Consciousness as Representing One's Mind

Abstract

Abstract The goal of this book is to introduce and explore one of the most wildly counter-intuitive ideas about the nature of consciousness on the market. This is the idea that consciousness might ultimately turn out just to be representing one’s own mental life—and what’s more, that the right kind of representation might itself be something more like a thought than it is like a picture or image. The aim of the book is twofold. The first is to set out a novel version of higher-order theory called the HOROR—higher-order representation of a representation—theory. The second is to develop a taxonomy of existing higher-order theories that sheds light on their relations to one another and makes clear what kind of empirical evidence would—or wouldn’t—challenge them.