Qualitative consciousness is conscious experience marked by the presence of sensory qualities, like the experienced painfulness of having a piano dropped on your foot or the consciousness of seeing the brilliant reds and oranges of a sunset. Over his career, philosopher David Rosenthal has defended an influential theoretical approach to explaining qualitative consciousness. This approach...
This chapter attempts to avoid as many consciousness debates as possible by confining the discussion to a simple kind of mental state that belongs to the genus phenomenal consciousness. This simple kind might be referred to as perceptual awareness or perceptual experience—episodes in which a subject both perceives something and is aware of what is perceived or of some aspect of what is...