Content: A Possible Key to Consciousness

Explaining consciousness requires first clarifying what consciousness is. Two essential features need explanation: qualitativeness, the sensory feel of experience, and subjectivity, that experiences exist only for the subject. These together constitute phenomenal consciousness. The author argues for realism about phenomenality, rejecting illusionism despite explanatory difficulties for standard science. Rather than focusing on structure or functions, the primary target should be qualitative and subjective nature. The content hypothesis is proposed: understanding representational content may explain both subjectivity and qualitativeness. Content is real but not directly observable, unlike its physical vehicles. Qualitativeness may arise from basic content items that are epistemic primitives, not themselves objects of representation. Progress in understanding content, as in predictive processing, may show why systems like us host conscious experience.

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Abstract

A first order of business in explaining consciousness is to make sure it’s consciousness that’s being explained. I argue that there are two essential features of consciousness needing explanation: qualitativeness – the sensory feel of experience – and subjectivity: that experiences exist only for the conscious subject. These constitute what’s called phenomenal consciousness or phenomenality. I argue that we should be realists, not illusionists, about phenomenality, even if this poses explanatory difficulties for standard science. Although some advise that we should focus on the structure of experience in relation to its neural correlates, I suggest that the primary explanandum confronting theories of consciousness is not its structure, nor its associated functions, but its qualitative and subjective nature. The bulk of the paper defends what I call the content hypothesis as an approach to explaining phenomenality. Getting a fix on the nature of representational content may be key to understanding both subjectivity and qualitativeness. Content, although real, is not available to observation as are its physically instantiated vehicles; thus, understanding the qualities of experience as a species of content may help account for its subjectivity. Qualitativeness itself might be understood as an entailment of a representational system’s need for basic content items – epistemic primitives – that are not themselves objects of representation. Basic sensory qualities can be construed as the content of such primitives. Progress in understanding the functional and ontological status of content, as for example in the predictive processing paradigm, may suggest why, as a matter of representational necessity, systems like ourselves host conscious experience.