Attention to consciousness

The notion of consciousness, though central to contemporary philosophy of mind, is not well understood. This fact vitiates many recent attempts to develop a theory of consciousness. I aim to achieve a deeper understanding of consciousness by considering what it is that distinguishes conscious mental phenomena from non-conscious mental phenomena. I argue that, contrary to widespread opinion, consciousness is not a matter of a mental state\u27s possessing phenomenality. Nor is it simply a matter of an organism\u27s developing a mental representation, first order or higher order. Rather, I argue, conscious mental phenomena are distinguished from non-conscious mental phenomena by their positioning within a cognitive system. In particular, the conscious mental phenomena are all and only those that are both (a) immediately available to a cognitive mechanism with the function of controlling behavior in novel circumstances and (b) capable of engaging controlled attention. Although my account invokes something like Michael Tye\u27s notion of a mental state\u27s being “poised” to affect certain cognitive mechanisms, it differs from Tye\u27s theory on which mechanisms a state must be poised to affect in order to be conscious. My account is further distanced from Tye\u27s and Dretske\u27s first order representational theories in that it does not restrict the contents of conscious experiences to non-conceptual contents. Rather, I maintain that the contents of conscious experiences are quite diverse, including both conceptual and non-conceptual contents. My arguments, both positive and negative, draw upon a variety of considerations, including the rich body of theory and data emerging from recent work in cognitive science, phenomenological considerations, and more general philosophical considerations such as overall coherence, simplicity, and argumentative support. If correct, my views not only undermine recent arguments for or against the explicability or reducibility of consciousness in physicalist terms, they show that those arguments are not about consciousness at all. Rather, on the framework that emerges in the dissertation, these arguments are about either the contents of mental phenomena or their phenomenal character—neither of which is consciousness