Brandon Ashby is a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in perception, imagination, and perceptual memory. His other interests include moral psychology, medical ethics, and the philosophy of disability. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp and is a member of The Puzzle of Imagistic Cognition research project.
What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?
Definitely ‘Rainbow’s End’, forthcoming in Mind & Language. I argue that there is a “grammar of consciousness”: the phenomenal characters of our perceptual experiences have a systematic and compositional structure that constrains how they can and cannot combine and recombine with one another to represent the world around us. They have an argument structure. This phenomenal argument structure is akin to the grammar of a language or the rules of composition that govern the representational elements used in maps, models, and diagrams.
Here’s an example. If you push your index finger straight down into your palm and then at a 45º angle, you can match the two experiences in terms of the felt degree of force even as they differ in the felt direction of force. There are two different aspects to our pressure experiences. So, if we wanted to formally model our experiences of pressure, we would need to use vectors. They have a vectorial structure. Temperature experiences, on the other hand, have nothing like a directionality component. We can be more or less hot or cold, cool or warm, but that’s it. So, if we wanted to formally model our temperature experiences, we would need to use directionless magnitudes. They have a scalar structure. Consequently, our temperature experiences would not be well-suited to represent pressures, since they lack the dual-component structure that would be needed to represent a degree and direction of force.
Unlike words and the representational elements used in maps, models, and diagrams, however, phenomenal characters possess their argument structures essentially. This is why, I argue, we cannot coherently imagine that there are physical/functional duplicates of us for whom what it is like to feel temperatures is what it is like for us to feel pressures, and vice versa. Pressure and temperature experiences have different argument structures from one another, and so each cannot play the role that the other does in composing our total experiences at any given time. With words, on the other hand, we can consider them as typographical objects that possess their grammatical properties or argument structure contingently. As a result, we can imagine that ‘found’ could have been a noun or quantifier, rather than a transitive verb. In the paper I detail a number of different kinds of phenomenal structure and I discuss the implications for philosophy of mind.
What are you working on right now?
My big project for the foreseeable future is developing a “grammar of consciousness”. In particular, I am expanding my work on phenomenal argument structure to the nature of spatial representation within and across different sensory modalities as well as our experiences of our own bodies and actions. Moreover, my extant work on the topic focuses on perceptual experiences of “low-level” properties like color, shape, size, texture, and temperature. But I think there is a lot to be said about the phenomenal argument structure of high-level phenomenology of the sort involved in perceptual experiences of different kinds of objects — say animate vs. inanimate objects — and experiences of causation. Looking even farther ahead, the ultimate goal is to expand the project beyond perceptual experiences to imaginative, mnemonic, emotional, and perhaps even cognitive experiences.
If you could be anyone else for a day, who would that be and why?
I would want to be Thomas Nagel so that I could know what it’s like to be Thomas Nagel wondering what it’s like to be a bat.
If you could have a one-hour conversation with any philosopher or historical figure from any time, who would you pick and what topic would you choose?
In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans has this very short chapter on what he calls “the informational system” where he talks about the connections between perception, memory, belief, artifacts like photographs, and the distributed storage and processing of information within and across social groups. It’s such a rich topic, but the chapter is so short. I’d really love to have the opportunity to ask him about how he would have wanted to develop those ideas and to run a few of my own ideas past him.
What would you like your last meal to be?
A dish that won’t be invented for another seventy years or so.
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Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
