‘What it is like’

ABSTRACT

‘What it is like’ is a popular philosophical locution to talk about conscious experiences, but how it manages to refer to conscious experiences is still under investigation. What’s remarkable about ‘what it is like’ is that its literal meaning doesn’t concern consciousness; nevertheless this phrase is popular in discourses about consciousness. Understanding ‘what it is like’ thus requires investigation into the contextual factors that guide the interpretation of ‘what it is like’, which have not been sufficiently explored. This paper aims at understanding the context of ‘what it is like’, based on a revised property account of its semantics. After criticising Stoljar’s account in terms of ‘stereotypical contexts’, I consider several contextual factors that can be discerned in Stoljar’s interpretation of Nagel’s definition of consciousness. Then, I consider and criticise Mehta’s proposal that the meaning of ‘what it is like’ is fixed by mentioning the hard problems of consciousness. Eventually, I propose that the meaning of ‘what it is like’ is fixed by Phenomenal Thinking Context, in which the audience is made to think in the way in which one typically thinks about experiences. I also argue that Phenomenal Thinking Context explains the popularity of ‘what it is like’.

KEYWORDS:

• Consciousness
• experience
• ‘what it is like’
• hard problem
• phenomenal character
• phenomenal thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As noted by Stoljar (2016) and Mehta (2022), examples are too many.

2 Gaskin seems to hold that it is entirely the context that makes WIL-talk refer to consciousness, arguing that ‘the burden of introducing consciousness will be borne by the explicit or implicit restriction … that interest us to experiential ones, and not by anything in the semantics of the phrase “what it’s like”’ (Gaskin 2019, 695–696).

3 Since Gaskin emphasises the role of context, one might expect Gaskin (2019) to describe the relevant contextual factors in detail. But it doesn’t seem that Gaskin has done so, perhaps because it’s unnecessary for his main goal of criticising Stoljar’s affective account (and defending the resemblance account that he prefers).

4 Sentences like ‘What is it like to ψ?’ and ‘S knows what it is like to ψ’ can be analysed in like manner.

5 See Lormand (2004, 307–308); Hellie (2007, 460); Stoljar (2016, 1167–1169); Gaskin (2019, 694). Stoljar (2016) uses preposition ‘to’ before the variable y to avoid confusing the two indices.

6 In Stoljar (2016), it’s ‘to’.

7 Stoljar’s (2016) full account of WIL includes an account of how ‘affect’ is used in ‘stereotypical contexts’, which I will criticise in section 3.

8 Two other contexts explored by Mehta are the ‘perceptual character’ context and the ‘conveyed character’ context exemplified in works of John Campbell and Susanna Siegel respectively, which orient more toward issues in philosophy of perception.

9 That being said, the sort of phenomenal thinking pertaining to the understanding of ‘What it's like to ψ’ may concern phenomenal concepts, as ‘What it's like to ψ’ is typically about the experiential quality of ψ-ing.

10 It’s noteworthy that sensory experiences, esp. visual experiences often come among the first of such examples, and visual experiences seem to be the easiest to imagine.

11 Thus, I find Mehta’s (2022, 216) comment on the examples of experiences too dismissive.

12 It’s worth noting that Stoljar (2016, 1172–1173) construes ‘John knows what it is like to have a toothache’ as ‘John knows what way having a toothache affects you’. If one follows Stoljar’s affective account, I suspect that ‘John knows what way having a toothache would affect himself’ is also a fine reading, for the indices in ‘John knows what it is like for y [for x to have a toothache]’ may be read as referring to John. Despite this, Stoljar’s interpretation still treats the indices as referring to the readers (‘you’), which shows how salient the audience’s perspective is when talking about ‘What it’s like to ψ’.

13 I would also note that while (1) and (6) make sense, I find them a bit unnatural.

14 On the other hand, this also explains why WIL-talk may seem technical. The (quasi)technical part may be the fact that the relevance of Phenomenal Thinking Context (and thus the phenomenal way of thinking) isn’t always immediately salient to non-experts, even though Phenomenal Thinking Context itself isn’t technical.

15 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.