Abstract
This chapter provides a coherently conceivable account of the realization of our experience, which meshes with the coherently conceivable and apparently plausible account of our capacity for thought beyond experience developed in Chapter Thirteen. It also concerns the realization of what I call “the primary imagination”. Section 1 concerns experience, Section 2 the primary imagination.
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Notes
Eye-hand coordination which constitutes merely know how, direct feedback, and reflex arcs are also no doubt involved in the execution of motor action.
We were lucky that a plausible and coherent theory was there to be adopted, but of course in the end it isn’t all that plausible, and up to some point we had good luck with phenomenal colors as well.
Shortly we will deploy not correlation over actual time, but a correlation fixed by counterfactual conditions in the moment. But let me ignore this complexity for now.
This might lead to special problems. There may be reasonable grounds to maintain that one’s entire momentary experience is never exactly duplicated over one’s life. This would make correlation especially difficult to chart. Note also that the content of visual experience may well not exactly match anything out in the world in all respects, because of perspectival distortion.
Certain features might be subfeatures of others, and hence certain of the corresponding patterns of firing might be subpatterns of others.
It may be worth noting that there may be an obvious explanation of the facts i) that we cannot have an experience which consists, say, just of a line without any intrinsic properties, that certain features of experience cannot exhaust the experience of a moment, and ii) that certain features are mutually exclusive in experience. For it may be that the brain must be in some global pattern of firing, but of course only one, across the whole range of subsystems involved in the constitution of phenomenal experience. Though note that this pattern of firing cannot exclude the presence of the patterns constitutive of the primary imagination.
I don’t yet mean to dismiss physicalist accounts of the experienceof phenomenal color.
Aristotle, De Anima, Bk. II, ch. 5–7.
See David C. Lindberg, Theories of vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). I am also indebted to discussion with Alison Simmons.
William of Ockham was apparently first to suggest action at a distance in color perception.
Moreland Perkins, Sensing the World (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 295–305.
Or set of thoughts.
If quasi-experience is to be imbedded in experience, I should put this differently.
If faint experience is involved, then we should adjust the account of Part One to admit different degrees of vividness, though that introduces features which are plausibly mere artifacts of our experience. Note also that the content of a quasi-experience which is the imaginary correlate of an actual experience would then fail to match the content of that experience in regards to vividness.
At least some memory is probably a capacity for categorization rather than the possession of such memory images, as I suggested in the last chapter. But there are, I think, sometimes such memory images, at least for many of us.
Present even in some lacking limbs from birth.
Or perhaps matching that experience except in regards to vividness.
We still have the problem of accounting for the primary imagination of a certain feature by someone who is incapable of experiencing it, if this is possible, but as always let me focus on the case of normal adult humans.
This would require some refinement of the kind of correlation deployed in the last section.
For some neurophysiologies work which underwrites models roughly like those suggested in this paragraph, and provides some suggestions about the specific brain locations involved, see S.M. Kosslyn, N.M. Alpert, W.L. Thompson, V. Maljkovic, S.B. Weise, C.F. Chabris, S.E. Hamilton, S.L. Rauch, and F.S. Buananno, “[atVisual mental imagery activates topographically organized visual cortex: PET investigations”, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 5, 1993, 263–287; and H. Damasio, T.J. Grabowski, A. Damasio, D. Tranel, L. Boles-Ponto, G.L. Watkins, and R.D. Hichwa, “Visual recall with eyes closed and covered activates early visual cortices“, Society for Neuroscience Abstracts19, 1993,1603. See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’Error(New York: Putnam, 1994), 96-108, for a popular sketch by a distinguished neurologist which is in accord with my suggestions.
See Damasio, Descartes’ Error,102, and the references he notes.
In fact, I did deploy somewhat suspicious modal correlations, but non-objectual accounts of a quasi-experience which was included in experience might look roughly like this, and would avoid that resource. The real problem, again, is that we cannot generate coherently conceivable non-objectual accounts of the realization of experience, and that objectual accounts are implausible.
One might wonder if the primary imagination is really a distinct faculty from the faculty of experience. Indeed, it might be that we should collapse all the contents of primary imagination into experience of a faint sort, and then treat it in the same way as experience. We might try correlation with correspondingly ghostly objects. Sense data might be useful here. And certainly in the next part we will see that non-objectual accounts of both experience and quasi-experience are probably the most plausible accounts. But surely the most commonsensical objectualmodels involve real colored objects for experience and something else for quasi-experience, neural firing without an object. And even the more plausible non-objectual accounts of the sort we will pursue in Part Three have reason to treat the “quasi-experience” of the primary imagination as a distinct and significant phenomena in its own right, even if in the end it isn’t radically distinct from experience.
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Mendola, J. (1997). Experience and Quasi-Experience. In: Human Thought. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_12
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