What is consciousness?  Bad question.  What are consciousness?  The term has many senses.

              “Creature” consciousness:  A thing is a conscious being or creature iff it has the capacity for mentation.
              “Minimal” consciousness:  A thing has that iff it is (actually) hosting any mental activity at all.
              “Control” consciousness:  What psychologists call the “normal waking state”; you’re awake and functioning and have normal control of your actions.

Those senses are not interesting or mysterious.  What people think is mysterious is subjectivity in one form or another.  So let’s turn to “state” consciousness:  A mental state is a conscious state (in one sense of the term!) just in case its subject is directly (from the inside) aware of being in it.  (As in a conscious memory, a conscious decision.)  That, I think, is the beginning of subjectivity.  And it is the easiest issue in that area, so let’s start with it.

Awareness of one’s own mental states

    Rosenthal contrasts two “conceptions of” (really doctrines regarding) consciousness in the present sense.  One is Descartes’:  Descartes simply identified the mental with the conscious; there’s no such thing as a mental state you’re unaware of being in.  A mental state and your awareness of it are one and the same thing.  Mentality just is awareness.
    But an opposing view was generated by  two kinds of 20th-century psychology:  There are representational, mental states that we are unaware of being in—repressed beliefs, desires and intentions (Freud), and/or computational information-processing states, as in your language module or in early vision (cognitive psychology).
    For that matter, we sometimes just fail to notice sensations that we have, because our attention is directed elsewhere.  A pain can go unfelt, if you’re a soldier in combat or just playing in a fast and violent basketball game.  (You realize later that the injury must have hurt, but you weren’t aware of it at the time.)  Armstrong gives the example of the long-distance truck driver, driving on automatic pilot while thinking about something else, who “comes to” and realizes that he hasn’t been paying attention to his driving.  He must have seen the stop lights, etc., or he would have crashed.  But he wasn’t aware of seeing a red light at the time.
    The following discussion assumes  that the second, antiCartesian doctrine is correct.  But the doctrine remains controversial.  I’ll be delighted if one or more of you devotes a paper to defending Descartes on this.
 
    So, Rosenthal and Armstrong assume that occurrent mental or psychological states fall roughly into three categories: those whose subjects are aware of being in them; those whose subjects are not aware of being in them, but could have been had they taken notice; and those, such as language-processing states, which are entirely subterranean and inaccessible to introspection.  A theory is needed to explain these differences.
    “Aware of” suggests intentionality, viz., that a conscious state is itself the intentional object of another state, the awareness.  If intentionality is representation, that would mean that the state is represented by the subject, perhaps by another state of the subject’s brain.

    There are two main representational theories of conscious awareness and conscious states in the present sense.  There is  Rosenthal’s “higher-order thought” theory, according to which what makes a mental state a conscious state is simply that the subject is having a thought about it, provided that the thought was directly caused by the state itself.  There is also the Lockean “inner sense” or “higher-order perception” theory offered by Armstrong.  On Armstrong’s view, the representing is done quasi-perceptually, by a set of functionally specified internal attention mechanisms of some kind that scan or monitor first-order mental/brain states.
    Each of those views easily explains the differences between our three categories of first-order state; a state is, or is not, or could not be a conscious state accordingly as it itself is, or is not, or psychofunctionally could not be the object of a higher-order quasi-perception or thought.  But let’s concentrate on the Armstrong theory, since we have Armstrong himself here in Greenville.

    Further motivation for a representational theory of awareness is obvious enough:  When we deliberately introspect and thereby become aware of a first-order mental state that we had not realized we were in, the awareness is quasi-perceptual or at least takes the form of a mental state of some kind itself directed upon the first-order state; it feels as though we are “looking at” a particular sector of our cognitive or phenomenal field.  And as we saw in class, this kind of introspective attending is under voluntary control; we can “look” around various sectors of our phenomenal fields at will.

    Caveat (not an objection):  This “inner sense” theory explains very little.  In particular, it does not explain why sensations have the qualitative characters they do, or what it is like to have an experience of this or that sort.  There is lots more to subjectivity.

Problems

    Objection 1:  Some philosophers have alleged a regress. If the second-order representation is to confer consciousness on the original, first-order state, it must itself be a conscious state; so there must be a third-order representation of it, and so on forever.  Reply: “Inner sense” theorists reject the opening conditional premise. The second-order representation need not itself be a conscious state.  (Of course, it may be a conscious state, if there does happen to be a higher-order representation of it in turn.)  It does not confer consciousness on the original state in the sense of bequeathing it.  The original state is a conscious state just because you quasi-perceive it.

    Objection 2:  Some philosophers have complained that representational theories leave introspective beliefs too fallible and underrate the privileged access we have to our own mental states. An internal monitor is a mechanism, and every mechanism is fallible and works only contingently.  But the objectors contend that our awareness of our own mental states is either infallible or, if not flatly infallible, constrained against unreliability.  Sydney Shoemaker, for example, grants that pain can “occasionally” escape awareness, but he insists that that could not happen “as a matter of course; it may be true in Lake Wobegon that all of the children are above average, but it can’t be true everywhere.”  Reply:  The Wobegon analogy fails; nothing about introspection affords any arithmetical calculation such as that of an average.  Rejoinder (Wittgenstein):  But there are concepts which impose rules of the form, “X can and occasionally does happen without Y, but this couldn’t be common or normal or without some special explanation”; to grasp the very concept is to know that any X without Y is a necessarily rare aberration.  To have the very concept of pain is in part to know that although in special circumstances there can be pain-behavior without pain, pain-behavior is overwhelmingly good evidence of actual pain.  So too with introspection.  It can and occasionally does go wrong, but that has to be an aberration and it requires a special explanation; it couldn’t happen as a matter of course.  But (again) the “inner sense” model predicts that if you have a broken introspector, introspection could go wrong all the time, even systematically.  If our introspectors were all to break, introspection would be completely unreliable—which idea makes no sense.

    Objection 3 (Johnathon; Karen Neander):  Like any mechanism that is a monitoring-and-reporting device, the internal scanner can be expected to issue the occasional false positive.  Even though you are not in any pain at all, your introspector could start yelling, “Yow, terrible pain in your left elbow!!!”  But what would that be like??  (a) It would be exactly like feeling pain; yet supposedly there is no pain at all.   But that’s as near as matters to a contradiction..  (b) It would be like hearing a voice saying “Yow, terrible pain…” even though you felt no pain.  –But that wouldn’t really be introspection, but only having the experience of hearing a voice.  (c) You would be in a weird dissociative state.   –What kind of dissociative state?  The alleged possibility has no clear description.  Which suggests that it’s not a possibility, contra the “inner sense” theory.

    Objection 4:  “Inner sense” meets methodological solipsism.  Consider beliefs and desires.  They themselves are in the head, but if Fodor-Putnam-Stich externalism is true, their contents are not.  An internal monitor can scan what is in the brain, but it cannot scan causal-historical-or-whatever processes extending outside the head and connecting one’s brain states to egg foo yung.  Yet you know introspectively that what you desire is some egg foo yung.  Or take one of your beliefs about water.  Introspection tells you effortlessly and reliably that that belief is (indeed) about water—water, not XYZ.  But an internal monitor can’t know whether you’re on Earth and in contact with H2O rather than on Twin Earth and facing XYZ.  Thus, introspection cannot be, or cannot simply be, the operation of an internal monitor.

    Objection 5 (Georges Rey):  Internal monitoring per se is cheap.  Every laptop does it.  Any halfway competent computer has proof-checkers and fail-safes of various kinds that monitor its own first-order computational states.  So every laptop is conscious?  Reply (Mark):  It’s only mental states that are made conscious by being monitored.  So every laptop has mental states?  Rejoinder:  All right.  But if we just assume that some creature or device does have first-order mental states but no conscious ones, could we make those states conscious just by adding a simple monitor and turning it on?  As before, monitoring is cheap; buy a little one at the hardware store and you’re in business.

Postscript:  Professor Armstrong’s replies in class on April 6

    To 2:   There is mounting empirical evidence of the fallibility of introspection (hypnotism, etc.).  Rejoinder:  Shoemaker et al. never denied that introspection is fallible; their complaint is that, as a conceptual matter, introspective error must necessarily be rare, exceptional, an aberration, in need of special explanation, etc.  And the “inner sense” theory does not secure that.  It leaves it a contingent matter that introspection is as reliable as it is, even if there are good contingent reasons why introspection is very, very reliable.
    Of course we have not seen an argument for Shoemaker’s thesis.  At this point, the “inner sense” theorist can just insist that the reliability of introspection is a contingent matter.  (But we would eventually have to look at Shoemaker’s argument to the contrary.)

    To 3:  We already know empirically that introspection can give false positives.  So what’s the problem?  Rejoinder:  In an extreme case—the introspector reporting terrible pain when there’s no pain at all—the experience cannot be satisfactorily described (see above).  That problem remains unsolved.

    To 4:  (1) 4 is more an objection to Fodor-Putnam-Stich externalism itself than it is to inner sense.  (In fact, it already is a standard objection to externalism.)  (2) Since there aren’t, in reality, any Twin Earth, XYZ etc., some internal features of your desires and beliefs about water are reliable indicators of the external fact that water is what the desires and beliefs are about.  That’s how you know.  (This assumes an epistemology according to which reliable indication suffices for knowledge.  Armstrong has defended such an epistemology at length, in his book Belief, Truth and Knowledge.)

    To 5:  Right, just monitoring per se won’t guarantee consciousness.  (The CNN example.)  Point taken; further conditions must be added.

    Professor Armstrong also offered three new arguments in favor of inner sense.

    1.  What’s characteristic of ordinary external perception is that it gives a continuous flow of information about the environment.  Introspection is the same in that regard; we have a continuous acquisition of information about our own mental states.  William James called it the “stream of consciousness.”  This is another way in which introspection is perception-like.

    2.  Assume “empiricism” about concepts, according to which we acquire concepts by abstracting them from things we perceive (“table” from tables, “bully” from bullies, etc.).  Then where do we get our mental concepts?  Presumably from (quasi-)perceiving our own mental states.
    (But this empiricism is very contentious and controversial as a general doctrine.  Also, such an account of mental concepts is also in considerable tension with Armstrong’s own analysis of mental concepts as third-person causal concepts.)

    3.  Think evolutionarily: What is the adaptive value of consciousness in the present sense?  We humans are the only species that can solve practical problems in our heads.  (Though the banana-seeking chimp made a small achievement of this kind.)  Problem-solving in the real world requires constant perceptual feedback; indeed, just walking from one room to another requires constant perceptual feedback.  So, probably, problem-solving in our heads, walking through the steps, requires feedback.  But the feedback doesn’t come from the real world, since we’re only in our heads.  It must come, instead, from the mental states we are running through.  But that means there is an information channel monitoring those mental states.  Hence, some version of “inner sense” theory is correct.