ABSTRACT
Out of the window, I can see a woman walking past on the pavement below. My perception and background knowledge provide me with a certain unprivileged access to her consciousness. For a start, I know what it looks like to walk where she is walking, so I know how the various buildings look from roughly the angles she can see them from. In addition, I can hear the same traffic noises she can, though I know it would sound different at street level. I do not know how good her eyesight and hearing are, however, and I have almost no idea what she is thinking – she could be trying to remember the middle section of a song, working out what 15 per cent of her salary is, deciding what to say to somebody she is about to meet – I have no way of knowing. She, on the other hand, has privileged access to her consciousness: she is actually seeing the buildings, hearing the
traffic, thinking the thoughts. This difference between my vague, uncertain, and incomplete unprivileged access, and her privileged access, reflects the difference between seeing her and being her. She knows her conscious experience by being the person whose experience it is, and I can only see her through the window. Moreover, what I see seems to confront me with a fact of transcendence, right there in the middle of the world, since her conscious experience transcends – goes beyond – the world I can see. It is not one of the things down there in the street for me to look at, not an object like a car, or a lamp-post, or even a woman. Neither is it a property of one of those objects, or at least not an ordinary property like velocity, density, size, or colour. Her consciousness is, rather, what it is like to be the particular physical object that she is.
