Phenomenal States

In ordinary parlance, phenomenal states may be considered to be "how thngs seem to us" as human beings. They make up the collection of various personal or subjective experiences, feelings, and sensations manifested in different modalities that constitute or accompany awareness. They are discriminable properties of conscious experience — otherwise known as phenomenal properties, "raw feels," or qualia. Such properties extend over a wide range of conscious experiences, and they can include successive or simultaneous responses to many different sensory channels. Nonetheless, they are parts of a more or less well defined mental "scene," each with different degrees of definition. This scene can range in quality and apparent clarity from the apperception that one is merely "being conscious" to a sharp concentration on one or a few features of a particular perceived object, emphasizing one modality (visceral, gustatory, haptic, etc.) over another. In general, however, this scene appears unitary or holistic; indeed, it may maintain properties of a mental image and show characteristics consistent with the modality upon which that image is based. In the presence of an object, that image may be extremely detailed, constituting perceptual experience. In the absence of an object, it may be more diffuse, constituting imaging or imagination supported by memory. The phenomenal scene and qualia are almost always accompanied by feelings or emotions, however faint, and in general by a more or less definite sense of spatiotemporal continuity or extent and duration. The detailed sequence of qualia is, above all, highly individual, resting on a series of particular occasions in one's own personal history and experience.