ABSTRACT
According to Descartes, only the physical world (res extensa) has spatial extension. The contents of consciousness are composed of a nonmaterial thinking stuff (res cogitans) which has no location or extension in space. But, if the analysis presented in Chapter 6 is correct, this misdescribes the phenomenology of everyday conscious experiences. Whereas thoughts and some feelings and images may have qualia of the kind that Descartes describes, most experienced events do not. Tactile sensations, pains, and kinaesthetic sensations generally have a location and extension within the body or on the body surface. The sounds we hear and the many objects we see are generally experienced to be out in three-dimensional space. Taken together, our experiences comprise entire three-dimensional, phenomenal worlds, produced by a reflexive interaction of represented events (external or internal to our bodies) with our own perceptual and cognitive processes. Looked at in this way, what we normally think of as being the ‘physical world’ is part of what we experience. It is not apart from it. And there is no mysterious, additional experience of the world ‘in the mind or brain’. If so, physical objects as-perceived are not quite distinct from our percepts of those objects, contrary to common belief.
