The Subject is Qualia:

Paronyms and Temporary Identity

    Things strike me in a variety ways. E. g., F and F# sound different, ripe and unripe tomatoes neither look nor taste nor smell the same, and silk feels smoother than corduroy. In each case, I distinguish an experience of something on the basis of what it is like to undergo it. That is to say, its “quale,” leads me to categorize it and, thus, respond appropriately to its stimulus. The function of a quale being established, we must define it along with its subject and, as Sartre maintained, their relation. How should we understand the subject and predicate terms and the copula in sentences such as ‘He is listening to Harvest’ or ‘She is seeing the sights of London’? Elaborating upon adverbialism, I shall argue that the subject of experiencing is a primitive substance that is temporarily identical to the paronym that it forms along with a quale. I begin by providing a brief exposition and defense of the adverbialist’s treatment of qualitative consciousness.

Qualia

The adverbialist identifies a quale with a “way” of experiencing, being to experiencing as rapidly or gently is to the flowing of a river. 1 To have a quale, on this view, is not to consciously grasp a quality of something that is distinct from oneself: neither a sense datum nor a res. Rather, it is to be experiencing in a certain way, as one is stimulated by events in one’s surroundings and/or body. (As we shall see, a natural extension of this view is to treat the subject of an experience, not as having it, as Sartre’s locution misleadingly suggests, but as making up something along with it.) To have the quale of a red experience, e. g., is to be experiencing redly, as it were. To say that one is now having a different experience, as would come from turning one’s attention to, say, a cucumber, is to say there has been a change in the way in which one is experiencing: one has gone from experiencing redly to greenly.

It has been argued that the adverbialist is unable to clarify the meaning of such locutions without reintroducing the model of qualitative consciousness that her theory was intended to replace. 2 To say that ‘Socrates is sensing redly’ can only mean that ‘Socrates’ sensing is red’, which seems to entail the existence of a red phenomenal object to which Socrates is (somehow) related. The objector maintains that unless the adverbialist accepts this analysis her view will be “incomprehensible.”3 She further maintains that the adverbialist cannot account for the distinctions that she posits between the ways in which a subject experiences things without reintroducing phenomenal properties. What could the difference between sensing redly and sensing greenly amount to if not that the former is the experience of phenomenal redness while the latter is the experience of phenomenal greenness? If the adverbialist eschews the request for an account of such a difference as ill-conceived, treating the distinction as a primitive fact, her view becomes “phenomenologically inadequate.”4 Qualia having been ‘left out of the picture’, it fails to provide a full account of a legitimate explanandum.

Adverbialism’s comprehensibility, however, is not dependent upon a belief in phenomenal objects. The adverbialist can insist she has obviated the need to posit such things by treating experiencing as describable in terms of the ways in which it occurs, attributes belonging to a different category than those of objects. (It would be a category mistake to treat ways of occurring as akin to ways of being. Compare: ‘His walking is slow’/‘He is walking slowly’ vs. ‘The tomato is red’/*‘The tomato is (being) redly’.) Even though ‘Socrates is sensing redly’ means the same thing as ‘Socrates’ sensing is red’, the adverbialist is not committed to the existence of phenomenal objects. For the former is intended by the adverbialist as an analysis of the latter, a clarification of the latter’s misleading “surface grammar,” providing for its elimination from usage. As such, the adverbialist’s analysans may be taken as a primitive form of expression, explicable only via paradigmatic applications, it being understood, as Wittgenstein said, that “explanations must come to an end somewhere.”

We now turn to the Sartre’s questions. What is the subject of experiencing and what sort of dyad do they form?

Substances and Paronyms

We shall take the subject of experiencing to be a “primitive” substance, rather than a substratum/bare particular. (We reject the latter view because it entails the existence of a type of entity none of whose properties are essential- not even being a substratum. The idea that qualia are subjectless will be discussed below.)5 According to Michael Loux, substances are “part(s) of the basic furniture of the world.”6 That is because substance kinds- denoted by sortals and having numerically distinct particulars as instances- are themselves fundamental categories of being, irreducible to the “first-order properties (such as) colors and shapes” in terms of which they must be analyzed by adherents of the alternatives just mentioned. (The universals in question are obviously Platonic, as an Aristotlean universal’s instances are not numerically distinct.) Thus, Loux does not consider the instances of all universals to be properties; some- the members of substance kinds- exemplify properties (the instances of other universals). To belong to such a kind, e. g., that of persons, is not to instantiate certain property universals- the kind’s essence- it is be an instance of a universal that makes something what it is and numerically distinct from other members of its kind. A person is, thus, a (primitive) substance who forms along her experiencing what Aristotle referred to as a “paronym,” in Frank Lewis words, an “accidental compound,” consisting of a substance and one of its accidents: e. g., Socrates and (his) sensing redly. 7 Here, then, is Sartre’s “dyad.”

We must now determine the relation between (the substance that is) a person and any accidental compound of which she has become an element. Is it identity or something else? Ockham’s razor and the fact that they are co-located militates against treating them as distinct. Their modal differences, however, suggest that they should not be identified: a paronym, unlike its substantial element, cannot exist sans its quale. R. M. Dancy contends that insofar as we are doing ontology- “inventory(ing)” the universe- we should disregard such differences, counting, e. g., Socrates and Socrates sensing redly as one, ala any competent “census-taker.”8 Lewis responds that a census-taker’s count should not be taken here as authoritative, at least for the purpose of doing ontology. 9 He notes, moreover, that there are non-modal differences between them: in the normal course of events, the former, but not the latter, will eventually lack the “time-indexed” property of sensing redly at t.

Temporary Identity

I have argued elsewhere that folk-ontology entails a dualistic conception of identity. 10 Insofar as one is concerned to preserve this conceptual scheme, one must provide for synchronic “census-taker counting” as well as mereologically alterable objects (MAOs, which also entail census-taker counting, albeit across time). Accordingly, at any given time, a material substance is “temporarily” identical (=t) with the (mereologically inalterable) aggregate of parts of which it is then constituted (and with which it is then co-located).11 Diachronically, however, it is identical (=d) with any of the aggregates to which it is “P-ly” related: both belonging to a sequence of aggregates each member of which belongs to the same sort and includes or is included in its successor. 12 That is to say, since we are taking falling under a sortal to be a matter of instantiating a (substance) universal, a =d b iff they instantiate the same instance of a substance universal (the overlap condition now being redundant as substances undergo only gradual mereological change). According to Locke and Peter Geach, there are numerous identity relations, one for each sort. We posit two: one relating
(certain) temporally separate objects and another relating (certain) contemporaries. Alternatively, identity is here taken to be relative to the type of judgment being made, either of things existing at different times or things existing simultaneously that they are identical.

Refining the principle of the transitivity of identity to reflect this distinction entails a solution to several identity puzzles, which is preferable to the alternatives for not requiring the modification each one makes to folk-ontology. 13 (That is to say, a cost/benefit analysis, which has become de rigour in contemporary metaphysics, reveals that the cost of dualism- refining the principle of the transitivity of identity- is less than the cost of other views on this subject, which either eliminate MAOs, so as to disallow co-location or allow co-location, so as to not eliminate MAOs or eliminate MAOs and allow co-location, treating substances as instantaneous temporal parts or aggregates thereof.) The transitivity principle relevant here is:

TP (@ t, x =t y & y =d z) Þ x =d z

TP yields a response to those who contend that temporary identity violates Leibniz’s Law in respect of time-indexed properties. 14 For a substance is diachronically identical to any aggregate that is P-ly related to that aggregate to which it is (now) temporarily identical, the latter being just one of a succession of P-ly related relata each one of which being at some time temporally identical to it (An aggregate, it should be said, persists not in virtue of being P-ly related to another aggregate, but simply by having its parts persist, ala Locke). Let us say, then, following a suggestion of Andre Gallois, that a(n) substance/aggregate will be F at t iff it is at some time before t temporarily identical to a(n) aggregate/substance that will be F at t. 15 By this standard, a statue would share whatever fate awaits the clay out of which it is made, say, being a paperweight at t. If it is possible for the statue and the clay to be temporarily identical, then it is also possible for the statue to be temporarily essentially a hunk of clay, that is, for the latter to “lend” to the former its essence. In borrowing it, the statue would acquire the above time-indexed property.

To account for the modal differences between an aggregate and that which it constitutes, Gallois stipulates further that x is “independently” essentially F iff x is F in any possible world in which it exists and that x is at t “dependently” essentially F iff x is at t temporarily identical to something that is independently essentially F. 16 Thus, by becoming a member of the sequence of P-ly related aggregates that make up the hunk of clay’s career, the statue becomes diachronically, but not necessarily temporarily, identical to any aggregate to which it will be P-ly related. The hunk of clay, however, is going to be temporarily identical to every possible member of that series: it is its sole “full-timer,” the statue being there only contingently. This diachronic fact entails their modal differences (as well as the irreducibility of the latter to the former). It would be a category mistake, however, to appeal to it in determining their relationship during the period of their co-location, for there the concern is with things existing simultaneously. Folk-ontology requires different standards for judgments of synchronic and diachronic identity.

The relation between a substance and a co-located paronym should also be treated this way. Their modal differences would, thus, not tell against their being temporarily identical. Moreover, despite only being temporarily identical, they would be indiscernible in terms of their time-indexed properties. Adopting a dualistic conception of identity would, thus, allow the adverbialist to comply with the extensional version of Leibniz’s Law as well as Ockham’s Razor. Finally, temporally separated paronyms P1 and P2 would be experiencings of the same person P (that is, P1 =d P2) just in case @ t1 P =t P1 and @ t2 P =t P2 (i.e. both are instantiations of P, itself an instance of a substance universal). I shall now compare this view of qualitative consciousness as it relates to personal identity to a recently developed alternative.

A Bundle of Bundles
The main component of Leopold Stubenberg’s “monism” is David Hume’s “bundle” theory. 17 On this view, experiences- what Stubenberg calls “percepts”- are not instantiated by a substance, their subject. Rather, they inhere in a bundle or collection whose elements are (somehow) synchronically and diachronically unified. A person here just is a series of collections of percepts whose unification does not entail the existence of an entity belonging to a distinct ontological category, such as a Lockean “substratum” or an “individuative universal,” ala Loux. Percepts themselves also turn out to be bundles, collections of qualia, unified but not in virtue of belonging to an underlying substance-subject. 18 A person on this view, then, is a bundle of bundles. 19 Stubenberg goes on to identify the percepts that make up the person-bundle with neural events, these being what is experienced. 20

The distinction between what one is and what one undergoes breaks down here. The resulting conflation of a subject and her percepts leaves the qualia making up the latter without ontological support, pointing up a problem with monism: qualia do not seem capable of existing independently of the entities of another category of being. As Stubenberg himself notes, 21 his view violates the Cartesian/Lockean principle that a collection of properties of any sort must be “supported” by something that is not itself a property (lest there be an infinite regress).22

Stubenberg’s response to this objection is a tu quoque: those who posit substances underlying properties must also provide an account of the nature of instantiation, in this case, an explanation of the relationship between a subject and her qualia. 23 The parallel problem for the monist is to explain how qualia inhere in a bundle without resorting to the notion of a common subject. But this reply misses the mark. For the question posed to the monist had to do with the possibility of properties existing without substrata; his opponent is not faced with this issue, only with the comparatively minor problem of accounting for the ability of a substance to bear qualities, which can plausibly be regarded as a ‘brute’ fact. Stubenberg says that “(properties) are not like table clothes; nothing about them suggests that they collapse pitifully absent a sturdy supporting structure.”24 However, that is precisely what his opponent maintains: properties do not seem capable of independent existence. Thus, it is incumbent upon him to refute the Cartesian/Lockean principle.

An attempt at doing so was recently made by Arda Denkel. Borrowing from Frege, Denkel contends that in itself a property is an “unsaturated,” and, hence, a dependent entity. 25 On his view, however, its saturation is not provided by something independent, a substance, ala Frege. Rather, it is a function of its inherence in a “compresence” of determinants every one of which saturates and is saturated by every other element. 26 Mutually supporting determinants of “sufficient diversity,” thus, form an independent entity wholly composed of non-substances. 27 A property, on this view, entails the existence of the complementary determinants needed to ‘flesh out’ a collection that itself requires no ontological support.

Denkel’s proposal is reminiscent of the attempt to reduce space and time to sets of unextended points and instants. Such an analysis only invites the question: how could what is extended be composed of parts lacking extension? The latter seem incapable of amounting to anything having magnitude. 28 In the same way, the idea of unsaturated entities saturating each other to yield an independent entity appears implausible. How could saturation arise from combining such things, even if they are diverse? (Moreover, if a compresence is taken to be a set of determinants, the proposed reduction involves making the category mistake of identifying concrete entities such a tables and trees with abstractions.) Taking our cue from Frege himself, we are forced to conclude that the unsaturated and the saturated belong to distinct and mutually entailing categories. 29 Thus, it remains incumbent upon Stubenberg to refute the Cartesian/Lockean principle.

Conclusion

We have been examining the relation between a subject and the qualia of her experiences. According to the views we have considered, a quale is not a representation its subject apprehends. Both assume that a subject is “closer” to her experiences than she would be were the performance of a mental act required to grasp their qualia. 30 To model this closeness, Stubenberg prefers to dispense with the subject of qualia. The adverbialist’s analysis, as developed above, leaves some “room” between a subject and any paronym that she forms along with a quale, treating them as only temporarily identical. She, thus, preserves both terms of the relation, losing the “propertyness” of qualia but not qualia themselves. Stubenberg remarks that an adequate analysis of qualitative consciousness should “save the phenomenon.”31 But the phenomenon in question is not merely qualia, as he suggests. 32 Rather, it is a subject’s qualitative consciousness- the "the possessor possessed," as Sartre put it. The above development of adverbialism manages to save more of that phenomenon than monism.

Notes

1. Adverbialism was originally developed in Roderick Chisolm’s Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 115-25. Another early proponent is Wilfrid Sellars. Cf. his "The Adverbial Theory of the Objects of Sensation" in Metaphilosophy, 6: 144–160. See also Michael Pendlebury’s “In Defense of the Adverbial Theory of Experience,” in Thought Language and Ontology: Essays in Memory of Hector-Neri Castaneda ed. Francesco Orilia and William J. Rapaport
(Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998) pp. 95-106. I shall remain neutral here regarding the debate between dualists and materialists.

2. CQ, p. 266. Panayot Butchvarov first raised this objection. See his “Adverbial Theories of Consciousness,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 5 (1980) pp.
261-80.

3. CQ, p. 270.

4. CQ, p. 273.

5. Ibid., pp. 244-5. The name of John Locke is often associated with the former view. See his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John Yolton (NY: Dutton, 1965), vol. 1, chap. 23, p. 245. Whether or not he should be labeled a substratum theorist is a point of contention amongst Locke scholars. For opposing views on this matter see: M. R. Ayers, “The Ideas of Power and Substratum in Locke’s Philosophy,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 25 (1975) and Jonathan Bennett “Substratum,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 4 (1987). The two most notable modern defenders of bare particulars are Gustav Bergmann (Realism, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967) and Edwin Allaire (“Bare Particulars” and “Another Look at Bare Particulars” both contained in both contained in Laurence and MacDonald, op. cit., pp. 248-54;
259-63).

6. Cf. “Beyond Bundles and Substrata,” (in The Foundations of Metaphysics, ed. Stephen Laurence and Cynthia MacDonald, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers) p. 244.

7. Frank Lewis, “Accidental Sameness in Aristotle,” Philosophical Studies 42 (1982), 1-5.

8. R. M. Dancy, “On Some of Aristotle’s First Thoughts on Substance,” Philosophical Review 84 (1975), p. 368.

9. Lewis, 22-3.

10. See my __________.

11. Ibid., pp. 532-3. Kit Fine contends (in “The Non-Identity of a Material Thing and its Matter,” Mind, Vol. 112, April 2003) that complete mereological overlap and spatial coincidence do not entail each other and gives putative counterexamples to this effect. I prefer Peter Simon’s view of this matter (developed in Parts: A Study in Ontology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 pp. 228-37) and do not find Fine’s counterexamples convincing. But I need not defend this claim as nothing here turns on it.

12. Ibid., p. 534. The P relation is based on Eli Hirsch’s “Compositional Criterion” of persistence. Cf. The Concept of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 71. The inclusion relation is designated by the primitive predicate of Lesniewskian mereology: “a is included in b iff ‘a’ designates exactly one individual and it is one of the one of more individuals designated by ‘b’.” See Simons, op. cit, p. 21.

13. The puzzles that I have in mind are summarized in Michael Rea’s “The Problem of Material Constitution,” Philosophical Review 104 (1995), pp. 525-52. Alternative solutions to these puzzles include: “eliminativism,” as defended by Peter van Inwagen in Material Beings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), “temporal parts theory,” as defended by Mark Heller in The Ontology of Physical Objects: Four-Dimensional Hunks of Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and “co-locationism,” as defended by Michael Burke in “Dion and Theon: An Essentialist Solution to an Ancient Puzzle,” The Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994), 129-39.

14. E. g., George Myro. See his “Identity and Time,” in The Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, ed. R Grandy and R. Warner, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp.
391-3.

15. Andre Gallois, Occasions of Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp., 79-100.

16. Gallois, pp. 168-72.

17. Leopold Stubenberg, Consciousness and Qualia, (henceforth, CQ) (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1998), pp. 286-88. See Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Shelby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), I. iv. 6. It should be noted that adverbialism and monism are not the only views on this subject. There is also “representationism” according to which qualia are either representations of (electro-chemical) properties of brain states or properties of mind/brain-independent physical objects. Adherents of the former view include, David Rosenthal, (“Two Concepts of Consciousness,” Philosophical Studies 49, pp.
329-59, “The Independence of Consciousness and Sensory Quality,” in Consciousness, ed. Enrique Villanueva, Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991, pp.
15-36, and “Thinking that One Thinks,” in Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays, ed. Martin Davies and Glyn Humphreys, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pp.
197-223) William Lycan, (Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, and “What is the Subjectivity of the Mental?” in Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 4, ed. James Tomberlin, Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1990, pp. 109-30) and Christopher Maloney (“About Being a Bat,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63, pp. 26-49). The latter position is held by Fred Dretske (Naturalizing the Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) and Michael Tye (Ten Problems of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). I shall say nothing here about representationism beyond that I agree with Stubenberg that it leaves too much room between a subject and her qualia.

18. CQ, pp. 286-7. Stubenberg does not provide a principle of diachronic unity for self-bundles; his view, thus, needs to be supplemented by an account of personal identity.

19. Hector Neri Casteneda develops a similar view of substances in “Thinking and the Structure of the World,” Critica 6 (1972) pp. 43-81 and “Perception, Belief, and the Structure of Physical Objects and Consciousness,” Synthese 35 (1977) pp. 285-351.

20. CQ, pp. 288-91.

21. CQ, pp. 304-5, 309-10.

22. This Cartesian definition of substance is developed in Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz, Substance among other Categories, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 122-39 and Substance: Its Nature and Existence, (London: Routledge, 1997) pp. 43-72. Cf. also Locke, op. cit., vol. 1 chap. 23, p. 245, Descartes The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 2: 114 and p. 156, and David Armstrong (A World of States of Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 99).

23. CQ, p. 288.

24. CQ, p. 288. Contrary to what he asserts, (CQ, p. 329) even tropes require ontological support: in that respect, they are no different than universals.

25. Arda Denkel, Object and Property, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 191-2.

26. Ibid., p. 191. For a similar view, see Peter Simons “Particulars in Particular Clothing,” in Laurence and MacDonald, pp. 364-84.

27. Ibid., p. 191, how much diversity is supposed to be an empirical matter.

28. See Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz, Substance among other Categories, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 105-13, 188-93. As Hoffman and Rosenkrantz note, Aristotle thought it “absurd that a magnitude should consist of things which are not magnitudes.” See The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 1:516.

29. See Gottlob Frege, “Function and Concept,” and “Concept and Object,” in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 3rd edition, ed. Peter Geach. and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 21-55.

30. See note 17 above for a list of articles in which it is maintained that qualitative consciousness does require the performance of such a mental act.

31. CQ, pp. 272-3.

32. CQ, p. 272.