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Much of our human mental life looks to involve a seamless unfolding of perception, action, and experience: a golden braid in which each element twines intimately with the rest. We see the very world we act in and we act in the world we see. But more than this, visual experience presents us with the world in a way apt for the control and fine guidance of action. Or so it seems. Milner and Goodale's influential work on the dual visual systems hypothesis casts doubt on certain versions of this intuitive vision. It does so by prising apart the twining strands of conscious visual perception and the fine control of visuomotor action. This chapter first clarifies the major claims that the bold proposal involves. It then examines three sets of worries and objections. The first set concerns some important matters of detail. The second set concerns a certain kind of conceptual or philosophical worry to the effect that the perception/action model equates visual experience itself unfairly with what are in fact certain elements within visual experience. The third set concerns the very idea of conscious experience as a well-defined conceptual or experimental target.

Chapter 1 begins by considering what are my own most certain and most fundamental beliefs, and suggests that they are the most reasonable starting points for addressing questions concerning free will. Like Descartes, I ask what if anything I can be absolutely certain about; but unlike Descartes, I find that I cannot be certain about my own existence, but only that conscious experiences occur. As I explain, this is partly because of the need for a language with which to express and communicate beliefs of any complexity, and thus the dependence of complex beliefs on prior beliefs about language and language use; and this in turn requires prior beliefs about language-users and a world in which language is used.

Argues that there are different constraints on theories of conscious experience as against theories of conscious propositional thought. (So what is problematic or puzzling about each of these phenomena is not of the same, but of different, types.) But, argues, nevertheless, that it is plausible to think that both conscious experience and conscious thought involve some sort of self-reference. In pursuing these questions, the author explores the prospects for a defensible form of eliminativism concerning conscious thinking, one that would leave the reality of conscious experience untouched. In the end, he argues that while there might be no such thing as conscious judging or conscious wanting, there is (or may well be) such a thing as conscious generic thinking.

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. This chapter first isolates the truly hard part of the problem of consciousness, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. It critiques some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness and argues that these methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. The second half of the chapter argues that, if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given.

This chapter begins by discussing the nature of self-interested reasons themselves, agreeing with Derek Parfit that what matters is not personal identity. It suggests that what matters to each of us is the hedonic quality of the experiences realized by the exercise of any capacity for conscious experience we now have or any such capacity in future which emerges from our present capacity (thus allowing for division of capacities, between which other things being equal we should be impartial). It argues that the well-being of others can ground reasons for each of us to act, sometimes to the detriment of our own individual well-being. The well-being of others is to be assessed impartially in the sense that no intrinsic weight is to be attached to relationships with others. This view may be described as a version of the ‘dualism of practical reason’.

In recent years there has been an explosion of scientific work on consciousness in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and other fields. It has become possible to think that we are moving toward a genuine scientific understanding of conscious experience. But what is the science of consciousness all about, and what form should such a science take? This chapter gives an overview of the agenda.

The cornerstone of recent work in the neuroscience of consciousness has been the search for the “neural correlate of consciousness” (NCC). This phrase refers to the neural system or systems primarily associated with conscious experience. This chapter addresses conceptual issues about what it is to be an NCC. The question generates all sorts of interesting puzzles: Must there be one neural correlate of consciousness, or might there be many? How strong a correlation is required? Over what range of cases? The chapter addresses these questions and a number of others, and puts forward a proposal for understanding the notion of an NCC.

If we think of the objects (as opposed to the facts and properties) we see as the objects we are visually conscious of, the texture of conscious visual experience is given by the number of objects we see. By using an epistemic test for the objects we see (viz, the objects one sees are the objects one has direct perceptual knowledge of) it is argued that the texture of conscious experience is very rich indeed — much richer, in fact, than studies of change blindness and inattention would suggest. We know, by direct visual perception, more than we know we know. We are therefore — often enough anyway — aware of more than we realize. A subjective, first-person, test for consciousness is the wrong test.

This chapter discusses the contexts that shape our conscious experiences and beliefs. The brain system that computes our orientation to gravity and the visual world is part of the mental context of our experience. We continually benefit from a host of such mental contexts without experiencing them as objects of conscious experience, and their influence can be inferred from many sources of evidence.

This final chapter may be as good a place to start as the beginning of the book. For this reason, it is written as a relatively self-contained overview of the entire argument, not necessarily following the order in which particular ideas emerged earlier. Inevitably, as befits an overview, there will be some repetition of material that has gone before. But it also introduces a small amount of new material, if it seems to fit best here.

This chapter explores how we think about conscious perceptual experience, both our own and that of others. It begins by considering the first-person case, that in which a thinker judges that he himself sees. The case falls within a general area to which Gareth Evans made original, important, and influential contributions, notably on the self-ascription of belief. After considering the first-person case and some of the epistemic and metaphysical ramifications of the treatment offered, the chapter goes on to compare it with Evans's account. It then discusses the relation between first-person and third-person ascription and to the explanation of some developmental phenomena. It concludes with a discussion of the extension of the model presented to the self-ascription and other-ascription of action and intentionality.

This chapter addresses some of the central issues raised by Evans's paper ‘Molyneux's question’, exploring how Evans's approach to Molyneux's question is informed by his account of the content of conscious perceptual experience, as developed in The Varieties of Reference. It takes issue with Evans's account of the content of perceptual experience, and in particular with what he sees as its conflation of subpersonal information processing content and personal-level experiential content.

The chief preoccupations of the neuroscientists have been, at bottom, correlational. A general pattern has been the following. A neuroscientist first proposes that certain functions are critical for consciousness. But, in doing so, he bases his specific postulates upon data and concepts taken, not from neuroscience itself, but from experimental psychology, cognitive science or just plain ‘folk psychology’. He then searches in the brain for those regions and systems that ‘mediate’ the critical functions. Since no specifically neuroscientific argument is used to justify the initial postulate, this approach adds nothing theoretically to its functionalist starting point. The same essential logic can also proceed in reverse. A neuroscientist first observes experimentally that a particular brain region or system discharges a particular function; he considers the function to be one which, in normal human experience, is associated with consciousness; so, he concludes, this region or system plays an important role in consciousness. But, in whichever direction the logic proceeds, the validity of the conclusion is entirely dependent upon the assumption that a particular function is critical for, or critically dependent upon, conscious experience. All the neuroscientist adds is a location in the brain (human or animal) where the putatively critical function is discharged. Location throws little light on the problem of consciousness. The neuroscientific trail then, at least as at present trodden, leads at best to a three-way set of correlations: between functions, brain regions or systems that mediate the functions, and conscious experiences. This chapter explores this terrain in a little more detail.

Few arguments in the recent philosophy of mind have generated as much discussion or controversy as Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (KA), and none has had a more surprising history. Having offered the KA in 1983 and ably defended it for fifteen years against a wide variety of objections, Jackson did an about-face in 1998 and disavowed it. His rejection of the argument is essentially coupled with the acceptance of another controversial if widely held view, namely the Representational Theory of Consciousness or at least of Conscious Sensory Experience (RTS), which he regards as the sole means to defeat the KA and avoid the cognitive illusion that generates its intuitive appeal. This chapter begins by briefly reviewing objections to the KA. It considers where, if anywhere, Jackson's own present critical view fits in the logical geography of options. It then turns to the question of whether the RTS is in fact either necessary or sufficient for refuting the KA.

This chapter discusses three problematic aspects of sensory experiences: their ineffability, structure, and ‘what it's like’ to undergo the experiences. It argues that these features of sensory experiences seem to admit of no explanation in terms of brain mechanisms. However, the sensorimotor account of phenomenal consciousness provides a satisfactory account of these puzzling features of sensory experience by proposing that the experienced ‘feel’ of a sensation derives from the laws of dependency that govern an observer's current active engagement with the environment. The sensorimotor approach emphasizes the distinction between two steps involved in an account of conscious experience: firstly characterizing the quality of sensory feels as enabled by the quality of the sensorimotor interaction involved; and secondly determining the requirements for an agent to be conscious of this quality.

The last chapter was profligate in suggesting that consciousness does various things. But many thinkers do not accept the possibility that consciousness is the kind of thing that can do anything at all. So anyone who claims causality for consciousness has to offer at least some kind of explanation of how this might be achieved. This chapter explains the meaning of the term consciousness as a ‘medium’. It shows that the Hard Problem of consciousness can be stripped down to one (still Hard) but double-edged question: how does the unconscious brain create and inspect the display medium (qualia) of conscious perception? This is considered one question rather than two because any scientifically acceptable account of how the brain creates qualia will at the same time constitute an account of how it inspects them. St-Marks-as-virtual-reality may offer a model of how this could be achieved. What is certain is that the first half of the question, ‘how does the brain create qualia?’, is enough to keep science going for a long time to come.

Shifts focus from conscious experience to conscious thought. It develops a dilemma. Either the use of natural language sentences in ‘inner speech’ is constitutive of (certain kinds of) thinking, as opposed to being merely expressive of it. Or there may really be no such thing as conscious propositional thinking at all, and eliminativism about conscious thinking is true. While the author makes clear my preference for the first horn of this dilemma, and explains how such a claim could possibly be true, this is not really defended in any depth, and the final choice is left to the reader. Nor does the chapter commit itself to any particular theory of conscious thinking, beyond defending the claim that, in order to count as conscious, a thought must give rise to the knowledge that we are entertaining it in a way that is neither inferential nor interpretative.