Online research in philosophy

Phenomenal consciousness is the property mental states, events, and processes have when, and only when, there is something it is like for their subject to undergo them, or be in them. What it is like to have a conscious experience is customarily referred to as the experience’s phenomenal character. Theories of consciousness attempt to account for this phenomenal character. This article surveys the currently prominent theories, paying special attention to the various attempts to explain a state’s phenomenal character in terms of its representational content.

Siewert identifies a special kind of conscious experience, phenomenal consciousness, that is the sort of consciousness missing in a variety of cases of blindsight. He then argues that phenomenal consciousness has been neglected by students of consciousness when it should not be. According to Siewert, the neglect is based at least in part on two false assumptions: (i) phenomenal features are not intentional and (ii) phenomenal character is restricted to sensory experience. By identifying an essential tension in Siewert's characterization of phenomenal consciousness, I argue that his case for denying (i) and (ii) is at best incomplete.

Phenomenal consciousness poses a puzzle for philosophy of science. This arises from two facts: It is common for philosophers (and some scientists) to take its existence to be phenomenologically obvious and yet modern science arguably has little (if anything) to say about it. And, this despite 20 years of work targeting the phenomenon in what I will refer to as the new science of consciousness. How has such a supposedly evident part of our world remained beyond our scientific understanding? One possibility is that there is no such phenomenon. This possibility, however, is undercut by the claim that phenomenal consciousness is phenomenologically obvious. In this paper I argue that this claim is mistaken. Distinguishing between the qualities we are phenomenologically aware of and the classification of those qualities as being mental (as qualia), I present both empirical evidence and theoretical reasons to deny that the latter is phenomenologically obvious.

One popular materialist response to the explanatory gap identifies phenomenal concepts with type-demonstrative concepts. This kind of response, however, faces a serious challenge: that our phenomenal concepts seem to provide a richer characterization of their referents than just the demonstrative characterization of 'that quality'. In this paper, I develop a materialist account that beefs up the contents of phenomenal concepts while retaining the idea that these contents contain demonstrative elements. I illustrate this account by focusing on our phenomenal concepts of phenomenal colour. The phenomenal colours stand in a similarity space relative to one another in virtue of being complex qualities—qualities that contain saturation, lightness, and various aspects of hue as component elements. Our phenomenal concepts, in turn, provide a demonstrative characterization of each of these component elements as well as a description of how much of that element is present in a given phenomenal colour. The result is an account where phenomenal concepts contain demonstrative elements and yet provide a significantly richer characterization of the intrinsic nature of their referents than just 'that quality'.

In theorizing about perception, philosophers have often multiplied qualities. To perceptible qualities of external objects, like colors and shapes (‘sensible’ qualities), have been added qualities of experiences (‘sensory’ qualities) or of sense-data (‘sensational’ qualities). Start with sensory qualities. The phrase ‘sensory quality’ is not much in use these days, having lost out to ‘phenomenal character,’ ‘phenomenal property,’ ‘qualitative character,’ or ‘quale.’ But whatever sensory qualities are called, pinning them down is no easy matter.