Questions: Relational Accounts of Consciousness

Question 1

On the relational account of consciousness, when you see a red apple, what is the phenomenal redness of your experience?

• A. An intrinsic property of your visual experience — a quale that your brain produces independently of the apple
• B. A representational content — a property that your experience attributes to the apple without directly involving it
• C. A relational property constituted by the way you are perceptually connected to the actual redness of the apple in the world
• D. A neural firing pattern in V4 that encodes wavelength information about the apple's surface

Answer: (C)

The relational account holds that phenomenal properties are not 'in the head' as intrinsic properties of mental states, nor are they merely representational content attributed to the world. Instead, phenomenal redness just is the way you are perceptually related to the actual redness of the apple — the relation between you, your perceptual system, and the external property. Option A describes the standard internalist view of qualia that relationalists reject. Option B describes representationalism, which relationalists distinguish themselves from by insisting on direct contact rather than representation. Option D is a purely physical description that says nothing about phenomenal character.

Question 2

You are hallucinating a red apple — there is no apple in front of you, yet your experience seems phenomenally identical to seeing a real red apple. Why is this scenario a significant challenge for relational accounts?

• A. It shows that the brain can produce phenomenal properties independently of any external object, suggesting phenomenal properties are intrinsic after all
• B. It is not a challenge — relational accounts treat hallucinations as a distinct non-phenomenal cognitive event with no experiential character
• C. It shows that relational accounts require us to deny that hallucinations feel like anything at all, which is phenomenologically implausible
• D. Both A and C — the challenge operates on both the metaphysical and phenomenological levels

Answer: (D)

The hallucination problem strikes at the core of relational accounts on two levels. Metaphysically: if phenomenal properties are constituted by relations to actual external objects, then when no object exists (hallucination), the relation cannot be formed — so no phenomenal properties should exist. Phenomenologically: but hallucinations do seem to have phenomenal character, and they seem indistinguishable from genuine perception. The conjunction of these two points is the challenge. Relationalists respond in various ways: disjunctivists deny that hallucinations really are phenomenologically identical to genuine perception; others argue that even hallucinations involve some real relational structure. But no response is fully uncontroversial.

Question 3

Relational accounts of consciousness face difficulty explaining hallucination because if phenomenal properties are constituted by relations to actual objects, experiences with no real object to relate to should have no phenomenal character — yet hallucinations seem to feel like something.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

True. This is the canonical pressure point for relational accounts. The view's core commitment — that phenomenal properties are relational, partially constituted by the external world — implies that when no world-side relatum exists (as in hallucination), the relation cannot hold and the phenomenal property cannot be instantiated. But phenomenology seems to report otherwise: hallucinations feel like something, often indistinguishable from genuine perception. Disjunctivism tries to deny the indistinguishability claim. Other responses try to find something the hallucinating subject is genuinely related to. Neither response has fully resolved the tension, making hallucination the central objection to the view.

Question 4

Relational accounts of consciousness agree with the standard internalist view that what-it-is-like to have an experience is fully determined by what is happening inside the brain.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

False — this is precisely what relational accounts deny. The standard internalist view holds that phenomenal properties are intrinsic features of mental states, fixed by the internal neural or functional properties of the perceiver. Relational accounts hold the opposite: phenomenal properties are partly constituted by the external world the subject is related to. Two individuals with identical internal states but different world-relations can, on the relational account, have different phenomenal experiences. This makes relational accounts a form of externalism about phenomenal consciousness — an extension of the semantic externalism familiar from philosophy of language into the domain of experience itself.

Question 5

What distinguishes the relational account from representationalism, and why does this difference matter for how each view approaches the hard problem of consciousness?

Model answer: Both relational accounts and representationalism point outward to the world to explain phenomenal properties, but they do so differently. Representationalism says your experience represents the redness of the apple — it attributes a property to the world via representational content. You are related to the apple by a representation, not directly. Relational accounts say your experience directly involves the actual apple: you are in perceptual contact with the redness as an external property, not via an intermediate representation. For the hard problem, this difference matters because representationalism still has to explain why representing redness feels like something, whereas relational accounts try to dissolve this question by identifying the phenomenal character with the subject-world relation itself — moving part of the explanatory burden onto the world rather than the brain.

This distinction also affects the treatment of hallucination. If phenomenal properties are representational, then hallucination and genuine perception can have the same representational content and thus the same phenomenal character — the world is irrelevant to whether the representation exists. If phenomenal properties are relational, then whether the world is present matters constitutively, which is why the relational account faces the hallucination problem more acutely than representationalism does.