Self-consciousness admits of both weaker and stronger varieties, where
each is a dispositional property of the agent. In the weak sense, for a
creature to be self-conscious is just for it to be capable of awareness of itself
as anobjectdistinct from others (and perhaps also capable of awareness of
itself as having a past and a future). This form of self-consciousness is
conceptually not very demanding, and arguably many animals will possess
it. Roughly, it just involves knowing the diVerence between one’s own
body and the rest of the physical world. But the stronger sense of self-
consciousness involves higher-order awareness of oneselfasa self, as a
being with mental states. This is much more demanding, and arguably only
human beings (together, perhaps, with the great apes) are self-conscious in
this sense. For an organism to be self-conscious in this manner, it has to be
capable of awareness of itself as an entity with a continuingmentallife,
with memories of its past experiences, and knowledge of its desires and
goals for the future. This is even more demanding than higher-order
thought (HOT) consciousness, since it involves not just HOTs about one’s
current mental states, but a conception of oneself as an on-going entity
with such states – that is, with a past and future mental life.
1.2 Conscious versus non-conscious mental statesOur main focus will be on the adequacy of various functional (and/or
representational) accounts of state-consciousness, especially on the ques-
tion whether any such account can give a satisfying explanation of phe-
nomenal consciousness. But there is one other crucialdesideratumof such
theories, and that is that they should be able to explain the distinction
between conscious and non-conscious mental states. Here we argue that all
types of mental state admit of these two varieties.
Consider routine activities, such as driving, walking, or washing up,
which we can conduct with our conscious attention elsewhere. When
driving home over a route I know well, for example, I will often pay no
conscious heed to what I am doing on the road. Instead, I will be thinking
hard about some problem at work, or fantasising about my summer
holiday. In such cases it is common that I should then – somewhat
unnervingly – ‘come to’, with a sudden realisation that I have not the
slightest idea what I have been seeing or physically doing for some minutes
past. Yet I surely must have been seeing, or I should have crashed the car.
Indeed, my passenger sitting next to me may correctly report that Isawthe
vehicle double-parked at the side of the road, since I deftly turned the
wheel to avoid it. Yet I was not conscious of seeing it, either at the time or
later in memory. My perception of that vehicle was not a conscious one.
This example is at one end of a spectrum of familiar phenomena, all of
Preliminaries: distinctions and data 231