We can keep the essential thrust of Strawson’s position by reformulating

consciousness.
Points of View 167
We can keep the essential thrust of Strawson’s position by reformulating
it as follows. Taking the central distinction to be between subjective experience
and what that subjective experience is experience of allows us to
capture the crucial feature missing in the hypothesized purely sensedatum
experience without immediately demanding any relevant conceptual
capacities on the part of the subject. Using this as the central notion,
we can reformulate the original characterization: having a temporally extended
point of view on the world involves taking a particular route
through space-time in such a way that one’s perception of the world is
informed by an awareness that one is taking such a route, where such an
awareness requires being able to distinguish over time between subjective
experience and what it is experience of. For obvious reasons I term this a
nonconceptual point of view.
7.2 Self-Specifying Information and the Notion of a Nonconceptual
Point of View
Once the notion of a point of view has been formulated so that no relevant
conceptual requirements are built into it, one might naturally think
that the analysis of perceptual experience and somatic proprioception in
chapters 5 and 6 already shows us how to make sense of the notion of a
nonconceptual point of view. No special argument is needed to show that
it is possible to have a nonconceptual point of view, it might be suggested,
because such a nonconceptual point of view is built into our experience
of the world from the very beginning. Much of the self-specifying information
picked up in perceptual experience is information about the spatiotemporal
route that one is taking through the world. This is, of course,
particularly apparent in kinesthetic experience, both visual and proprioceptive.
It might thus seem that one does in fact have a continuous awareness
of oneself taking a particular route through the world that does not
require the exercise of any conceptual abilities, in virtue of having a constant
flow of information about oneself as a physical object moving
through the world. The suggestion is that the ecological coperception of
self and environment, together with the proprioceptively derived distinction
between self and nonself, is all that is needed for experience from a
nonconceptual point of view. This suggestion is a very natural one. But it
168 Chapter 7
is misplaced, and seeing why it is misplaced is an important first step in
the project of moving from basic-level information pick-up to full selfconsciousness.
We need to begin by exploring in more detail why a point of view has
been described as temporally extended. Is it the nonconceptual point of
view itself that is temporally extended, or simply the lifespan of the creature
that has the point of view? The issue can be focused with a thought
experiment. Suppose that we imagine a creature whose experience takes
place completely within a continuous present and lacks any sense of past
or future. The hypothesis is that every experience that this creature has
is completely novel. Could such a creature have experience reflecting a
nonconceptual point of view? If the answer is affirmative, then it follows
that a nonconceptual point of view has to be temporally extended only
in the limited sense that it is enjoyed by creatures who move through the
world over time. If negative, we will have to look for a new sense of temporal
extension.
Reflection on this thought experiment leads, I think, to the conclusion
that the capacity to make the basic distinctions at the heart of the notion
of a nonconceptual point of view would be absent in the case under discussion.
A creature whose experience takes place completely within a
continuous present cannot draw the fundamental nonsolipsistic distinction
between its experience and what it is experience of. A minimal requirement
on being able to make such a distinction is that what is being
experienced should be grasped as existing independently of any particular
experience of it. What we are trying to avoid, it will be remembered, is a
situation in which the esse of the putative “objects of experience” is their
percipi, and this requires “a component of recognition or judgement
which is not simply identical with, or wholly absorbed by, the particular
item which is recognised, which forms the topic of the judgement”
(Strawson 1966, 100). There must be recognition that the object of experience
has an existence transcending the particular occasion on which it
is apprehended. At the most basic level, such a grasp of independent existence
itself involves an understanding that what is being experienced at
the moment either has existed in the past or will exist in the future, that
it has an existence transcending the present moment. By definition, however,
a creature that experiences only a continuous present cannot have
any such understanding.
Points of View 169
There is a possible confusion here that it is important to clear up. The
distinction between self and nonself that has been seen to be present in
somatic proprioception is emphatically not equivalent to the distinction
between experience and what it is experience of that is currently at issue.
What could potentially confuse matters is that both distinctions appear
to qualify as instances of what Strawson terms nonsolipsistic consciousness.
A nonsolipsistic consciousness is “the consciousness of a being who
has a use for the distinction between himself and his states on the one
hand, and something not himself or a state of himself, of which he has
experience, on the other” (Strawson 1959, 69). A creature who, in virtue
of somatic proprioception, has a grasp of the boundaries and limits of the
self, and hence of the distinction between self and other, can be described
as “having a use for the distinction between himself and his states, on the
one hand, and something not himself or a state of himself on the other.”
The same holds for a creature who has grasped the distinction between
experience and what it is experience of. But it would be a mistake to think
that a grasp of the first distinction would automatically bring with it a
grasp of the second. The distinction between self and nonself has nothing
to do with the concept of experience. Moreover, there is an important
difference in the respective temporal dimensions of the two distinctions.
The distinction between self and nonself is available purely synchronically.
It does not require taking into account times other than the present,
unlike the distinction between experience and what it is experience of.
That second distinction is diachronic, as will emerge shortly.
The important question as far as this second distinction is concerned,
therefore, seems to be this: What form must experience take if it is to
incorporate an awareness that what is being experienced does not exist
only when it is being experienced? And in particular, what must the temporal
form of any such experience be? Clearly, such an awareness would
be incorporated in the experience of any creature that had a grasp of the
basic temporal concepts of past, present, and future, but we are looking
for something at a more primitive nonconceptual level. What I would
suggest is that certain basic recognitional capacities offer the right sort of
escape from the continuous present without demanding conceptual mastery.
Consider the act of recognizing a particular object. Because such an
act involves drawing a connection between current experience of an ob-