Representational Theories of Consciousness

Representationalism holds that the phenomenal character of an experience is constituted or determined by what and how the experience represents. Seeing red feels the way it does because the visual state represents a surface as having a certain colour; pain feels the way it does because a state represents bodily disturbance in an aversive manner. The theory tries to explain consciousness through the better-developed resources of intentional content.

Its strongest motivation is transparency: when attending to visual experience, one seems to attend through it to properties of the world rather than to an inner mental object. Its hardest cases are experiences whose phenomenal differences appear to outstrip representational content: inversion, blurry vision, afterimages, moods, and the affective dimension of pain.

Strong and weak representationalism

Strong representationalism says that phenomenal character is nothing over and above representational content of an appropriate kind. If two experiences match in content, they match phenomenally.

Weak representationalism says phenomenal character supervenes on or is partly explained by content but may also depend on mode, vehicle, attention, or other features. It preserves the insight that experience presents a world without promising that content alone exhausts what experience is like.

The difference matters dialectically. A counterexample in which content stays fixed while character changes refutes the strong claim, not every representational role for experience.

Transparency

Look at a red apple and try to attend to the intrinsic properties of the visual experience itself. Attention appears to land on the apple's redness, shape, and gloss. The experience is transparent or diaphanous: its character is revealed through the properties it presents.

Representationalists infer that phenomenal character is determined by represented properties. Sense-datum theories instead posit an inner coloured item; transparency makes such an intermediary phenomenologically absent.

The inference is not compulsory. Experience may be transparent because attention is world-directed while still possessing a subjective mode not reducible to content. Blur, effort, familiarity, and visual versus imagined presentation can become salient without appearing as properties of the object.

What kind of content?

A representational theory must specify the content that fixes character.

• Conceptual content requires the subject to possess concepts deployed in experience. Infants and animals pressure this restriction.
• Non-conceptual content can represent fine-grained properties beyond the subject's classificatory concepts.
• Wide content depends partly on the environment and causal history.
• Narrow content is fixed by the subject's internal organisation.
• Accurate content describes the world correctly; hallucination shows that phenomenal character does not require accuracy.

Most views use non-conceptual, possibly wide content with accuracy conditions. A hallucination and matching perception can then share content while differing in whether the world satisfies it.

Naturalising phenomenal character

If representation can be naturalised through causal covariance, biological function, or information-processing role, representationalism promises a route from physical systems to experience:

$$\text{physical state}\to \text{representational content}\to \text{phenomenal character}.$$

Each arrow carries a problem. Naturalistic theories must explain misrepresentation and content determinacy. Representationalism must then explain why some representations are conscious while retinal, computational, and unconscious neural representations are not.

Higher-order, global-access, or attention conditions may mark the conscious subset. But if those conditions do the decisive work, content alone is insufficient and the theory becomes a hybrid.

Inverted Earth

In Block's Inverted Earth, colours and colour vocabulary are systematically swapped. An observer receives an inverting device and is moved unknowingly to the inverted environment. Over time, externalist causal relations may change what their internal states represent while local phenomenology remains stable.

If wide content changes without phenomenal change, phenomenal character is not identical with wide content. Conversely, an internal inversion could change character while environmental content remains fixed.

Representationalists respond by appealing to narrow content, different temporal stages, or contents that include modes of presentation. The case shows that "content" cannot remain unspecified. A version protected by adding every phenomenal difference to its content risks explaining character by redescribing it.

Blurry vision and modes

Seeing a tree clearly and seeing the same tree blurrily may represent the same object and broad properties while differing phenomenally. One response adds higher-order content: blurry vision represents its own uncertainty or reduced precision. Another says the content itself is less determinate. A third introduces a representational mode, analogous to the difference between seeing and imagining one content.

Modes make the view plausible but weaken strong representationalism. If modes possess phenomenal character not fixed by what is represented, representation is one component rather than the complete analysis.

Pain, moods, and affect

Pain can represent actual or potential bodily damage, location, and intensity. This explains phantom pain and mislocalisation: representation can be inaccurate. It does not obviously explain unpleasantness. Pain asymbolia suggests sensory representation can persist while aversive significance changes.

A representationalist may include imperative or evaluative content: pain represents damage as bad and commands protection. The account must avoid circularly defining the content through the unpleasant phenomenal feature it was meant to explain.

Moods are harder because anxiety or elation may lack a specific object. They may represent the environment globally as threatening or inviting, or modify the manner in which all contents are presented. Either answer expands representation beyond simple object-property accuracy conditions.

Unconscious representation

Visual processing, motor control, and memory contain states that plausibly represent without being conscious. Representation is therefore not sufficient unless the theory specifies a further condition.

Candidate conditions include:

• availability to a global workspace;
• being represented by a higher-order state;
• recurrent sensory processing;
• sufficient integration;
• availability to attention and working memory.

These conditions belong to the empirical theories compared in the next tranche. Their addition yields a representational theory of conscious access more readily than an explanation of why the selected representation has phenomenal character.

Relation to physicalism

Representationalism is compatible with physicalism if content and conscious availability are physically realised. It can answer the knowledge argument by saying Mary gains a new representational capacity, and answer inversion by denying content can remain fixed under complete functional identity.

It does not entail physicalism. A property dualist could hold that irreducible phenomenal properties represent, and a relationalist could make experience partly constituted by worldly objects. The theory concerns the structure of phenomenal character, not by itself its ultimate ontology.

The corresponding theory of perception - including accuracy conditions, causal matching, object-dependent content, and perceptual justification - is developed in Intentionalism about Perception. The rival view that ordinary objects partly constitute veridical experience is developed in Disjunctivism and Naive Realism.

Assessment

Representationalism supplies a powerful theory of what experience presents and why it can be accurate or illusory. Its strongest version succeeds only if every phenomenal difference can be represented without building the difference into content by fiat.

Selected references

• Block, Ned. "Inverted Earth" (1990).
• Dretske, Fred. Naturalizing the Mind (1995).
• Harman, Gilbert. "The Intrinsic Quality of Experience" (1990).
• Lycan, William G. Consciousness and Experience (1996).
• Tye, Michael. Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995).