is sweet or not when I am not around, but it tastes sweet. It seems sweet.

Once you do that, though, this question arises: does anything seem real or unreal to you anyway, even if you suspend belief in everything you are conscious of? That is, can you suspend belief in everything you are presented with? Are you compelled to believe in the reality or unreality of anything you are presented with? What is left? What is lost? Are you forced to believe?

This question is important because it gets us to what phenomenology can contribute to a discussion about what exists. This is a metaphysical question, not in the domain of phenomenology as it is traditionally understood. But it is in the domain of which physics or physicalism is involved:  the entities posited by physics to explain what is apparent to us should address at least what we is apparent to us after doing phenomenology; physicalism says  only what is physical exists so it should show how what is apparent after doing phenomenology is physical (these two tasks might be different; they might  be the same; I'm not sure).   

When we walk in with what we hold to exist or be real, we can look at this phenomenological description as a test of our theory.

Take, for example, someone claiming to see the Virgin Mary hovering in the sky over a cave. What exactly is apparent to them? They believe that it is the Virgin Mary but what is apparent to them if they suspend belief in that? What can they suspend belief in, and what must just seem to be real and presented to them? 

This is the sort of thing that is supposed to be done in doing phenomenology.

Anyway, that is the end of this metaphysical discussion.

[Right now, I have a massively high temperature, dried out mouth, and exhaustion, sitting by a gas fire and listening to a documentary on BBC4 about the science of sleepwalking and law. So, the phenomenology bit might be a bit unclear. I feel very frustrated about my understanding of the phenomenological tradition. But I need to get it clear, bit by bit].

---------------------------------------

*If I continue to run with this, I'll probably change the principle's specific terms. Since reading a paper by Peter Simons, and seeing a lecture by him, I think it's better too refer to 'real particulars' rather than 'existing particulars'. According to Simons, 'existence' refers to a much broader scope of things, including things that are not real; in addition, in his paper, he argues, or perhaps simply shows, that 'existence' is more...I don't have the paper in front of me, so I can't use his term - but, it might be said to be more esoteric, or metaphysically technical or idiomatic than 'real'. So, then, it would be the principle of the experienced real particular, or PERP. These things matter to analytical philosophers. But, here, existence is fine.

**Atheists always drink this. It's an empirical fact.

Are you an atheist?

See?

Hallucinations and Perceiving

These last posts show that I am preoccupied about what we experience when we imagine something.

This is because I feel compelled to believe that we do experience something; - further, that what we experience is something complex; - further again, that the complexity of what we experience when we imagine something is in some sort of way like the complexity we experience when we perceive it: when we see/hear/taste/smell/touch, and so on. And this 'in some way like' seems to me best understood as what we experience resembles what we experience when we see, etc.

So, being less abstract, I feel compelled to believe that what we experience on imagining a ghost resembles what we would experience when we see a ghost.

This gives a reason why what we might call 'powerful' imaginings -   hallucinations, particular fantasies, affecting dreams - seem to us to be actual perceptions.

But doing this raises all sorts of challenges, the sorts of challenges I've been looking at:

• If we believe that there are only physical things, i.e., only what occupies some physical space exists, then whatever we experience when we hallucinate has to occupy physical space. 
• However, if it is true that we experience something blue when we see a little blue skittle 'meep' man (if I can call it that; see the first season of '30 Rock') and 
• If it is true that what we experience on hallucinating a blue man is the same as what we experience on seeing a blue man, 

                        then

• We must experience something blue on hallucinating a blue man.

But, then, what is this blue thing we are experiencing? And where is it?

That's been the problem so far.

Disjunctivism
But maybe there is another way of approaching hallucinations.

The philosophical position of disjunctivism is that hallucinations are not anything like perceptions. A visual hallucination of a  blue man is not at all like seeing a blue man. We experience something when we see the man but we don't necessarily experience something, or experience at least anything like a man, when we hallucinate one. So, forget about it. 

This answer is like the answer to what happens when we imagine (last post).

But, like there, we have this problem:  whoever hallucinates a little blue man will say that it's like seeing a little blue man. So why do they do it.

• One answer is this: the issue is with their beliefs about what's going on - that's where it goes wrong. 

• Or, maybe, we're not sure if it was like actually seeing it - but it's the only way we can describe it. We are, to use a phrase Wittgenstein is famous for, 'tempted to say' that visual hallucinations are like seeing,etc...

Projectivism
In 2005, the Sydney-based philosopher Philip Chaurd argued that this is just what happens when we believe we see, hear, etc., i.e., we perceive, the temporal order of things, e.g., hearing one note after another, a C followed by a G. That we seem to hear this change in notes gives rise to the doctrine of the specious present, the most contemporary understanding of which is that we see, hear, etc. a duration because we see, hear, etc., a temporally ordered change  (I discuss this in depth in in my doctoral thesis). But this idea of the 'specious present' has raised all sorts of issues over the ages, issue that seem to require metaphysical thought.  And some philosophers deny that we do perceive a duration or an ordered change. But then why do we think perceive this sort of thing?

Chuard's answer, if I understand it right, is that, from our belief that (i) what we perceive, which is not change ,and (ii) beliefs that our perceptions have changed,

We 'project' to the belief that (iii) we have perceived a change.

I think. I'm not sure. I don't know what 'projections' from beliefs are exactly, or what they are supposed to do in theories of perceptions, or what they save us from in the discussion (this Wikipedia entry is the most collated entry on projectivism I can find). If they are projections as Hume describes them...they suggest a 'beaming out',  like a film projector, of something from the mind onto things in the physical world - which, taken

• - Literally, is weird. However, weirdness should be no barrier to philosophy; the world seems to be weird if you think enough about it.  The problem here is that it is not helpful to think of it as a literal projection: the 'something' and its properties still exist, e.g., if I project a little blue man-like thing into the world from my beliefs - there is a...well...a little blue man-like thing in the world.                                          This is like projecting an image onto a cinema screen. What is projected onto the screen is, in an important way, actually on the screen. Sure, a thirty-foot Liv Tyler's face isn't there in the cinema, on the screen, but blue, pink and brown colours, and two-dimensional shapes are up there.  And these - the properties of the image of Tyler's face - are what is projected.
• - Metaphorically, is no help either. What is the metaphrand (a term from Julian Jaynes) of the projection metaphor. That is, what is it that we are describing metaphorically as a projection? It's a 'belief' doesn't, I think, answer this question at all.

In any case, for change at least, it's not my view. My own work undermines the central assumption that we don't perceive change. My own work isn't out yet, though - it's to be published soon in the Journal of Consciousness Studies - so I wouldn't expect anyone to be considering it.

Anyhow, we might be able to say this sort of thing with hallucinations, dreams, etc.   But we might say of all these trauma-induced memory hallucinations, and those caused  by drugs, and maybe those suffering from conditions such as a schizophrenia, or dreams, etc., that they don't see, hear, etc. anything. People are just delusional here - they think they saw something under the influence of drugs but they saw nothing; they did not see. All is good.

And, anyway, how imagining seems is very different to hallucinating, dreaming, etc.

With hallucinating, dreams, etc., what we experience seems to be real.  But with imagining, is this true? Couldn't we say that what we experience doesn't seem real?

This is something Julia Jansen has raised with me.

Where is My Mind?

We have discussed the idea that mental images occupy space (whether they seem to or not). This leads to the next two questions:

(i) If mental images occupy space, what is this space?
(ii) What are mental images made of? That is, what is the stuff in this space?

In this section, I want to talk about what spaces I think they aren't in.

Private Space

The idea floated a few entries back was that whatever it is we experience - the image, if you like - when we imagine or remember literally occupies some kind of space. And then I wondered if that was some kind of private space, a space which no-one else can observe; if it is a separate space to the one we share with everyone else - because the 'whats' that are in it, the images etc., are not in the shared world.

If we were in the medieval period, this might have seemed reasonable; my thinking of it comes from medieval metaphysicians such as Athanasius Kircher and Fludd. But I don't think this is something we would now take seriously. So let's see what else we might say about this space for mental images.

The first thing to say is that, however one thinks about, a certain position about the actual world requires that mental images, if they exist (see later), cannot be in some other space than what we see, hear, taste, etc. If mental images exist, mental images must be spatially related to the external world. They need not be what they seem to be - but if they're anything they better be somewhere in the actual physical world.

But why assume that they have to be in the actual physical world? Couldn't they be in some other possible world? Could they be possible objects in the space of another possible world?

Possible Space

I say the 'actual physical world' because there is one type of space images might occupy that some philosophers might think is a real space. I don't think images do occupy this space, but I want to spell it out (it's also useful to introduce a current way many philosophers think). They'd occupy this real space if the following from two statements are true:

(i) Images are only possible; they are not actual in the world we share. This is not a typo or conceptual confusion: I am not confusing images and what is imagined - I mean what we experience, the representation, the image itself, is merely possible.

(ii) Modal Realism is true. 

'Modal realism' is the position that whatever is possible is real. This includes whatever is possible which is not actual. That is, whatever is merely possible is also real.

What makes something merely possible can be controversial but examples of it have included, e.g., you right now wearing something other than what you're actually wearing (whatever that is; I don't judge); the Nazis winning WWII (e.g., as imagined in Philip K. Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle'); and... I suppose... dragons, elves, unicorns... dolphins in dinner jackets.

Many contemporary metaphysicians talk of whatever that is possible, whether actual or not, as being something that occupies a possible world. For the modal realists,  the merely possible stuff, the 'non-actual' stuff, is just not in this actual world; it is in a different possible world; it has a different actuality, some of them might say. So, e.g., a resistance fighter against the fourth generation of Nazis, clothed in Henry VIII's tournament armour, is really reading an entry like this on his laptop - and, seeing the mention of unicorns, he sobs "oh! Solostick! My loyal steed. Why did you have to die?" (ok. I'm annoying myself now). He is really reading this - just not in this actual world; in another actuality, another possible world.

Just because it isn't actually real doesn't make it unreal. According to its most famous advocate, the highly influential philosopher David Lewis, each of these possible worlds is in a separate spacetime to the others. Though all things in each of them are real or exist,  nothing in one world is spatially or temporally related to anything in any other; but they are spatially or temporally related to each other - so long as they are in the same world.

I don't want to criticise the talk of possibility in terms of possible worlds; I don't even want to criticise modal realism. (Lewis has argued that modal realism is the best way of explaining our statements about what is possible; famously, he has added that the most common, and usually final, objection has been just an incredulous stare, i.e., people just staring at him in disbelief  because of what he says). With this in mind, someone might answer the question

'How can the images of my remembering and imagining occupy a different space to my body, the world around my body, etc.?'

With

'They are in the space of another possible world.'

But this would be a very confused answer. This would mean that the images are merely possible, not actual; that is what it means for something to be in another possible world. Maybe this is true of what I imagine - when I imagine a unicorn, as above, the unicorn might be possible. But if I'm experiencing anything here,  then what I'm experiencing is actual. It's in this actual world.

The thinking behind all this is part of a certain view of the world already discussed: physicalism, that everything is physical. I'll say more about the idea of physicalism as we go on - but  now, there's what it says about things in space. 

So far as I understand most people's thinking (but there's something to say even about this), a condition of something being physical is that it occupies space, and this space is the same one as that of mountains, planets, cafes and viruses.

So why not, then, have it that images are physical? Why not have them sharing the same 'spacetime' as all the physical stuff?

Biology

Along with all the matter, all the mountains, and sky, and badly worn shoes, my body and its bits seem to definitely be part of the physicial world. My body, and your body, and anyone-but-God-and-ghosts-reading-this's bodies, at least seem to be particular lumps - albeit very sophisticated and distilled lumps -  of matter. In other words, biological stuff shares the same spacetime - it is spatially related to - all the other stuff in the world.

So, if the images I experience are part of my body, then they are in same spatial world as the rest of my body. They are spatially related to other physical things. We can then say things like: when I imagine a unicorn, what I experience is three feet from the front door (because I'm standing outside the front door). The unicorn, of course, is not; there is no actual unicorn - I'm only imagining it. But the image - the mental image - of the unicorn is three feet from the door. What's so wrong with that?

I've said they do not seem that way. But at this point, we might say: so what? They just don't seem that way. That doesn't mean they aren't that way. And the alternatives seem much worse, if you think we're just physical things. The alternatives are that we have our own private space, or we can experience other actualities, or...doesn't that all seem much worse?

I say all this because if we say that we experience mental images, and we allow then that there are mental images, and we think everything that exists is physical, and so is spatially related to everything else, then mental images are somewhere. So where is this somewhere? And if we look there, what will we find? Whatever we find there - how is that related to these images?

WAIT WAIT WAIT - a panicked pedestrian is waving their arms in front of the b batmobile. This isn't how you fight crime!

What we imagine doesn't exist anywhere in space. And - neither do 'mental images'. What am I thinking?