The orthodox view that phenomenal consciousness is unified at any moment—a single thing produced by one brain mechanism—is mistaken. Instead, conscious experience is a multiplicity, an aggregate of phenomenal elements, each generated by a distinct consciousness-making mechanism in the brain. Cognitive science therefore requires a multi-track theory of consciousness: a computational model that recognizes the manifold nature of experience and its distributed neural basis.
A challenge is developed for Higher-Order Thought theories of consciousness: they fail to explain the presentational character of visual experience—the sense that objects are directly given to us. A novel alternative, the Map Theory of consciousness, is proposed, which holds that the higher-order representations responsible for conscious experience have a cartographic, map-like format, thereby accounting for presentational character.
The traditional view holds that qualities must inhere in substances to exist. Berkeley argues that sensible qualities are ideas that depend on minds for their existence, not by inhering in them but by being perceived. This alternative framework, once properly understood, provides a solution to a central problem in the philosophy of perception: how ordinary perception can acquaint us with a mind-independent world despite the mind's power to create phenomenally rich experiences.
The history of philosophy shows a pattern of expanding the moral circle—the set of entities considered worthy of moral concern—alongside expanding beliefs about which entities possess consciousness. Recently, proposals for consciousness have extended to invertebrates, plants, logic gates, and fundamental entities, the last driven by renewed interest in panpsychism. This paper explores the ethical implications of panpsychism, concluding that while panpsychism likely expands the moral circle significantly, it probably offers little of practical significance.
Pluralized panpsychism, which holds that consciousness is fundamentally a property of groups of basic objects, is structurally similar to emergentism and struggles to explain how a plurality of basic objects could be a subject of experiences. Because of these issues, this view does not offer a substantial improvement over orthodox panpsychism.