Abstract

Consciousness has always been the subject of human philosophical, scientific, literary, and artistic study, but never more so than today. Perhaps this is because, in an age where so much of nature has been explained in precise scientific terms, consciousness continues to be as mysterious as ever. However, a fundamental source of this mystery is the very concept of consciousness. In Qualism, I subject the concept of consciousness to analytical scrutiny, arriving at a what I believe is the most sensible and intuitive way to conceive of consciousness. In Chapter One, I argue that the key to understanding consciousness is understanding qualia: the subjective qualities of conscious states. Chapter Two begins to answer the question of what qualia really are, looking specifically at conscious sensory states. I argue in favor of the modern scientific and philosophical view that mental states are essentially representational . In Chapter Three I further explain qualia by proposing a theory called qualism . According to qualism, mental states are essentially representational, but what makes a mental state conscious is its having qualia. In Chapter Four I take this conception of qualia and demonstrate how it applies to another major category of conscious states, namely, our conscious beliefs. I argue that, contrary to a popular opinion in the philosophy of mind, conscious belief states have qualia. In Chapter Five I investigate a particularly elusive category of conscious states known in the philosophy of mind as access conscious . I argue that access conscious states are conscious states that represent objects as having certain temporal properties. In Chapter Six I conclude with an argument that introspective consciousness is a higher-order representational state in which we become conscious of the qualia of the lower-order state