Representational theories of consciousness

Representational theories of consciousness are theories in philosophy that appeal to some sort of representation as a model to explain the phenomenon of consciousness and conscious states. Several varying approaches are taken in explaining the wide variety of conscious phenomena, but generalities can still be drawn.

=="What it is Like"==

There are several ways that philosophers have addressed the issue of “What it is like," or what it is to experience a quale (take redness, for example). “What it is like” is the supposed internal experience. Some representational theories of mind deny an internal experience at all. Some, like Fred Dretske and Tye, consider it to be the qualitative property itself, as in; experiencing redness is akin to what you do when you experience redness.

In other words, something like joy is not itself, anything. The feeling of joy is associated with the things that happen when you are joyful, for example, laughing, smiling, joking, skipping, etc. A representational theory of consciousness is committed to the notion, as expressed in the quotation above, that there in no internal experience of something like joy, only the external aspects such as laughing. Laughing represents your joy, and is your joy, according to representational theories of consciousness, like the one held and outlined by Tye. Laughing represents joy for us, and joy itself is that representation. It itself is not a feeling, or anything tangible. If it were, what would it be?

Experiences are the representations of subjective things, such as how a color looks, or how music sounds. How you hear something is your subjective interpretation of sensory information, according to a representational theory of consciousness.

Perceiver-independent view-- Even though we think of red, conventionally, as being a standard, universal experience, a representational theory of consciousness suggests that it is perceiver-independent, and there is no one set, intrinsic way that red looks.

Commitments of representational theories

A Representational Theory of Consciousness is committed to the notion that intentionality can be understood in representational terms, and in understanding it in that way we can have a working explanation of the nature of consciousness.

A Representationalist does not just believe that conscious phenomena have some representational content. Such a view is already widely accepted. A true Representationalist believes that intentionality is itself, representation.

Brentano's Thesis

Brentano's position is that intentionality is not akin with mental phenomena, but rather one quality of mental phenomena.

Issues with Qualia

In philosophy, Qualia refers to the qualities and properties of sensory experiences, such as the redness experienced when you see a ripe tomato. Qualia are very important to conscious experience, and therefore a serious topic of discussion for representationalists and anti-representationalists alike.

What do qualia represent, and how?
Two significant representationalist views on qualia are those of Dretske and Tye. Tye treats qualia as purely objective properties caused by the external world, and Dretske expands on this while adding in restrictions as to what it takes to actually experience certain qualia. Dretske also states that qualia are mental or sensual representations of the objective data that Tye talks about, and the additional representation in his explanation allows for his restrictions.

However, it is important to note that to Dretske, the perception of qualia, along with how things represent qualia is dependent on the intended function of the system observing it (human eyesight for example). So just because things are indistinguishable does not mean they are representationally identical in terms of qualia.

Dretske's initial example uses human vision and toad vision in the french poodle argument. Toads have poor visual acuity when it comes to mid-sized objects such as poodles, and to toads, poodles look indistinguishably similar to bulldogs, terriers, or varying breeds of dogs. Humans however were designed to have very good visual acuity for dog-sized objects, and can easily distinguish differences between poodles, bulldogs, and terriers.
Because of this difference in capability and intended function, toads cannot tell the difference between similarly sized dogs, and therefore cannot experience the poodle quale. Humans sight was designed to be able to tell the difference, and therefore humans can experience the poodle quale. The intent of function is important, because it allows for a half-blind human with impaired vision the ability within Dretske's system to represent poodle qualia, even though they cannot distinguish them visually. A visually impaired human could still dream of poodles using poodle qualia, or hallucinate inexistant poodles and experience the same quale as a real poodle, whereas a toad could never do these things.

The first person perspective and the knowledge argument
Representationalist thought has a largely de-personalizing effect on the first-person perspective. It follows from the usage and definitions of qualia that whatever someone experiences can be represented with qualia to any other human being, since all humans are born with the same "intended function" that Dretske is concerned with. This leads to a sense that personal experience is cheap, because your experiences can always be boiled down to their qualia components, and at that point anyone that hears about them can know exactly what and how you felt during your experience.

This is very similar to an issue brought up in the knowledge argument, or the argument from Mary's room. Mary is a neuro-scientist that studies mental states and brain function, but has lived inside a room with no colors, and only a black and white television to experience the outside world. She is able to study the way color affects human brains, but has never experienced it herself. The argument continues that Mary is then let out of the room after learning all about color vision without ever experiencing it, and the reader is prompted with the question: does mary learn anything new via experience?

The classic worry is that Mary does learn something, and therefore there must be more to the qualia of color than simply knowledge of them. However, there are counter-arguments to this. Dennet states that we only have the intuition that she would learn something upon leaving because we lack the ability to comprehend the full knowledge of color that Mary supposedly learns in the room.
Dretske however doesn't fight this directly, stating .

Instead, Dretske believes that knowing what it seems like to experience something is what Mary can learn about color vision, and proposes another example involving Mary the marine biologist, who is studying dogfish and sharks that can sense electromagnetic fields. Dretske's Mary is able to learn the quale of the dogfish electric field sensing using this seeming method, while not knowing what it is like to be a dogfish. There are many more aspects to knowing what it is like to sense electric fields or see in full spectrum color than just what it seems like. Dretske's argument against Mary's room is that Mary does in fact learn something when she exits the room into a world with color, it just has nothing to do with knowing the qualia, and he defends his theories in this fashion.

Reasons for believing representational theories of consciousness
Given the explanation of qualia, there are a number of different ways one can argue for a representational theory of consciousness. The first argument is in favor of some type of Materialism. In the strict sense of Materialism, there are only physical objects in the world. Immaterial objects can only be explained in physical terms. So if Bertie experiences a green after image, it can only be explained in a number of ways. The first is that there is a green object in the world that Bertie is experiencing, or that there is a green-like object occurring somewhere in the brain. It isn’t logical to think that ether one of these two answers is correct, and the Adverbial Theory of Materialism addresses this problem. According to the theory, there is no actual or non actual green object. Materialists claim that the question of where the green object of experience is, presupposes the existence of the object. We know from the earlier definition of qualia that it is possible to experience an inexistent object. Though the objects of our experience may not exist it does not take away from our experiences of those objects. Take for example the case of seeing a real tomato, and hallucinating a tomato. The redness of both tomato’s is the same, even though one is real and the other is not.

So when we speak of an object in our visual field, we understand that the object really isn’t in us, and even though we may speak in such a way, we do so only for the sake of semantics. If we didn’t, we would have to say things like “There is something going on which is like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is something illuminated in front of me, that is, when I am really seeing something”, which as the SEP suggests, is either an adverbial view of qualia, or a representationalist account.

The alternate view of Materialism is known as Eliminativism. Eliminativism is the notion that certain mental states, such as beliefs and desires do not really exist. Dennett is an advocate of this type of Materialism. However, if a person believes they are having a a visual experience, it seems difficult to deny whether or not they are having that experience. A Eliminativist would either have to say that the person is lying, or that they are delusional. And as we have already shown, it is possible to has a genuine experience of a non actual object. Another problem with Eliminativism is that is it difficult to state the belief that beliefs do not exist. The argument has the conclusion as one of its premises, and is question begging.

The next argument has to do with Veridicalty, or the truth conditions of the experience. Again if we agree that a person can hallucinate and can be subjected to illusions, then the authenticity of the experience should not be questioned. It doesn’t seem to be a requirement that the representation be a true representation, or that the person having the experience even have the appropriate concept that goes along with he experience. The subjectivity of the experience allows us to have a genuine experience of a inexistent non conceptual object.

The next argument is that of Transparency. What the transparency argument claims is that we “see through” our perceptual states, until the only thing that is left is the object of our perception, and we don’t know that we are in a perceptual state. What this means is that if we attempted to examine the features of our experience, there are no intrinsic mental features of the experience that aren’t representational.

There are a number of objections to the Transparency theory. Block describes “mental paint”, which are independent introspectible mental features of a perceptual representation. He describes bodily sensations and moods in this way. However, Tye disagrees and believes that bodily sensations and moods are representational.

In response to Block, Tye writes that pain can be described as a property that enters into a representational experience. Whether or not the pain is in a real limb or a phantom limb, the pain represents a disturbance in a specific part of the body. Because there are certain types of pain, it can be classified as a specific type of bodily disturbance. Tye writes that they are mechanical responses to changes within the body, and are analogous to the eye changing when it reacts to light. Pain is a sensory representation, yet doesn’t require the concept of pain in order for a person to be in pain. What this means is that pain is causal. Pain simply is the feeling somewhere in the body. That feeling, based on concepts and awareness elicits a response from the person. If a person is aware that they are in pain, this allows the person to introspect and form an experience of pain. This is simply the added element of cognitive awareness, but not required for pain to be representational.

Tye extends the argument to include moods and emotions. He writes that background feelings are the way our bodies are in under normal circumstances. When changes occur, we are able to track the differences accordingly. If we become angry, our blood pressure and heart rate will increase. We may be cognitively aware that the change occurs, but like with pain, it isn’t necessary. As Tye puts it, moods and emotions upset our physical equilibrium. We physically respond to mental stimuli. Our mental state is a representation of our experience, and our physical state is an independent representation of the same experience.

The last argument in the SEP is the argument from Seeming. What this argument has to do with is the way the world seems to a person. It states that if a person has two consecutive experiences that are of the same phenomenal content, they will have no basis for distinguishing a difference between the two experiences. Likewise, if a person has two consecutive experiences that are comprised of different content, they will have two different phenomenal experiences and represent them in different ways. In short, the same phenomenal content will have the same representational experience, and different phenomenal content will have different representational experience.

Attacks and Responses

Dretske's theory of consciousness includes two representational systems: natural and conventional. According to Dretske, the intentionality of conventional representations is created by its designers--for example, the functions of instruments or of language. However, Dretske assumes the existence of "natural" representations whose indicator functions exist independent of a creator's intentions--for example, senses such as sight and hearing were not designed by anyone in particular, yet they still faithfully represent the world to us. Dennet and Searle deny the existence of any such natural representations outright. Dretske defends his conception of natural representations by appealing to evolutionary theory and saying that the functions of our organs evolved and changed over time without a specific creator, and yet these organs still seem to possess unique functions which help us to represent the world.

Those who believe in representational theories of consciousness would need to be able to correctly identify relevant worldly representata for any particular representation. A good example of difficulty in identifying relevant representata is found in the objections to color realism. For instance, color words like "blue" or "red" are used to refer to objective, real-world physical qualities of objects. One cannot explain phenomenal "blueness" in terms of its represented real-world color and then construe that real physical blueness as something meant to produce sensations of phenomenal blueness--that is circular logic. However, it is unclear that color realism is a problem to representational theories of consciousness, since one can hold an error theory of physical color, taking the position that the colors of physical objects are illusory and maintaining that physical color concepts are conceptually prior to phenomenal ones.

Another issue with a representational theory is the existence of representations which represent that which does not exist. For instance, if one were to look at a basketball and then hallucinate another, nonactual basketball being next the other one, the first visual representation of the actual basketball can be explained whereas the representation of the hallucinatory basketball has an origin which is difficult to pinpoint. Representational theorists will argue that the existence of that which does not exist poses a problem for not only representational theories of consciousness, but for everyone. Nonetheless, the qualia of "orange," would nonetheless represent the basketball, regardless of its existence or nonexistence, according to representational theorists.

Some philosophers argue that there exist non-intentional mental states, such as bodily sensations and moods, which are not representational. For instance, feelings of pain or the feeling of itchiness do not seem to be intentional, and the same goes for feelings such as happiness or anxiety. If one is happy, it only seems to be a state that he himself is in, and not a feature of some object. Representationalists will retort that bodily sensations do seem to represent something, for instance, pain might represent disorder within a certain body part. One could also hold that moods represent one's surrounding environment or circumstances--for example, happiness can represent an enjoyable or exciting environment, and anxiety can represent that something bad is about to occur.

It also seems as if there can exist phenomena that have the same intentional contents and different qualia. For example, there could be two flower pots which look the same and are of the same size, but one is further back in a person's visual field than the other. As a result, one flower pot looks bigger than the other does, and although both flower pots in the person's visual field represent the same thing, namely a flower pot, they have slightly different qualitative properties since they appear to be different by virtue of their appearances due to their being a difference in the distance away they are from the person viewing them. Another example would be the famous duck-rabbit drawing--the visual image of the picture represents the same thing, but depending upon how one views the image, different qualia are yielded. One response to the issue of the differing flower pots would be to say that the flower pots being represented in the person's visual field are really just the phenomenal shapes of the flower pots being represented, which are different, and therefore the intentionality of the two representations is different. To dismiss the duck-rabbit problem, a representationalist would contend that when viewing the image as representing a duck, he would be viewing the image's appendage as being a bill, and not ears, and vice-versa; as such, the qualia of the experience of viewing the duck-rabbit would change according to the interpretation of the viewer.

References and other Readings

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See Also

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