Sunday, 25 November 2018


A guitar being played softly in another room. Is this 'experiencing' assembled out of qualia? If it is thought in neurological terms the answer might be yes, but that way of framing it is artificial, involving the imposition of a complex theoretical framework and then imagining variations on its basis. Or else you could deliberately listen in such a way as to focus on the constituent sensations, not only the notes and the timbre that identifies them as the plucking of guitar strings, but also the modality of the sounds relative to an aural field which sets them as originating in an adjacent room, and in a particular activity of the player - reading through a written score in this instance. By framing your perception in a certain way you can make it about a complex of pure sensory events, a web of salient and of background noticings, but this act of framing belongs to a chosen way of interpreting perceptions that is different from but parallel to the natural 'take' - a guitar in another room. You may choose to take experience as phenomenal, in which case it is decomposable in a certain way, but you cannot conclude that the individualised phenomena are prior constituents of the natural event. You might in fact say that the nature of consciousness is precisely not to be made up of qualia, and this means both that it is never what it is consciousness of, and also that however it is it is always already a synthesis, an overflowing, is more contents than its content.

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