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Complex Subjects: On the Natural Origins of Subjective Experience

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Abstract

This paper outlines a naturalistic yet non-deflationary account of subjective experience. I advance five theses which, when taken together, offer an account which retains the reality of subjective experience in a way that’s convivial to the scientific study of consciousness. The five theses include Non-eliminative Materialism (experiences are neurophysiological states of the body), the Two Perspectives View (based in what Feigl calls “Russell-Schlick Monism”), Experiential Embodiment (as recursively self-maintaining systems, subjects of experience engage the world from an embodied perspective, with the details of their embodiment shaping the nature of their conscious minds), Subjective Comprehensibility (the subjective perspective is a comprehensible outgrowth of animal evolution), and the Complex Subject Thesis (the subjects of consciousness are exceedingly complex systems of living matter). All told, the five theses offer a non-deflationary yet naturalistic account of experience, one which mitigates a number of problems and puzzles associated with consciousness, including epiphenomenalism, experiential privacy, and the origins of the subjective perspective. At the same time, the account rules out a number of positions on experience’s relationship to the physical world including various forms of dualism, panpsychism, and platform neutral functionalism.

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Notes

  1. For the purposes of this paper, terms like “qualia,” “subjective experiences,” “conscious experiences,” “sentience,” and so on, will be used interchangeably to refer to two interrelated aspects of a creature’s mental life: (1) there is something-it-is-like (Nagel 1974) to have subjective experiences, that is, they are felt-qualitative/experiential; as Herbert Feigl puts it, they are things we “live through,” enjoy or suffer (1958/1967, 76; see also 1971, 304). And (2) subjective experiences are always had from a subjective perspective or point of view, and are thus private for the creature having them.

  2. I discuss some of these advantages in more detail in Dempsey 2004 and 2013.

  3. There is, of course, a long-standing debate over type versus token-identity and reductive versus non-reductive physicalism (see, e.g., Lepore & Loewer, 1987; McLaughlin 1989; Kim 1989, 1992, 1998; Marras 1993; Fodor 1997). I here set aside these debates. My claim is that qualia are physical in the same way that neural activity is physical, because they just are sorts of neural activity. Thus, whatever metaphysical picture best makes sense of the claim that neural activity is physical, and that neurological organs and processes are multiply realizable, will be applicable to qualia.

  4. I discuss some of the benefits of TPV in Dempsey 2004 and 2013.

  5. Aristotle 1882: “the motions of pain and pleasure, and generally of all sensation, plainly have their source in the heart, and find in it their termination” (Parts of Animals, Book III, part 4). See, e.g., Brandt & Huppert 2021.

  6. Recursive self-maintenance is very similar to the idea of autopoiesis, the idea that animals can maintain themselves by producing their own parts; see Maturana & Varela 1980; Fleischaker 1990.

  7. Differences in embodiment will also lead to differences in opportunities for action and the attainment of adaptive environmental affordances (Gibson 1979).

  8. On the “James-Lange” thesis, see e.g., Prinz 2004.

  9. See, e.g., Coleman (2006 & 2013) and Ganeri and Shani (2022) for alternate versions of panpsychism which may or may not be consistent with the CST.

  10. For an extended discussion of Strawson’s interesting arguments, see the 16 replies and commentaries on his 2006 target article, as well as Strawson’s “Reply to Commentators with a Celebration of Descartes,” all in the same edition; see also Strawson 2016. I consider the strengths and weaknesses of his account in Dempsey 2013.

  11. Acknowledgements: many thanks to the participants of the 2019 “The Science of Consciousness” conference and the 2024 “Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness” conference at which some of this research was presented. Thanks as well to the students and faculty of KPU’s philosophy department, especially Colin Ruloff, Melinda Hogan, Pearl Meredith, Samuel Holmes, and Hanako Story. Finally, thanks to the anonymous referee at this journal for very helpful feedback.

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  1. Kwantlen Polytechnic University, 12666 72 Ave, Surrey, BC, V3W2M8, Canada

    Liam P. Dempsey

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Dempsey, L.P. Complex Subjects: On the Natural Origins of Subjective Experience. Erkenn (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-026-01165-1

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