practical reasoning systems. (For example, see Baars’ vigorous defence of
the idea of aglobal workspace– 1988, 1997.) Then add to the system a
mind-reading faculty with a capacity for HOTs, which can take inputs
from the perceptual memory store, and allow it to acquire recognitional
concepts to be applied to the perceptual states and contents of that store.
And then you have it! Each of these stages looks like it could be indepen-
dently explained and motivated in evolutionary terms. And there is mini-
mal meta-representational complexity involved.
But is not dispositionalism the wrongformfor a theory of phenomenal
consciousness to take? Surely the phenomenally conscious status of any
given percept is anactual– categorical – property of it, not to be analysed
by saying that the percept in questionwouldgive rise to a targeted HOT in
suitable circumstances. In fact there is no real diYculty here. For presum-
ably the percept isreally– actually – contained in the short-term memory
store C. So the percept is categorically conscious even in the absence of a
targeted HOT, by virtue of its presence in the store in question. It is merely
that what constitutes the store as one whose contents are conscious lies in
its availability-relation to HOT.
It might still be wondered how the mereavailabilityto HOTs could
confer on our perceptual states the positive properties distinctive of phe-
nomenal consciousness – that is, of states having a subjective dimension,
or a distinctive subjective feel. The answer lies in the theory ofcontent.
As we noted in chapter 7, we agree with Millikan (1984) that the repre-
sentational content of a state depends, in part, upon the powers of the
systems whichconsumethat state. It is no good a state carrying infor-
mation about some environmental property, if – so to speak – the
systems which have to consume, or make use of, that state do not know
that it does so. On the contrary,whata state represents will depend, in
part, on the kinds of inferences which the cognitive system is prepared to
make in the presence of that state, or on the kinds of behavioural control
which it can exert.
This being so, onceWrst-order perceptual representations are present to
a consumer-system which can deploy mental concepts, and which contains
recognitional concepts of experience, then this may be suYcient to render
those representationsat the same timeas higher-order ones. This is what
confers on our phenomenally conscious experiences the dimension of
subjectivity. Each experience is at the same time (while also representing
some state of the world, or of our own bodies) a representation that we are
undergoing just such an experience, by virtue of the powers of the mind-
reading consumer-system. Each percept of green, for example, is at one
and the same time a representation ofgreenand a representation ofseems
greenorexperience of green. In fact, the attachment of a mind-reading
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