Transparency and Subjective Character
Self-Experience February 2, 2023 Robert J. Howell
Subjective character—the sense that an experience belongs to a self—may conflict with the transparency of perception, the idea that perceptual experience reveals only objects and qualities, not the experience itself. If subjective character is a genuine part of all conscious states, it should appear in unreflective perception, but such perception seems transparent and lacks self-referential phenomenology. An empirical argument from depersonalization is considered, but patient reports are best interpreted as consistent with the absence of subjective character.