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Any system with the basic package is a decider; any decider with directly active perceptual information has the ‘basic package-plus’ and is a ‘decider-plus’. This chapter argues that being a decider-plus is logically sufficient for perceptual consciousness. First, on the provisional assumption that the basic package-plus includes all the purely functional conditions necessary for perceptual-phenomenal consciousness, the sole-pictures argument of Chapter 4 is extended to cover any decider-plus, not just zombies; then that assumption is defended. No merely natural or nomological or brute necessity has to be invoked. Among numerous likely objections discussed are those relating to blindsight; automatism; the usual objections to functionalist accounts of consciousness; the ‘explanatory gap’; and Carruthers’s critique of rival accounts to his own.

The basic package is necessary for perceptual consciousness but seems not to be sufficient. What is also necessary is ‘direct activity’: a special feature of the way events constituting incoming perceptual information affect the system, explained partly with the help of the ‘rabbitoid’. This imagined creature is a decider, but is unlike a normal rabbit in that its perceptual information does not automatically give it the opportunity to modify its current goals if doing so would help it. Direct activity is further explained in terms of ‘instantaneity’ and ‘priority’. It is an integrated process, to be conceived of holistically, and contrasts sharply with what is often called the ‘availability’ or ‘poisedness’ of perceptual information.

This chapter focuses on the nature of perceptual-phenomenal consciousness. This is the ‘what-is-it problem’, and contrasts strongly with the ‘what-is-it-like problem’. A solution to the latter cannot be found for Nagelian reasons, but that does not prevent an attempt to solve the what-is-it problem. Jackson’s Mary provides useful lessons: she could not get a priori from the physical and functional truths to a full knowledge-with-understanding of phenomenal truths, but she could get a priori from the physical truths to a knowledge of which phenomenal statements were true. The difference between Block’s ‘access consciousness’ and ‘phenomenal consciousness’ is no difficulty for the project; nor is a new science needed. In what follows, the moderate realism of everyday psychology will be useful.

The main alternative accounts of perceptual consciousness are briefly discussed, including scientific-psychological; neuroscientific; dualist; physicalist; Wittgensteinian; Sartrean; behaviourist; other kinds of functionalist; pure representationalist (Dretske, Tye); higher-order perception (Armstrong); higher-order thought (Rosenthal, Carruthers). The book concludes with a reminder of its core points.

Contra sense datum theories, most philosophers hold that perceptions have immediate ‘objective import'. How should the possession by a perception of such import be explained? The paper suggests that two important dimensions along which accounts of perceptual objectivity divide turn on answers to the following questions. (1) The Division of Labour Question: should the full content of our commonsense realism about the world we perceive be thought of as part of the actual content of perception itself or something the theorist of perception assumes? (2) The Consciousness Question: is it possible to derive explanations of the objectivity of conscious perceptions from an account of the objectivity possessed by non-conscious perceptions? The paper argues that a relational theory of perceptual consciousness delivers a negative answer (with Burge and contra Strawson) to the first, and a negative answer(with Strawson and contra Burge) to the second, exploiting the key insights in each of these philosophers approaches.

What is actual now with my and probably your perceptual consciousness is only a room. Much that is often assigned to consciousness or conscious mentality, neither adequately initially clarified, is indubitably not actual—qualia, mental paint, inner representations, something it’s like to be something, self or inner subject, a direction of a conscious state or event, vehicle of consciousness, medium of it, any neural properties explanatory of what is actual. In general, what is actual is only a subjective physical world—more particularly a piece, stage or part of one. No content or object either that is other than such a world. Actualism in its denials having to do with qualia is of course in open to historic objections having to do with a similarity of perceptual consciousness to illusion and hallucination. It defeats them. It is not naive realism, however, or what can be called indicated consciousness.

The characteristics of subjective physical worlds, more particularly parts of them, are open to literal specification. They are counterparts of the characteristics of the objective physical world, some identical, some not. Such a subjective world is physical in being within science’s inventory and method, spatial and temporal, lawful, etc. That such a world has such physical characteristics is in no way put in doubt by its also having subjective characteristics—inseparableness from consciousness, privacy, and so on. Such worlds are no less real for being myriad in number and each having lawful dependencies not only on the objective physical world but also on perceivers. Such worlds are specifically real, of course, in sharing characteristics with the objective physical world. Objections to this completed theory of perceptual consciousness have to do with circularity, consensus, unbelievability, two rooms, rhetoric, supervenience and so on. They can be met.

Aims to clarify the epistemological outlook that arises from my positive elucidation of the truth of (R), and also to offer further defence against a number of key objections. Firstly, I explain the position of my own views in the context of the standard opposition between foundationalist and coherentist theories of perceptual knowledge. This brings out precisely the sense in which I succeed in capturing the ‘undeniable datum’ with which I begin Ch. 2, that perception is a basicsource of knowledge about the mind‐independent spatial world. Secondly, I go on to consider two broadly sceptical objections, firstly, from the possibility of perceptual imagination, and secondly, from the possibility of perceptual error. Thirdly, I consider whether my own position is in any way susceptible to objections parallel to those that I myself direct at its classical foundationalist opponents. Fourthly, and finally, I discuss the way in which I am able to capture the intuitive phenomenon of a foreground and background in perceptual consciousness: surely far more is, in some sense ‘experienced’ by a person in perception that is the subject matter of any (conceptual) perceptual demonstrative content that is in the market to be endorsed by him in belief.

According to actionism, perceptual consciousness is a skill-based, environmentally-situated activity. Perception, therefore, on this approach, is not something that happens in us (in our brains) and so it is not a process in our brains whereby an internal picture or representation is produced. Perception is related intimately to action (although it does not itself require action). In the last few years, actionism has come under attack from those who call into question the kind of dependence it posits between perception and action. This chapter responds to these criticisms. It offers a taxonomy of different ways of thinking about the relation between perception and action. It shows that none of these, understood correctly, provide grounds for rejecting the claims of actionism. Moreover, it shows that one influential line of thinking about the relation between vision and action — a line associated with the two visual systems hypothesis of Milner and Goodale (1995) — far from providing resources for rejecting actionism, actually depends on its truth.

Considering humbler creatures than ourselves provides a better chance of uncovering what really matters for perceptual consciousness. This chapter discusses a series of broad classes of behaving systems, starting with ‘pure reflex systems’ and ending with ‘deciders’: systems with the ‘basic package’, capable of choosing between alternative courses of action, if only in a rudimentary sense. The idea of the basic package provides a framework for thinking about behaving systems, which advances the overall project of understanding perceptual consciousness. This framework helps to bridge the gap between descriptions in purely physical or biomechanical terms, and descriptions in psychological terms.

This chapter is concerned with the behavioural paradigms used in the search for the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC). Many researchers have questioned whether looking for the neural correlates would eventually lead to an explanatory theory of consciousness, while the proponents of NCC research maintain that focusing on correlates is a strategically sensible first step, given the complexity of the problem. The aim of this chapter is to question whether researchers are really studying the NCC at all. It argues that in hoping to sidestep the difficult conceptual issues, the phenomenon of perceptual consciousness itself is also missed.

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.