[Wittrs] Re: Strawson on Experience and Experiencers
- From: "Cayuse" <z.z7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:20:31 -0000
BruceD wrote:
I'm trying to make sense of this. This is what I get. We agree that we
have experience. We agree that we experience ourselves as an
experiencer. But since our experience of ourselves is part of our
experience then there is way to tease apart the R from the E.
If I use the word "experience" to refer to a skill acquired through practise
(e.g. "machine tool operator required, experience essential") then I agree
with Strawson that "There cannot be experience without a subject of
experience because experience is necessarily for someone or something
--- an experiencer or subject of experience". However, when discussing
the philosophical problem of consciousness I'm not using the word in that
manner, and judging by Strawson's writings I doubt very much that he is
either. This leads me to suspect that he is being misled by language
(confusion of language games).
Certainly the *ideas* of experiencer, experienced, and experiencing stand
in mutual relationship and interdependence, just as do the *ideas* of
deceiver, and deceived, and deception. When we talk about experience
as something gained through the practising of a new skill, then this mutual
relationship and interdependence hold up, but to use the word as Chalmers
does in reference to what he calls the "hard problem" (i.e. *conscious*
experience) is to engage in a very different language game.
"Experience" in this latter game cannot be compared with deception
(or any other attempt at analogy) since deception constitutes only a
*part* of the "data of conscious experience", not the *whole* of it
(i.e. "experience"). There can be only one "entirety of the data of
conscious experience", and the *idea* of experience (said idea being
merely a *part* of that data, additionally complicated by having variant
conceptions) is at the root of much confused thinking and cross-purpose
debate on this issue.
In this latter (Chalmersian) language game, the word "experience"
has been recruited to allude to something (or rather to "not a nothing")
that is at the very limit of language, in contrast to those games in which
the word is used to refer to some aspect of cognitive function. Being
at the very limit of language, it makes no sense to misconceive it as an
entity and then to pile misconceived entity upon misconceived entity by
postulating the existence of some associated "experiencer" that is distinct
from it but that stands in mutual relationship and interdependence with it.
It is by just such a misconception (putting the entirety of the data of
conscious experience on an equal footing with those entities, activities
and relationships that appear *within* the data of conscious experience)
that we arrive at the problem of accounting for the relationship between
conscious experience and the experiencer. The "experience" of which
Chalmers speaks appears nowhere *within* the data of conscious
experience, not as entity, activity, nor relationship, and neither does
this putative "experiencer". Chalmers' "hard problem" results from
confusing the well grounded and useful idea of self as organism in its
habitat with the ungrounded and useless metaphysical idea of self as
experiencer.
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