Hi Alex

There is a lot in your post but I’m going to talk about just the first two sentences for now because it seems to me that we are on somewhat different wavelengths and it might be best to address that issue first. 

You say: “What I mean by 'in a phenomenal sense' is that I'm aware of it, and of its contents. I don't agree that if we really knew we could say - there are lots of 'knowledge how' (e.g. of bicycle riding) examples that don't conform to this.”

When I think of the notion of consciousness – let’s say human consciousness for now to keep it simple (!) – I mean the general state in which human beings think and feel. That is, I mean the way we apprehend things – our state of being, if you like, which we presume (though can’t prove) differs from the state of being of, say, a stone or a worm or a cat or even a monkey.

Seen in these terms, everything we do, think, feel, want, don’t want, etc is impregnated by – conditioned by, if you like – our consciousness. We can’t even do a “simple” thing like look out a window without looking and seeing the way a human does (i.e. with a human consciousness). We can’t do anything – from working out the most complex theory through to riding a bike - without that, in some way, being done in this “human consciousness” way - even if, as in riding a bike, we do part of it “mechanically”.

So, from my point of view, I don’t think it helps to try to separate human actions into those that involve different “degrees”, so to speak, of consciousness (e.g. explaining a theorem as compared with riding a bike) because, to my mind, that distracts attention from the fundamental  issue which is: what is human consciousness anyway?

Part of the problem in all this springs, I often think, from the ambiguity of the word “conscious” and the different ways we use the word. If I say “I was not conscious of his presence”, the word has a different shade of meaning from “I was not conscious because I was knocked out” and that again has a different shade of meaning from “I am a conscious human being” (i.e. whether I like it or not).

The last sense is the one that, in my view, is – or at least should be - the focus of the “philosophy of consciousness”.  But it is clearly not an easy matter because human consciousness is the milieu we inhabit, so to speak, and we know no other.  Describing it is, as I say, a bit like the fish trying to imagine what life outside the aquarium might be like (so it would have something to compare its present state with). I don’t mean to say that the issue is therefore necessarily a closed book. There are probably useful things that can be said – though I confess I don’t come across them very often.

Cheers

Derek