2 Consciousness

Daniel D. Hutto

What is Consciousness?

There is no u erly clean, clear and neutral account of what exactly is covered
by the concept of consciousness. The situation reflects, and is exacerbated by
the fact that we speak of consciousness in many dierent ways in ordinary
parlance. A consequence of our multifarious uses of the concept is that it has
proved impossible to define its essential characteristics through conceptual
analysis. We have nothing approaching a descriptively adequate philosophical
consensus of what lies at the core of all and every form of consciousness in
terms of necessary and sucient conditions that would be accepted by all
interested parties.
This is not regarded as a cause for despair. The same is true of other philo-
sophically important topics such as knowledge and causation. Despite this,
consciousness remains of pivotal philosophical interest because of its centrality
to our psychological lives and the way that it tantalizingly resists incorporation
into a fully naturalized account of the world.
Recognizing that a empts to provide a philosophically robust definition of
consciousness are likely forlorn, a standard tactic for isolating core features
of consciousness is to provide clear-cut exemplars as specimens. By means of
this strategy we might still, at least, divine philosophically important a ributes
of the quarry. Take your experience of reading these lines. Hopefully their
content is at the focal centre of your a ention, but even if so there will be a
range of other peripheral and background things of which you are consciously
aware: colours, noises, feelings. Some of these may remain present throughout
your intellectual activity while others intrude upon it momentarily, in largely
expected but perhaps occasionally surprising ways, before vanishing from
the stage. Despite such comings and goings you will not feel as if your overall
experience is ruptured or fragmented.
Conscious experience of this sort is u erly mundane and intimately familiar.
It appears to be an all-or-nothing property that pervades the waking lives of
many creatures. Human beings, cats, octopi (apparently), and spiders (perhaps)
are kinds of beings commonly thought capable of possessing consciousness
while inanimate objects, such as chairs, are not. We say of creatures or organisms

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that they are conscious if they are awake and sentient. Evidence of this is that
they exhibit a certain degree of sensitivity or coordination with respect to
aspects of their environment. However if the case just described is taken as
our paradigm, then merely exercising capacities for such responding will not
suce for being truly conscious. It is easy to think of examples of complex
intelligent activity, sometimes of a quite sophisticated kind, that are never-
theless apparently habitual, automatic, or unreflective.
Most philosophers insist that, minimally and necessarily, to be conscious it
must also be the case that a being possess or enjoy some degree of occurrent
experiential awareness. In other words, there must be something that it-is-like
for them to be awake, sentient or intelligently controlling its behaviour. A truly
conscious being enjoys experiences that have phenomenal aspects; it feels a
certain way to be such a creature in such and such circumstances.
Experiential awareness can take dierent forms. It may be transitive in the
sense of being awareness of environmental surroundings or aspects thereof.
For example, the subject may be aware of the red speck in the centre of its visual
field. For this reason consciousness is o en regarded as being inherently
intentional, as being directed at certain objects, not others. But it seems possible
to be experientially aware in more intransitive ways too in ways that lack
directedness at specific objects. Diuse and undirected forms of consciousness
are surely possible, as is the case with moods, such as elation, calmness or
depression. Other, even more basic forms of undirected conscious experience
are also imaginable. Either way, to repeat, being conscious appears to require
being in a state of mind with a characteristic feel one in which there is
something-that-it-is-like to be in it. This is seemingly common to all forms
of consciousness; or, more cautiously, at least there are interesting forms of
consciousness that have this feature necessarily.
Conscious beings are essentially experiencers and the particular types of
experiences that they enjoy have distinctive characteristics and notable aspects
(i.e. they have specific phenomenal properties or characters). Experiencing
itchiness, for example, is quite dierent from experiencing anger. Seeing the
peculiar greenness of an aloe vera plant diers from seeing the peculiar green-
ness of a Granny Smith apple. We can specify the dierences by using illocu-
tions such as this or that shade of greenness. But this is to invoke inevitably
crude and (still) relatively abstract categories in order to pick out something
that is much more fine-grained, analog and particular.
Experiencing phenomenal characters, apparently, ma ers. Having experiences
seems to make a dierence to what is done, in line with how such experiences
are evaluated. Encountering the unusual taste and smell of durian, for example,
may evoke reveries or prompt certain other actions, depending on whether one
finds that taste pleasant or unpleasant. In line with this some are inclined to
reserve, more stringently, the accolade of being phenomenally conscious only

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for those beings that exhibit a certain degree of global control over their actions
or that are capable of reporting, expressing and appraising how things appear
to them. To achieve this, it is argued that conscious beings must not only be
aware of and a end to aspects of their environment but to aspects of experi-
ential mental states themselves. Accordingly this kind of capacity implies at
least some degree of self-awareness or self-consciousness. If one accepts this,
subjects that are truly phenomenally conscious must not only enjoy experiences
with certain phenomenal qualities, they must be aware of the qualities of these
experiences. If so, those states of mind that exhibit phenomenal consciousness
do so at best only partly in virtue of having phenomenal characters.
Still, even if all conscious beings are experiencers of some or other phenom-
enal properties it may be that they experience these in more or less unified
ways. Human experience tends to integrate experienced phenomenal proper-
ties (i.e. those associated with dierent sensory modalities), continuously and
seamlessly over time. Recent empirical studies concerning the phenomenon of
ina entional or change blindness, raise doubts about the extent and degree to
which we actually experience the world in fully detailed and non-gappy ways.
Still, for human experiences at least usually it feels as if the way in which
our experiences inter-relate and change happens in coherent, well-coordinated
and expected manners.
Typical human consciousness, at least, feels as if it were, in important
respects, objective, temporally extended and unified. It involves having a coher-
ent and unified individual perspective on reality. These unique points of view
are internally complex. When we notice and a end to specific worldly features,
such as the greenness of a particular apple, this involves being able to see an
apple as something more than just the sum of its presented features. To see an
apple as something in which greenness, and other properties, might inhere is
to see it as having a continued existence over time. Experiencing a world of
objects and their features always occurs against a larger and more complex
background in which such items are systematically related to other things. To
have experience of the world, as opposed to merely having sentient capacities,
is to experience worldly oerings in a structured way.1
This entails, modestly enough, that dierent sorts of creatures may enjoy
dierent forms of consciousness. What it is like to be a human being may vary
considerably from what it is like to be a dolphin, or more famously still, what
it is like to be a bat. Indeed, even what it is like to be a particular human being
in a particular set of circumstances can dier qualitatively from what it is like
to be a particular human being in another set of circumstances.
Conscious experience is subjective at least in the sense that as Nagel (1974)
proposes it is idiosyncratic. Being phenomenally conscious apparently equates
to having a particular point of view or perspective that involves having a range
of more or less unified experiences with individual phenomenal characters.

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Many philosophers hold that since we have no direct access to how things
appear experientially to others, it is enigmatic whether others are conscious or
what the exact character of their conscious experience is like. Thus unless it is
possible to securely infer what it is like for the other from more objective avail-
able facts, then, for all we know, even apparently sophisticated and intelligent
beings may lack conscious experience altogether, or they may enjoy experiences
that possess radically dierent phenomenal or qualitative characters from our
own. Moreover, the way that their experiences are normally integrated with
one another or unified (to the extent that they are integrated or unified at all)
may be quite alien to the way that typical human experience is organized.
Even if a fully transparent conceptual analysis of consciousness is not on the
cards, it seems that there are a number of identifiable or at least apparent
properties that are fundamental to it that make it of real philosophical interest.
Perhaps based on empirical or philosophical reflection it will be decided that
not all of these seeming a ributes are genuine; perhaps they will not all make
the final list of properties that warrant straight explanation. Nevertheless,
phenomenality, intentionality, subjectivity, unity, temporal extension, minimal
self-awareness are prima facie prominent features of consciousness that must
be either explained or explained away.

Reductively Naturalistic Frameworks

When thinking about consciousness, the mainstream tendency in contempo-

rary analytic philosophy of mind is to focus on metaphysical (as opposed to
conceptual) concerns. The working habit of those of a reductive naturalist bent
is to propose equations about mental states and their properties. For example,
they aim to provide general formula that will tell us, say, what conscious expe-
rience is by equating it to something else. In line with this agenda, a plethora
of theories of consciousness have been advanced. To mention but a few, these
include conjectures that equate consciousness with events or properties of the
neurobiological sort (Crick, 1994; Churchland, 1989b), quantum mechanical
(Penrose, 1994), functional/representational (Carruthers, 2000; Denne , 1991a,
2006; Dretske, 1995; Lycan, 1996; Rosenthal, 2000, 2005; Tye, 1996).
Such theories do not aim to provide traditional conceptual analyses. If
successful, ultimately they would tell us what is necessary and sucient for
having conscious experience (or conscious experience of a certain type) in the
same spirit that the property of being water was identified with the property of
being H20. That, of course, is a specific empirical hypothesis about a natural
kind. What is usually on oer by reductive naturalists who theorize about
consciousness is, as Putnam (1967) observes, typically not very detailed or
finished hypotheses but rather a kind of schemata for hypotheses.

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 Consciousness

Debates between naturalists of this stripe take the form of in-house assess-
ments of (and sometimes proposed adjustments to) each others headline pro-
posals. Not every framework is regarded as equally promising. For example,
the more extreme versions of behaviourism are almost universally unpopular
today. Their followers hold that any and all genuine mental phenomena need to
be identified with behaviours or dispositions to behave that allow for opera-
tional definitions, however complex, in terms of observable causes and eects.
A major criticism of this framework is that, in relying entirely on dispositions,
however complex, in order to understand the mental it lacks the essential
resources to satisfactorily account for the holistic and complex sorts of inter-
actions that occur between mental states that take place before responses
are produced. In this respect, functionalism, its natural successor, is deemed
superior because it makes space for precisely this sort of complexity.
Reductive functionalists take it that to be a conscious mental state of a certain
type equates to being a functional state of a whole organism: a state that can be
understood in terms of its wider systemic relations or teleological purposes and
that has appropriate causal relations to perceptions, other mental states and
actions. According to the analytic or commonsense version of the doctrine,
mental phenomena, including the experience of sights, sounds, pains and other
conscious mental states, are identified with specifiable higher order causal
roles. And for reductive naturalists these, in turn, are, either directly or indi-
rectly, identified with the physical states that happen to occupy, realize or fill
those roles. Rich mental activity is thus thought to take place between stimuli
and responses. Mental states, activated by environmental triggers, causally
interact in specifiable ways with each other and other bodily states, and only
then produce outward responses.
In large measure functionalisms popularity as a general framework for
thinking about mentality derives from the fact that it gives both philosophers
and psychologists the requisite apparatus and platform for positing inner, caus-
ally ecacious mental states without having to commit, in advance, to specific
details about how such mental states are physically realized or implemented.
This is useful because there appears to be an enormous stock of creatures of the
actual, terrestrial and imaginable, alien varieties that are capable of conscious
experiencing, despite the fact that they lack a physiology similar to our own.
The key functionalist insight is that not every creature which might be capa-
ble of conscious experience need have central nervous systems or brains like
ours. Consequently, we should not expect to uncover any neat, cross-species,
one-to-one correlations holding between particular types of experience and
particular types of neural or physiological states. To assume otherwise is, it is
claimed, to promote an unwarranted species-biased chauvinism.
Moreover, empirical work has revealed that brains, such as ours, are open
to re-wiring; that the neural structures underpinning certain types of mental

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activity are highly plastic. For example, patients who have had hemispherecto-
mies in which the cortex of one hemisphere is removed have succeeded in
enlisting other parts of their brains to restore the lost functions, thus managing
to compensate. In the light of such discoveries it appears mistaken to assume
that there will be uniquely dedicated neural configurations supporting very
specific kinds of mentality. It is likely that this is true of conscious experience too.
Considerations of this sort cast doubt on strong, type-type versions of mind-
brain identity theories: those that propose straightforward identifications of
particular kinds of conscious experience with particular types of brain event.
Type-type identity theorists hope to provide class-to-class identifications of
brain events or processes that will be capable of grounding an interestingly
predictive and informative science of the mind. Such theories hope to tell us
that being a middle-A sound is identical with being an oscillation in air
pressure at 440 hertz; being red is identical with having a certain triplet of
electromagnetic reflectance eciencies; being warm is identical with a certain
mean level of microscopically embodied energies, and so forth (Churchland,
1989b, p. 53).
However if some version of functionalism is true then psychological
laws can be cast at a higher order level even though conscious states will be
variously, and thus disjunctively, realized in species specific (and perhaps even
individual-specific and/or circumstance-specific) ways. Consider that the hum-
ble carbure or can be functionally defined in terms of the abstract causal role
it fulfils. Something is a carbure or insofar as it mixes air with liquid fuel.
In theory, such devices could be made of metal, rubber, plastic, possibly even
soul-stu as long as they are capable of discharging the stated function. The
relation between a functional role and what realizes it can be one-to-many as
opposed to one-to-one. Thus a general description of the realizers of any given
type of experience would take the form of a disjunction on the right side of the
relevant equation that includes mention of a, perhaps, indefinitely long chain
of dierent kinds of instantiating states.
The trouble is that, without significant qualification, functionalism can
appear overly inclusive when it comes to saying which sorts of systems ought
to make the list of the conscious. This is illustrated by the fact that it is easy
to imagine beings that produce the appropriate outward behaviour through
functionally identical means but which plausibly lack any kind of experiential
awareness. For example, Ned Block (1978) famously imagined a scenario in
which the behaviours of a complex artificial body are orchestrated by com-
munications between members of the Chinese nation, so as to mimic in all
functionally relevant respects the responses of a human being undergoing
a painful experience. In order to achieve this feat, the Chinese citizens are pro-
vided with rules on how to respond to instructions provided by sky-based
display and are able to communicate with one another by means of two-way

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radio-links so that, by working together, they are able to remotely generate just
the right kinds of responses in the body.
However outlandish the scenario, it is at least theoretically possible that the
Chinese nation could simulate human pain behaviour in the artificial body
by such means, mirroring at one level of description the ways in which such
behaviour is normally functionally produced in humans. The worry is that if
the two systems are identical in this respect then, assuming functionalism is
true, it appears we have no principled grounds for saying that one is really
undergoing the experience of pain and the other not. The situation is preposter-
ous since, intuitively, we want to ascribe the experience of pain to the individual
human being while withholding that ascription to an artificial body controlled
by the conglomerate of Chinese individuals engaged in this bizarre exercise. Yet
the only path to that verdict seems to require thinking of conscious experience
as something distinct from functional properties per se.
Indeed, this is precisely the moral that many are inclined to draw from this
thought experiment; while functionalism might reveal something important
about the processes and structures associated with experiencing it is incapable of
providing a real insight into the nature of experience itself. On these grounds
functionalists are o en accused of having no reasonable means of accommodat-
ing the phenomenal character of experience. Their proposals apparently miss
out the most important ingredient: how it feels.
Of course, it is possible for the functionalist to bite the bullet and insist, fly-
ing in the face of standard intuitions, that if a systems behaviour is generated
in the right way then it simply is conscious. So if the human is, then so too is
the body governed by the Chinese nation. But this is not the only (nor the
most convincing) line of reply. Arguably, the charge of liberalism might be
answered by adjusting the level of grain of the proposed functional analysis.
This requires a shi of a ention from abstract job descriptions crudely, what
the thing is doing to a greater focus on precise engineering details crudely,
how the thing actually does what it does (Churchland, 1989b, Chapter 2;
Flanagan 1991). Ironically, what is hailed as the chief virtue of functionalism
its capacity to abstract from specific details and its openness to the possibility
of various realizability looks to be a vice when it comes to understanding
consciousness.
Nevertheless, to assume that such objections are fatal is to underestimate
the flexibility of the functionalist approach. It is quite open for defenders of this
framework to insist, more in the spirit of identity theory, that the peculiarities
of how a system is organized and even what materials it is composed of might
ma er to having experience (or having certain kinds of experience). This is
wholly consistent with acknowledging that two systems that dier in their
lower level engineering details might be regarded as functionally equivalent at
some higher level of analysis.

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What this possibility reveals is that, despite some traditional disagreements

and border disputes, there is scope for seemingly distinct and opposing reduc-
tive naturalistic frameworks to become more closely aligned and tightly ali-
ated. Indeed some authors go as far as to claim that the identity theory is just
an empirically special case of functionalism, one that (implausibly) locates all
mental states at the same very low level of institutional abstraction the neuro-
anatomical (Lycan, 1996, p. 59). In the other direction even avid supporters of
functionalism are quite happy to acknowledge that when you make a mind,
the materials ma er (Denne , 1997, p. 100). Importantly this thought is wholly
compatible with accepting that when it comes to understanding consciousness
handsome is what handsome does and that ma er ma ers only because of
what ma er can do (Denne , 2006, p. 17).
What this shows is that there may be ways and means of adequately dealing
with so-called absent qualia cases and that if these were the only cases that
had to be dealt with, then nothing in principle bars the development of a fully
illuminating naturalistic theory of consciousness. The real devil is simply in the
detail of deciding exactly which levels of functional analysis are most appropri-
ate for understanding various forms of conscious experience and which aspects
of the physical world are needed for instantiating such experiences. Deter-
mining that is a long term project that would be at least partly constrained by
further theoretical considerations as well as empirical findings.

Arguments For and Against Non-Reductive Naturalism

Not everyone is sanguine about the prospects of reductive naturalism. Indeed,

many are convinced that the whole style of approach is wrong for the study
of consciousness, full stop. This is because they hold that consciousness has
special properties that are distinct and irreducible to properties of any other
kind. Traditionally, this sort of view is associated with substance dualism of the
kind promoted by Descartes. According to substance dualists reality is bifur-
cated, composed of two quite distinct and fundamentally dierent substances:
the mental and the physical. Most of todays dualists are thoroughgoing
naturalists. They claim only that phenomenal properties are real, and although
wholly natural, they cannot be equated with any other kind of properties.
Rather they are primitive properties in their own right that exist alongside
representational, functional and physical properties. Hence to fully understand
how they relate to other worldly properties requires additional explanation
in terms of special fundamental laws, laws that are as basic as any others to be
discovered by a completed physics.
Understood non-reductively, the ultimate aspiration of a science of conscious-
ness is to connect first-person data to third-person data; perhaps to explain the

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former in terms of the la er, or at least to come up with systematic theoretical

connections between the two (Chalmers, 1999a, p. 8). Ultimate success in this
venture would take the form of a fundamental theory which would explicate
the simple, universal laws that underwrite the principles connecting experi-
ences and informationally driven brain processes. Yet even those who are
commi ed to this project recognize that currently there is a lack of adequate
formalisms for characterizing and ge ing at experiential properties. Thus in
order for there to be a viable first-personal science of consciousness existing
methods of investigation must be substantially improved and developed, as
is promised by techniques such as neurophenomenology (for an overview
see Lutz and Thompson, 2003).
A range of thought experiments motivates belief in the metaphysical
dualism that suggests a need for research programmes of this kind. Ultimately,
reductive naturalists claim that physical features and facts exhaust all that
there is. Once the physical details of the world are in place, everything else
follows or is entailed automatically. Jacksons (1982) famous knowledge argu-
ment is designed to cast doubt on the truth of this view. It features a thought
experiment in which the central character, Mary, a super-scientist, knows every
physical fact it is possible to know. It is imagined that Mary has been confined
from birth in a wholly black and white environment and that she has only
had access to the outside world via the black and white media of television
monitors. Although she knows everything that is possible to know about
every physical detail of the world, her knowledge is, nevertheless, incomplete.
Specifically, she lacks knowledge of certain facts about colour experience.
Due to her confinement, she does not know what it is like, either for herself or
others, to experience colours. This is not something that she can learn without
being released from her monochrome prison. The moral is that if Marys factual
knowledge is incomplete, then knowing everything that there is to know about
physics is not to know everything that there is to know simpliciter. When given
a metaphysical twist, this conclusion is thought to imply that fixing the physical
facts simply doesnt fix all the facts, namely, that physicalism is incomplete.
An even more direct a empt to demonstrate the limitations of reductive
naturalism involves conjuring up zombies. Zombies are atom for atom, com-
plete physical duplicates of conscious beings; they are identical in every beha-
vioural, functional and physical detail, but despite this they are completely
lacking in conscious experiences. For zombies the lights appear to be on even
though no one is at home. This profound experiential vacancy is unnoticeable
for all intents and purposes. It is not something that you, I, or even the zombie
itself would be able to detect or articulate. It need not be supposed that zombies
are actually possible; likely they contravene existing laws of nature that apply
to our world. But this is entirely consistent with their existence as denizens of
some logically possible world (Chalmers, 1996, p. 180).

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Conceiving of zombies seems to be no great strain. Their possibility seems

quite coherent. Thus if it is allowed that bona fide or coherent conceivability
implies metaphysical possibility then the mere possibility of zombies putatively
shows that experiential properties need not, always and everywhere, be tied to
or co-vary with behavioural, functional and/or physical properties. Experiential
properties have intrinsic features that are logically distinct from all other prop-
erties. If so, because of this conceptual wedge, all forms of reductive naturalist
theories of consciousness are false.
Moved by these considerations, non-reductionists are confident that all
a empts to understand conscious experience in terms of something else will be
unable to clear a fundamental hurdle; they will fail to deal squarely with the
so-called hard problem of consciousness. Chalmers (1996) formulation of it
takes the form of wondering for any given proposal about the nature of con-
scious experiencing (i.e. that identifies it with a certain functional organization,
representational properties, complex pa erns of neural or organismic activity,
the global access and integration of information, or what you will) how it is that
the proposed states or activities in question could give rise to or generate
conscious experience. The assumption is that no satisfactory answer is or will
be forthcoming. The very idea of making sense of the production of conscious-
ness in terms of something else is a fools errand. Thus consciousness remains
the biggest stumbling block to obtaining a complete understanding of the natu-
ral world using the standard categories oered by the objective sciences.
Notably, the hard problem is not just hard it seems impossible to solve.
Hence when it comes to explaining the relationship between the experiential
and other worldly properties the best that can be hoped for is a non-reductive
specification of relations that hold between them.
There are a number of ways reductive naturalists can respond to these sorts
of challenge. This always takes the form of trying to show that despite appear-
ances these thought experiments do not have the implications that they appear
to have. This can be handled piecemeal. For example, some hold that zombies
are not coherently conceivable, and thus nothing interesting follows for meta-
physics from the a empt to imagine them. In the case of Mary, some argue that,
despite the fact that she learns something new on leaving her room, what she
learns is not any kind of factual knowledge.
A more popular general strategy is to appeal to special features of phenom-
enal concepts that are distinct and irreducible to physical concepts, even though
phenomenal properties are not distinct from physical properties. This provides
space for insisting that even though zombies are genuinely conceivable, their
conceivability is not a faithful guide to metaphysical possibility. It also permits
one to deny of Mary that her epistemic situation, as described, need have any of
the interesting metaphysical consequences proposed. Knowing everything

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there is to know under one conceptually based description does not entail
knowing the very same things under another.
What makes this line of reply plausible is that concepts of phenomenal
consciousness are apparently special in key respects. Their special features are
what systematically foster and explain the illusion that experiential properties
can come apart from all other properties, even though this isnt so. Public con-
cepts of experience, such as redness or itchiness are, some hold, recognitional
in nature. They are thought to involve perceptions of worldly properties.
In contrast, phenomenal concepts, such as seems red or feels itchy which
some hold are formed on the basis of re-enacting or having higher order per-
ceivings or believings about first order experiential states are regarded as
purely recognitional or inherently first-personally perspectival (Papineau, 2002;
Tye, 2009).
If phenomenal concepts are formed in special ways and have unique pro-
perties because of this, then it is arguable that it only seems to us that zombies
are possible (i.e. one can conceptually imagine phenomenal properties as being
distinct from all other properties even though they cannot be) and that it only
seems that Mary doesnt know all the facts (in fact she does, but she knows some
of them under a limited description or mode of presentation). If so, those who
are excited by the idea that such thought experiments damage the prospects of
naturalism are subject to a persistent cognitive illusion.2
Those who endorse the phenomenal concepts strategy place dierent bets
on the odds of closing the so-called explanatory gap (Levine, 1983). For even
if naturalists are able to put their metaphysical house in order there remains
a lingering and perturbing question of why a neural state should be the basis
of a certain kind of experience or of any experience instead of none at all. This
question suggests that there is a gap in our understanding that still appears
to remain wide open even if one denies the force of the standard thought
experiments.
One tactic for dealing with it, promoted by McGinn (1991), is to simply con-
cede that our minds are cognitively incapable of forming the relevant concepts
required for closing it (i.e. of providing a constructive, scientific account of con-
sciousness). This is so, he maintains, even though consciousness is a perfectly
legitimate natural and, indeed, wholly physical phenomenon. In principle it is
wholly explicable in physical terms even though we are, forever, cognitively
closed to understanding how this could be so. We are prevented from this
because we lack the appropriate cognitive faculties.
Top-down a empts to understand the psychophysical link between the
experiential and the physical are impeded on one side by the limits of intro-
spection. There is nothing in our experience that provides us with the means of
intelligibly understanding how experience is generated by the processes that

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underwrite it. Bo om-up scientific approaches are similarly limited by the

perception-based methods they employ; hence they are equally unable to make
sense of the productive link between the physical and experiential. It does not
follow that the psychophysical link is inexplicable. All that is entailed is that
the missing link cannot be characterised or made intelligible in either physical
or mental terms. Given our inherent conceptual limitations, it is just that we are
forever prevented from making sense of the relation between experience and its
material substrate. The truth about the psychophysical nexus is out there but it
is permanently beyond our ken. Consciousness will always remain a mystery.
Understanding its place in the natural world is a perpetual, epistemic problem
but not a metaphysical one.
It might be wondered what, if we lack even the possibility of epistemic
assurances, could warrant this staunch faith in the truth of physicalism? What
justifies the idea that there exists an explanation of the psychophysical con-
nection, that is forever beyond our grasp? McGinns answer is that nothing
rationally justifies it, but rather it must be accepted as an article of metaphysical
faith (McGinn, 1991, p. 87).
Other reductionists reject this pessimistic a itude wholesale, believing it is
possible to solve the hard problem by changing the tools with which we cur-
rently think about consciousness (i.e. by fiddling with the concepts on both
sides of the equation until the mystery disappears). The assumption is that in
the course of time the concepts of mental and physical concepts will co-evolve
and a solution will be revealed as we bring them into correspondence (Van
Gulick, 2000, p. 94). But this promise of conceptual reconciliation seems unlikely
to be fulfilled since our quotidian concepts of experience do not develop a er
the fashion of theoretical concepts in the basic sciences. Nor does the way the
la er are developing seem likely to make them more like the former.
The most aggressive strategy for dealing with the explanatory gap and the
hard problem is to deny that addressing such how and why questions is
legitimate. Some hold that they beg crucial questions and that in defending
their proposed identity claims reductionists should simply deny that there
are two properties here (Papineau, 1993b, pp. 17980). The key when adopting
this line is to deny, from the get go, that there is any sense in playing the gen-
eration game at all (i.e. of trying to answer the question of how the physical
gives rise to experience). Defenders of this view deny that a straight solution
to the problems of consciousness is ever on the cards. But this is not because
consciousness wont reduce. Rather it is because it makes no sense to ask, in
general, how or why the mental and the physical are related given that they
are one and the same, though dierently encountered by us. Put simply, If
feelings are one and the same as brain states, then brain states dont generate
a further realm of feelings (or give rise to them, or accompany them, or
are correlated with them). Rather, brain states are the feelings (Papineau,

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2002, p. 3). Accordingly the best policy for dealing with the hard problem is the
same as in dealing with taxes; avoidance is permissible but evasion is illegal.
In this case avoidance looks like the best move since as soon as you suppose
that conscious states are distinct from material states, then some very puzzling
questions become unavoidable (Papineau, 2002, p. 2).
A empts to identify conscious experience with a physical state of some kind
or other would be doomed to fail from the outset if conscious experiences in
fact shared no essential properties in common with such states. But the reply
to this charge is that while this might seem to be the case it simply isnt so. It is
entirely possible that one and the same thing may present itself to us in dier-
ent ways. There are plenty of cases in which a single referent is mistaken for
numerous distinct ones and vice versa because of misleading appearances,
names or descriptions. Noting this is all that defenders of reductive theories
require if they are to establish that their hypotheses about consciousness might
be possibly true in ways that would obviate having to deal with the problems
of consciousness.
To take this line is to hold that there is nothing more inherently absurd in
claiming that conscious experiences might equate to certain kinds of physical
happenings than there is in claiming that the Morning star and the Evening
star are the same planet: Venus. In neither case is the identity immediately
obvious or self-evident. If we allow this then there is no reason to deny, in
advance, that conscious experiences could not be identified with something
physical. To think otherwise, on the basis of appearances of dierence, is to be
under the sway of the stereoscopic or antipathetic fallacy.
While a ractively simple, nevertheless this sort of reply only goes so far. It
does nothing, by itself, to motivate acceptance of any of the proposed identity
claims; at most it makes space for their possible truth; at best it secures the
barest logical possibility of putative identity. And it does not deal with the root
problem that underpins the explanatory gap or the hard problem because it
fails to overcome worries about the intelligibility of making certain identity
claims. The bo om line is that to make their favoured identity claims credible,
it is necessary for reductionists to deal with the appearances of dierence in
some satisfactory way.

Rethinking Metaphors of Mind

Credibly establishing identities always rests on showing that what outwardly

appears to be dierent is in fact of the same kind for example, a planet, a
person, an event and so on. Establishing an identity in a fully satisfying way
depends on the possibility, in principle, of being able to explain away appear-
ances of dierence. To make an identity claim intelligible requires showing

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that seemingly distinct things can possess all of their apparent properties with-
out tension or contradiction. Thus to make any progress on the problems of
consciousness, to render any given naturalistic equation about consciousness
truly convincing, would involve showing how the properties proposed for the
reduction could be the kinds of things that experiential states or properties
might be.
A nagging concern is that all existing reductionists proposals leave too
many important questions unanswered about the appearances of dierence.
In particular, they give inadequate answers to question, such as: Why do
experiences feel as they do? Who or what does the experiencing? How and
where does this all come together?
A deep-seated problem is that although reductive naturalists outwardly
denounce the picture of mental objects as occupying an inner sanctum of the
mind, they are inclined to take seriously questions and problems that do not
wholly make sense without presupposing this picture in some, perhaps vesti-
gial way. For example, some are tempted to ask: Where is my experience of pain
located? The sense of this question is taken to be straightforwardly akin to
the query; where is my pen located? But this leads directly to the problem of
phenomenal space, which is the problem of finding a place for the world of
experience within the world of physical space. In this context Denne is right
to ask, Now what is phenomenal space? Is it physical space inside the brain?
Is it the on-stage space in the theater of consciousness located in the brain
(Denne , 1991a, p. 130)?
Denne s analysis of the assumptions grounding the enterprise of explain-
ing consciousness is instructive. He believes that most philosophers, and many
lay folk influenced by them, conjure up images of the mind as an inner, mental
theatre complete with a self who examines various on-stage objects in the
spotlight of consciousness (pains, colours, figments of the imagination, etc.).
Those under the sway of this picture think of our verbal reports concerning
consciousness as based directly upon what the self sees on its private, inner
screen. Apparently it introspects mental items in a way similar to that in which
we ordinarily inspect everyday things such as watches or pieces of china.
Denne has done more than most to get us to critically question our thinking
on this score so as to abandon the idea that there is any such place in the physi-
cal world (and, in particular, the brain) where all the events of consciousness
come together. Rather than starting with such dangerous assumptions about
our explanandum he thinks that we have no choice but to begin our investi-
gations into the nature of consciousness by interrogating first-person reports
in a public, intersubjective context. He gives the name heterophenomenology
to this activity. While engaged in it, we, as interpreters, eectively allow the
subjects to verbally describe to us the nature of their experiences. They generate
texts about how things seem to them. They have authority concerning the

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content of what is described. But what is described are best understood (at
least in the first instance) as notional worlds that are analogous to fictional
worlds, such as Sherlock Holmess London (not the real London). In being of a
like nature to such fictional worlds, The subjects heterophenomenological
world will be a stable intersubjectively confirmable theoretical posit (Denne ,
1991a, p. 81).
It follows that speech acts are the primary interpreted data for the study
of consciousness. These are reports, judgments, and beliefs that are made
concerning purported conscious experiences. The question of whether or
not what is described in these speech acts is real or fictional is le in abeyance.
Ocially, when we start investigating consciousness scientifically using this
method, we are required to begin (but not end) by focusing on the contents of
the speech acts of humans (and other possible speakers), staying studiously
neutral on what if anything lies behind them/explains their etiology.
The ontological moral Denne is inclined to draw is that although we ought
to allow subjects to have the final word in saying how they judge that things
appear to them, this in no way commits investigators to take seriously what
they describe at the level of ontology. He maintains that this is the only sound
way to take the first-person point of view as seriously as it can be taken
(Denne , 2003, p. 19). For him, interrogating such texts are our only means
of neutrally analysing the reports about what is going on in our minds. He
claims that the texts generated in these circumstances, and not something above
and beyond to which they putatively refer, are the raw material for any theory
of consciousness.
In promoting this understanding of where we must start Denne oers a
new metaphor for consciousness; the multiple dra s model. The multiple dra s
model identifies consciousness with our ability to generate a coherent text
concerning our putative mental episodes. James Joyces Ulysses is the model.
But he goes further and advances a positive reductive theory of consciousness
in terms of the ability to generate detailed, coherent serial reports. For Denne
the business of explaining consciousness boils down to explaining how the
brain is able to produce the relevant texts. By his lights we wont have explained
consciousness until we give a naturalistic account of our ability to produce
coherent speech acts through which we describe our experience of what it is
like for us to be conscious. And like all good reductionists he believes that,
Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events
could explain consciousness at all (Denne , 1991a, p. 454). Explaining con-
sciousness, for him, converts to explaining the capacity for a certain kind of
text production.
His task is not to explain the existence of conscious experience as it is usually
imagined to be but rather to explain how our talk about how things seem to us
is produced by underlying sub-systems. Thus he hopes to give an ontogenetic

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 The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind

explanation of how those sub-systems were formed and an account of how they
work. The essence of his proposal is captured in the following remark I am
suggesting conscious human minds are more or less serial virtual machines
implemented ineciently on the parallel hardware evolution has provided
for us (Denne , 1991a, p. 218). In line with his multiple dra s model he calls
the virtual machine that gives rise to consciousness a Joycean machine. And
he is quite aware of the limits of his theory; he notes that If consciousness
is something over and above the Joycean machine, I have not yet provided a
theory of consciousness at all (Denne , 1991a, p. 281).
There are similarities between Denne s approach and ambitious higher
order theories of consciousness those that maintain that being phenomenally
conscious requires a ending to or noticing the aspects of ones mental states
in ways that necessarily involve making reference to those aspects in higher
order acts of perception or thought. Accordingly, phenomenal consciousness
requires the use of higher order perceptions or thoughts (Lycan, 1996;
Rosenthal, 2005; Carruthers, 2000). If such higher order operations are, in fact,
partly constitutive of phenomenal consciousness then the neural basis of
experience must include machinery for inner sensing or for making theory
of mind ascriptions.3
For those who doubt that such mechanisms form part of our basic biological
equipment, Denne s account has an advantage. He does not believe that
the Joycean so ware is built-in; he regards it as the result of cultural design.
He tells us that consciousness is, largely a product of cultural evolution that
gets imparted to brains in early training (Denne , 1991a, p. 219). But critics
regard this as an admission that non-verbals, such as animals and infants, are
incapable of having experiences. Denne s response to this worry is that our
folksy intuitions regarding animal and infant consciousness are not sacrosanct.
Je isoning some of our most deeply held intuitions concerning the nature
of experience may be a price we must pay for adopting a neater criterion of
consciousness.
A deeply objectionable feature of Denne s theory, echoing the problems of
certain versions of behaviourism and functionalism, is that a complex system
would count as conscious if it produced pa erns of behaviour identical to,
say, those of yours or mine when we generate a stream of coherent u erances
that are interpretable as saying how things seem to us. Highlighting this aspect
of Denne s account, many have complained that his theory leaves out what
is critically important for understanding phenomenal consciousness: phenom-
enal qualities themselves. A capacity for experiencing such qualities, it is argued,
is logically independent from (and developmentally prior to) capacities for
propositional believing, reportage and narrative text production.
The problem for Denne s proposal and the oerings of higher order thought
theorists is that, as stand-alone accounts, they allegedly place too much emphasis

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on sophisticated extras or supplements. These may be plausibly required for

having certain kinds of conscious experience but should not be confused with
the essential ingredients of a more basic, biologically grounded capacity for
phenomenal experiencing itself.
The idea that experience is more basic than such accounts suppose is further
supported by the observation that conscious experience is not primarily about
the abstract recognition and identification of objects but rather has a more
perspectival nature. This has independently motivated the conjecture that
conscious experiences must occur at an intermediate and cognitively impene-
trable level of perceptual processing; one that is neither very high nor very low
(Jackendo, 1987). In line with this, Block (2007) has suggested that the neural
basis of experience does not include mechanisms of reportage. But he accepts
that this generates a methodological puzzle for consciousness research given
that sincere first-person reports are the accepted basis for investigating the
neural correlates of consciousness.
There are various ways of making sense of what the relevant kind of pre-
conceptual, pre-linguistic form of perceptual processing involves. A popular
conjecture is that such perceptual experiences might be best understood in
representational terms. This conjecture is lent some initial plausibility by the
fact that those sentient beings which are known to be perceptually conscious
do not get by in the world by merely being responsive and reactive to its
oerings. Rather they are conscious of things as being a certain way. As Tye
observes, the idea that perceptual experiences must be contentful is most
strongly motivated by the thought that, in seeing objects, they look some way
to us, together with the further thought that an object can look a certain way
only if it is experienced as being that way. This in turn, seems to require that
the object be represented as being that way (Tye, 2009, p. 88).
Minimally, a state represents as if it presents some portion of the world as
being a certain (potentially) truth-evaluable way, for example, as being hot or
as being red. Importantly, a creature need not have sophisticated conceptual
abilities in order to be in such states of mind; it is possible that such content is
non-conceptual. All that is required for a mental state to possess content of this
kind is for it to have inherently specifiable correctness or accuracy conditions.
The intuition is that simply by instantiating the property of phenomenal blue-
ness a mental state is automatically capable of representing something in the
environment as being blue.
The most ambitious reductive variant of this idea takes it that the phenome-
nal character of an experience is exhausted by its representational content;
phenomenal properties are nothing but representational properties. Such
theories hold that the phenomenal aspects of experience are nothing over
and above taking features of the world to be a certain truth-evaluable way.
Accordingly, what it is like to be conscious boils down to representing how

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 The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind

things might be (given that how the world seems to be and how it actually is
may dier). Consequently, there can be no dierence in phenomenal character
without a corresponding dierence in representational content because
phenomenal character just is a kind of representational content. Weaker, non-
reductive versions of representationalism hold that changes in phenomenal
character lawfully co-vary with changes in content because, although distinct
from representational properties, phenomenal properties perform representa-
tional service.
Both strong and weak versions of representationalism about consciousness
face a number of serious objections (for details see Hu o, 2009). Arguably, a
major problem with all such accounts is that they a empt to understand basic
perceptual activity by illicitly importing features that in fact necessarily depend
on being a participant in sophisticated, linguistically-based practices (e.g.
having mental states with the kind of semantic content that requires assessment
by appeal to public norms and concepts, as in the a ribution of blueness to
aspects of the environment). If so, in imagining basic experiences to have
more properties than is necessary or possible for them to have, such accounts
make the opposite mistake to Denne and his followers.
Plausibly, having a capacity for phenomenal experiencing is more rudimen-
tary and fundamental than the capacity to represent the world as being a
certain truth-evaluable way. Consequently, experiencing aspects of the world
might be thoroughly non-contentful (and not just non-conceptual). Experi-
encing might not be intrinsically content-involving even though there is
something-it-is-like to experience worldly oerings in phenomenologically
salient ways.
This non-representationalist view of experience features as the central
plank of a radically enactivist approach to phenomenality; one that seeks to
understand phenomenal experience by focusing on the ways in which creatures
actively sense, perceive and engage with their environments (see Hu o and
Myin, forthcoming). Enactivists propose that the core features of experiential
properties are best explained by appeal to specific pa erns of sensorimotor
activity, through which complex self-organising systems interact with aspects
of their environment. Their slogan is: Experience isnt something that happens
in us, it is something we do (No, 2004, p. 216; see also Thompson, 2007). They
maintain that Experience is not caused by and realized in the brain, although
it depends causally on the brain. Experience is realized in the active life of
the skilful animal (No, 2004, p. 227). Thus enactivists challenge traditional
internalist thinking about the extent of the supervenience base of conscious-
ness, holding that it constitutively involves not just the brain but also bodily
and environmental features.
In pressing this idea, enactivists are critical of endeavours to understand
the phenomenal character of experience on a purely correlative basis, namely,

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by looking exclusively at what goes on inside the craniums of experiencers

(a style of approach exemplified by those who seek to identify the neural
correlates of consciousness). Like those critics who are worried about the
hard problem and the explanatory gap, enactivists hold that even if relevant
mind/brain correlations are established, the fruits of such work would remain
explanatorily sour: ultimately this alone would tell us precious li le about
how or why experiences have the particular phenomenal characters or feels
that they do. By way of contrast, it is argued that charting which environment-
involving pa erns of sensorimotor interaction make a dierence to having
experiences with specific kinds of phenomenal character holds out much greater
explanatory promise.
While it is impossible to give a full and fair assessment of these proposals
here, this analysis suggests that it seems likely that a completely satisfying
naturalistic understanding of conscious experiences will require the complex
balancing and selective integration of a range of dierent theories. Achieving
this will require modifications, not only, of the ambitions and resources of
specific proposals, in tune with a be er understanding of the level at which
they best operate; it will also require a fundamental re-thinking of some of our
basic assumptions about the nature of consciousness.

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