Intentionality And Qualia

BRENDAN LALOR

INTENTIONALITY AND QUALIA

Consciousness is bornsupported bya being which is notitself.

(Jean Paul Sartre 1958: lxi)

What is perceptually experiencedis solely theinformation presented to the senses by the world.

(Robert Shaw and John Bransford 1977, 16)

1. INTRODUCTION

Ernie is admiring his home-grown tomato: it is shiny, red, plump, and ob-viously juicy. But to say that, of course, doesn’t capture the ineffable waythe experience seems to him, qualitatively speaking. It’s not clear thesefeatures of experience – the so-calledqualia – could ever be “captured”,scientifically speaking.

This matter has exercised philosophers considerably. Historically, theyhave been attached to the idea that in perception agents such as Ernie“directly” experience something other than the properties of perceivedobjects, that these experiences are properly analyzed as acts of appre-hension of internal objects which, according to Jackson (1976), resistphysical explanation – mental images, sense data, things which account forthe intrinsic phenomenal character of experiences. But the contemporarydispute is not over whether qualia are nonphysical. The current terms ofthe debate about qualia are due to Peacocke (1983), who characterizedthem as nonintentional features of experience – mental contents which lackthe property of being about anything, object, property or relation. Hence,they can be characterized as introspectively accessible things or propertieswhich determine phenomenal character and yet can vary independently ofintentional content. Peacocke (1983), Block (1990, 1996), and Shoemaker(1993) have argued that there are such, thus conceived; and others, such asTye (1993), Dennett (1988, 1991), and Harman (1990), have denied them.

Many contemporary philosophers, intentionalist and nonintentionalist,have suggested that if qualia are to be captured in the physicalist’s net at all,

Synthese121: 249–289, 1999.© 2000Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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they must be internalistically constituted. Any account of the red look withwhich a tomato presents agents like Ernie will have to proceed by referenceto structures local to the nervous system, or to symbols’ internal functionalroles, or to some such internal factors. In any case, the view goes, fixing thelocal physics must fix the phenomenology. Even if we grant that physicallytype-identical agents can have different thoughtcontents(a la Twin Earth),when it comes to thequalitiesof twins’ experiences, contextual differencescouldn’t make a difference. Or could they?

Yes, I shall argue. I defend a species of wide intentionalism about thephenomenal appearance of color and qualitative features of experiencegenerally; I’ll lay it out in Section 2. In Section 3, I explain some of themain challenges to my intentionalism and some preliminary qualms aboutthese arguments for nonintentionalism. Then in Section 4, I introduce anintentionalist form of internalism about qualia, and explain its inadequa-cies. Finally, Section 5 consists of an extended defense of my theory ofthe phenomenal in which I make it plausible that qualitative content is notlocally supervenient, give pointed replies to the arguments in Section 3,and discuss the implications (for my theory) of empirical data pertaining tocolor memory and imagination. Not only shall it turn out that the legitimateneeds of a theory of qualitative content do not support internalism aboutqualia, but, more than that, a positive explanation of what many have pre-dicted will prove inexplicable on any physicalist account will be explained:the way experience seems to each of us qualitatively.

2. AN INTENTIONAL THEORY OF THE PHENOMENAL

It’s my conviction that the mental is intentional through and through. Evenqualitative content is exhausted by aboutness; it is constituted by propertiesobjects are represented as having. So qualitative properties of experiencecannot vary differentially with respect to intentional ones.1 I call my ver-sion of qualia intentionalismqualia interactivism, since, according to it,perceptual qualia are emergent properties of organism-environment inter-activity, and depend especially on the fine-grainedinformation-theoreticpropertiesof perceptual systems, such as a system’s ability to discriminatedifferent properties in the world, and when those properties are determin-able, to make informational distinctions. In the form of a motto: “Samecognitively accessible informational properties, same qualia; differentcognitively accessible informational properties, different qualia”.

To be sure, this intentionalist thesis is about the metaphysical consti-tution of qualitative aspects of experience, for instance, color experience.It holds that just as water = H2O, and temperature = mean molecular kin-

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etic energy, experience of colorC in S = the introspectible activation ofstructures inS which signalC, which carryC-information.

Let me mention a few considerations which support intentionalismabout the qualities of experience in a general way. First, it allows anonmysterious account of how qualia could relate to the physical world,alleviating the need to find supra-scientific entities to serve asphenomenalaspectsof experiences, such as qualia of unique red experiences, or, say,the duck-look of the duck-rabbit figure. If we can naturalize other inten-tional properties, as we re already committed to doing, there’s no reasonto withhold intentionalist naturalization from these. Second, this allowsintentionalists to account formisrepresentationssuch as phantom pains,after-images, hallucinations, and perceptual illusions simply by explain-ing why states with those intentional contents are tokened in the relevantconditions. Finally, it makes for aunifiedaccount of mental phenomenaas intentional, as famously articulated by Brentano (1874/1973). So thesemantics of expressions embedded in linguistic contexts such as, “Thislooks —”, advert to the intentional contents of visual experiences, just likethe semantics for expressions in such contexts as, “This is believed to be—”, advert to belief contents.

Qualia intentionalism would be nice, but, prima facie, it might be ar-gued, no explanation we can presently imagine would do justice to Ernie’sexperience of color. That is, it seems it will always be possible for him tosay, “Yes, I understand theexplanans, but what about my rich experienceof color?” This sense gives rise to what’s been called the “explanatorygap” between qualia and the physical world. There are two reasons I won’tbe preoccupied with closing this gap. First, these gaps come and go asintuitions change and concepts become more sophisticated; so, in a sense,I don’t think this problem per se is too important for any physicalistsnow.It may fix itself. Second, I accept a kind of irreducibility thesis anyway,according to which phenomenology is anemergentproduct of interactiv-ity between an organism and the world, not supervenient on merely localphysical constitution. So I will not be concerned if my completed accountdoesn’t give one the sense that qualia have beenreduced.Properly appre-ciated, however, interactivism changes intuitions about the significance ofthe gap.

The explanatory gap may nevertheless account for why some of thesubtlest anti-individualist philosophers have suggested that we might varythe intentional while holding phenomenology constant. Indeed, this isoften considered part and parcel of famous externalist thought experi-ments. Burge (1979), for instance, speaks of “Holding. . . non-intentionalphenomenal experience . . . constant” and varying intentional properties

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(Section IIb.f). Davidson (1987) allows this as well (448). Burge (1988)even speculates that

at least some aspects of one’s mental life are fixed by the chemical composition of one’sbody. One might call thesepure phenomenological feels.(653)

I see no reason for anti-individualism to permit this, and interactivism shallshow why not.

Before going on to consider the perception of color, let me say, first, thatI envision what I say here aboutvisualiaextending to the other modalitiesgiving rise to phenomenal experience: audition, olfaction, gustation, kin-esthesis. Second, I am all for granting intentional status to the phenomenalfeels of tickles, pains, orgasms, moods, and sudden insights,2 as well. Myview is that these stand to states of the body, as visual and other typicallyoutward-directed forms of perception stand to states of the environment.3

Not that there is a hard and fast line between inner and outer perception:For instance, haptic perception of deformations of the skin and articularstresses provides information about both the weights of objects and theposition of the body’s limbs.

I take all of these kinds of qualia to be introspectible activations ofour perceptual systems as they register the complex information-theoreticproperties they are designed, evolved, or trained to indicate. The processby which weintrospectthese qualia is just our testing the degree to whichwe can gain access to the information carried by our activated perceptualsystems. I fulfill the burden of making this plausible in Section 5 below.

We now turn to the “hard case” of techni-color qualia.

3. ATTACKS ON THE INTENTIONAL THEORY OF THE PHENOMENAL

Critics of the intentional theory of qualia claim that qualitative or phenom-enal contents and intentional contents come apart under at least variouscounterfactual circumstances – that experience is essentially more thancontent which has an aboutness to it: therednessof Ernie’s experiencehas a nonrepresentational quality. The most forceful nonintentionalist oflate has been Block, on whose attack I’ll dwell.

Block has devised arguments to substantiate his thesis that even if infact qualitative content and intentional content are always correlates, it ismetaphysically possible to decouple them, as when one gets inverted withrespect to the other. I’ll focus here on the two arguments which have provedto be of lasting significance. One of them fosters the intuition that inten-tional properties can vary even though phenomenal ones remain constant;and one cultivates the intuition that phenomenal ones can vary even though


intentional ones remain constant. They work together to counter all brandsof intentionalism on the market. The alleged possible property differencewould show, by Leibniz’ Law, that there is more to this aspect of the mentalthan intentionalism captures.

Before presenting the arguments, let me mention two requirements acase of property inversion must satisfy in order to be effective for the anti-intentionalist’s purposes. First, to be convincing, it ought to be a case inwhich either all the relevant intentional color properties of experience shiftwhile the phenomenal ones remain constant, or vice versa. Sophenomenalinversion should not show its effects in behavior-driving intentional states,like belief, since that would indicate that intentional properties had shiftedalong with phenomenal character. An inverted subject’s remark, “Peculi-arly, the grass now looks red”, would show as much. In effective inversionsof this kind, the beliefs and reports of the inverted subject regarding thecharacter of experience should have the same intentional contents as nor-mal subjects’. It is likewise necessary forintentionalinversion that subjectsbe unable to report the phenomenal sameness, since their ability to do sowould indicate an incomplete intentional inversion. In these ways, inver-sions must be behaviorally undetectable. Second, it must be possible toimagine in one worldbothsuch an inversionandall the nitty-gritty detailswhich intentionalists claim are relevant to the constitution of color exper-ience. Block must at least comply with these requirements to show thatintentionalists are mistaken.

I’ll present his arguments, and then two kinds of ultimately unsatisfyingintentionalist responses appealing to technical difficulties which attend theengineering of the inversions.

3.1. Block’s One-Two Punch

3.1.1. Inverted Earth4

You and your twin are separated at birth. You’re left on Earth, your twin isbrought to Inverted Earth, which is as much like Earth as possible, exceptfor this: each thing’s color is the complement of its counterpart on Earth.Ripe tomatoes there are green, although called ‘red’, and the sky is yellow,although called ‘blue’, and so forth. (So your twin’s skin pigmentation isappropriately altered.) However, your twin has magic lenses inserted intohis eyes so that ripe tomatoes look red to him, and the sky blue. Thus,your brain states are relevantly similar in your respective tomato- and sky-viewing situations.

[I]f you and your twin are looking at your respective skies, saying ‘Still blue’, you have ex-periences that have the same qualitative content, but inverted intentional content, and they

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are functionally inverted. Conclusion: the distinction between intentional and qualitativecontent is vindicated . . . (Block 1990, 67)

In a variant of the example, Block asks us to imagine that one night madscientists insert color inverting lenses into your eyes and substitute you foryour counterpart on Inverted Earth. Upon awakening, unsuspecting, youmight look out your window and say, “How green the grass”. Thanks tothe inverting lenses, you would enjoy the same overall janglings in thevisual cortex and other relevant parts of the visual system as used to beproduced in you by Earth’s green grass. Your statement would be false, ofcourse, since ‘green’ in your mouth means green, not red, the color of grasson Inverted Earth. But with time and conversance, you would assimilate toyour physical environs and social community, after which, your utterancesof ‘green’ would come to mean red, and your beliefs and remarks aboutthe colors of things would once again be systematically correct. Blockagain concludes: Same qualitative content, different intentional content.Distinction vindicated. QED.

Block need not have resorted to Inverted Earth to make the case. Ima-gine the perhaps more likely sort of scenario occurring onStar Trek: TheNext Generation.Of two identical twin human babies, one is fit with lensesand raised on one of the Enterprise’s holodecks running a simulation of In-verted Earth, and the other raised lens-less in another holodeck simulatingnormal Earth conditions. Intuitively, both have the same qualitative exper-ience, although different intentional contents. (Or, if you like,your eyescan be fit with lenses and you can be transported to the Inverted holodeck.)

Block’s variants on the Inverted Earth thought experiment provide twodistinct arguments that qualitative aspects of experience stay the samewhile intentional aspects vary. In the first variant, the important thing isthat thebrain statesof you and your twin remain relevantly similar. Block(1994) claims there is “a highly plausible principle that any materialistshould accept: that qualia supervene on physical constitution” (517), notintentional properties. This version of the thought experiment seems tosupport the principle: Where there is no difference in brain state, we don’timagine there would be a difference in qualia, even if there is an intentionaldifference. In the second variant, in which you are unknowingly takento Inverted Earth, the important thing is that at no point do younoticea phenomenal change, which, Block then concludes, indicates that therewas no such change, even though there was an intentional change.

Note that while the Inverted Earth example presents a challenge to whatmight be called strong intentionalism, which holds qualia are identical tocertain intentional properties of experience, it leaves intact a weaker inten-


tionalist thesis: No difference in qualia without a difference in intentionalproperties (see Note 1 above).

But this is where Block’s Inverted Spectrum argument comes in.

3.1.2. Inverted SpectrumTraditionally, the philosophers’ chestnut, the Inverted Spectrum hypo-thesis, involves imagining two persons who agree on the colors of objectsand the use of color vocabulary, but whose color experiences are never-theless inverted with respect to each other (see, e.g., Locke 1690/1959:Book II, Chapter 32, Section 15). As things stood, the trouble for the anti-intentionalist was that, given the inconclusiveness of reports, there wasno way to settle the issue about whether the inversion was genuine – inprinciple, no third party could compare the qualia and let us know whetherwe weren’t justsayingthere was a spectrum inversion. The verificationistrepudiation of this version of the Inverted Spectrum as paradigm nonsensemay have been too strong; but the thought experiment was inconclusive.

Then Block (1990, 61) conceived theintrapersonalversion of the hy-pothesis, which seems to alleviate the need for an “outside” opinion. Itunfolds in four phases. First, a normal subject enjoys normal color exper-iences att1. Next, the subject undergoes the spectral inversion, and issuesreports such as: “The sky looks yellow”, “Ripe tomatoes look green”, and“Lemons look blue”. In the third phase, our subject brings her use of colorterms and all other color-related dispositions into step with the communityand the environment, and even issues reports like: “The sky looks blue”,and “Roses are red”. Still, she remembers that colors used to seem dif-ferent to her until the final stage, which begins when the last memory ofher colorful past vanishes (due, say, to amnesia) – label that momentt2.Here we have timest1 and t2 such that the relevant intentional propertiesare invariant across them while the qualitative properties shift. Presto: thephenomenal varies while the intentional doesn’t. And the subjectreportedit. QED.

3.1.3. Engineering ChallengesBoth thought experiments are open to criticisms of an empirical nature: Itmight be denied that Inverted Earth affords an example in which qualia re-main constant while intentional contents shift, or that our color experienceseven could be inverted.

Evolutionary semantics, the view that much intentional content isphylogenetically fixed, is gaining a foothold in philosophy of mind today;5

and adherents like Dretske (1995) and Tye (1995) think Inverted Earth isunable to do the job Block assigns it. They argue that intentional phenom-

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enal contents given rise to by color detectors are fixed by natural selection.Whenever the green-detector is activated, it will give rise to an experienceas of the color of Earth’s grass and Inverted Earth’s ripe tomatoes. Yourtwin’s green-detector will maintain this intentional identity, bestowed uponit by evolution; and thanks to the inverting lenses, it will be activated at thesight of Inverted Earth’s red grass. Even if the semantics of your twin’slanguagewere in sync with Inverted Earthers, the intentional isomorph-ism would be incomplete: When you and your twin view your respectivetomatoes, thanks to the inverting lenses, you undergo the same qualitativestates; but thanks to the way evolution fixes the semantics of phenomenalrepresentation, the relevant intentional contents are also the same. For allthe example shows, then, intentional propertiesdo fix phenomenal ones.

To engineer a case which would convince evolutionary semanticists,one in which the qualitative constancy is accompanied by the right in-tentional variation, one might try to contrive a being unconstrained byphylogeny, a being, say, who comes into existence by accident, uncon-nected with any species, but who is physically type-identical to one of us.Block (forthcoming, Section 4) has done this (see also Rey 1998, Section2.4). He suggests that evolutionary semanticists will have to admit thatitsphenomenology would be fixed by its local physical structure. So if it werefit with inverting lenses and sent to Inverted Earth, its brain states would berelevantly type-identical to ours. And since it has no phylogeny to muddythe water, even evolutionary semanticists should admit that the qualia itenjoys upon viewing Inverted Earth’s red grass are the same as those weenjoy viewing Earth’s green grass.

Block’s argument will not impress Dretske (1995), who bites the bulletand argues that a being without a phylogeny is without not only qualitativecontent, but any content. In my (1998) I take in this phylogenetic orphanand argue that Dretske’s once-and-for-all evolutionary determination ofcontent is too rigid. Why shouldn’t a green-detector become a red-detectorthrough adaptation? And once we admit this possibility, we allow thatphylogeny won’t prevent twins’ intentional contents from undergoing fullinversion eventually – which I am prepared to allow. The real question,then, is about whether this brings phenomenological inversion in its train.

But there are empirical worries other than these. Other philosophershave attacked the possibility of behaviorally undetectable inverted spectraon the grounds that the asymmetric structure of phenomenal color spaceprevents a mapping of one set of hues onto another appropriately. Thedegrees of freedom for inversion are significantly constrained by the factsabout this space, such as that unique hues (green, blue, red, and yellow)must be mapped onto unique hues, and composite hues (e.g., orange) onto


composite hues to prevent behavioral detection. It is natural, as we haveseen, to suppose that the mapping might be determined by switching huesfor their complements (red for green, yellow for blue, etc.). But the numberof hue steps between yellow and green, 18, and red and blue, 31, differ.6

So a complement-flip-flop will not work.There are also the familiar asymmetries in reports of color experiences:

Red and yellow are experienced as “positive”, “advancing”, “warm”, andgreen and blue as “negative”, “receding”, and “cool”. Unless green is ex-perienced as warm after inversion this will give rise to different reports, andlikely different patterns of inference,7 which the requirements on effectivenonintentional inversion rule out. Block (1990) suggests that compensat-ory inversions of such experiential qualities as warm and cool might ironout this wrinkle. But this move suggests a horrible possibility: if all qualit-ative content can vary independently of intentional content in this way, weshould be able to imagine beings with pleasure and pain qualia invertedwith respect to ours – beings who prefer not to be bludgeoned, even thoughbludgeonings are associated with the qualia of experiences we describe aspleasurable, and who prefer backrubs, even though those are associatedwith our pain-qualia. Is it coherent to suppose that a pleasure and painqualia inversion might be behaviorally undetectable? At bottom, this worryis that if we grant Block’s stories, we concede that the experiences of hue –and all qualities– are epiphenomenal captives, essentially inert remaindersof conscious experience, which can neither be expressed, nor reported, norinfluence action in any way.8 And this fails to do justice to the potencythe qualities of experience seem to have to motivate action, to influencebehavior.

These considerations make the idea of the right kind of inversion ofour actual qualitative states sound like nonsense, and thus cast significantdoubt upon Block’s anti-intentionalism about them.

But, at least for the sake of argument, I propose to allow that theseengineering problems don’t cut to the core of the philosophical issues.Shoemaker (1981) has made a good case that this is so. He argued thateven if the empirical facts of theactual case render inversion absurd, asensiblecounterfactualcase of inversion can be made to work. That is,even if inversion is precluded in the human case, there could be beings likeus, but whose color experience is symmetrical. And if inversion is possibleand qualia aren’t exhausted by intentional contents for them, then whyshould they be for us?

So I grant that the possibility of phenomenal and intentional propertiesvarying differentially with respect to each other cannot be ruled out onaccount of the lately mentioned technical details – although I do not grant

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that it can’t be ruled out by other considerations. I conclude that there isenough room in logical space for Block’s position, and that his argumentsthus require other intentionalist rejoinders. To those I now turn.

4. WHY NOT A NARROW INTENTIONAL THEORY OF THE

PHENOMENAL?9

Some philosophers, such as Rey (1992a, 1992b, 1998), Tye (1994),10

and White (1994), think we can have our cake and eat it, too – thatcontra Block, we can remain true to intentionalism while preservingnonintentionalist intuitions about the internality of experience. The pro-posed compromise is that while thereare intrinsic, internal features ofexperience,all its features are nevertheless intentional. This mixed viewindividuates color-terms’ meanings partly by reference to which colorsthey represent (the externalist component), and partly in terms of head-bound syntactic properties of the vehicles that do the representing – modesof presentation (the internalist component).

These philosophers propose that the internal aspect of one’s color spacecan be determined by reference to both the above-mentioned linguisticdescriptions (of reds as advancing, and so forth), and something like be-liefs about the formal relations hues bear to one another, saturations, andbrightnesses, and about what objects of a given color one has experiencedbefore. The position or role of the computational concept |RED| in sucha descriptive internal network might pin it down enough to distinguish itfrom |GREEN|. In effect, these philosophers help themselves to modes ofpresentation supplied by putative narrow color contents to account for theways things seem.

In this section, I will explicate and argue against the narrow inten-tionalist position. It won’t be until Section 5 that Block’s arguments areeffectively countered, and a positive interactivist view developed by ref-erence to which the Inverted Earth and Inverted Spectrum stories can becorrectly evaluated.

4.1. Intentionalist Internality?

It is difficult to turn inward to attend to the intrinsic features of our ex-perience of say, a tree, without thereby turning outward to the tree itself.This is what is meant by saying perceptual experience isdiaphanous, ortransparentto its objects; and it has been remarked by philosophers atleast since Moore (1903, 450). However, many have asked, is it not also


obvious that there is some component of experience which resides whollyinside us?

Rey (1998) asks us to imagine a man who was red-green color blind, butignorant of this fact for years, having pretty well mastered the applicationof color vocabulary by “discriminating instead a property that co-varieswith hue” (ms., p. 15f.). Rey’s suggestions for this property is reflect-ance. Suppose the man then learns of his color blindness and undergoesa corrective operation. Surely, Rey suggests, our man can attend to thedifference in his experience of the tree before and after treatment; he willnotice an apparently “new property, not so much of the tree (he alwaysknew it was green), but of his experience considered in itself”.

Particularly when we attend in the way I imagined our newly color sighted man . . . mightattend to ‘the way red looks’, we seem to be attending not towhat is represented, but ratherto theway in which it is represented.The actuallyrepresentingfeatures recede: it’s, so tospeak, themodeof presentation, not the mode ofpresentationthat becomes important.(Rey 1998, Section 3.2.3)

This mode, says Rey (1998), “is narrow, supervening only on the nervoussystem of the experiencer” (ms., p. 17); hence, there’s more to colorexperience than wide content.

But this is too quick. As Rey knows, hue and reflectance, the propertyby reference to which our man used to determine color, donot covary.Hardin (1988) explains that many objects with dissimilar spectral reflect-ance profiles nevertheless belong to the same hue family (80–81). Andobjects with different relative spectral reflectance properties may look to bethe same color in daylight, but different colors under incandescent tungstenlight (47). Not to mention, there are chromatic phenomena such as holo-grams and color television which do not depend on reflected light; in thesecases, there simply is no reflectance to vary with color.11 Hence, before andafter the operation, the properties signaled in the world differ. What thenis to prevent wide intentionalists from explaining the phenomenologicaldifference in terms of the informational difference?

In Rey’s defense one might argue that, on many theories of function,even before the operation, the relevant subsystem of the color blind man’svisual system,C, had thefunctionof picking out color information for thecognitive system in which it is embedded. To callC a reflectance detectoris to assume – controversially – that its features taken in isolation wouldhave been the only determinants of its function. But, arguably, since colorwas the distal property that mattered to the larger system,C was a color-detector.12 Sure, when color and reflectance were pried apart, the colorblind man ran the risk of misrepresenting, say, red as brown. But thispossibility wouldn’t make for a difference in the wide content of color

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categorizations since the same distal properties are signaled in our manafter the operation as were signaled before. Still, something is different; itmust be the narrow content.

Stephen White (1994) gives a different argument that narrow contentis vindicated by the alleged failure of broad content to account for aninternal difference. We can conceive of a subject “whose similarity metricis atypical and who sees a significantly narrower band of the spectrum asred than does a normal subject” (497); the narrow content of the subject’sword ‘red’ is thus different than the broad content of the community’s.

But these sorts of argument defeat a strawman, a naive externalist viewabout intentional content which fails to recognize that it’s theinformation-theoretic propertiesof visual systems that matter to experience, the actualand counterfactual performance of the perceptual system’s discriminatoryability. The wide representationalist need not hold that the property in theworld which is represented is all that matters to the quality of experience,as Rey and White suppose. The information picked up by the newly colorsighted mandoesshift, even if both his old and new visual systems countas color detectors. His new one performs differently: He no longer guesseshue on the basis of reflectance; he can finally reliably sort colors in allcounterfactual situations, and make distinctions inside the classes specifiedby his former color categorization abilities.

Consider an analogy. Of two relatively reliable tests for strep throat, theELISA test works by checking chemically for an antigen, which is a partof the offending agent itself (a bacterium called Group A Streptococcus),while an ASO TITER test checks for antibodies produced in response tothe presence of the agent.13 Note that it is theuseto which the tests are putthat makes them strep-detectors rather than antigen- or antibody-detectors.There is significant overlap or agreement in the tests’ results. But there areinformational differences due to their different sensitivities: For instance,since there are rare disease states of the body, such as syphilis, which canfool the ASO TITER, it can produce false positives in some cases in whichthe ELISA yields true negatives; yet the ELISA might produce more falsenegatives overall than the ASO TITER, while the ASO TITER yields morefalse positives; etc. A negative result from an ELISA test carries differentinformation than the same result from an ASO TITER.14

Likewise, two thermometers both measure temperature, but the onemounted on the wall and the one designed for use in brewing are calibrateddifferently, and so detect different information – one has the ability to makediscriminations the other doesn’t. In both these cases, the devices detect thesame distal property, but have different information-theoretic properties.


If information-theoretic properties specify the grain and shape of inten-tional directedness, then detecting the same property in the world need notgive rise to experience with the same qualitative character. Determiningwhat distal properties devices like disease tests or perceptual systems havethe function of signaling is not just a matter of what information theycarry; it’s a matter of theuseto which they’re put. But use, as we’ve seen,collapses information-theoretic distinctions. Hence, no reason has beengiven to think the newly color sighted man entertains new, nondiaphonousproperties, nor have we reason to think we need White’s “narrow red”,since, in such cases, the obviously different qualities of experience can beidentified with the informational differences.

Tye (1994) proposes a different route to the internality intuition. Histhesis is that there is something so intrinsic about looking square thatsomething could havethat phenomenal look even ifthat look failed tobe the way square things normally looked (163) – andthat look is quiteindependent of the environment (169). To see this, claims Tye, we needonly imagine a possible world in which somex looks square without look-ing the way square things normally look. So suppose a world in which,due to odd atmospheric conditions, triangles normally look square, andsquares octagonal. In these circumstances, ifx were a triangle, it wouldbe true thatx looks square, but false thatx looks the way square thingsnormally look; if x were an octagon it would be false thatx looks square,and true thatx looks the way square things normally look. Now imaginethat Ernie is looking at a square on Earth, and the recently imagined coun-terfactual conditions obtain on Twin Earth, where his twin’s brain is ina state physiochemically identical to his, only he’s looking at a triangle.“Intuitively”, Tye says, having the same brain states guarantees that “visualexperiences are phenomenally identical” (168). “So, visual experienceshave, in one clear sense of the term, narrow intentional contents” (169).

If this is right, it’s hard to imagine what could account for the squarelook entertained by the Ernies if not that ‘looks square’ picks out an in-ternal thought constituent, the tokening of which is sufficient to producethat intrinsic look. That rules out wide content as an explanation of thelook, but not narrow.

It remains to be seen whether these modal claims about truth-values arecorrect. Of course it may be true that in the imagined world retinal imagesproduced by viewing triangles are square. But would that mean triangleslook square? For the time being I’ll leave the question open, and return toit at the end of Section 5.2 below.

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4.2. Computation and Intrinsic Looks

Rey and Tye argue that the way to specify intrinsic mode-of-presentation-properties of experience is by reference to the computational roles ofmodule output representations – which are supposed to fix the narrowcontents of sensory symbols.15 Modular visual processes operate on retinalinput in a fixed and autonomous manner (Tye 1994, 165), insensitive toholistic facts, such as the normal appearance of red things (they’re inform-ationally encapsulated).16 Rey (1998) explains, “to enjoy a red experienceis to stand in a certain computational relation to a special, ‘restricted’ pre-dicate in one’s language of thought”, a module output which enters intoprocessing in characteristic ways (ms., p. 6; cf. his 1992b). The relativesimplicity of these outputs explains the feeling that qualitative aspects ofexperience, like color, are simple, apparently nonconceptual, and hard todescribe – like Ernie’s experience of his tomato, with the account of whichI began the paper.

This view rests on the empirical hypothesis that there are internalsymbols with stable, peculiar, internal causal-functional roles (Rey 1998,Section 3.2.4). Tye (1994), for instance, bets this will be true of onlyrepresentations of things like colors, simple shapes, and relative distances(1994, 165f.): only these are processed modularly; hence only they cangive rise to intrinsic looks. The rest of the looks – thenonintrinsic ones– involve extra-modular processes which operate on representations ofshapes, colors, sizes, and textures, and compare them with backgroundbeliefs to produce new beliefs, such as that what’s being seen is a feline.

Narrow intentionalists have available a neat response to the InvertedEarth argument, namely, that the relevant intentional contents entertainedby you and your twin aren’t completely different at all. Since the compu-tational role of the relevant representations tokened in you as you look atEarth’s ripe tomatoes is isomorphic with those tokened in your twin uponviewing Inverted Earth’s ripe tomatoes, you share a narrow meaning, andthus both experience the same intrinsic look. This view actually predictsthat you should have the same phenomenology. Rey (1998, Section 2.5)even claims we have reason to think that your Inverted Earth twin’s in-trinsic red-experiences will seem exciting and advancing. After all, fixingsuch computational facts as are definitive of intrinsic red might automat-ically instantiate the causal powers which bring about these introspectibleeffects. If so, it might be claimed that narrow intentionalism explains thelaws of perceptual psychology which subsume these facts about colorexperience.

This point might be criticized by evolutionary semanticists. If the twinis your Earth blood-twin. then evolution explains the role of the red-


detector’s detector’s outputs in cognition: Red is experienced as advancingand exciting, say, because in the evolutionary context it was associatedwith fire, blood, and danger. But if the twin shares an evolutionary historywith Inverted Earthers, there is no non-question-begging reason to thinkyour twin’s intrinsic red-experiences, rather than green-experiences, wouldbe like yours in these respects. Since green played the corresponding rolein that evolutionary context, thanks to the inverting lenses, your twin wouldinstead experience the color of Inverted Earth grass as exciting.17 OnRey’s view, however, these historical facts at best set up narrow contentby helping fix computational roles; they aren’t constitutive of it.

The narrow intentionalist’s response to Block’s Inverted Spectrum ar-gument is less clever, but palatable: Deny it is possible. The identity ofthe computational roles of sensory symbols before and after inversionguarantees identity of phenomenology.18

The computational take on intrinsicality holds out other possibilities,too. For instance, Dennett is fond of claiming there is no fact of the matteras to whether phenomenal content itself shifts or just our reactions to it.He (1988: 526ff.) discusses a case in which professional coffee tastersdispute why they no longer enjoy the taste of Maxwell House: Has timetaken its toll on the perceptual machinery (so it no longer tastes like it usedto)? Or have their reactions to that very taste become more sophisticated?Dennett maintains that the question is misconceived, since it presupposesa false distinction between the apprehension of an inner presentation, anda judgment about it (cf. Dennett 1991, 392). However, the narrow inten-tionalist can insist that there is a fact of the matter: Either the taste modulenow outputs different types of representations than it used to, or changeselsewhere in the cognitive system have caused the changes in judgment, orboth.

4.3. Phenomenology and Computation

The narrow intentionalist theory of qualia depends on a dubious harmon-ization of computation with phenomenology. We have no reason to believeconsciously accessible phenomenological content will be so much as agood index of representations’ computational roles. It would be unsurpris-ing if, from the phenomenological point of view, we are unable to discerna perceptual deliverance which is the direct output of a module19 from onewhich has been operated on by intervening computational comparativeprocesses, and only then becomes consciously accessible.20 It’s a truismof cognitive psychology that many mental operations are cognitively im-penetrable by consciousness. So the phenomenological and computationalmight turn out to be different levels of organization.

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What we know about other higher level sciences, such as informa-tion science, suggests that such relations between levels of organizationare ubiquitous.21 Just as the multiple realizability of higher levels of or-ganization allows informational structures to be implemented in multipleways, it might permit the phenomenological content,x looks red, to betokened without any systematically corresponding computational token.And just as the context dependence of systems’ lower level features allowssyntactically type-identical objects or properties to implement differentinformational properties, lower level computational features might imple-ment different phenomenological properties on different occasions.22 Andsince one cannot insist a priori that phenomenology be mapped onto com-putations, we have yet no reason to think phenomenological judgmentsinvolving ‘looks red’-type expressions will be telling of computationalunderpinnings.

If Tye and Rey insist that intrinsicality is a function of computationaldetails, they must accept the counterintuitive result that, since we mayoften be unaware of computational facts,we ourselves might be unawareof how things intrinsically look to us.And to avoid this conclusion byassuming that module output representations supply modes of presentationin the phenomenological sense is to beg the question.

Of course, that thereneedn’t be a clean mapping between compu-tation and phenomenology does not imply that thereisn’t one. Even ifwe knew there were, the data we presently have merely hint at how acompleted computationalist account would gerrymander experience intophenomenologically intrinsic and non-intrinsic features. Maybe lookingred, square, and far away will turn out to be processed modularly; andmaybe looking feline and expensive won’t. If language turns out to beprocessed modularly for the most part – as it’s widely believed to be –then the narrow intentionalist will count complicated things like the logicalforms of sentences as intrinsic features of experience. The modularity ofword recognition would imply that the factsthat ‘fuse’ is a word, but that‘fghes’ is not a wordare intrinsic features of’ experience. Such pills are nottoo bitter, and I see no reason why narrow intentionalists shouldn’t acceptthem.

But it could also turn out that something’s looking red is no moreintrinsic than its looking feline. Consider some of the ways in which extra-modular information about context often matters to experienced color. Justas we experience objects as having constant shapes in spite of flux ofthe retinal image (due to shifting perspective or saccadic movements), weexperiencecolor constancyof objects in spite of the chromatic flux on theretinal image (caused by shadows, refraction, and a host of other variables).


It has been remarked that a piece of coal in sunlight appears darker than apiece of white paper in the shadows, even though the coal sends more lightto the eye (Hardin 1988, 83; 1990, 561). A red piece of paper folded so asto cast a shadow on itself is perceived as uniformly red, even the shadowedregion corresponding to the dark gray patch on the retinal image.

But there are also experimental data suggesting that color phenomeno-logy is fixed by more than just straightforward operations on retinal input,and may involve holistic cognitive factors.

Consider the phenomenon ofmemory color, in which subjects tendto see the colors they expect to see. Wasserman (1978, 110) reports thatsubjects see stereotypically green shapes as greener than shapes without astereotypical color. Subjects asked to match test shapes of the same greencolor with target color samples of varying saturation match tree shapesrather than star shapes to the target green with the highest saturation eventhough all the shapes are cut from the same paper. Beck (1972, 147–148)reports that subjects see orange shapes of characteristically red things, suchas apples and hearts, as being closer in color to red than orange shapesassociated with no characteristic color, even when they are cut from thesame orange paper.23 The “locations” of objects in color space appear tobe at least weakly sensitive to noncolor categories into which they fall.

Further, Rosch (1975) has shown that the internal structures of colorcategories are organized around naturalprototypes, and that more pro-totypical members of categories are recognized more quickly than poorcategory exemplars. Presumably reaction times are longer when represent-ations of nonprototypical category members are being processed becauseclassifying these requires more comparisons with representations of lessprobable instances or features associated with the category. Rosch alsofound that antecedent knowledge of category names significantly affectsperformance – indicating that the process of color recognition is cognit-ively penetrable, and to that extent, less modular. So colors might not evenbe candidate intrinsic qualities in the computationalist sense anyway.

Psychological data tell against intrinsic perceptual features in othersensory modalities as well, such as audition. For instance, phoneme per-ception, although categorical, seems to be sensitive to extra-modular visualinformation elsewhere in the cognitive system (McGurk and MacDonald1976; Massaro 1987; Dekle et al. 1992), and higher level information aboutsemantic context (Warren 1970; Samuel 1991).

We thus have reason to doubt that computation plays the role narrowintentionalists want it to in the production of color (and other) experience– thus, to doubt that modularized outputs are to be seen as equiva-

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lent to phenomenologically salient representations, internalist modes ofpresentation.

Block has his own argument against the narrow content view of qualia,and it’s worth mentioning. According to Block, narrow content about coloris constituted by descriptive beliefs sufficient to individuate each colorfrom the rest; but the right kind of amnesiac word lack these beliefs, yetcould experience color qualities; hence, narrow content cannot account forcolor experience.24 One might even argue that, quite apart from the am-nesiac possibility, you, your Twin Earth twin,andan Inverted Earth twinwithout inverting lenses, all share narrow color contents. After all, if In-verted Earthers experience green as advancing, and so on, then the narrowcausal role of the state your Inverted Earth twin occupies when lookingat local (green) tomatoes can be construed as narrowly type-identical tothat tokened in you when you view local (red) tomatoes. That these arenevertheless different color experiences is shown by the fact that were youto view your twin’s garden, you would remark the color differences, andvice versa. So, if there is a phenomenal difference, it is not captured bynarrow content. Block is right here: Inverted Earth shows that a qualiadifference couldn’t consist in an internal functional difference.25 If that’swhat narrow content supervenes on, then it fails to do the trick.

White (1994) suggests that a way out might be found if appeal be madeto an adaptation of narrow content which allows “discriminative skills andcapacities”, and not just internal functional roles, to help individuate con-tents. This gets things backwards though. It implicitlyassumesthat certaindispositions – nonintentionally characterized – can be said to be discrimin-ative of something. But the way to individuate a clump of dispositions as askill-for-discriminating-red is by reference to what in the world it detects,red – which adverts to broad content. In the next section, I shall argue,contra Block and the narrow intentionalists, that nothing short of advertingto our color-detectors-in-context will suffice to give the content of colorexperiences. While representations in the head may help implement qual-itative content, such content isn’t specifiable – even in part – by referenceto properties of the head, but requires reference to what in the world isintended, represented, signaled. So stop the sun and start up the earth.

5. INTERACTIVISM AND THE PHENOMENAL

The interactivist picture of how informational links between organism andworld support qualitative content shall provide a more subtle account of therelations between the phenomenal and other levels of organization than doeither Rey’s and Tye’s computationalism or Block’s physiochemical view;


there are also more empirical data which support it. The visual systemkeeps color intentionality up to date by adaptation to contingencies in theenvironment thanks to heterogeneous updated links between organism andworld, at many levels of organization, and on many time-scales.

After situating my view in relation to a complementary program in psy-chology, I give my promised replies to Block, which, it turns out, requirean interactivist theory of color memory, the outline of which, finally, I alsoprovide.

5.1. Pure Experience of A World

The theoretical background against which narrow intentionalist argumentsare most plausible isconstructivism, according to which perception isso rich thanks to rich models of the environment built up by cognitiveprocesses on the basis of a relatively impoverished sampling of stimuli.Helmholtz (1925), for instance, held that even the perception of objects assingle bodies requires elaborate construction: “It is only by comparing theimages of the two eyes . . . that the idea of solidbodies is obtained” (23).It’s hard to get Humpty together again; on this sort of view, the cognitiveresources allotted for perceptual processes are spent on performing thesecomparisons so as to reconstruct a picture of the world. It is thus temptingfor constructivists to suppose that what consciousness beholds is a modeof presentation, a world-model, an epistemic mediator, “one of the links inthe cause-and-effect chain that binds the perceiver to the distal cause of hispercept in the world” (Shaw and Bransford 1977, 12).

William James (1904a) remarked that these

theories of perception . . . violate the . . . sense of life, which knows no intervening mentalimage but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.(9)26

As Hegel would have it, there is an antithetical research program in thefield, usually associated with James J. Gibson, which respects WilliamJames’ intuition, namely, ecological psychology. The bald claim of thisapproach is that perception as such consists in a direct epistemic linkto the world – that the distal causes of perception, objects and proper-ties in the world, and not retinal images or internal models, comprise theclass of things with which our beliefs, actions,and experiential contentscorrelate.27 An analogy will shed light on how this could be so. Considerthe polar planimeter, a device which measures directly, without calculationor internal modeling, the area of any plane figure. It consists of an arm con-nected to a measuring wheel which skids and rotates as it traces the figure’sboundary such that the total angle of rotation consequent to a complete cir-cuit of the figure is directly proportional to the area of the figure.28 For this

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device, measuring qua measuring is not a matter of internal modeling andcalculation, but of its interactivity with plane figures. Itembodiesabstractmathematical principles: It isbuilt so that, given its manner of interaction,it will register that complex property.

Gibson’s insight was his recognition that our perceptual systems arelike that: they don’t have to construct all of the properties in the distalenvironment they were constructed for detecting. Perceptual acts qua per-ceptual acts are a matter of interactivity with the perceived world, and notessentially of internal modeling. At the level of organization at which suchacts occur, there is no epistemic mediation: perceivers don’t perceive in-ternal constructsinstead ofthe world; theyperceivethe world.29 To contortthe title of one of James’ essays, in this sense, we havepure experience ofa world, unfiltered by internal constructs.

But that there is noepistemicmediation does not mean there isno causal mediation or implementation. Of course there are chem-ical, physiological, maybe computational, and other physically mediatingevents at lower levels of organization on which perceptual experiencesupervenes. An example due to Shaw and Bransford (1977b) makes thedistinction clear: In hearing a Beethoven piano concerto over the radio,

We should no more count the properties of these electromechanical media as an intrinsicpart of the perception of the music than we should count the vibratory activities of ourcochlear or neural transmissions. (32)

What is heard is the concerto, not the mediators. Experience itselfinvolves seeingthrough the intrinsic properties of information-bearerstowhat is intended through them (cf. Harman 1990, 41).30

According to interactivism, the perceptual-phenomenological is con-stituted as a distinct level of organization due to agent-environmentinteractivity: What might be called the “subjective pole” of this relationconsists in agent skills for picking up the relevant kinds of information; the“objective pole” consists in the adequacy of the environment as a sourceof information (given the kinds of information gathering skills brought tobear on it). Neither pole is sufficient in isolation. Together they generate ataxonomy of perspectival properties which falls out of the way organismscarve up the environment.31

Interactivism’s emphasis on the objective side of the relation preventsthe underestimation of the role of theworld in constituting phenomenalexperience, of which nonintentionalist and narrow intentionalist views areguilty.

[Theories] of direct perception in no way belittle the richness of perceptual experience. . . but they have sought the basis of that perceptual richnessnot in the elaboration done bycognitive processes butin the richness of the stimulation.(Michaels and Carello 1981, 9)


Dennett (1991) is in harmony with interactivism on this point:

When we marvel . . . at the glorious richness of our conscious experience, the richness wemarvel at is actually the richness of the world outside, in allits ravishing detail. It does not‘enter’ our conscious minds . . . (408)

Its ready availability to us constitutes the objective pole of conscious-ness.

Interactivism’s emphasis on the subjective side guards against the tend-ency of overzealous “externalists” to neglectagents’ capacities. After all, itis agents that have to be able to pick up the information. It is only becauseof the way our visual systems are built that a high rate of symmetricaloutflow of part of the optic array can signal collision for us (Gibson 1977,73). It is only because our visual systems can represent distal edges thatglimpsing top-right and bottom-left edges forming right angles in suitableopposition (and in an appropriate environmental setting) can indicate adoor (Kirsh 1991, Section 2). It is only because we can move our headsfrom side to side that our visual systems can enhance depth perception byexploiting the fact that the rate of optical flow of points in the visual arrayis inversely proportional to the distance of the environmental points fromthe observer; farther points translate more slowly (Mace 1977, 47f.).32 Ina legion of such cases, the way we are built is what allows us to pick upsuch information about the distal layout of the environment as we do.

By design or use, our perceptual systems constantly exploit regularitiesof structures in the environment. Biederman (1995) makes this especiallyclear in his discussion of the presuppositions of the visual system. Forinstance,

. . . a straight edge in the image is perceived as being a projection of a straight edge inthe three-dimensional world. The visual system ignores the possibility that a (highly un-likely) accidental alignment of eye and a curved edge is projecting the image. Hence suchproperties have been termednonaccidental. . . On those rare occasions when an accidentalalignment of eye and edge does occur – for example, when a curved edge projects an imagethat is straight – a slight alteration of viewpoint or object orientation readily reveals thatfact. (126)

Because of our manner of visual interactivity with the environment, curvededges almost never appear straight (for long).33 These examples illustratethat the moreour structure presupposes about the structure of the world,the less needs to be computed by the head; and the more our skills makethe world’s structure readily available to us, the less needs to be explicitlystored in the head.

The deepest facts we know about color fit nicely into this perspective –namely, that color seems to be the upshot of an animal-environment agree-ment. Color researcher and founder of the Polaroid company Land (1977)

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has admitted that given our current knowledge, “there is no obvious phys-ical quantity at a point that will enable us to specify the color of an object”(115); and given our current technology, “only our eyes can categorizethe colors of objects; spectrophotometers cannot” (108). This curiosity isdue to thecontext-dependenceand extrememultiple realizabilityof colors:ambient energy of the same composition may be perceived as differentcolors in different contexts, or by different animals; and light distributionscomposed of light of different wavelengths may be indistinguishable interms of their color. This latter phenomenon, calledmetamerism, reflectsthe fact that for our visual systems, indefinitely many triples of properlyadjusted spectral lights – each absorbed by one of the three cone typeson the retina – can give rise to one and the same color (see Hardin 1988,26–28).

Colors are complicated distal properties in the environment; but they’renot intrinsic to objects taken in isolation from any observer class, asproperties couched in terms of objects’ objective physical features wouldbe. There are no plausible candidate objectivist counterfactual supportingdefinitions of any color, such that all and only surfaces of objects whichhave the (possibly disjunctive) physical property specified by the definitionare that color (Hardin 1988, 61–65). The bunches of objects which sharetheir colors are curiously gerrymandered by reference to common effectsthey produce in us, which we call ‘colors’. As White (1994) nicely putsit, “the notion of fool’s gold is clearly intelligible, whereas the idea of anobject’s being fool’s red – that is, of its being indistinguishable in colorfrom red objects under normal circumstances without being red – is lessobviously coherent” (472). Again, this is not to say the colors exist merelyin us. Things really do have their colors; it’s just that colors are context-dependent properties which emerge from the interactivity of the systemswe have for detection and the information light provides us about objects.

The groundwork for a reply to Block is now laid; but before going on Iwant to suggest how the interactivist intentionalist account, when extendedto qualitative aspects of experience quite generally,34 provides a satisfyinganswer to Thomas Nagel’s (1974) what-is-it-like question. Nagel arguedthat there are some facts that exhibit point-of-viewiness which will neverbe captured by an objective physicalistic scientific theory; hence, material-ism is false as a general theory about the world. If, however, the propertiesof experienceemergeas a result of the interactivity of the organism’s dis-criminatory capacities and the world, then it should be no surprise thatthere are facts to which epistemic access cannot be gained by beings notconstituted in the right way – by beings whose perceptual systems lack therelevant information-theoretic properties.


Information-theoretic differences are a commonplace. First, differentorganisms often segment the same informational continua differently. Notall color sighted animals carve up the wavelength spectrum the same way.Data suggest, for instance, that pigeons make hue discriminations withinwhat constitutes a human hue category, yellowish-green (Jacobs 1981,117f.). And Platt et al. (1996) showed that ecological considerations fordifferent mammalian species, such as feeding patterns, were good predict-ors of performance in color memory tasks – their visuospatial memoryabilities were specialized for tracking the spatial and color properties oftheir principal foods. Second, organisms are often sensitive to differentkinds of information. Bats tap sound waves for information about thelayout of the distal environment. Dogs can’t make the color distinctionswe can, but many of them can pick out location by sound better than wecan because of enhanced high frequency hearing and the design of theirreshapeable ears. Finally, Dretske (1995, 95) points out that even if we didknow what it’s like in a certain respect to perceive using bat sonar, thereare many other (perspectival) properties, simultaneous awareness of whichconstitutes bat experience; and without appreciation of the whole mix, wefail to know what it’s like.

The interactivist might even agree with Nagel that knowing all thenonperspectival physical facts about the experience of, say, bats, willleave out what it’s like to be a bat. But that does not mean that all ofthe information-theoretic properties which comprise bat experience (andonly those properties) leave out what it’s like. Just as the language ofphysics can’t capture properties referred to in, say, biology or econom-ics (see Fodor 1974), such information-theoretic properties as humans areable to express might not be enough to allow expression of propertiesof bat experiences.35 But interactivism shows that this does not refutematerialism or intentionalism in any case.

5.2. Reply to Block

Internalists claim to have established that there are properties of experienceconstituted by purely inner factors, and that arguments to the contraryeither fail or are unmotivated. My purpose in the rest of this paper isto show not only specifically how wide intentionalism about qualia ispossible, but that it is well motivated, too – better than its competitors.I won’t be arguing that therecould notbe relevant internalist propertiesof experience, but rather that internalists don’t have a good attack on myindependently motivated picture. And since my arguments lend wide inten-tionalism about qualia more plausibility than it has generally been granted,they are not merely defensive.

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In this section, I will programatically stake out an interactivist positionin logical space by means of interactivist reinterpretations of the Inver-ted Spectrum and Inverted Earth stories, distinct from nonintentionalistand narrow intentionalist interpretations. Then, in Section 5.3, I will fill-in a theory which explains how this sketch could be right – how colorphenomenal content could emerge from organism-environment interactiv-ity, and how it might be that the thesis of the local supervenience of thephenomenal on the functional or physical is mistaken, contra our cast ofinternalists.

Recall Block’s 4-stage Spectrum Inversion. Stage 2 begins with spectralinversion, and in stage 3 the subject adjusts linguistic and other disposi-tions to the new look of the world; in 4, the subject forgets the relevantfacts about stage 1. Block takes it that qualitative aspects of experienceare switched while everything else is the same before and after. Inter-activism suggests that this telling gets the empirical details wrong, thatinstead, everything is the same before and after, although there are qual-itative and intentional switches in between. During stage 2 and part of 3,interactivity and feedback from the world about the colors of things allowspre-inversion green-detectors to adapt and become red-detectors.36 At thepoint in stage 3 at which the informational properties of the perceptualsystems reach isomorphism with stage 1, the subject would experiencecurrent perceptions as coherent with stage 1’s pre-inversion perceptions –both as representing fire trucks as red and clover as green. They would beseen as red and greenagain.By the time the intentional is completely backto usual, so is the phenomenal. Hence, contrary to what is often assumedthe subject would recall stage 2’s perceptions as different than stage 4’s,not stage 1’s.37 (So Block’s stipulation that stage 1 memories are forgottenis irrelevant.)

At stage 2, while adjustments to inversion are in the works, thingswould seem strangely inverted. The color detectors which informed oneof green now “go off” in the presence of red (and vice versa), and fixingthis takes time. The phenomenological oddity here is that one has to con-sciously compensate for one’s perceptual deliverances about color, muchas one has to consciously deliberate about movements if one plays a videogame with the joystick upside down, or attempts to copy a fine drawingwhile watching the mirror image of one’s drawing hand. But in these cases,if adjustment is achieved, phenomenologyunnoticeablyreturns to normal.

This prediction is empirically supported by research on the ability ofperceptual systems to recalibrate their information-conducing propertiesto the world. Sometimes in nerve damage patients who experience nosensations at the ends of their fingers past, say, the first knuckle, nerve


tissue is transplanted from the thigh. Interestingly, when these patients arepin-pricked at the finger-tip immediately after the procedure they reportsensations as of a pin prick at the first knuckle. Over time, however, thequalitative feels come to seem located where the stimulation is present.Clark (1993) points out that although there is a spot on the retina, themacula, which yellows as age advances – and changes the informationabout wavelength received by the brain – there is no noticeable change inthe quality of color-as-perceived, in qualitative content (170). Finally, inthe much-discussed studies on visual field inverting goggles (reviewed inWelch 1978), the world comes to seem normal to many visually invertedsubjects to the point that they can go about their lives as usual. Subjectswho adjusted most thoroughly did not think of their visual fields as upsidedown. In all of these cases, after recalibration, informational properties arerestored or preserved, and with them, experiential properties.

The interactivist response to the Inverted Earth argument, then, is clear:deny Block’s intuition that ripe tomatoes would look red to his twin; theywould come to look green, since that’s the color of tomatoes on InvertedEarth. Their looking green to him is just a matter of the information-bearing states in him being linked to the world so as to signal green underwhat have become normal conditions. There is a similar response availableto Tye’s (1994) alleged possible world in which, when beings like us per-ceive triangles, they normally look square. The coherence of the describedstate of affairs is itself doubtful. If atmospheric distortions caused trianglesto systematically project square shapes on our retinas, after adaptation,those retinal patterns would give rise to experiences as of triangles, notsquares. That is what those signals would be informative about.

Interactivist intentionalism about the phenomenal is thus a distinct,competing theoretical possibility. Its correctness would show that Blockmis-imagines both the Inverted Spectrum and the Inverted Earth scenarios– that he fails to imagine either all the relevant factors in one possibleworld, or at least one of the factors in sufficient detail. So, next, I locatethe Achilles’ heel of Block’s arguments and provide an extension of andmotivation for my account which leaves no doubt about the inadequacy ofhis case.

5.3. Interactivist Color Memory

Both of Block’s arguments depend on the principle that when subjectsdon’t notice a phenomenological difference there is none. In his intraper-sonal Inverted Spectrum case, the subject reports the difference betweenstage 1 and stage 2, but doesn’t report any transition from stage 2 to 3;hence, Block concludes, there is no phenomenological change between

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the latter two. Block himself makes clear where the principle is invoked inthe Inverted Earth example in his (1996) elaboration:

Imagine that on the birthday before you leave for Inverted Earth you are looking at a clearblue sky. Your visual experience represents it as blue. Years later, you have a birthday partyon Inverted Earth and you look at the Inverted Earth sky. Your visual experience representsit as yellow . . . But the phenomenal character remains the same, as indicated by the factthat you can’t tell the difference. So, there is a gap between the representational content ofexperience and its phenomenal character. (43)

The principle assumes that memory will faithfully preserve the colors ofthings and color relationships.

I shall challenge this assumption and argue for an interactivist view ofcolor memory, on which the accurate retrieval of color memory contentsdepends on the subject’s relationship to the environment: The subject nevernotices a change in qualia because ofslow compensatory adjustments tothe mechanisms which recall memories of how things used to seem.38

Agents’ inability to detect these changes in the color qualities of theirexperiences should be seen in the same light as their inability to detectcontent switches after they’ve lived on Twin Earth a while.

Block is not impressed by this move, as he thinks it pathetic to trot inexternalism about memory of phenomenal character to defend wide inten-tionalism about phenomenal character. According to Block, intentional-ism about phenomenal memory content

says that the memories of representational contents are wrong, so the memories are wrongtoo. But that is just toassumethat as far as memory goes, phenomenal character is rep-resentational content. For the argument to have any force, there would need to be someindependent reason for taking externalism about phenomenal memory seriously. (1996,45)

Likewise, Rey (1998) complains that “such accounts would need to beindependently motivated in order not to seem ad hoc” (ms., p. 20). Whatfollows is the requested motivation.

5.3.1. Intentionality and Perceptual MemoryThe picture I defend of how color memory actually works is based ona model of memory widely accepted among cognitive psychologists.Barbara Tversky (1997) captures some of its relevant essential features:

. . . [M]emory . . . is not . . . like files of information or in this case, fadingphotographs, ofstimuli encoded or representations established of particular events, tagged as such andstored away . . . . [E]vents are encoded and represented in multiple ways that are not ne-cessarily integrated. At retrieval, there is a search for information and reconstruction of anevent constrained by the situation at retrieval and facilitated by inferential processes. (272)


My point shall be that recall of color is no exception: it does not involveconsulting internal, stable records, but a process of generation. It’s nottoo misleading in this context to think of memories of episodes of colorperception in terms of computational metaphors – as schematically en-coded, encrypted, compressed, zipped, whatever, for efficient storage inbins.39 Recalling a memory then requires the right decoder. In this way,color memories are like juice concentrates: For efficient storage, somethingreplaceable is taken out and re-added on an as-needed basis. Needlessreplication of elements common to many memories would violate soundprinciples of cognitive economy.

There is evidence that, as the cognitive division of labor has it, thedecoder for color information borrows visual color codes from a currentcoding mechanism, which is hooked-up to the color sensors of the per-ceptual system. Correct color memories depend on the sensors’ propercalibration. So recall is a ceteris paribus affair. If nothing has changed, thenwhen memory reconstruction mechanisms reverse the process of encoding,one re-entertains that same content. If encoding rules have been re-written,recall will undergo a corresponding shift. In the Inverted Earth and InvertedSpectrum cases, I claim that feedback from the world into the visual systemresults in such a returning of the coding mechanisms.

This theory of color memory does constrain possible cognitive architec-tures, but, in many respects, in ways we already know they’re constrained,as I shall now show. (So this is not the ad hoc special pleading on behalfof color memory against which Block railed.)

Memory is relatively fragile. Psychologists have long known aboutwhat’s calledretroactive interferencewith episodic, or event, memory,which occurs when later experiences affect a distortion of an originalmemory, as when subjects are fed misinformation which leads them toreconstruct memories incorrectly. Psychologists have become pretty goodat implanting false event memories about, for instance, being lost in ashopping mall (Loftus and Pickrell 1995), or knocking over a punch bowlat a wedding (Hyman et al. 1995).40 Memory for imagery and color isno exception. Psychologists have been documenting subjects’ tendency toinaccurately “fill-in” imagistic aspects of remembered experiences for along time (see Bartlett 1932). Loftus’ (1977) research on shifting colormemory shows how easily color properties of event memories can betampered with: Witnesses to a staged automobile accident in which a greencar crashes can be made to “remember” that it was blue.

It might be thought that these subjects must have had vague memories,but that others, whose memories were more vivid would perform better.But Friderike Heuer et al. (1986) have shown that people who report

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having vivid visual memories perform less accurately on tasks of colormemory than others. And Yuille and Cutshall (1986) have shown inac-curacies in color memory in a real-life case of eyewitnesses to a murder,even when most other aspects of memory were highly accurate.

Color memory also degenerates relatively quickly. White and Mont-gomery (1976) showed that people begin to lose the ability to remembercolors as soon as color stimuli are removed: When asked to adjust a col-orimeter to match afterimages that resembled either a red-white-and-blueAmerican flag or a simple striped pattern, subjects matched the afterimagesof stripes in a flag pattern as redder than afterimages of thesame stripesin a simple striped pattern.41 Especially interesting, given my appeal toinformation-theoretic properties, is the recent work of Massaro and Loftus(1996) on the degeneration of vivid iconic memories; they claim that theidentity of the informational and phenomenological properties of thesememories is suggested by the precise coordination of their decay.

Still more evidence for the possibility of color shifting in memorycomes from research which shows that color aspects of memory are infact separable, taintable, and less reliable than spatial memory. Siple andSpringer (1983) amassed evidence that color is an independently access-ible feature of memory representation, not bound up with shape or textureinformation. Park and James (1983) found evidence that in many casesspatial information is stored automatically in event memory, although colorinformation is not; and Park along with Mason (1982) found a superiorityof spatial over color memory: color memory was most effortful, and it wasat chance level unless subjects were specifically instructed to encode theinformation.

The explanation for the relative fragility of color memories is that, asemphasized by Tversky above, they are psychodynamic products whichdraw on various sources for their elements – which, in turn, gives rise tovarious sources of possible retroactive interference.

This is the same general reason why the subjects in Block’s storiesmay fail to notice changes in the phenomenal appearance of color. In theInverted Earth case, after adjustment, there is a kind of retroactive inter-ference with memories of how things used to seem; and in the InvertedSpectrum case, subjects don’t notice the change (from the oddity of objectsperceived during stage 2 to the normalcy of those perceived late in stage 3),because the interference sets in gradually. In both cases, the interference isdue to the environmentally-sensitive nature of the memory reconstitutionprocess. Memory presupposes the reliability of many information sources,including a properly tuned perceptual system.


In the Inverted Spectrum, then, stage 2 memories are odd since clover-perceptions will all of a sudden have begun to be coded as red and fire-truck-perceptions as green during that stage. Even after the visual systemadjusts to the greenness of clovers and redness of fire trucks, when stage2 clover-memories are retrieved and unzipped, they will represent cloversas having the complement of their currently perceived color – that was theway their look was coded.

What about the memory of your Earth sky and the look of the skyyou enjoy as an assimilated Inverted Earther? Block thinks these will bequalitatively the same (see the Block quote at the beginning of Section 5.3above); but there is no reason to suppose this if intentional adjustment iscomplete. It is true that you cannot tell the difference between the phe-nomenal content of your memory of Earth’s blue sky and your currentperception of Inverted Earth’s yellow sky. In one sense, your memoryrepresents a blue sky; that’s what was encoded. But, in another sense itdoes not represent the sky as blue, since, as you now decode the ‘blue’-memory, you can’t help but unzip it as yellow, and thus misremember.Given the connection between color perception and memory, the adapta-tion of your perceptual system has limited your ability to correctly recalland elaborate the remembered colors of objects. Yours is a memory of ablue sky which represents that sky as being yellow. This is the shade ofdifference Goodman (1976) had in mind when he distinguished a pictureof a black horse from a black-horse picture, the former expression referringto what is depicted, the later to how it is depicted.

We can now catch Block on the horns of a dilemma, bearing in mindthat his arguments sought to show qualia intentionalism wrong on the basisof what phenomenal differences his protagonists notice. Agents either failin his cases to notice qualitative changes in their color experience, or not.Either way, the intentionalist has the upper hand. To the extent that subjectsdo notice experiential differences – due, say, to subtle differences in theways certain colors are perceived (cf. the candidate differences discussedin Section 3.1.3) – Block’s conclusion is blocked. To the extent that theydon’t notice, I have told a plausible intentionalist story about why theydon’t.

For the most part this concludes the reply to Block.But I want to add a few touches to my intentionalist picture of qualia. In

the next subsection, I suggest how the interactivist account extends to coverthe qualia of mental imagery. In the final subsection, I broaden the picturein another way, by showing how interactive processes in color perceptionoccur not just over relatively long periods of time (the time scale on which

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we’ve seen the visual system adjusts its settings), but, ubiquitously, onshorter time-scales as well.

5.3.2. Intentionally and ImagingEven if we explain the qualia of perception and memory, there are stillthose of novel imagination. What of them? Incidentally, there is a case fora similar dependence of imagery in general – not just remembered imagecolors – on perceptual systems. Kosslyn (e.g., 1995) holds that perceptualrecognition and encoding systems can be run in the other direction to formimages. There is good evidence that channels and mechanisms used tore-cognizevarious visual properties like shape, letters, and color, are also usedto imagine those properties. First, a now widely-replicated effect, Segaland Fusella (1970) discovered that visual imagery impairs visual signaldetection, suggesting that imagery engages part of the mechanism of theperceptual system. Farah (1985) has also argued for common mechanismswhich underlie both perception and imagery on the basis of other chro-nometric data. Second, curious properties of perception also show up inimagination, suggesting that image inspection is accomplished by some ofthe very mechanisms used in perceptual recognition. For instance, in per-ception humans can make out vertical stripes better than oblique ones: asdistance increases, oblique ones begin to fade before vertical ones. Surpris-ingly, the same is true when the stripes are imagined (Kosslyn 1981, 239).In the McCollough Effect, subjects who alternate between viewing red andblack vertical stripes and green and black horizontals for a few minutes,and who are then presented with test patterns of black and white horizontaland vertical stripes, see green on the vertical white stripes and a pinkishred on the horizontal white stripes. Remarkably, Finke and Schmidt (1977)showed that if subjects are given green and red patches and merely imaginethe black stripes, they experience the same effect when presented with thetest patterns.42 Finally, there are also neuropsychological data supportingthe shared resources and mechanisms of imagery and perception.43

In broad strokes, this is the key to a naturalistic understanding of theso-called “intentional inexistence” of mental phenomena. They arein-tentional because not only perception, but even imagery generation runsthrough world-directed perceptual mechanisms so as to confer intentional-ity – informational content – on what is imaged. Even philosophers’ “colorpatches” have aboutness in this less obvious way. This also explains whyimagination is constrained by the informational distinctions available toperception, and to the dimensions of perception. And these mental phe-nomena have a kind ofinexistencein that imagined objects need not exist.On the one hand, in color mental imagery we “see” color in the absence


of the appropriate sensory input; but on the other, the production of suchimagery is sensitive to actual sensory input in that it is produced by someof the same mechanisms as are generally responsible for perception in thefirst place.

This points to the derivative nature of intentional inexistence and theprimacy of intentionality as directedness on objects and properties in theworld.

5.3.3. Here-and-now Visual IntentionalityI have given an account of the way the visual system adjusts itself to theworld over time to keep the intentionality of visual perception up to date. Inthis section, I point to ways the world plays a role in the here-and-now in-tentionality of visual perception, as well, by helping synchronize the visualsystem with the world. Certain facts about visual memory suggest that itsmechanisms often ought to be conceived as running outside the head inthe here-and-now. The recognition of this interactivity on short time-scaleswill help place the longer time-scale interactivity we’ve been discussing inproper perspective – as an instance of more general phenomenon.

Consider the asymmetry between recall and recognition. Schematiccodes appear to guide reproductiverecall of words (Kintsch 1970) andimagistic features of experience, like shape and color, so that the moretypical an instance of any of these categories, the more reliably and quicklyit is recalled (Tversky 1997, 264). Inrecognition, however, the atypical isbetter recognized than the typical. Subjects are more reliable and quickat recognizing unique shapes, scenes, faces, and words, than they areat recalling or reproducing them (Tversky 1997). That recall of atypicalinstances should be most effortful is not surprising, given that recall in-volves pulling together standardized elements from various sources (e.g.,perceptual mechanisms, schematic face and shape models) (see Section5.3.1 above). Since elements of atypical items will be nonstandard, andthus not included in the set of on-board schematic data usually available tomemory reconstitution processes, recall of them will often be formidable.In recognition, however, the world is the mechanism that plays this role– that stores the data used by reconstitution processes. In these cases,the world, as Brooks (1991) says, is its own model. What better way tocognitively represent something too obscure to remember than to have itright therein front of your eyes?

A second instance of the efficiency of reliance on the world – resultingin asymmetry between recall and recognition – comes specifically from thecase of color recollection. Dana Ballard and his colleagues (1997) showedthat people rely on the world for incremental access to information about

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color whenever possible, and prefer not to store it in on-board memoryIn effect, the world becomes an extension of short-term color memory,part of a system ofdeictic representation.Subjects were given a task inwhich, on a computer screen divided into three sections, they had a simplemodel made up of variously colored tiles, a work space in which theywere to promptly reconstruct the model, and a resource area from which todraw tiles. Using an eye-tracking device, Ballard and his colleagues foundthat subjects often consult the model for information about tile color evenwhen they remember the location information for that tile. This indicatesthat fixations on the tile in the model area can provide access to locationinformation without color information. Other times, subjects remembercolor information and fixate solely for location information (Section 3.1).While they could store both forms of information, they prefer to let theworld model itself – presumably because, in spite of temporal cost (the tasktakes more time with more fixations), carrying the information in workingmemory is expensive compared to acquiring it serially on-line (Section3.2).

In another experiment, Ballard’s team changed the color of a tile in themodel during a saccade to that area from the workspace (Section 3.3). Thishad a minuscule effect on fixation time (50 msec.), even when that tile wasthe target of the saccade. In another condition, the change was made duringa saccade from the resource area to the model, indicating that the subjectneeded location information. Fixation time increased by 129 msec.; butmost subjects were unaware of the change, and fixated a nearby tile ofthe right color forits location information, indicating their reliance on themodel for location and color information. Ballard et al. conclude that thecolor of tiles in the model area is not retained in visual memory from pre-vious fixations. This suggests minimalism about internal representationsof distal layouts – that perception is task-oriented, involving minimal pro-cessing of task-irrelevant features of the world. There is less we take withus from experience and more that we leave in the world than we mighthave guessed.

Yet conscious awareness of the world and its properties seems rich, full,seamless, and integrated. It seems that everywhere we direct our attention,there is a rich representation awaiting us. Any time we want to attend, say,to the hue of an object, it’s there available to us, on demand. Ballard etal. suggest a metaphor which sheds light on the apparent inconsistencybetween our rich, full experience, and minimalism about inner represent-ations of the layout of the environment. It appears to application users atcomputer workstations that infinitely long programs can be seamlessly run;but system programmers know that chunks of the program in peripheral


storage have to be shuffled in and out of memory as needed, which isnotaseamless process from the programmer’s point of view. Both points of vieware correct, and reflect different levels of description of the same system.Maybe our conscious awareness is like that: it simply may not have accessto the synthesizing events which the body performs at short time scales,like that at which eye fixations take place – the scale at which “the humansensory-motor system employs many creative ways to interact with theworld in a timely manner” (Section 5).

I have argued that human agents rely on the world for their color percep-tion and color memory over the short and long hauls. From a perspectivewhich recognizes the general phenomenon of interactivity at various time-scales, the entire human color-detection system – considered on the timescale of auto-calibration earlier discussed – might be conceived as a kindof deictic device for representing color. After all, it keeps representingthesecolors by adaptive tuning tothem.This essentialthatnessof thecolor detection system – its pointing beyond itself – makes it a modelof diaphaneity. Color qualia, then, are exhausted by aboutness. In thisway, consciousness of the visually perceived properties I have discussedis purely diaphanous.44

It might be thought that this constitutes an elimination, or at least areduction. James (1904a) apparently thought this; and he embraced it:

“consciousness”, when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on thepoint of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity. . . (4)

I agree with James that consciousness is not a reifiable thing, a pureEgo, but do not on that account take consciousness to be nothing. It isa phenomenon, a process essentially constituted by subjective and object-ive poles: It draws its being from objective things and properties, on theone hand, and information-theoretic properties of (various systems of) theagent, on the other.45 As Sartre said, “Consciousness is bornsupportedbya being which is not itself”. Its being is negated only if its support is.46

It’s open to noninteractivists like Block and Rey to find ad hoc waysof accommodating the data which support color interactivism. But so faras I can see, there is no good reason, apart from the bald claim of eithernonintentionalism or narrow intentionalism, to think an inverted subject ora subject in an inverted world would not adjust to see things as they are.47

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Ron McClamrock and William Lycan for helpful comments onportions of previous drafts of this paper, and to Georges Rey for kindlyproviding his (then) forthcoming papers.

NOTES

1 There is room in logical space for a weaker form of intentionalism about qualia onwhich intentional properties fix qualitative ones, but the possibility is left open that agentsin states which differ in intentional properties might still enjoy the same qualia. In Section5, it will become clear why I deny there is any reason to accept this weaker doctrine.2 Strawson (1994) has recently argued that there is something it’s like to have an insightor understand a sentence.3 This extrapolation requires argument I won’t give. For that, see Dretske (1995) andesp. Tye (1995, Chapter 4). Also see Buck (1993), a neuroscientist who argues that thequalia of affective experience are states whose function it is to provide the organism withknowledge of internal events relevant to self-regulation. (But cf. Note 43 below on myhesitancy regarding neuroscientific data.)4 This example is discussed in Ron McClamrock’s (1984) MIT Ph.D. thesis,Intentionalityand Cognitivism, for which Block was an advisor.5 See my 1998 for in depth discussion of this view.6 Kuenhi (1983, 60), cited by Hardin (1988, 142).7 The categories in which things are classified affect judgments about relationshipsbetween them. For instance, Stevens and Coupe (1978) showed that people judge that Renois east of San Diego (although it is not) because they think that in general Nevada is eastof California. The pre-inversion categorizations of hues as advancing and receding wouldplausibly give rise to subtle inferential asymmetries which would have to remain intactpost-inversion.8 Jackson (1982) unflinchingly acknowledged this.9 I benefited from William Lycan’s comments on an earlier draft of this section.10 It seems he has since changed his mind. See Tye (1995, 203–07) and later.11 For further discontinuities between reflectance and hue, see Hardin (1990, 564–5).12 In my 1998 I defend a view of functions on which this claim about the visual system’sfunction is plausible.13 Specifically, the ASO TITER requires that a blood sample be mixed with strep, and thepresence of strep antibodies causes a typical but mistakable antigen–antibody complex toform, indicating the presence of the offending agent. The ELISA test, on the other hand,requires only a standard throat swab.14 Thanks to John Talarico for the details of this example.15 Actually, by courtesy I extend the idea that narrow content is fixed by computational roleto Tye. His stated view is merely that physical constitution fixes narrow content; but hisappeals to mechanical perceptual processes and module output representations as determ-inants of intrinsic looks (see below) seem to require the computational reading. (Unless hethinks what matters is something about the material the output representation is made of –


in the spirit of Churchland 1984: 40. Yet I don’t see how it can, (i) if we accept multiplerealizability, and (ii) if we are to avoid holding that its an homunculus which “sees” thematerial look of the vehicle of representation.) Indeed, if narrow content is determined bysomething more fine-grained than functional/computational role, it doesn’t seem intuitiveto me that it could beintentional content at all – and it’s not clear that anything wouldseparate such a view of qualia from Block’s. See Note 18.

Since White has not explicitly wedded himself to this computationalist picture, he willbe excused until the end of Section 4.3 below.16 For a classic presentation of this view about the modularity of visual processes, seeFodor (1984).17 Of course, one might stipulate that the forces with which Inverted Earthlings had tocontend in their evolutionary history were also inverted with respect to Earthlings; but thenit getsvery hard to maintain that they’re much like us. If we want it to turn out that theyexperience intrinsic red as exciting and advancing, then we might have to stipulate thatwhat they would call “quickly spreading green-hot fires” did not affect the survival of theirspecies in the ways red-hot fires affected ours. According to the evolutionary semanticists,only thus could the nuances of color-representations’ computational roles be preserved inthe right way.18 Oddly, Tye (1994, 171) allows narrow contents to be inverted here, arguing that allinversion requires is some physical brain state difference. But this doesn’t square withthe requirement that computational properties, not neurological ones, are what matter tonarrow contents. See Note 15.19 My hunch is that while module outputs behave systematically, they are typically sub-doxastic, representing things like edges – and hence not things to which consciousness hasthe right kind of access.20 On Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) notion of phenomenological intrinsicality, the bodypre-structures for consciousness even such nonintrinsic (so-called “non-observational”)properties aslooking feline.This is not the computationalists’ notion: Theymustrest theintrinsic/nonintrinsic distinction on facts about whether and when representation-formingprocesses gain access to extra-modular information.21 See, e.g., McClamrock (1995), Chapter 1, and Simon (1981), Chapter 7.22 The execution of a programmer’s command in a higher-level programming languageis multiply realizable with respect to the details of machine code implementation, and,say, which buffers hold which digits. Type-identical chunks of machine code will performdifferent functions on different occasions, depending on embedding context. Thus, due tovariations of all kinds – from hardware configurations to temporary memory locationsto current variable values – there’s no reason why the higher-level features of a pro-gram should be straightforwardly mirrored in machine code, much less lower levels oforganization, like that of hardware.23 The two experiments here described are cited in Hardin (1988, 105–106).24 Block (1990, 69f.; 79, fn 26). White (1994, 473) reports that Block gave, in conversation,the amnesiac objection.25 For the older arguments to this effect, see Block and Fodor (1972).26 I think there are also significant disagreements between interactivism and James’ views.See, e.g., Note 45 below.27 I don’t want to give the wrong impression with my appeals to Gibson. He has rightlybeen criticized for failing to recognize that detecting stable properties in the worldis

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an information processing problem carried out largely by systems in the head; and heunderestimated the difficulty of such detection (see, e.g., Marr 1982, 29–31).28 See Turvey and Shaw (1979, 188).29 Turvey and Shaw (1979) suggest that researchers might not be so tempted to thinkotherwise if they considered “perception as theact of representingrather than asa processof using a representation” (207).30 Compare Dretske (1995): “Conscious mental states. . . are states that we are consciouswith, not states we are consciousof ” (100f.), and James (1904a): “In its pure state, orwhen isolated, there is no self-splitting of [the experience] into consciousness and what theconsciousness is ‘of’ ” (15).31 By calling these properties ‘perspectival’, I don’t mean to connote ‘unreal’. While theyare context-dependent emergents of organism-environment interactions, they’re no less realon that account (see Gibson 1977, 69f., and esp. 77ff.).32 This sort of interactivity illustrates that there is an intermingling of perception andaction.33 See also Burge (1986) for discussion of ways the visual system is conditioned by thisworld.34 I take it that even if we haven’t specific reasons to generalize the account to qualia of,say, each sensory modality, the success of the embeddedness perspective in handling colorqualia (which I shall show below), together with it’s illumination of the mental generally,constitutes a deep reason to do so – at least for argument’s sake.35 The significance of this point extends beyond philosophy of mind. It might, for instance,be extended by philosophers of social science into a defense ofVerstehentheory, on whichunderstanding of higher-level properties, like oppressiveness, requires having the rightsubjective experiences.36 Here I leave the notion of feedback from the world intuitive, although I hone it in my1998 paper.37 For example, White (1994, 287), a critic of Block, nevertheless allows Block to tell thestory so that at stage 3, the pre-inversion memories would seem foreign.38 I first found this idea in Dennett (1991, 395–7), who presents it only intuitively; after Ibegan formulating my ideas, I came across a forthcoming (1998) paper by Michael Tye inwhich he works this out more systematically. I have benefited from both, although addedmuch in the way of detail.39 Tye (1991, 1995, 121–3) has proposed that images in general are interpreted, matrix-likestructures filled-in with symbols representing shades of color, texture, etc.40 Anderson and Neely (1996, 258–71) provide a nice summary of the literature ondistortion and forgetting in episodic memory (1996, 258–71).41 This suggests that even the apparent color of an afterimage depends on memory color.But this could be an artifact of memory color during the presentation of the stimulus (seethe discussion of memory color in Section 4.3 above).42 This experiment is relayed by Block (1981, 10).43 See, e.g., Farah et al. (1988). I am skeptical of the value of such studies since it’s notclear to me what janglings in brain areas known to process external visual informationduring the explicit formation of visual images should mean. But it is suggestive. For areview of more cognitive neuroscientific evidence of substantial links between imageryand perception, see Cooper and Lang (1996, esp. 138–41).


44 I make no pretensions to having given a full theory of consciousness (although I havegiven a theory of some central kinds of qualitative experience). Following Kripke (1980),I’ll call what I’ve given apicture rather than a theory – a sketch of how to approach theproblems. A full interactivist theory of consciousness would involve, among other things,analyses of the ways in whichintegrativeprocesses are interactivist (the lately discussedwork by Ballard et al. suggests some ways), the ways in which control ofattention isinteractivist as opposed to just internal or just stimulus-driven, and the degree ofaccesstotasks carried out by skill-processes.45 Interpreting James on these matters is difficult; but it seems he thought consciousness ismerely an external relation (1904a: 16). He downplays the import of the taxonomy whichfalls out of the information-theoretic properties of the subject’s perceptual and conceptualsystems – a taxonomy which specifies the nature of the subjective pole of consciousness.But see his (1904b, 44f.) for a recognition of and struggle with this.46 I take it that the contrapositive of this point – that when the right kind of interactiveagent-environment relation obtains, so does qualia consciousness – rules out the so-calledAbsent Qualia Hypothesis of a being with all the right functional or even intentionalproperties but no qualia.47 The contrary claim looks especially paltry in light of the general support for the truthof interactivism from other domains, for which I have argued elsewhere. See my 1997a,1997b; and 1998.

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Department of Humanities and PhilosophyUniversity at Central OklahomaEdmond, OK 73003U.S.A.E-mail: [email protected]

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