Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820. Electronic Mail: ddulany@s.psych.uiuc.edu Abstract: Connectionism can provide useful theories in which consciousness is the exclusive vehicle of representation. The theories may not, however, handle some phenomena adequately: sense of agency, modes and contents of awareness, propositional and deliberative thought, metacognitive awareness and consciousness of self. They should, however, be useful in describing automatic, activational relations among nonpropositional conscious contents. Connectionism has become a powerful intellectual force, and consciousness is the most significant intellectual challenge facing a number of disciplines. Whatever the limitations of a connectionist approach to consciousness, O'Brien and Opie can be congratulated for bringing forward a provocative and useful thesis for examination. Most significant, I believe, is their case that connectionist metatheory provides for consciousness being an exclusive vehicle of representation. The view is sure to be challenged by those with a deep commitment to a cognitive unconscious that symbolically represents and can act as an independent system. That assumption has been fundamental to standard architectures, from Bower (1975) to Baars (1996). It is also embodied in computational views (e.g. Jackendoff, 1987) holding that consciousness is only a sometime, non-obligatory emergent of fully-formed cognitions. The authors are right to describe serious challenges to that view, but no single paper can undo decades of conceptual confusion and methodological bias in the literatures. Suffice it to say now that if claims for the power of a cognitive unconscious were correct, the experimental effects would be too strong and replicable for these literatures even to be controversial. No one can claim that. If we challenge the dissociation thesis, a major value of connectionist metatheory lies in consigning the nonconscious to mental operations and the potentially explicit; the representations and their forming operations become inseparable within the network. This is inconsistent with symbols in an unconscious being essentially like symbols in consciousness, just stored but separately doing what symbols do while waiting to be retrieved. But does connectionism provide the computational resources needed for a broad enough vehicle theory of consciousness? And does the authors' conception of explicit representation capture what we need to recognize in phenomenal experience? We can all consciously symbolize something past in remembrance, something present in perception, or some possible future in an intention or expectation, or even something entirely unreal in imagery. If a connectionist theory of phenomenal experience is to be successful, it must handle