Tamminen is right. When a dog sees a cat, the only thing it's conscious of is the cat and not its visual cat-impressions.RJG wrote: ↑January 1st, 2019, 8:46 pmNot so. If dogs are conscious, then they can only be conscious of their 'experiences', or in this case, their visual and olfactory sensory reactions (which in turn are presumably caused by the 'real' food itself).Tamminen wrote:I think dogs are not conscious of their experiences, but they are conscious of food and such things.
You're wrong, especially because the subjective appearance of an object is not what is perceived. What is perceived is the object itself and not its appearance.
"When you see the object, you experience the object as causing your experience of it. This is even more obvious in the case of touch: when you run your hand along the top of the table, you experience the sensation in your hand as being caused by the pressure on the surface of the table.
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In normal conscious perceptual experiences, you cannot have the perceptual experience without its seeming to you that what you are perceiving is the cause of your experience. Think of hearing a sudden loud noise or smelling an unpleasant smell or bumping into something in the dark or any number of other cases. In every case, when you have the subjective event in your subjective perceptual field, you experience it as being caused by the very thing you are perceiving, even though you cannot identify the thing, even though you do not know what exactly you are hearing, smelling, or bumping into. This is one the keys, and in a way the main key, to understanding the formation of the intentionality of perceptual experience."
(Searle, John R. Seeing Things As They Are: A Theory of Perception. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. pp. 61+63)
I agree that subjects are material objects (bodies or organisms), but it is not the case that all my sensations are bodily sensations, i.e. sensory appearances of my own body (or parts thereof). There is a difference between perceptual consciousness/awareness of one's own body and perceptual consciousness/awareness of other bodies (or things or events).