The Engaged Thomist

In “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,” Gilbert Harman argues that qualia can be explained in functionalist terms. There is a particularly important passage: "Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the presented tree, including relational features of the tree 'from here'" (39). What Harman is trying to elucidate in this quote is that our qualia are nothing over and above the data that we encounter. In other words, the qualities of experience we possess are not properties of the experience itself, but rather these qualities are properties of the thing experienced. So, in the tree example, the intrinsic qualities which we often associate, or even identify with, qualia which are over-and-above the thing experienced are actually just features of the tree. Now, the broader point of Harman’s paper is to show that qualia...

In “A Theory of Consciousness,” Rosenthal argues that some mental states can be non-conscious and that this poses a problem for most theories of consciousness which say that all mental states are conscious. Rosenthal begins by drawing a distinction between conscious and non-conscious mental states. Rosenthal ultimately thinks that “intentional and sensory properties” are a better marker for mental states “than consciousness” (734). He uses the fact that we sometimes have desires before we are aware of those desires as his first indication that there is a distinction between these two kinds of states. Other examples Rosenthal provides include cases of emotion: “we will occasionally recognize  that we ourselves  are  sad or angry only  after somebody else points it out to us” (731). He also says that “subliminal  perception and peripheral vision  remind  us  that perceptual sensations can occur without our being aware of them” (731). Once he has arg...