d on what is thought to be the special qualitative character of conscious experiences. My own view is that the water has been muddied by a tendency to conflate qualities of what is experienced with qualities of experiences. Your visual experience of a ripe tomato is an experience of something red and spherical, but it is the tomato, not your experience, that is red and spherical.
I will not pause to elaborate this point here. Rather I shall focus on the second aspect of consciousness mentioned earlier: its ‘subjective’ nature. The thought is that you are privy to your own experiences in a way no one else could be. Experiences are private, unobservable, in principle, from the ‘outside’. In contrast, goings-on inside your body, including goings-on in your brain, are observable by anyone with the right equipment. It is all well and good to suppose your experience of a ripe tomato is correlated with an occurrence in your nervous system: a neuroscientist might observe and measure the neural correlate of your experience. But it makes no sense to imagine the neuroscientist’s observing your experience.
Really? Consider what it would be for a scientist to observe your experience. If you are careful to distinguish qualities of what is experienced – the redness of a tomato, for instance – from qualities of the experience, you can see that it would be a mistake to expect a scientist observing your experience of a red tomato to observe something red and tomato-shaped. This leaves open the possibility that your experiencing the tomato is an occurrence in your brain that could in fact be observed by others.
Were that so, it would seem to undermine the powerful sense that experiences are distinctively private affairs: subjectivity sacrificed on the altar of objectivity!
Maybe not. Consider, first, the difference between something being in a given state and observations of something being in that state, and pretend for a moment that your undergoing a conscious experience is for your brain to be in a particular state. Now, imagine a neuroscientist observing your brain being in that state. The neuroscientist’s observing of your brain state is itself a matter of the neuroscientist being in a distinct experiential state. Why think that the neuroscientist’s experience of your experience of a red tomato would resemble your experience of a red tomato or, more generally, that a neuroscientist’s observation of any conscious state would yield an awareness of ‘what it is like’ to be in that state? What is misleadingly described as your awareness of your own experiences is not your inward observation of those experiences, but simply having or undergoing those experiences. Assuming it makes sense to identify experiences with neurological states or processes, having and observing an experience are two very different things.
What of the elusive ‘what-it’s-like-ness’ of experiences? Knowing what it is like to experience red apparently requires having undergone a ‘red experience’, that is, having visually encountered something red. The point is a perfectly general epistemological point having nothing in particular to do with experiential qualities. Knowing what an echidna looks like requires having encountered an echidna, or a picture of an echidna, or a creature you know to be echidna-like.
None of this is especially controversial. If visually experiencing a tomato is a matter of being in a particular perceptual state, a scientist experiencing that state is a matter of the scientist being in a distinct perceptual state. These states – yours and the scientist’s – need not be similar, qualitatively or otherwise. And if knowing what it is like to be in a particular state is a matter of being – or having been – in that state, knowing what it is like to experience a tomato visually differs from knowing what it is like to experience a visual experience of a tomato. You could know either without knowing the other.
The subjectivity of experiences stems, not from their in-principle unobservability from the ‘outside’, but from the relatively humdrum distinction b