3.3 Unity and Conscious Thoughts

16. As I took the ferry trip last summer from Athens to the island of Hydra, approaching the Hydra harbor, I con­sciously thought to myself: Oh lucky man, am I. The sky was blue, the water glistened, the sea birds were calling out, the sun felt warm on my skin. Even the Greek beer I was drinking had a pleasant taste. It felt good to be alive. My mood was one of sheer delight.

These experiences and conscious states did not occur in isolation from one another. There was an overall unity in my consciousness, a unity manifest to me in my experience. In what does this unity consist?

16. Consider first my conscious thought: Oh lucky man, am I. As I mentioned earlier, conscious thoughts come wrapped in linguistic auditory images. These images are introspectible to us. They have phonological and stress fea­tures. Arguably, they have syntactic features too. For us, in having conscious thoughts, it as if we are producing sen­tences in a natural language. We can "hear" ourselves speaking internally.

17. The phenomenology of occurrent thoughts derives fundamentally, I maintain, from the phenomenology of their associated linguistic, auditory images.⁷ This is some­times denied on the grounds that it is the contents of the thoughts that gives them their phenomenal "feel," or at any rate that the contents are a factor in their "feel." But there are strong reasons to deny that this is the case.

Consider my consciously thinking to myself, while in the Greek islands, that bottled water is plentiful. There is an associated linguistic image. Imagine taking that image away altogether. Would a conscious thought remain with a dis­tinctive phenomenal "feel"? It seems to me not.

Now imagine someone else having a phenomenally iden­tical image but a thought with a different content. Imagine, for example, my molecular duplicate in the twin Greek islands, on Putnam's famous planet, Twin Earth, who thinks that bottled twin water (or twater) is plentiful. Intuitively, he does not thereby differ from me at the phenomenological level. What he thinks is certainly different from me. His thought has a different content from mine, as witnessed by the difference in truth conditions for the two thoughts, and if he is conscious of what is thinking, then, in that sense, his thought has a different conscious content. But this is not a phenomenological difference. The difference is simply that he believes that he is thinking that bottled twater is plentiful whereas I believe that I am thinking that bottled water is plentiful.

Conversely, suppose that a monolingual Chinese tourist who is visiting the Greek islands at the same time as me con­sciously thinks that bottled water is plentiful. In this case, our thoughts have the same content. But there is patently a huge phenomenal difference between us. The difference derives from the large difference in the auditory features of which we are aware in having the linguistic images.

If the associated images are identical, the thoughts are phenomenally identical; and if the associated images are different, the thoughts are phenomenally different. The phe­nomenology of a thought derives from its image.

16. What about the phenomenology of thinking, as opposed to the phenomenology of specific thoughts? The obvious way to handle this, given what is said above, is that it derives from the associated images being of the same gen­eral phenomenal type: the Chinese speaker and I are both subject to linguistic images that share an "inner" auditory phenomenology.

17. Linguistic auditory images involve the experience of sounds. It is as if, in undergoing the images, we are talking to ourselves. We have the experience of hearing the sounds spo­ken. The experience is often delusive, of course; for we need not really be speaking to ourselves. But it is still an auditory experience, just as Macbeth's experience of a dagger was still a visual experience even though no dagger was present.

18. Once it is appreciated that the phenomenology of a conscious thought derives from the phenomenology of an associated auditory experience, the question of how the thought is phenomenally associated with simultaneous per­ceptual and bodily experiences is easily answered. The auditory experience has additional nonauditory features. It is an experience of myself producing certain sounds inter­nally while seeing certain colors, smelling certain smells, and so on. There is a single multifaceted perceptual experi­ence here, as argued in chapter 1. This experience is also bodily: It has a very rich, multimodal, partly bodily and partly perceptual content. What is really unified is the apparent internal pattern of sound and the other experi­enced qualities of things experienced. And the unity is achieved via the common phenomenal content. No new account is required.

19. Note that it is a consequence of the above position that it is possible to have conscious thoughts with a phenome­nology of their own even in the total absence of a body image. What is required are appropriate auditory experi­ences. And such experiences, as we have seen, can occur in the absence of any bodily feeling.