11 - Consciousness

Summary

William James famously held that we consciously experience all and only those stimuli that we attend to. A theoretical and only mildly philosophical question is that of state/event consciousness. Higher-order theorists (HOT) resist the perceptual model, and maintain that merely having a thought about the first-order state will suffice for consciousness, provided that the thought arose from the state itself without benefit of (person-level) inference. This chapter discusses some philosophical issues. Sensory qualities ("qualia" in the strict sense) are the first-order qualitative features of which we are aware in sensory experience: colors, pitches, smells, textures. The second problem is the intrinsic perspectivalness, point-of-view-iness, and/or first-personishness of experience, as discussed by K. Gunderson, T. Nagel, and others. The third problem is the existence of funny facts and/or special phenomenal knowledge. The last problem is the explanatory gap called to our attention by J. Levine.