Act and Object Dismantled

Act and Object Dismantled

Things are getting scary around here, philosophically. Paradigms are shifting, shattering, vaporizing before our very eyes (literally). The act-object analysis of conscious experience is in deep trouble. The senses have no objects! There is no object such that a visual experience is a seeing of it. Not physical, not mental, and nothing else either.[1] We have visual experience, but there is no object that is seen. The external physical object causes the experience, but it doesn’t feature as a constituent of it—as what is immediately given. The internal mental sense-datum exists in the mind, but it also isn’t seen, since the mind is not a visible thing. But then, there is no object to be the object of a mental act of seeing: when we see, there is no mental act of object perception—no object for the mind to act towards. Otherwise put, no object is presented to the mind, because there is no object being perceived. The seeing is empty of objects, material or mental. In the case of hearing, we don’t hear sound waves traveling through the air–we don’t hear sounds as wave-like movements of molecules in the air. What would that even be like? Nor do we hear sense-data of sound: sense-data are silent, for one thing, being occurrences in the mind. In the case of touch, we don’t experience hot objects as high in molecular motion; if we did, heat would feel like millions of tiny collisions. Neither do we taste or smell molecular formations. These objects, though real enough, are not perceptual realities—not phenomenological facts. Also, the experience is phenomenologically real, but it isn’t itself an object of sense experience. The act-object structure is therefore lacking essential ingredients. This means there is no intentional relation between the subject and an object—if there is any intentionality, it doesn’t take that form. Then what form does it take, if any?

This failure is mirrored in the subject side of the alleged act-object relation. What is the subject that features as a constituent of the subject-act-object triad? The question is pressing and prominent: it has troubled many a theorist of conscious experience from Hume onwards. Some say the subject is a mental object, but there is no perception of such an object (the “transcendental ego”); others maintain that the subject is physical, the body or brain perhaps. I need not rehearse this debate. I wish only to point out that the act-object analysis seems to cry out for a subject to perform the object-directed act, or to be what the object in question is presented to. It seems like a theoretical postulate designed to prop up a dubious piece of metaphysics—that which performs the putative act in question. The subject, the ego, the conscious self—a homuncular something I know-not-what. No doubt animals exist, even persons, but this subject entity is wheeled in to do a conceptual job—to be the other end of a postulated relation. But if we reject the underlying model, this entity loses its raison d’etre; it vanishes to the same place as its correlate the intentional object, leaving…leaving what exactly?

Where does the subject-act-object picture come from? Why do we think in these terms about conscious experience? Surely, it comes from our thinking about the physical world, not from any immediate apprehension of the structure of experience. The body is a physical object existing in space, surrounded by other physical objects; it acts on these objects and is acted on by them. In perception objects act on the senses to stimulate them, eventually reaching the brain, another object. We have act-object relations. It is very natural, even unavoidable, to suppose that this same structure repeats itself in the perceiving mind, only now we are dealing with conscious subjects, mental acts, and intentional objects. The entities and relations are different, but the structure is the same. How could it not be so? Granted, the ontology is spookier, more contrived, but the overall architecture repeats itself. But do we experience this architecture, feel it in our mental bones? Might it rest on a false analogy? Consider the atom: it was modeled on the solar system, with a nucleus and surrounding particles. The nucleus is like the Sun and the revolving particles are like the planets. But this model was cast into doubt by quantum physics; the atom turned out to be stranger than the model suggested. Similarly, we might model the mind on the solar system, with the self as like the Sun and intentional objects as like the planets. But that may be a misleading model, a baseless extrapolation. It might, indeed, be a complete myth, entrenched by repetition and a lack of any alternative model. That is what the problem of identifying suitable objects of perception would appear to suggest: the inner architecture of conscious experience simply fails to contain objects of the required type—the potential candidates just don’t have the requisite qualifications. The problem of non-existence already posed a difficulty for the model, leading to the sense-datum theory; but that theory had its own difficulties, notably the imperceptibility of sense-data. Then there was the problem of the conscious subject, and of the exact nature of the intentional relation (is it causal?). Perhaps it is time to face the possibility that the whole scheme is an error: the act-object conception of experience rests on a mistake.

But what can replace it? Isn’t it compulsory? How else are we supposed to conceptualize consciousness? One possibility is that we can’t, erroneous as that model may be: the form of conscious experience is a mystery. It has a form, but we cannot conceptualize it, given our object-centered conceptual scheme. But let’s not resort to mysterianism yet; perhaps we can find a better analogy than the solar system and objects that cluster around a center. And there is a model that crops up in the history of thought about consciousness—the model of a river. More broadly, we have the idea of a wave in water (or some other medium): a wave isn’t an object like a planet or a particle; it is a pattern or perturbation. What about the idea that waves pass through consciousness giving it the phenomenology it has? Not objects but undulations—currents, eddies, crests and troughs. Here we can borrow the apparatus of process philosophy: gone is the picture of solid atoms in the void, circling and colliding; instead, we embrace the more fluid idea of alterations in a medium (compare the idea of the ether). Consciousness is not a repository of hard little objects (or even soft ones) but something that bends and vibrates (think of Einstein on space). No doubt these physical analogies are imperfect—consciousness is a being unto itself—but at least they serve to free us from rigid adherence to the solar system kind of metaphor. On this model, there are no objects of perception—nothing object-like—but rather colorations or configurations of a medium: processes, events of becoming, transformations. To be specific, when you see what you call a red cup what is happening is that your consciousness is undergoing a certain process—it is “red-cupping”. Adverbially, it is behaving “red-cuppingly”. This is a strange locution, to be sure, but then our language is not set up to describe experience as it intrinsically is; in fact, experience is pretty ineffable (the same is true of the atom under quantum physics). Just as pain is an object-less alteration of consciousness—a process—so visual experience is not object-involving but a process. There is no real object that we see (or non-existent object), physical or mental, but rather a process-like alteration—a bending or coloring or suffusing. Perhaps there is a kind of appearance of object-hood attached to the experience, but upon closer analysis the experience is not really committed to such an object. Perceptual events are caused by objects in the world, and there might even be mental objects aptly called sense-data, but there are no phenomenal objects—as it were, phenomenal cups. In Kantian language, the noumenal world consists of objects (physical or mental) but the phenomenal world consists of processes in a medium, rather like waves in water. We may call these waves “objects of consciousness”, i.e., things we are conscious of, but they are not themselves objects (as opposed to properties, processes, waves, etc.). This is a non-objectual theory of the phenomenological form of conscious experience—we might call it “the Ripple Theory”. It has the advantage that it avoids the problems attending objectual theories of consciousness, but it must be admitted that it has the drawback of being virtually un-stateable. How serious a drawback this is depends on your view of the expressive limits of human language and human concepts—that is, on your view of the inexpressibility of reality. We were surely built to understand the ways of observable physical reality, but when it comes to the structure of consciousness, we might not be so well prepared. We might have a tendency to fill the gap in our conceptual scheme by borrowing from the part of it we are most comfortable with. Our experience escapes easy comprehension. Phenomenology is difficult.[2]

[1] See my “Are We Blind?”

[2] The whole history of philosophy (and psychology) reveals a struggle to describe what goes on in the conscious mind when it goes about its business, with many a technical term and controversial concept. Impressions and ideas, the phenomenal and the noumenal, the given and the posited, sense and reference, noesis and noema, the real and the intentional, the for-itself and the in-itself, the qualitative and the propositional, the syntactic and the semantic—all attempts to do justice to the inner being of the conscious mind. Clearly, there is something elusive here, which frustrates our best efforts. We vaguely feel that the inner is a domain unto itself, but the pull of the external and physical is strong. The result is a mishmash of the familiar and the novel, never quite hitting the target. We need a conceptual breakthrough, but find nowhere satisfactory to turn to. Hence the metaphors and analogies and strange locutions.