Consciousness in questions

Abstract

What is it like to be conscious? Whereas nobody knows, by definition, what is it like to be unconscious, everybody knows what is it like to be conscious. Those of our mental states that are conscious have a distinctive phenomenal character, which we can experience and report. For example, there is something about seeing things that has its own distinctive character, which differs from hearing or smelling them. This property of having a distinctive phenomenal character is shared, not only by conscious mental states built up from sensory ingredients but also extends to states arising from ‘within’—such as beliefs, thoughts, desires, hopes or intentions, all of which correspond to distinctive experiences. What gives conscious mental states their distinctive quality is their content: they are about something or, better, they represent something; and this representation determines their phenomenal character. ![Graphic][1] This representationalist view raises a key question for the scientific study of consciousness, particularly for the study of neural correlates of conscious experiences: do the neural correlates of conscious experience relate to the content of that experience? According to Chalmers (1998), a neural representational system counts as the correlate of an experience if the neural correlates are themselves sufficient for that experience. So, ‘if there are neural representational systems whose contents match the contents of experience in this way, then knowing what the contents of an experience are helps us identify its neural correlate. Conversely, if one already knew what the neural correlate of an experience was, its role in information processing could tell us what contents the experience has’ (Siegel, in Bayne et al. , 2009, p. 192). Controversial as this statement may be (there are indeed non-representationalist views of consciousness as well, see Hellie, in Bayne, 2009, pp. 563–6), it sets the stage for studying the neural constituents … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif