Conversational Substance

Carl H. Flygt

September, 2005

On the Relational View of consciousness and world, if two travelers exit a freeway at a scenic overlook and take in the view, they will have experiences with the same phenomenal character. You could even say that they will have the same experience.

Alva Noe, paraphrased from the Berkeley seminar of September 14, 2005

On the Relational View of human perception, perceived objects are one of the elements that constitute subjective experience. Other elements presumably would include the health of the sense organs and brain and perhaps the mood of the subject. Thus if our two travelers getting out of their automobiles each enjoy a basic state of good health and are substantially in the same mood, they will enjoy the same experience as they walk around in the same parking lot at the same time.

It seems only natural to observe that such constitution of experience by the object must be causal, just as the role played by the health or disease of the relevant sense organs, or by the overall mood, whether carefree or dark, is also efficiently causal in constituting the experience. In chess, by way of contrast, the definitions and rules that constitute a particular game are not efficiently causal. The condition that two and only two players participate in the game does not seem best characterized by the diachronic notion that a rule on two-fold participation in part caused the encounters between Fischer and Spassky in 1972. Perhaps we can say that in chess, which is a product of institutional fiat, the constitutive condition is pure and synchronic, but in conscious experience which, in mundane cases is a clear product of natural selection and evolution, and not of the declarational action of a cosmic and bureaucratic Lawgiver or Gamesman, the constitutive relation is much more complex, and by and large sullied by material resistances, redundancies and temporal contingencies. Clairvoyant or mystical conscious experience, on the other hand, which is anything but mundane, but rather fresh, surprising and intensively consuming, may exhibit constitutive features more on the synchronic model.

Now with the Relational Picture of perceived objects and their constitutive conditions firmly in mind, we can turn to the circumstance of pure conversation, which again is anything but mundane and densely materialist, where the objects that constitute experience are not perceived but are imagined. I will take it as justified that image consciousness contains material objects, but not overly heavy objects. When in pure conversation can we be reasonably assured that everyone, as a matter of objective fact, is having the same experience? What moreover is explained by such a datum? Clearly that condition will obtain when, and only when, everyone is imagining the same object. I have gone to some trouble in my forthcoming book to list and present as a social contract what I think are the necessary presuppositions and agreements to get that to happen reliably. In pure conversation, everyone has the same experience (and is in the same state of consciousness) when and only when everyone present has objective knowledge of the reference of the current locution.

Now for John Campbell, experience of the object explains our ability to think demonstratively about it. It explains how we can enjoy a conceptual or intentional state directed at that object in the presence of that object. Campbell would appear also to think it explains the a priority of experience over the capacity for intentionality by supplying intrinsic (categorical) grounds, such as the object’s substance, for our thinking about objects in general or at all. But Campbell appears to think categorical grounds are not intentional (conceptual). Very well. Everyone can have an opinion.

In pure conversation, as distinct from mere perception, the locution is tied unequivocally and in a living, breathing way to its Fregean object. The locution instantiates an actual causal chain that extends over space and time, Kripke-style, to the baptism of the object or objects to which the locution refers. The mystical, Fregean part is that the baptism itself always devolves from an intelligible and supersensible world, not just from the densified material realm of mere nature and cause and effect. When two parents turn to a newborn and concur, “Thou shalt be named ‘Gaius Julius,’” the baptism involves categorical elements already. Infants, after all, are always presented to perception as unities, for example, and as realities. The sense of any conversational locution involves these categorical elements as well as the material token, when conversational reference is made.

In all conversation, and not just in the subconscious kind, the sense of any locution is apt to be highly intensional, and its material/transcendental reference thereby obscured. The locution will therefore be subject to all manner of semantic indexing and assignment by each of the conversational intelligences present, such that an absolute alignment among them all would amount to something like a miracle. But in pure conversation, miracles and their energetic mystical effects are the standard, not the exception. Of course, ideal standards notwithstanding, one does not expect superficial perfection in all conversational essays. That would be unreasonable. It is really a question of long background practice as to how and whether the contents of the spiritual imagination can be reified and made to stand out in the ether as actual and substantial perceptions.

What constitutes a conversational substance? Kant thinks it is an a priori content in the understanding, a notion we bring to a possible experience and thereby fill it out. John Campbell seems to think it has more to do with vision, and the incommensurably richer qualities afforded knowledge by light and space over propositional representation. But I think both Kant and Campbell really want to say it has to do with the self, which somehow and for some reason is radically invoked, brought forth and bound together with the object when and only when the categorical ground of the imagination is not just understood or seen, but is actually inspired with material form.