Alberto Barbieri

Within the debate on the mark of the mental, disjunctivism holds that no unique feature is common to all mental phenomena. Although once popular among philosophers supporting the “two-separate realms” view of the mind, nowadays, disjunctivism has fallen out of favour, often seen as denying the very existence of a mental mark. However, given the challenges faced by the most popular current alternative proposals, disjunctivism appears increasingly attractive. In this paper, we develop a revised form of disjunctivism that overcomes the problems traditionally associated with it without encountering the limitations of the alternative proposals. On our account, all mental states exemplify either intentional presentationality or phenomenal presentationality (or both). These two features, while irreducible to each other, are nevertheless similar enough to be considered species of the common genus of presentationality as such: i.e., the feature of presenting something to the subject. The latter, thus, is what uniformly marks out the mental domain: mental states are mental in virtue of being presentational, either in the intentional or in the phenomenal sense (or both). As our account is in the spirit but not the letter of disjunctivism, we label it “sui generis disjunctivism”.

Conscious mental states have several puzzling features. One is that they are phenomenally unified: your concurrent experiences of, say, seeing a blue sky and feeling a headache are not experienced separately but, rather, together, as forming a unified experience. After decades of neglect, the phenomenal unity of consciousness has now firmly entered the research agenda of analytic philosophers of mind. A major task in this agenda concerns the explanation of this unity, usually framed in terms of which personal-level facts ground phenomenal unity. This is the problem of phenomenal unity (PPU). Several accounts have been proposed to address this issue, none of which has settled the debate. In this paper, I am to make some progress on this matter by exploring the prospects for a solution that appeals to the phenomenal character of conscious states, namely their what-it-is-like aspect. Although phenomenal character is often employed to describe what is unified in phenomenally unified conscious states, no approach has explicitly focused on whether it might also play the role of phenomenally unifying these conscious states. I argue that when so-called subjective character (the conscious states’ property of being phenomenally given to their subject) is incorporated into the structure of phenomenal character, the solution in question looks very promising, as it avoids the shortcomings of extant solutions to PPU.

In contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, the sense of our personal existence that several classical philosophers have believed to permeate our experience is typically cashed out in terms of the ubiquity of our inner awareness of our own experience. In this paper, I address the issue of what grounds such an inner awareness, arguing against the widespread view that it obtains in virtue of a more fundamental awareness the occurrent experience has of itself. This is the state elf-awareness view (SSV). Specifically, I argue that all versions of SSV are bedevilled by what I call the problem of state awareness, that is, the problem of understanding why and how a mental state-level relation like state self-awareness could recover a subject-level relation like inner awareness. I also defend the depth of this problem by blocking a potential solution to it.

The nature of pre-reflective self-consciousness—viz., the putative non-inferential self-consciousness involved in unreflective experiences, has become the topic of considerable debate in recent analytic philosophy of consciousness, as it is commonly taken to be what makes conscious mental states first-personally given to its subject. A major issue of controversy in this debate concerns what pre-reflective self-consciousness is an awareness of. Some scholars have suggested that pre-reflective self-consciousness involves an awareness of the experiencing subject. This ‘egological view’ is opposed to the ‘non-egological view’, according to which the subject, in being pre-reflectively self-conscious, is just aware of their own occurrent mental state. In this paper, I argue in favour of the egological view. The argument I develop is a qualified version of a line of reasoning originally provided by Rosenthal and builds on a proper clarification of the ontological status of token mental states. More precisely, I argue that token mental states are structured ‘fact-like’ entities having their subject among their constituents. Accordingly, one cannot be aware of one’s own occurrent mental state without thereby being aware of oneself.

An important distinction lies between consciousness attributed to creatures, or subjects, (creature consciousness) and consciousness attributed to mental states (state consciousness). Most contemporary theories of consciousness aim at explaining what makes a mental state conscious, paying scant attention to the problem of creature consciousness. This attitude relies on a deeper, and generally overlooked, assumption that once an explanation of state consciousness is provided, one has also explained all the relevant features of creature consciousness. I call this the priority of state consciousness thesis (PSC). In this paper, I want to explore how the renewed centrality bestowed to phenomenology in contemporary discussions on consciousness challenges PSC and, consequently, the standard way of framing the problem of consciousness. More precisely, I examine PSC in light of a view about the structure of phenomenal character that is paradigmatic of the approach above. This is subjectivism about phenomenal character (SUBJ), according to which a mental state is conscious when it acquires the property of for-me-ness. I argue that PSC and SUBJ are incompatible because the latter implies that creature consciousness is explanatorily prior to state consciousness. Consequently, if SUBJ is true, then PSC is false, and what constitutes the problem of consciousness is primarily a problem of explaining (a kind of) creature consciousness. I conclude by defending my claim from a pair of possible objections and drawing some implications for the discussion of for-me-ness and the debate on the explanation of consciousness.

Several philosophers claim that a mental state is phenomenally conscious only if it exhibits so-called for-me-ness, or subjective character, i.e., the fact that there is something it is like to be in a conscious state not just for everyone but only for the subject who undergoes it. Consequently, they stress, a proper explanation of consciousness requires to address the question of what the nature of for-me-ness is. This question forms what I call the problem of for-me-ness. Although the debate on the problem of for-me-ness has assumed a centre stage within philosophy of consciousness, relatively scant attention has been paid to systematize it. In this paper, I propose to fill this gap by developing a taxonomy of the existing responses to the problem at stake. I start by claiming that for-me-ness—the phenomenon to be explained—is best thought of as a minimal form of self-consciousness. Answering the problem of for-me-ness, hence, means to provide an account of the metaphysical structure of such a phenomenon. Next, I claim that the nature and the structure of minimal self-consciousness can be established by considering five conceptual distinctions. Based on such distinctions, finally, I classify the existing responses to the problem of for-me-ness into five positions. Scholars interested in the debate at issue should find this taxonomy useful not only to recognise and assess the core theses of the existing answer to the problem of for-me-ness but also to develop their own response.