Still, several important issues remain to be discussed.

This
188 Chapter 7
distinction can be employed to mark a significant substantive sense of
self-consciousness.
Still, several important issues remain to be discussed. First, more needs
to be said about the notion of a nonconceptual point of view. The discussion
in this chapter has been devoted principally to establishing conscious
place recognition as a necessary condition for possession of a nonconceptual
point of view, and it should be obvious that it is far from a sufficient
condition. In the next chapter I will discuss in more detail how the capacity
for conscious place recognition is put to work to provide a nonconceptual
point of view on the world. A second set of issues emerges when we
ask how the distinction stressed in this chapter maps onto certain other
distinctions, one of which has already been discussed. In particular, something
needs to be said about how the distinction between conscious place
recognition and nonconscious place recognition relates, first, to the distinction
between conscious and nonconscious creatures and, second, to
the distinction discussed in chapter 4 between behavior that supports an
intentional interpretation and behavior that does not. A third point that
needs to be discussed is how the conclusions of this chapter mesh with
the Acquisition Constraint, which governs the overall project of showing
how full-fledged self-consciousness can be built up from the pick-up of
self-specifying information in perceptual experience.
Describing the type of memory implicated in experience reflecting a
nonconceptual point of view as conscious memory can make it tempting
to think that all and only creatures capable of conscious place recognition
are conscious. This is certainly suggested by the contrast drawn between
conscious place recognition and unconsciously generated differential responses
due to prior exposure to stimuli. Nonetheless, there is nothing
incoherent about the idea that a creature inhabiting what I termed the
continuous present could have conscious experiences. Of course, it could
not have conscious experiences if we stipulate, as Strawson does, that
conscious experiences are available only to creatures with a point of view
on the world. But there are no good grounds for making this stipulation.
Perceptual experiences with first-person nonconceptual contents derived
from the pick-up of self-specifying information can be entertained by
creatures who lack a point of view on the world in virtue of lacking conscious
recognitional abilities. I can think of no non-question-begging
reason to deny that these are experiences. And in any case, even someone
Points of View 189
determined to deny that such states could count as experiences in some
rich and as yet unspecified sense of the word would nonetheless have to
accept that such a creature could still be conscious in virtue of having
sensations.10
We should not assume that only creatures possessed of the appropriate
conscious recognitional capacities can behave in ways that demand intentional
explanation. The operational criteria for the appropriateness of intentional
explanation discussed in chapter 4 neither make any reference
to, nor imply the existence of, conscious recognitional abilities. These criteria
derive from the basic thought that representational perceptual states
are intermediaries between sensory input and behavioral output to which
appeal needs to be made when there is no invariant connection between
input and output. There is no reason to think that a creature moving
around the world and acting on the basis of self-specifying information
in the various ways described by Gibson could not be capable of behavior
that is plastic and flexible enough to require intentional explanation. And
if the behavior is suitably plastic and flexible, then, as discussed in chapter
5, the first-person nonconceptual contents derivable from the pick-up of
self-specifying information are particularly well suited to capture the contents
of perceptual protobeliefs in way that explains their direct relevance
to action. Intentional explanation can enter into the picture prior to the
emergence of the conscious recognitional abilities necessary for possession
of a point of view on the world.
This point can be brought home by reflecting on the strong pressures
to concede that at least some instrumentally conditioned behavior is intentional
(Russell 1980, Dickinson 1988). Instrumental conditioning certainly
does not require conscious recognitional capacities, being perfectly
explicable on Gibsonian lines in terms of increasing perceptual sensitivity
to a particular affordance. All that instrumental conditioning requires is
consciousness in the very weak sense of sentience, since reinforcement
depends on the capacity to feel sensations. It is reasonable, I think, to
hold that the capacity for intentional behavior is restricted to creatures
that are conscious in the weak sense of being able to feel sensations. But
the converse does not hold. Creatures whose behavior is not intentional
can be perfectly capable of feeling sensations. This is presumably what
makes possible the various types of instrumental conditioning that do not
result in intentional behavior.
190 Chapter 7
The conclusion to draw, then, is that that we are dealing here with three
intersecting distinctions, rather than three different ways of describing the
same distinction. None of the three distinctions map cleanly on to any of
the others. Nonetheless, it does seem that these three distinctions give us
a hierarchy of cognitive abilities, ordered according to the relations of
dependence among these abilities. Basic consciousness is clearly the most
primitive of the three abilities. It is presupposed by both the others, while
itself presupposing neither of them. In fact, it is very plausible to think
that it is innate (Gazzaniga 1995). Next comes the capacity for intentional
behavior, which requires consciousness in the weak sense of sentience
but is independent of the conscious recognitional abilities that we
have seen to be necessary conditions for possession of a nonconceptual
point of view. It is perfectly possible, as I have stressed, for the first-person
nonconceptual contents yielded by the pick-up of self-specifying information
to occur at this level. Subject to the conditions discussed in this chapter,
such contents can interact with the highest of the three cognitive
abilities, which is the capacity to entertain conscious recognitional abilities
of the sort discussed in this chapter.
It seems reasonable to think that the categorization of these three factors
in terms of their degrees of primitiveness provides useful clues to
answering the more general developmental question of how the capacity
for conscious recognition can arise, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
It will be remembered that the following constraint was suggested
as a means of ensuring that an articulated theory of self-consciousness
is suitably sensitive to the developmental progression from first-person
perceptual contents to first-person thought:
The Acquisition Constraint If a given psychological capacity is psychologically
real, then there must be an explanation of how it is possible for
an individual in the normal course of development to acquire that
capacity.
The application of the acquisition constraint to the present case is
straightforward. We have a modest hierarchy of three stages, intended to
capture relations of logical dependence. But how plausible is this hierarchy
in developmental terms? Do the abilities associated with each level
provide sufficient resources for the acquisition of the abilities associated
with higher levels? The first level is basic sentience. This really presents