The New Science of the Mind

by Mark Rowlands

  C. Intentionality as Disclosing Activity

  Suppose I have a visual experience as of a shiny, red tomato. The empirical mode of presentation of the tomato consists in the way it is presented to me-in this case, shiny and red. The transcendental mode of presentation of the experience, however, is that which allows the tomato to be presented to me as shiny and red. This characterization is intended to be neutral with regard to what it is that gets presented-and this neutrality is reflected in my use of the expression "as of." Historically, the candidates have been (i) the thing-in-itself conceived of as something lying behind the presentation, or (ii) a structured series of presentations. For our purposes, we need not adjudicate. I shall frame the discussion as if there is something lying behind the presentation-something that gets presentedbut this discussion could just as easily be framed in terms of option (ii). If there is no tomato there, of course-if the experience is an illusion-then it is still true that some object in the world-that which is erroneously taken to be a tomato-is presented as shiny and red. In the case of a hallucination, there is no object that is taken to be red and shiny-erroneously or otherwise-but, nevertheless, there is a region of the world that is taken to be red and shiny. This localization to a region is what makes the hallucination a specifically visual hallucination.5

  In each case, it is the transcendental mode of presentation of the experience that allows the world-object or region-to be presented in this way. The transcendental mode of presentation of my experience is that in virtue of which the tomato, or relevant part of the world, is disclosed or revealed to me as shiny and red. The noneliminable core of intentional experience, therefore, consists in a disclosure or revelation of the world. The fundamen tal sense in which intentional acts are directed toward objects, therefore, is that they reveal or disclose them as having certain aspects or empirical modes of presentation.

  7 Summary

  Any perceptual experience has a noneliminable intentional core, and it is in this core that we find the intentionality or directedness of experience. This core is the transcendental mode of presentation: that in virtue of which an experience presents an object as falling under a given aspect or empirical mode of presentation. In presenting an object in this way, the transcendental mode of presentation thus brings about, or effects, a certain disclosure or revelation of the object. The object is disclosed or revealed as falling under (i.e., possessing) a given aspect or empirical mode of presentation. The essence of perceptual intentionality is, accordingly, disclosure or disclosing activity.

  In the rest of the book, I shall argue that the thesis of the amalgamated mind-understood as the conjunction of the theses of embodiment and extendedness-emerges as a natural, obvious, indeed almost banal implication of this understanding of intentionality. Intentionality is disclosing activity. But disclosing activity is, in general, indifferent to its location. Processes occurring in the brain can constitute (i.e., realize) disclosing activity. But this is also true of processes occurring in the body. And it is also true of things we do-activities we perform-in the world. Intentionality is revealing activity. Our revealing activity typically-not always, not necessarily, but typically-extends out from the brain through the body and out into the things we do in the world. This, I shall argue, is the ultimate justification for the thesis of the amalgamated mind, and so provides the ultimate basis for the new science itself.

  1 From Perception to Cognition

  The previous chapter defended the following claims:

  1. Any experience-any conscious state intentionally directed toward an object-must possess a noneliminable intentional core. It is in this core that the intentional directedness of the experience is to be found.

  2. This core is identical with the transcendental mode of presentation of the experience. A transcendental mode of presentation is not something of which the subject of the experience is aware when he or she has the experience: if it were, then the experience would have to contain another transcendental mode of presentation in virtue of which the subject could be aware of the first transcendental mode of presentation. As determinants of empirical modes of presentation, transcendental modes of presentation occupy a noneliminable role within any experience.

  3. The transcendental mode of presentation is that aspect of the experience in virtue of which the experience's object is presented as falling under, or possessing, a given aspect or empirical mode of presentation.

  4. The noneliminable, transcendental core of the experience, therefore, consists in a form of revealing or disclosing activity.

  5. The essence of intentionality-of intentional-directedness toward the world-is, therefore, disclosing or revealing activity.

  In this final chapter, I shall argue that the ultimate basis and justification of the thesis of the amalgamated mind lies in this conception of intentionality. If this conception of intentionality is accepted, then the amalgamated mind emerges as an obvious, almost mundane, consequence. If the arguments of the previous chapter are correct, then this conception of intentionality should be accepted for the case of experiencesunderstood as states that are both conscious and intentional. However, the amalgamated mind-the conjunction of the embodied mind and the extended mind-is a claim concerning primarily the nature of cognition rather than experience. The first stage in the argument of this chapter, therefore, is to extend the account of intentionality already developed from experience to cognition.

  The general contours of this extension are already fairly clear. Suppose I am thinking about an object-say, a tomato-and I am thinking about the fact that it is unusually red and shiny. The aspects of the tomatoredness and shininess-are objects of my thought. I am thinking about the tomato by thinking about its redness and shininess. Thus, in the terminology introduced in the previous chapter, redness and shininess are empirical modes of presentation of the tomato. The standard model of intentionality, however, has a straightforward implication. Intentional directedness toward an object is mediated by a mode of presentation. An empirical mode of presentation is an object of an intentional state-in this case, of my thought. Therefore, the standard model entails that my thought must contain another, distinct mode of presentation: that which permits the tomato to be thought of as falling under empirical modes of presentation (redness and shininess). This is the transcendental mode of presentation of my thought about the tomato. Just as the transcendental mode of presentation of my perceptual experience is that aspect of the experience in virtue of which the tomato is visually presented to me as falling under the empirical mode of presentation of being red (or being shiny), so too the transcendental mode of presentation of my thought is that in virtue of which the tomato is presented to me, in thought, as being red (or shiny). That my thought should possess this noneliminable transcendental mode of presentation is, similarly, a straightforward implication of the standard model of intentionality according to which intentional directedness toward an object is brought about via a mode of presentation of that object. If a mode of presentation is an object of my thought, then the standard model entails that there must be another mode of presentation that allows it to be such. This noneliminable, transcendental core of my thought is that in virtue of which the thought discloses or reveals, to me, the object as falling under, or possessing, a given aspect or empirical mode of presentation. The transcendental core consists, therefore, in a form of revealing or disclosing activity. It is in this core of revealing activity that we find the intentionality of thought. The various empirical modes of presentation of the tomato are objects of intentional directedness. So we will look in vain at these if we want to identify intentional directedness itself. Intentional directedness itself consists in the revealing or disclosing activity that allows an object of intentional directedness (e.g., a tomato) to be presented as falling under another object of intentional directedness (e.g., the empirical mode of presentation of redness).

  In short, cognition no less than perception reveals objects as falling under empirical modes of presentati
on. Both the objects and the empirical mode of presentation are objects of intentional directedness. The intentionality of both perception and cognition is precisely that in virtue of which one type of intentional object (an object simpliciter) is disclosed as possessing or falling under another type of intentional object (an aspect or empirical mode of presentation). The intentional directedness of both perception and cognition is the noneliminable revealing activity in virtue of which this sort of disclosure takes place.

  Therefore, the idea of revealing or disclosing activity lies at the heart of the intentionality of both perception and cognition. This is why it is plausible to suppose that the sort of model developed in the previous chapter for perception can also be applied to cognition. This extension is the first stage in the argument of this chapter. The next stage is to disambiguate the concept of disclosing or revealing activity.

  2 Causal versus Constitutive Disclosure

  The idea of disclosure is not unambiguous, and it is important to distinguish two forms. In essence, the distinction I am going to develop is a vehicle-content distinction. Acts of both perception and cognition have content (though not, perhaps, of the same sort). The content of a perceptual or cognitive act reveals an object as falling under an empirical mode of presentation. That is, content can effect one type of disclosure of an object. However, whenever there is content, there is also a vehicle of that content. And this vehicle can also effect a type of disclosure of the object. However, crucially, the way in which a given content discloses an object is different from the way in which a vehicle of that content discloses that object. A content discloses an object by providing a logically sufficient condition for the object to fall under a given empirical mode of presentation. A vehicle of content discloses an object by providing only a causally sufficient condition for that object to fall under a given empirical mode of presentation.

  These claims are not as unfamiliar as they might sound. To begin with I shall focus on experience. Here, the vehicle-content distinction is more typically rendered as a distinction between an experience and its material realizations. The claims, therefore, amount to this: there is an important difference between the way in which an experience discloses its object and the way in which the material realization of the experience discloses that object. As we shall see, this does not presuppose any form of dualism about experience. Rather, it is an expression in an unfamiliar language of a, by now, very familiar point: there is an explanatory gap between conscious experience and its material bases.

  Suppose, again, that I have a visual experience as of a shiny, red tomato. The tomato is disclosed to me as red and shiny because, roughly, there is something that it is like to see the tomato. At the level of the content of an experience that is essentially characterized by there being something that it is like to have it, this "what it is like" is the transcendental mode of presentation of that experience. Thus, the transcendental mode of presentation of the tomato given to me in my experience of it consists in what it is like to see the tomato: what it is like to see the tomato is that in virtue of which the tomato is revealed to the subject as red and shiny.' The expression "in virtue of" should be understood as expressing a logically sufficient condition: what it is like to see the tomato, in its concrete phenomenal particularity, is, in this case, a logically sufficient condition for the tomato to be revealed to the subject as red and shiny. If a subject has an experience with the requisite what-it-is-like-ness, then there is no logically possible way in which the tomato (or region, etc.) cannot be revealed to him as red and shiny. If the experience is an illusion, then some other-that is, nontomato-object will be revealed as red and shiny. But it is still true that the content of the experience provides a logically sufficient condition for that object to be revealed as red and shiny. If the experience is a (visual) hallucination, then it is still true that some region of the world is revealed as red and shiny-the region that appears to be a red, shiny tomato. And the content of the hallucination provides a logically sufficient condition of the region's being revealed in this way.

  Transcendentally, what it is like to have or undergo an experience is not something of which we are aware in the having of that experiencealthough we may, in suitable contexts, become aware of its empirical counterpart (but see note 1). Rather, it is that in virtue of which the world is revealed to us as being a certain way: that is, as falling under a given aspect or empirical mode of presentation. It reveals the world in this way by providing a logically sufficient condition for the world to be presented in this way. Whether it also provides a logically necessary condition is an interesting question, but not one that needs to be addressed here.'

  Let us switch focus, now, from the visual experience as of a shiny red tomato to the material realization-the vehicle-of this experience. By "material realization," I simply mean a supervenience or realizing base of the experience, where the idea of supervenience is understood in the usual way: as a one-way relation of determination with modal status. The material realizations of experience also reveal or disclose the world, but they do so in a quite different way: the revealing activity performed by the material realization of an experience has a quite different status from that of the experience itself. This, ultimately, is why there is an explanatory gap between conscious experience and its material realizations.

  Consider, for example, the mechanisms whereby, it is thought, my retinal image of a red tomato is progressively transformed into a visual representation of a tomato. Let us, for now, work with our favorite paradigmatically internalist model of this process: Marr's (1982) account. The retinal image is transformed into a 3D object representation by way of its progressive transformation through raw primal sketch, full primal sketch, and 21/2D sketch. To identify the mechanisms responsible for these transformations, if Marr's account is correct, would be to identify the mechanisms that are causally responsible for my visual experience of the tomato and its specific aspects.

  The successive transformations that collectively produce the visual experience of the red tomato are a form of disclosing activity. However, this is quite different from the form of disclosure exhibited by transcendental modes of presentation, at least when these are understood at the level of content. In no part of the Marrian story-or in any story like it-do we find logically sufficient conditions for the disclosure of the world as being, for example, shiny and red. This disclosure undoubtedly has physically sufficient conditions in certain psychophysical events, occurring, perhaps, both inside and outside the body. But these physically sufficient conditions do not add up to logically sufficient conditions. There is no logical contradiction involved in supposing that there are two subjects in whom exactly the same Marrian processing operations are being performed on exactly the same retinal image, but where, as a result of these processes, one of the these subjects experiences a tomato as shiny and red where the other experiences it as dull and green (or experiences nothing at all).' This may be physically impossible, but the absence of logical contradiction shows that it is not logically impossible. Indeed, this is one way-a simple translation into the language of disclosure-of understanding the force of the various explanatory gap intuitions.

  The shift from physically to logically sufficient conditions is, in effect, a move from what produces a given item to what a given item consists in. At the level of the content of experience, a transcendental item is that in which the appearance of an item as empirical consists. Thus, understood transcendentally, the phenomenal character of my visual experiencewhat it is like to see a shiny red tomato-does not (causally) produce the revealing of the tomato as red. Rather, it is what the revealing of the tomato as red consists in. We can use the ambiguous expression "in virtue of" to express this idea-the phenomenal character of my experience is that in virtue of which the object of the experience is revealed in the way that it is-but only if we are clear that this is a constitutive rather than causal sense of that expression.

  It is useful, for the purposes of extending this idea to
cognition in general, to formulate it explicitly in terms of the distinction between vehicle and content. Visual experiences possess phenomenal content. The phenomenal content of an experience discloses the intentional object of that experience by providing a logically sufficient condition for the object to fall under a given empirical mode of presentation. The vehicles of that content provide only a causally sufficient condition for the object to fall under this mode of presentation.

  Cognitive states-thoughts, beliefs, memories, and so on-also possess content. Their content is semantic. Much work has recently been done with a view to delineating the relation between semantic and phenomenal content. Does phenomenal content reduce to semantic content? Or is the former sui generis? We need not get involved with these questions. For our purposes, it is enough to point out that semantic content, whatever its relation to phenomenal content, discloses objects in a different way than does the vehicle of that content. Semantic content provides a logically sufficient condition for an object to be disclosed as falling under a given empirical mode of presentation. The vehicles of that content provide only a causally sufficient condition. Thus, if am entertaining a thought with the content "That tomato sure looks shiny and red," then this is a logically sufficient condition for the tomato to be revealed to me, in my thought, as shiny and red. There is no logically possible way that the tomato could not be revealed in thought in this way given that my thought has the content it does. However, whatever causal mechanisms we identify in the brain-whether these mechanisms are neurologically specified or identified in terms of a more abstract functional role-these provide only a causally sufficient condition for the tomato to be revealed to me, in thought, in this way. As a matter of natural necessity, given that these neurological or functional mechanisms are activated in the right way, I must be thinking of the tomato as shiny and red. But this natural necessity does not translate into logical necessity. There is no contradiction in supposing that, even given the appropriate activation of the mechanisms, I am thinking of the tomato in some other way, or not thinking of the tomato at all. The semantic content of my thought constitutively discloses the tomato as shiny and red. The neurological or functional mechanisms causally disclose the tomato as shiny and red.