| Current theories of phenomenal consciousness—theories, that is, of the felt or qualitative aspect of mental states—are often accused of leaving out the essential features of this phenomenon. Moreover, the opponents of these theories typically hold that their failure is not accidental. They argue either that the problem of phenomenal consciousness (roughly, the problem of how our non-phenomenal nature explains our phenomenal nature) is unsolvable, or that we still lack even the conceptual resources needed for its solution. My dissertation challenges both the adequacy of current theories and the skeptical stance of their rivals. I think that current approaches are indeed in principle incapable of capturing phenomenal consciousness, but that an account that does capture this phenomenon is within our reach. The reason for the failure of these theories, I argue, is the underlying assumption that phenomenality consists in various strictly cognitive and representational features of mental systems.; The main purpose of my dissertation is to lay the foundations for an alternative account of phenomenal consciousness, according to which “the missing element of consciousness”—the one needed for capturing the allegedly intractable features of this phenomenon—is the conative-evaluative aspect of our minds. Conative-evaluative attitudes like desires, interests and preferences play an essential role in constituting phenomenality. I argue that phenomenality arises from an interplay between our cognitive nature, and, in particular, the (relatively passive) representational aspect of our minds, and our (more active) conative-evaluative nature. There can be no phenomenality—nothing “it is like” to be sensitive to various (internal or external) conditions—if all there is is neutral-unevaluated information. Rather, what gives rise to phenomenality is the subject's being non-indifferent towards information—her adopting conative-evaluative attitudes towards, and thereby conferring significance upon, items represented by her states. In the phenomenal mode information is “evaluatively loaded”—it is “colored” by the subject's evaluative outlook; and what creates the evaluative outlook is conative attitudes of various sorts. The “subjective point of view”, which is widely taken to be the mark of the phenomenal, is actually an (attitudinal) evaluative point of view. |
