A single ripe red tomato on a weathered wooden table in hard midday light
Philosophy 04 Oct 2026 12 min read

Being Sure an Experience Is Happening Without Being Sure What It Is

Dennett, Chalmers and Strawson all open by calling experience the most familiar thing there is. Take them at their word, then ask which certainty that familiarity buys you.

Three philosophers who disagree about nearly everything else open their best-known pieces the same way. Daniel Dennett, 1988, first line of "Quining Qualia": "'Qualia' is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us." David Chalmers, 1995, first paragraph of the paper that named the hard problem: "There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain." Galen Strawson, 2018, in the New York Review of Books: "It's the most familiar thing there is," he writes of consciousness, "however hard it is to put into words."

I take that convergence as the firmest ground in the debate. Dennett thinks qualia, as philosophers have described them, do not exist. Chalmers thinks experience is irreducible. Strawson thinks denying it is the silliest claim ever made. All three sign the same opening line. This post is about what follows from it, and what does not.

The question this series asks here

The first post in this series defended the right to change your mind. The second said to change it on evidence without becoming a weathervane. The third asked what a feeling can be trusted for. The fourth called knowledge, following Feynman, a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty, and treated confidence levels as the joints a mind moves on.

Consciousness is the one domain people exempt from that rule. Eric Schwitzgebel names the exemption at the top of his 2008 paper on introspection: "Current conscious experience is generally the last refuge of the skeptic against uncertainty." So the question here is not whether consciousness is real. It is the series question, pointed inward: what, exactly, am I entitled to be sure of? My reading is that experience hands you one certainty that belongs at the top of the scale, and that a good part of the felt mystery of consciousness comes from letting that certainty pay for a second one it never covered.

Descartes at his narrowest point

The formula people quote, "I think, therefore I am," is from the Discourse on the Method (1637) and the Principles of Philosophy (1644). The Meditations (1641), the text people usually have in mind, do not contain it. What Meditation II says, in the Latin, is "ego sum, ego existo, certum est": I am, I exist, that is certain. What that secures is narrow. There is thinking going on, and things seem a certain way. Even if I am dreaming, Descartes says, I seem to see. The seeming cannot be taken away.

Notice what is missing. The passage secures that there is seeming. It secures no description of the seeming, and nothing in it tells you whether your account of your own experience is right.

There is a grace note in the next Meditation. It opens with Descartes shutting his eyes and stopping his ears, resolving to make himself, in the Latin, "magis notum et familiarem," better known and more familiar, to himself. Cottingham renders it "a more intimate knowledge of myself"; Veitch's older translation keeps the word, "a more intimate and familiar knowledge of myself." Either way, familiarity with the self is something Descartes sets out to build through attention, not something he starts with.

Presentation and revelation

The cleanest tool I have found for separating the two certainties comes from Chalmers, in his 2018 paper on what he calls the meta-problem of consciousness: the problem of explaining why we think there is a hard problem at all. Partway through, he takes the sense of being directly acquainted with our experiences and splits it in two.

"One is the sense of presentation: that we are somehow immediately presented with our experiences. Another is the sense of revelation: that the full nature of consciousness, and of various phenomenal properties, is fully revealed to us in introspection." Then the line that does the work: "Presentation... is especially relevant to explaining our certainty that we are having experiences, and revelation is especially relevant to explaining our sense that they are irreducible."

Read his own 1995 sentence through that split. "There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience" is presentation. "But there is nothing that is harder to explain" is where revelation starts to be assumed: the feeling that introspection has already shown you the thing in full, so that any physical story will arrive too late to be the story of it. Chalmers is the one who pulled the two apart. My claim is only that the mystery feeling is strongest where they run together.

Russell's table and Mary's room

Bertrand Russell gave the vocabulary in 1912. Knowledge by acquaintance is direct awareness "without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths": in the presence of his table, he is acquainted with "its colour, shape, hardness, smoothness." Knowledge by description is the table taken as "the physical object which causes such-and-such sense-data." Two relations to one item, and you can have the first in full while the second is still being worked out. Russell was writing about sense-data, and extending the distinction to qualia is a later move, but the shape carries.

A grey room with a grey chair, grey books and one red apple on the table

Frank Jackson staged the same distinction in 1982. Mary knows every physical fact about color vision and has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room. "What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it." That she gains acquaintance with red is the part nobody disputes. Whether she gains a new fact about the world, something missing from physics, is the contested step.

Jackson himself changed his mind about that step. In "Mind and Illusion" (2003) he wrote that he had once dissented from the physicalist majority and had since capitulated, and that the interesting question was now where the intuitions against physicalism go wrong. The change is easy to flatten, so state it precisely. He kept the experience: Mary sees red for the first time and that is real. He dropped the inference from the experience to a gap in the world. In this post's terms, he kept the presentation and gave up the revelation. (The 1982 paper is titled "Epiphenomenal Qualia"; the argument originally came paired with the view that qualia do nothing, a half most people who cite Mary have already dropped.)

Where the second certainty outruns what you can check

Strawson states the strongest realist position in one line: "When it comes to conscious experience, there's a rock-bottom sense in which we're fully acquainted with it just in having it. The having is the knowing." I think that is right, and I read it as presentation. Strawson supplies his own qualifier a few paragraphs earlier: we are directly acquainted with experience "at least in certain fundamental respects." The qualifier matters, and two cases show where.

Two identical cups of black coffee steaming on a zinc counter

Dennett's coffee tasters, Chase and Sanborn, have worked for years at a coffee company and have both stopped enjoying the house blend. Chase says the coffee tastes exactly as it always did; he just no longer likes that taste. Sanborn says he still likes the same tastes he always did; the coffee no longer produces them. Something changed in each man, and from the inside neither can tell whether it was his experience or his judgment of it. Having the experience did not settle what the experience was.

Schwitzgebel's catalog runs the same direction. "Even the grossest features of emotional experience largely elude us," he writes, and he spends pages on inner speech, imagery, and the periphery of vision, which most of us assume is as sharp as the center, the way you assume the refrigerator light is always on because it is on every time you look.

Dennett's reply to Strawson in the NYRB states the lesson without denying anything Strawson cares about. "We can know something important, something that cannot be ignored, while still being in the dark about the 'essential nature' of a phenomenon." And: "While we can know many things about the contents of our conscious experience, we have no privileged insight into how this is possible, and we have no immunity to error on this score." Both men grant the having. They differ on how much the having tells you.

The boundary in both directions

Calibration means not over-doubting either, and the unreliability evidence has a precise shape that is easy to overstate.

Nisbett and Wilson's 1977 paper is routinely cited as "we cannot introspect," and it says something narrower. Shoppers asked to choose among four identical pairs of stockings preferred the rightmost by almost four to one; asked why, nobody mentioned position, and most denied it could have mattered. The failure is in access to the process behind the choice. The paper itself says access to the contents of current experience is probably real. Schwitzgebel draws the line in one sentence: "it's one thing not to know why you chose a particular pair of socks... and quite another to be unable accurately to determine your currently ongoing visual experience as you look at those socks." Choice blindness, where people confidently explain a choice they did not make, has the same scope: reasons, not what red looks like.

And Schwitzgebel, the field's most thorough skeptic about introspection, concedes the center. "We may generally be right about foveal visual experience of color and the presence or absence of canonical pains." A bright red filling the middle of your view, a clear pain in your hand: these are the cases where it is hard to go badly wrong, and he says so, while noting that resting the whole case on them "rigs the game."

So the redness of red sits exactly where the unreliability evidence is weakest, and that is why I keep the claim narrow. For a vivid color in the center of view, presentation and description nearly coincide. For emotion, imagery, and the edges, they come apart, and the second certainty gets marked down.

The zipper

A low-stakes version of the whole post needs no stance on qualia at all. Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil asked people to rate how well they understood everyday devices, a zipper, a sewing machine, a crossbow, then to write out step by step how each one works, then to rate themselves again. The ratings dropped. Their paper calls it an illusion of explanatory depth and finds it much stronger for explanatory knowledge than for facts, procedures, or stories.

A brass zipper half open on olive waxed canvas

Nothing about the zipper changed between the two ratings. The failure was in the explanation. Familiarity sits right next to the feeling "I understand this," and a simple test pulls them apart. That is the pattern I see in the consciousness debate: an object you could not be more acquainted with, and an explanation that was never in hand.

What the split leaves open

Separating presentation from revelation does not decide realism against illusionism, and I want to say that plainly.

Chalmers: "I am not an illusionist. On my view, consciousness is real, and explaining our judgments about consciousness does not suffice to solve or dissolve the problem of consciousness. But the meta-problem is not just a problem for illusionists. It is a problem for everybody." Strawson says the mystery people feel is usually about how experience could be physical, and that here they make "a Very Large Mistake, in Winnie-the-Pooh's terminology": "the mistake of thinking that we know enough about the physical components of the brain to have good reason to think that these components can't, on their own, account for the existence of consciousness. We don't." Dennett: "I don't deny the existence of consciousness; of course, consciousness exists; it just isn't what most people think it is."

All three hold presentation firmly. All three argue about revelation: whether introspection delivers the nature of experience, and whether what it delivers rules anything out. That is where the live question is, and I leave it live.

Where the field is now

The meta-problem has become a research program, and the newest work bears on the split above. For most of what follows I have read abstracts and publisher descriptions, not full texts, and describe only what those confirm.

Rodrigo Díaz ran four studies (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2021) asking whether ordinary people share the intuition that experience cannot be reduced to physical process. His abstract reports that such "problem intuitions are not widespread," and that where they appear they track factors unrelated to consciousness itself. A 2026 follow-up in Philosophical Psychology by Katarzyna Celka, Micha Wyrwa and Maciej Raś repeats the design with non-English speakers; per its abstract, the results match Díaz's, and the authors argue there is still a meaningful sense in which laypeople treat consciousness as hard to explain. Alongside both, a 2022 study by Daniel Gregory, Malte Hendrickx and Cameron Turner gave a version of Mary's room to a general US sample: 82.1 percent said Mary does not know what it is like to see red before she sees it. Read together: people reliably say Mary gains something, and do not reliably say that what she gains lies beyond physics. Presentation is near-universal. Revelation is not.

On the illusionist side, François Kammerer named the problem this post circles in a 2018 paper, "Can you believe it?": the illusion meta-problem, which asks not just why experience would seem phenomenal if it is not, but why that seeming is so hard to shake. His book House of Mirrors (Oxford, 2026, open access) proposes a framework he calls Meta-Cartesianism to answer it; I have only the publisher's description, which says the framework explains why the illusion is unusually strong. Maxim Gorbachev and Keith Frankish (Synthese, 2025) map the possible shapes an introspective distortion could take, noting in their abstract that illusionists do not agree on what the distortion is. The side that says revelation fails has not settled how it fails.

On the realist side, Schwitzgebel's The Weirdness of the World (Princeton, 2024) pairs realism about experience with the claim, in the publisher's framing, that every theory of mind and cosmos defies common sense and none compels belief. Daniel Stoljar's The Introspection Principle (Oxford, 2026) lists revelation among thirteen standing problems for any theory of introspection: not settled, not dismissed, on the list.

None of this is a consensus. Chalmers wrote in 2018 that neither illusionism nor realism had a fully satisfactory answer to the charge of absurdity, and nothing I found since changes that. What has changed is that "why does this seem so mysterious" is being worked on directly, by both camps, with data.

The rule I live by

The practice is per-claim certainty, the same as the rest of this series, applied to the one place I used to exempt. Three sentences, three confidences.

"Something is happening, and it looks like this." Near the top of the scale. This is presentation, the having, and the whole field signs it.

"I know what this experience is." Much lower, and lower still for emotion and the periphery than for a bright red in the center of view. This is revelation, and the evidence says to hold it the way the third post said to hold a low-validity gut: useful, correctable, scored against outcomes.

"No physical story could account for it." An open question, held open on purpose. Chalmers, Strawson, and Dennett all have reasons here, and I can read each of them generously without closing it.

The fourth post put consciousness on my standing list of questions I cannot answer. This is what holding it open looks like one sentence at a time. The experience is the most familiar thing there is. The certainty that comes with it is real, and it stops exactly where the description begins.

Sources

Philosophy Epistemology Consciousness The Thinking Series

Comments

// Comments are reviewed before appearing. No spam. No noise.