Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
(is physicalism true?). For him, property dualism is the only reasonable option:
type-B views are popular but not very coherent, and type-A are quite simply on
the wrong side of the Great Divide between those who take consciousnessly seri-
ously and those who do not. But Chalmers acknowledges that, as Dennett says, in
the end he falls back on intuitions.
Ultimately, argument can take us only so far in settling this issue. If
someone insists that explaining access and reportability explains
everything, that Mary discovers nothing about the world when she first
has a first red experience, and that a functional isomorph differing in
conscious experience is inconceivable, then I can only conclude that
when it comes to experience we are on different planes. Perhaps our
inner lives differ dramatically.
(Chalmers, 1996, p. 167)So the two teams end up either crediting or rejecting their own intuitions, being
sure that consciousness either does or does not need its own special explanation
and, in both cases, refusing to budge. Their exchanges amount to ‘that schoolyard
dialectic: “You’ve left something out!” “No I haven’t.” “Yes you have.” “No I haven’t.”
“Yes you have.” etc. etc.’ (Raffman, 1995, p. 294).
We will return to these differences, and to Dennett’s proposed alternative of
heterophenomenology, but first we need to look at some traditional first-person
methods.
PHENOMENOLOGY
The term ‘phenomenology’ is used in several different ways. Sometimes it refers to
a person’s experience (their ‘phenomenology’, how it is for them) or to experiences
in themselves (‘the phenomenology’, or what it’s like), but here we are concerned
with phenomenology as a method and a philosophy.
As a method, phenomenology also has two meanings. In the broad sense, it refers
to any methods for the systematic investigation of phenomenal experience (Ste-
vens, 2000). In the narrower sense, it refers specifically to the tradition based on
Husserl’s philosophy, and its later developments by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others. Here we are concerned not so much with
the philosophy, which is often obscure and difficult for outsiders to understand, but
with the methods that Husserl advocated for getting to the ‘experience itself ’ (Galla-
gher, 2007, 2012; Thompson and Zahavi, 2007; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012).
Husserl argued that there can be no meaningful distinction between the external
world and the internal world of experience, and emphasised the importance of
lived experience over scientific abstractions. In order to explore this lived experi-
ence, one should suspend, or bracket, all one’s preconceptions and prior beliefs,
especially those about the nature of the external world and its relationship to
experience; one should step back from the natural attitude of observing a world
‘out there’, and into the phenomenological attitude which investigates the very
experiences that we have. It does not matter whether things really exist, physi-
cally or objectively (for example, whether the apple you are looking at is there in
front of you, or whether you are dreaming or hallucinating it); that is a question
‘I can only conclude
that when it comes to
experience we are on
different planes’(Chalmers, 1996, p. 167)