In reply, we may allow that thecontentsof the two sets of experiences are
very likely identical; the diVerence being that the experiences of the youn-
ger children will lack the dimension ofsubjectivity. Put diVerently:the
worldas experienced by the two sets of children will be the same, but the
younger children will be blind to the existence and nature of their own
experiences. This looks like a pretty fundamental diVerence in the mode in
which their experiencesWgure in cognition! – Fundamental enough to
justify claiming that the experiences of the one set of children are phenom-
enally conscious while those of the other are not, indeed.
A related worry, though, is developed by Tye (1995). As we saw earlier,
he maintains that conscious experiences, even in adults, have the quality of
transparency. If you try to focus your attention on your experience of a
bright shade of colour, say, what youWnd yourself doing is focusing harder
and harder on the colour itself. Your focus seems to go rightthroughthe
experience to its objects. This might seem to lend powerful support to
Wrst-order accounts of phenomenal consciousness. For how can any form
of HOT-theory be correct, given the transparency of experience, and given
that all thephenomenainvolved in phenomenal consciousness seem to lie in
what is represented, rather than in anything to do with the mode of
representing it?
Now in one way this line of thought is correct – for in one sense there is
nothing in the content of phenomenally conscious experience beyond what
aWrst-order theorist would recognise. What gets added by the presence of a
higher-order system is a dimension ofseemingorappearanceof that very
same Wrst-order content. But in another sense thisisadiVerence of
content, since the contentseeming redis distinct from the contentred.So
when I focus on my experience of a colour I can, in a sense, do something
other than focus on the colour itself – I can focus on the way that colour
seemsto me, or on the way itappears; and this is to focus on the subjec-
tivity of my experiential state. It is then open to us to claim that it is the
possibility of just such a manner of focusing which confers on our ex-
periences the dimension of subjectivity, and so which renders them for the
Wrst time phenomenally conscious, in the way that we suggested in section
3.3 above. (See section 3.7 below for further elaboration of this point.)
3.6 HOE versus HOT accountsWith the superiority of higher-order overWrst-order accounts of phenom-
enal consciousness now established, the dispute amongst the diVerent
forms of higher-order theory is apt to seem like a local family squabble.
Accordingly, our discussion over the next two sections will be brisk. In this
section we consider choice-point (4) inWgure 9.2, between higher-order
260 Consciousness: theWnal frontier?