CONSCIOUSNESS

1. Philosophy 73
and phenomenal-level, the relation between the processes of brain-level and the contents of
conscious experience in phenomenal level is a constitutive relation which can’t have a causal
relation from a framework of level theory of consciousness. Metzinger’s self-model theory
of subjectivity claims that conscious self arises when your phenomenal self-model in your
brain is transparent. In traditional view, phenomenal transparency is based on the distinction
between vehicles and contents, and contents of conscious experiences can’t access the properties
of vehicles of conscious experience. Differ from the traditional view, Metzinger’s concept
of phenomenal transparency is the attentional unavailability of earlier processing stages in
the brain for introspection. Metzinger claims that conscious self-model becomes transparent
if the system doesn’t recognize its currently generating self-model as a model simulating the
reality. By this analysis, there are some examples of phenomenal opacity, hallucination and
lucid dream, because in these situations conscious model of reality is suddenly experienced
as a model. Furthermore, in Metzinger’s analysis, because attentional unavailability of earlier
processing stages in the brain is in degree, there are different degrees in phenomenal transparency.
In Metzinger’s analysis of phenomenal transparency, contents of conscious experience
can access processes in brain in the sense of whether systems recognize they are representing,
so the access is a kind of causal relation between brain-level and phenomenal level. However,
from a framework of level theory of consciousness, brain processes are constitutive
components of contents of conscious experience, so the relationship between brain processes
and contents of conscious experience is a constitutive relation between different levels. The
entities in a constitutive relation between different levels cannot have causal relations, for example,
cells of stomach cannot have a causal interaction with stomach. Based on a framework
of level theory of consciousness, I provide a analysis of phenomenal transparency for the
distinction between vehicles and contents of conscious experience. In conclusion, I think this
intuition from a framework of level theory of consciousness supports the distinction between
vehicle and content, and it is the reason why the subjectivity is so hard to explain. P7
67 Still Being Some One Kuo Ling-Fang (Dept. of Life
Sciences, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan)
Some representationalists say that there is no self. What we are just the collection of representation.
German philosopher Thomas Metzinger use some experiments to illustrate that
we can manipulate representations to change the features of self which he calls ‘Mineness’,
‘Selfhood’ and ‘Perspectivalness’. These experiments like the ‘rubber-hand illusion’ and the
‘whole-body analog’ of the ‘rubber-hand illusion.’ From these manipulations, Metzinger
wants to show that these are just representations rather than any kind of thing which we call
the self. It is really difficult to reject what they have done. The experiments indeed show the
manipulability of self, but there still exist many kinds of possibility because manipulability of
self does not imply there is actually no such thing as self. If we look these experiment more
deeper, we will discover that there is a limitation of manipulation. No matter how radical the
experiment is, they just still have some aspect of self’s feature, because the manipulation is
base on a minimal constitution of self, so we can never see the experiment without a self. So
after all the experiments about manipulability of self, the data does not convince us of the
thing that there is no self but let us believe more truly that there is something we can manipulate
in faith. P1
68 Color Content, Semantics, and Error Theories Christopher Richards
(Philosophy, Houston, TX)
What if error theories of color were true? That is, what if there are no colors and we are
systematically wrong about that fact? We judge there to be colors, but there are none. There
are many powerful considerations in favor of this view, and it fits well with the known facts
about color vision. But the error theorist about color has a major problem: there seem to be
sentences that involve colors that are true. If there are true sentences involving color, then the
error theorist must account for the appearance. This has consequences for any theory of the
contents of consciousness; that theory must be capable of accounting for this error and our
phenomenology. Some error theorists (notably, Boghossian and Velleman) hold that the folk