I am a little suprised to get back and find out that you have not responded to my challeneg…which I take to mean either that you don’t have a good response (I win) or that you think the response is to obvious to make…I prefer the former, but since I am feeling more charitable than usual I will assume that it is the latter to that end let me correct what I said.

You say

One can be conscious of the content of a state without thereby being conscious of the state itself. I spell this out in chapter 2 in the argument attributed to Guzeldere on pp 60-61.

So, one can attend to a state, be conscious of the contents of the state, but not thereby be conscious of the state itself.

I said “Yes, I know. That is Robert Lurz’s position”, which is not quite right. Robert accepts everything you said except the last bit…so Robert’s challenge to you is “why isn’t being conscious of the contents of the state a way of being conscious of the state?”

Now the Guzeldere stuff is not an objection to this kind of view because the state in virtue of which one is conscious of the contents of first-order state are not the same as the first-order state. Crucially, the higher-order state will not have the content ‘there is a tree’ or whatever, but something like ‘I, myself, am seeing a tree’

So, too, all the theories you discuss seem to me to be akin to this. Or at least you have not yet given any reason to think otherwise…

I believe that there is another way to be conscious of one’s mental states which does not amount to being conscious that one has them and is, therefore, perfectly consistent with the truth of propositions 1 [Conscious mental states are simply mental states of which one is conscious], 3 [Animals have conscious mental states], and 4 [Animals are not conscious that they have mental states]: one can simply be conscious of what one’s mental states represent. My claim is that a creature can be conscious of its thoughts and experiences simply by being conscious of what it thinks or experiences in having those thoughts or experiences, and that its being conscious of what it thinks or experiences does not entail its being conscious that it thinks or has experiences.

So how are the views that you present not a version of this kind of same-order account?

So, one can attend to a state, be conscious of the contents of the state, but not thereby be conscious of the state itself.

So, you are suggesting that I can attend to a state and not be conscious of the contents of the state? Then why do you say that attending to the state makes me conscious of the contents of the state?

I don’t have time, at the moment, to work through the rest of your responses, but I still don’t see anything more than rhetoric here…what is the ARGUMENT that these guys are not just implementing transitivity? That they don’t want to be? shessh!

I am having a difficulty time seeing what your complaint is such that you are not contradicting yourself. You claim that these guys are not giving a theory of consciousness. You also claim that they are giving a theory of consciousness, just one that isn’t neurophilosophical. So I ask, which is it?

I asked

If you are right that they are “spelling out ways of implementing the two standard (first-order/higher-order) representational theories of consciousness” then wouldn’t it follow that what their theories are theories of is consciousness?

And you answered:

No. The theory of consciousness is the first-order/higher-order stuff NOT the neuro stuff…you have not demonstrated (at least not yet) that these guys are using the neuro to GIVE a theory of consciousness rather than, as I have been arguing, to IMPLEMENT a non-neuro theory.

To which I respond, “No”!? So their theories are not theories of consciousness? So how would it be possible, then, for them to give a theory of consciousness that is constituted by the “the first-order/higher-order stuff NOT the neuro stuff”?

Maybe you are assuming that something about supplying an implementation story prevents one from thereby giving a theory? On this reading of your complaint, it is because Prinz and Churchland are merely supplying an implementation of Transitivity that they aren’t really giving a theory of consciousness. But if this is the complaint, then Rosenthal isn’t giving a theory of consciousness either, since, as he explicitly states, the main reason for believing in HOT is that it gives an implementation of Transitivity.

If your point is, instead that they do have theories of consciousness but “that in so far as they amswer these questions they do not appeal to any neuroscience , but rather rely on transitivity or transparency” then my point is that you have given insufficient reason for believing this. Now, there’s little dispute that Tye is a fan of Transparency, but even Tye’s theory is neurophilosophical, since the ability to explain and predict various things about visual agnosia and the neural correlates of consciousness are supposed to help support his PANIC theory of consciousness. Worse, I’m not seeing what justifies your interpretation of Prinz and Churchland as being committed to Transitivity. Not only do they explicitly reject it, there’s nothing in the theories they endorse that entails it.

I am totally mystified how you think that Churchland and Prinz are endorsing Transitivity. Likewise, I am totally mystified how you get an “endorsement of transitivity” out of “what will differentiate a conscious representation from an unconscious representation will involve relations that the representation bears to representations higher in the processing hierarchy.” The claim that state consciousness depends on relations to representations higher in the processing hierarchy is logically compatible with the falsity of Transitivity. It would only entail Transitivity if you further assume that the relations to the higher level representations constituted being aware of oneself as being in such and such state.

As to meta-representation, self-representation is meta-representation. This is because meta-representation is just representation of representation. So even same-order guys like Kriegel, are appealing to meta-representation. What I don’t see, however, is any evidence that Prinz or Churchland are appealing to meta-representation or anything else that would entail commitment to the principle that a state is conscious only if one is conscious of being in it.

You write “I assume that they are so conscious in virtue of attending to the representational states in question. ” But as I’ve tried to indicate, neither Prinz nor Churchland commit to the view that attending representational states requires being conscious of the representational states. Attending to representational states just means, for them something like increasing the likelihood that those states will be activated (Churchland) or have their information routed to short-term memory (Prinz). Thus, no commitment to Transitivity is thereby expressed.