Source
Lycan (2000; substantive revision 19 October 2023), LIT-1355, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read in full in NOTE-1068: the introduction’s four senses of “conscious”, §2 and §2.1 (representation is not enough), §4.2 (unconscious representation), §4.5.1 and §5.1 (“what it’s like”). The works it reports were not read.
What was actually shown
An argument in three steps, made in the entry’s own voice.
- Representation is not enough for a quality. Saying “red” or pointing to a colour chip represents redness without anything looking red, so the representation must be “specifically a visual representation” (§2). “representation alone is cheap and ubiquitous” (§2.1). Strong representationalism adds a sensory or functional condition: Dretske’s “systemic”, Tye’s “poised”, Lycan’s functional role.
- A quality represented in that way can still go unnoticed. Most representationalists “already hold that a sensory quality can occur without being noticed by its host”, as in the driver “on autopilot” who “obviously saw the red light, and saw its redness in particular, but who was daydreaming and quite unaware of the redness” (§4.2).
- What it is like is a further property. In the unnoticed case “it would not be like anything for the subject to experience that quality”, so what it is like to experience it “requires awareness and so is something distinct from the quality itself” (§5.1). It is “itself a property of the quality” (§5), and it is ineffable where the quality is describable.
Hence the scope the entry gives its subject: “As always, the representational theory addresses only sense (3)” (§4.5.1). And the reply to the objection from unconscious representation, that it refutes only pure representationalism (§4.2).
What could have come out otherwise: if every case in which a quality is represented in the sensory way were also a case the subject is aware of, step 2 would have no instance. The entry offers one instance, and it is contested.
What this does not say
- It does not show the driver’s perception was unexperienced. That is asserted. Block reads such cases as phenomenal consciousness without access (LIT-643; THEORY-103 is his overflow claim), and the higher-order entry (LIT-1362, §2) grants that one “may be possible to get oneself to believe” the driver’s perceptions are phenomenally conscious but forgotten. Telling the two apart is QUESTION-048’s problem, and nothing here solves it.
- It does not say what awareness is. The entry lists the options (higher-order representation, self-representation, attention, acquaintance) and leaves them to other theories (§3.6).
- It is not representationalism. The THEORY holds only the split between a quality and its being experienced. Whether qualities are represented properties, and whether they are wide or narrow, is the entry’s subject and stays unsettled there (§4.6).
- It is not the claim that there is no phenomenal consciousness. It keeps “what it’s like” as a real higher-order property. Illusionism (THEORY-633) denies that property; this THEORY assumes it.
- It does not speak to affect. The entry’s split of a pain into a sensory quality and an affective aspect that morphine blocks (§4.5.1) is a different distinction, reported from Lycan (1998), and is not part of this claim.
- The usage is disputed. Dretske and Tye use “what it’s like” for the quality itself (introduction, §5). On their usage step 3 is false by definition, and the dispute is partly verbal.
Connections
No answers: relation is declared. The THEORY says that awareness
separates an experienced quality from an unnoticed one. It does not say
what awareness is, so it does not answer QUESTION-254 even in part.
- CLAIM-412. If this THEORY holds, then a theory that fixes the character of an experience by an organized representation has not yet said what makes it experienced. The claim is meant to do both. So the THEORY marks where the claim goes beyond its nearest standing relative.
- CLAIM-411. This is the same objection put to representationalism, and the representationalist’s reply concedes its structure: the theory owes a further condition, and it locates that condition in awareness.
- QUESTION-254. The question asks what separates experiential from merely processing organization. On this THEORY, for perception the separating factor is awareness of the state. That is one candidate answer, and it is the higher-order family’s.
- THEORY-103. Block’s overflow puts experience beyond access. This THEORY puts a quality short of experience. The two disagree over the same unnoticed-perception cases.