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Does cognitive and affective consciousness consist only in conscious representations? In only a two-term relation? Our holds on our own conscious representations give us their likeness to linguistic representions—spoken or written representations. So are thinking and wanting to be understood as only or purely representations? Understood by way of the doctrines of a language of thought, or evolutionary causalism as an understanding of representation, or relationism related to functionalism, or the persuasive lingualism of Searle and others? No. The last theory takes conscious representations to be causal intermediaries but also, more importantly, to be semantic and syntactic signs, of which it gives a good account. Conscious representations in actual consciousness are such things, but with the additional essential characteristic that they are indeed actual—as other things talked of with thinking and wanting definitely are not, say self, direction, vehicle, medium, and neural properties.

What is it for the conscious representations of cognitive and affective consciousness to be actual? It is for them to be subjectively physical in their own way, differently from the subjective physical worlds of perceptual consciousness. Their characteristics are counterparts of the characteristics of the objective physical world and of subjective physical worlds, some identical, more of them not. They are within the inventory of science and its method. They are spatial but not actual as such.Their lawful dependencies are different, including a unique dependency on subjective physical worlds. They are not within points of view and do not have primary and secondary properties. They are more similar to subjective physical worlds with respect to their characteristics of subjectivity, starting with inseparability from consciousness. In terms of a well-known line by Fodor, being actual is the something else that conscious representations are in virtue of which they are real.

There is an ordinary division into consciousness in perceiving and consciousness of thinking and of wanting—perceptual, cognitive and affective consciousness. Each of us has a hold on our own consciousness, misnamed introspection, and we have a common sense definition of consciousness. But there is pessimism, greater and lesser, about our coming to a theory or analysis of consciousness in the primary ordinary sense, an account of its nature. Has this been owed in part to the absence of an adequate initial clarification of the consciousness under discussion? To not answering the same question? Has it resulted in particular from a conflation of conscious and unconscious mentality in science in particular but also philosophy? Clearly there is a distinction between, say, dispositional and occurring belief, between knowing where the 43 bus goes when you are having no such thought, and believing it when you are doing so.