4 The subject as organism

4.1 Elaboration of the premises

Premise 1: Phenomenal consciousness

First of all, it is interesting to note that Nagel’s initial characterization of consciousness in terms of there being something that it is like is already concerned with the organism as the entity for which there is something that it is like: After having noted the diversity of beings capable of conscious experience which may lead to very different kinds of conscious experience, Nagel argues that “no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism, […] something it is like for the organism” (1974, p. 436). So, given that the philosophical community seems to have agreed to refer to Nagel’s slogan in order to characterize phenomenal consciousness in the first place, they should seriously consider Nagel’s talk of the organism as the subject of experience. But apart from this observation, all that is stressed in the first premise is the relational character of phenomenal consciousness, much in the sense of one of the commitments defended in Williford’s paper. The reasons for holding this are mainly phenomenological: it simply appears that way. And we are all aiming at a theory of why this is so. Williford’s elaboration of the relational structure of consciousness in terms of the genitive and dative of manifestation captures the intuition expressed in this premise very well. Thus, there is not much room for disagreement here.[9]

Premise 2: Intentionality

In his canonical elaboration of the structure of intentionality, Subject—Intentional Mode—Content, Tim Crane (2001, p. 31) admits that he does not provide an account of the first relatum, “because the nature of the subject is not something that is within the scope of this book (strange as that may seem)”. Yet, as far as intentional states are concerned, the assumption that attitudes are not free-floating entities but come along with a thinker, perceiver, or believer is rather uncontroversial. What’s controversial is how we should characterize the subject and what kind of commitment is implied in the “acceptance” of a thinker, perceiver, or believer.[10]

Premise 3: Subject identity

In a way, this premise is at the same time trivial and important. First of all, if one accepts premises 1 and 2, then it is natural to accept premise 3, if only because the alternative would lead to a multiplicity of subjects, giving rise to questions regarding the relations between them. I discussed this option above in section 2. There are many debates about the relation between consciousness and intentionality, but there is hardly any debate about the relation between the subjects of each . So in a way, this premise simply states the obvious, given premises 1 and 2. But it is plausible to accept it even independently of these premises as the default position. One important reason for this is that there are many conscious experiences that are both phenomenal and intentional—perceptual experiences, for example. If I am looking at a red tomato, then my conscious experience presents me with an object in the external world at which I am thereby visually directed. But there is also something that it is like for me to see the tomato if I am phenomenally conscious of it. Since it would be odd to claim that there are two subjects involved here—one being intentionally directed and one being conscious of the tomato—the default position is that it is one the same subject that is intentionally directed and phenomenally conscious. Second, despite the discussion among analytic philosophers in the last fifty years, it is not clear that phenomenal consciousness and intentionality can be separated from each other so easily anyway. In fact, proponents of phenomenal intentionality (or cognitive phenomenology, see Bayne & Montague 2011) like Searle (1992), Strawson (2004), Pitt (2004), Horgan & Tienson (2002), Kriegel (2013) and others argue to the contrary. Again, then the premise simply states the obvious.

But this premise also is important because once we commit to it, we can follow either premise 1 or 2 in our investigation to see whether we can formulate constraints on the nature of the subject based on either consciousness or intentionality. This is the job of premise 4, which accepts lessons from recent investigations into ways of being intentionally directed.

Premise 4: Embodied Cognition

Cognitive Science has recently been dominated by discussions on the so-called 4Es, i.e., embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition. These notions characterize four important ways in which our current theorizing about cognition departs from classical cognitive science. They are more or less independent of each other and can be accepted and rejected in isolation.[11] This is not the place to elaborate in detail all four of them, especially because for the purposes of this argument only the feature of embodiment is important. Many of our psychological acts, like perceiving, being emotionally directed at or affected by something or other, performing intentional actions, etc., are embodied in the sense that features of an organism’s non-neural body contribute importantly—be it causally or even constitutively—to the execution of these cognitive acts (Wilson & Foglia 2011).

A plausible claim defended by enactivists is that even a basic cognitive act like perceiving involves many bodily movements like eye-, head- and whole-body movements when looking at or focusing on an object, or when jointly attending to an object with someone else (Noë 2004). This can be accepted independently of more radical claims regarding the usefulness of representations typically put forward by enactivists (Hutto & Myin 2013). What’s more, a bulk of empirical evidence has accumulated that supports the important role of the body and bodily actions for psychological acts:

1. Facial expressions and bodily postures are arguably constitutive elements of feelings and their expression. Many theories of emotion such as multifactorial models (e.g., Scherer 2009; Welpinghus 2013) usually include as one component a bodily feature. Moreover, eye- and head-movements count among the constitutive and content-determining elements of visual perception (Noë 2004).

2. Research on mirror neurons has demonstrated the intricate relation between perceiving and acting in the sense that the same neural structures are employed for the execution and observation or recognition of intentional acts and emotional expressions (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2008; Keysers 2013). Controversial debates about the role of mirror neurons for social cognition notwithstanding, it is fair to say that from a neural perspective, perception and action have to be considered as constituting one single complex system. We develop motor programs for the performance of certain actions and reuse these programs in our observation of others when they perform such actions. These motor programs contain goal-directed representations with a bodily format (Goldman & de Vignemont 2009) that are crucially different from the propositional format of a belief, say.

3. What’s more, lessons from studies of pathological conditions like visual form agnosia (Milner & Goodale 1995) suggest that we can be directed at an object in a purely motor-intentional way, thereby demonstrating a “bodily understanding” (Kelly 2002) of an object that is not based on concepts and cannot be put into appropriate words.

Generalizing these (and many other) points (see e.g., Gallagher 2005) leads to a paradigm shift with regard to our understanding of the subject of intentionality: intentionality is not restricted to propositional attitudes; an embodied agent, i.e., an organism,[12] has many sensorimotor, affective, and cognitive means to be directed at objects and states of affairs. This way of understanding the structure of intentionality allows us to capture many more phenomena that clearly fall under the name of intentionality as directedness, e.g., reaching for and grasping an object.

All the premises taken together yield the conclusion that there is one subject capable of intentionality and consciousness that can be identified with the organism (not with the stream of consciousness), characterized by a variety of cognitive capacities allowing for a range of intentional attitudes—some of which are affective,[13] others sensorimotor,[14] and still others are of sophisticated cognitive[15] varieties. The overall state of the subject, being the whole organism, is represented in the brain. This representation contains information about its body, its interior milieu, etc., such that all representations having to do with the organism’s interaction with objects can be coupled to or integrated with the representations monitoring and regulating the state of the organism in the brain. On the basis of such couplings, it is in principle possible to make sense of the idea that object-representations become subjective in the sense of being something for the organism.

A caveat: this does not amount to an explanation of how consciousness arises in the first place, or of why integrated representations are experienced at all. But hardly any theory of consciousness has properly addressed this hard problem so far (Chalmers 1996). The limited claim of this commentary is that we can at best make sense of the subjective character of phenomenal consciousness if we adopt an integration-theory as outlined above and regard the subject for which there is something that it is like as the whole organism. As I concluded in the first part, depending on how he is going to individuate episodes—a problem which he has not yet solved—, Williford seems to be in need of such an integration-account anyway. Therefore, this sketch of an alternative should be appealing for someone taking subjective character seriously.[16]

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jennifer Windt, Thomas Metzinger, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also grateful to Kenneth Williford, who provided such a stimulating and challenging paper and once again to Jennifer Windt and Thomas Metzinger for the chance to contribute this commentary.

This work is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.