Conscious experience and experience externalization

Klaus Gärtner

pp. 97-112

in: Inês Hipólito, Jorge Goncalves, João Pereira (eds), Schizophrenia and common sense, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

According to Sass and Parnas, schizophrenia is essentially a self-disorder which leads to the externalization or alienation of experience. This view is based on the phenomenological assumption that subjects suffering from schizophrenia manifest disturbances in the most basic presentation of the self, i.e. in the sense of being the experiential subject of experience. Interestingly, recent interpretations of the phenomenal character within the study of consciousness involve a similar claim. Just like Neo-Phenomenologists (including Sass and Parnas), proponents of such a view argue that, rather than overemphasizing the qualitative features of phenomenal properties, we need to turn to the most basic feature of experience, namely pre-reflective self-consciousness. In this paper, I will reflect on Sass and Parnas's phenomenological account of schizophrenia and show how a particular model of conscious experience fits their claims. My aim is to give a road map to naturalizing phenomenal consciousness and present a way to ground the phenomenological view of schizophrenia.