The phrase phenomenal consciousness" involves a philosophical technical use of consciousness" and it is best introduced by  noting some less technical uses of consciousness" and the related term conscious." The philosopher David Rosenthal has made some observations about different uses of the word conscious" that are useful for gaining an understanding of what consciousness is supposed to be . The way in which uses of the word conscious" may be distinguished is in terms of a distinction between the things that may be said to be conscious. The sort of thing that we may say is conscious is a person or a creature. A second sort of thing that we may say is conscious is a mental state of a person or a non-human creature. Many of us are familiar with the Freudian idea that some of our beliefs and desires are conscious while others are unconscious, and since the state of a creature is a very different sort of thing from the creature itself, the sense in which a state is conscious  is a very different sense of the word conscious" than is the sense in which a creature is conscious (creature consciousness"). Rosenthal further distinguishes the notions of creature consciousness and state consciousness in terms of the relative difficulty that theorists have had in understanding these types of consciousness. According to Rosenthal, being creature conscious amounts to no more than being awake and having mental states whereas state consciousness requires the satisfaction of additional criteria that distinguish conscious mental states from unconscious mental states . A second kind of distinction that Rosenthal draws among uses of the word conscious" distinguishes transitive from intransitive uses of the word. The word conscious is used transitively when we speak of someone being conscious of something as when I am conscious of a buzzing insect that is pestering me. Intransitive uses of the word conscious" are silent about whether the thing that is conscious is thereby conscious of something.

Rosenthal advocates an explanation of state consciousness in terms of transitive consciousness and an explanation of transitive consciousness in terms of mental representation. According to Rosenthal, a person is transitively conscious of x just in case they have a mental representation of x. Further, Rosenthal embraces as pre-theoretically intuitive the transitivity thesis whereby a person has a conscious mental state only if they are transitively conscious of that state . It follows from these two points, then, that a person has a conscious state only if that person has a mental representation of that state.

Phenomenal Consciousness

A theory of phenomenal consciousness must do two things: it must explain what makes a mental state a conscious mental state and it must explain what it is for a conscious mental state to have phenomenal character, that is, the property of the state in virtue of which there is something it is like to be in that state. The theory I shall sketch is what I shall call The Egocentric Interface Theory of Consciousness. In brief, the theory posits that mental processes form a hierarchy of mental representations with maximally egocentric (self-centered) representations at the bottom and maximally allocentric (other-centered) representations at the top. Part of what it means to be higher or lower in the hierarchy is to be further from or closer to the sensory and motor periphery of the nervous system. Focusing on the processing of sensory information, we can trace the path of information from relatively egocentric representations of the stimulus in sensation through stages of processing that increasingly abstract away from egocentric information and represent things in memory in an allocentric way. Further, we can note top-down effects from relatively allocentric representations high up in the hierarchy to egocentric representations lower in the hierarchy. I hypothesize that phenomenally conscious mental states are to be identi¯ed with states that are relatively intermediate in this hierarchy. More specically, conscious states are hybrid states that involve the reciprocal interaction between relatively allocentric and relatively egocentric states: a conscious state is composed of a pair of representations interacting at the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface. Unconscious mental states are states that are either too high up or too low down in the hierarchy or are not engaged in the requisite reciprocal interactions. What a person is conscious of is determined by what the contributing allocentric and egocentric representations are representations of. The phenomenal character of these states is identical to the representational content of the reciprocally interacting egocentric and allocentric representations. That, at least, is the theory in brief. The remainder of the paper will spell things out in a bit more detail. It is organized as follows. First I say a few more things about the way philosophers think of phenomenal consciousness and how this might relate to empirical work on consciousness. Then I dive into the exposition of EIT with an emphasis on empirical evidence for the theory. Finally I discuss philosophical examinations of the theory. Thus, if one is conscious of a buzzing insect, one is thereby in a conscious state and need not additionally be conscious of that state. In spite of his disagreement with Rosenthal about state consciousness, he agrees that transitive consciousness is to be denied in terms of representation: being transitively conscious of x involves mentally representing x. Note that the above discussion of creature consciousness, state consciousness, and transitive consciousness made no explicit mention phenomenal consciousness. The above points about state, creature, and transitive consciousness can all be made by calling our attention to the various ways in which people use the word conscious" in non-technical discourse. The same cannot be said of so-called phenomenal consciousness. The term phenomenal consciousness" is not only a technical term, but often those who introduce it into technical discourse give little indication as to how it involves a common sense use of the word conscious." Indeed, when people use the term phenomenal consciousness" they are not much interested in a kind of consciousness distinct from the three already mentioned. They are interested instead in certain properties that conscious states allegedly have. These properties are referred to interchangeably as phenomenal properties," phenomenal character," or qualia." Two key theorists who discuss phenomenal consciousness and qualia are Block  and Chalmers . Block characterizes phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) as follows.  P-consciousness is experience. P-conscious properties are experiential ones. P-conscious states are experiential, that is, a state is P-conscious if it has experiential properties. The totality of the experiential properties of a state are what it is like" to have it. Moving from synonyms to examples, we have P-conscious states when we see, hear, smell, taste, and have pains. P-conscious properties include the experiential properties of sensations, feelings, and perceptions, but I would also include thoughts, wants, and emotions. It is clear that the kind of consciousness that both Block and Chalmers are interested in is state consciousness, for all of their examples of consciousness are examples of conscious states.  What, then are qualia? This is of course a vexed issue, but we can nonetheless characterize some agreement among those who are fond of asserting their existence. Qualia are alleged to be  intrinsic properties of conscious states that  account for what it is like" for the subject to be in that state and are  directly and fully knowable only by that subject. To further characterize qualia, we can start with  and work our way out to  and then . When I have a conscious mental state, e.g. a conscious perception of a red rose, there is presumably something it is like for me to be in that state, and for all I know, when you have a conscious perception of a red rose, what it is like for you is quite different from what it is like for me. For all I know what it is like for you to see red things is like what it is like for me to see green things, and vice versa. And, while you can tell me a bit about what it is like for you there's a lot that you know that I can't have access too. It is in this way that the characterization of what it is likeness goes hand and hand with the claim that this whatever-it-is is only directly and fully knowable by the subject who has it. The allegedly intrinsic nature of qualia is hypothesized to explain why what it is like to be in a mental state is only directly and fully knowable by the subject of the state. The thought here is that if something is denied by relations it enters into, then we can describe it fully by describing the relations it enters into. Thus if there is something that we cannot describe fully by describing the relations it enters into then it is not denied by relations it enters into.  One of the most questionable aspects of qualia concerns whether they are intrinsic. One can question whether there really are any properties that are intrinsic. Or one can grant that some properties are intrinsic, but question whether intrinsic properties are consistent with being the sorts of properties that account for what it is like to have a mental state or the sorts of states that account for whether they are directly and fully knowable by the subject. One sort of consideration against regarding qualia as intrinsic is that if qualia are denable in terms of being directly knowable by the subject, then that makes them extrinsic or relational after all, since qualia would be denable in terms relations to the subject and the various parts of the person in virtue of which the person has any knowledge at all. Given the highly questionable status of the allegedly intrinsic nature of qualia, I will proceed with the following minimal account of qualia: qualia (phenomenal characteristics) are the properties of mental states in virtue of which there is something it is like to have them. This characterization thus leaves open whether such properties are intrinsic or fully and directly knowable only by the subjects of the mental states that have them. It is worth noting that in the characterizations of phenomenal consciousness from the quotations from Block and Chalmers given above, qualia were characterized solely in terms of this minimal characterization, that is, no explicit mention was made of qualia being either intrinsic or knowable fully and directly only by their possessors. On the account of consciousness I advocate below, qualia will not turn out to be intrinsic for they will turn out to be representational contents and representational contents are widely and correctly regarded as relational. Regarding the question of whether they are directly and fully knowable only by the subject, I address that question at length elsewhere and will thus devote no additional space to it here .  Neuroscientific Applications of the Concepts of Consciousness Let us leave these philosophical remarks aside for a moment and turn to discuss how one might apply these concepts of consciousness in empirical settings. Two useful kinds of cases to look at in this regard involve blindsight and motion induced blindness. I begin with blindsight. We can roughly characterize blindsight as a condition following certain sorts of brain damage wherein subjects report a loss of consciousness in spite of the retention of visual ability. One source of di±culty in characterizing blindsight in a clear and uncontroversial way is that there are few if any clear and uncontroversial ways of characterizing the relevant functions of consciousness and visual ability. Another source of difficulty is that, even when one is able to ¯x interpretations for \consciousness" and \visual ability" the data concerning blindsight shows neither a total loss of consciousness nor a total retention of visual ability. Many philosophers who delight in the superior chemical purity of thought experiments over real experiments have taken to discussing the conceptual possibility of the imaginary condition superblindsight wherein both loss of consciousness and retention of visual ability are total. I propose that in this case, if not in general, we should reject fake chemical purity as being as good as none whatsoever and thus seek to gain as much clarity as possible by examining real phenomena. We can summarize blindsight in terms of the following questions: What are the lesions involved? What is the measure of retention of visual ability? The lesions involved are to primary visual cortex. In an early study of blindsight subjects were better than chance at moving their eyes to the location of a °ash of light in a region of the visual ¯eld wherein they had reported not being able to see °ashes of light . Subsequent studies investigated the sorts of stimuli that blindsight subjects could respond to in spite of reporting no visual awareness, including stimuli characterized in terms of features such as wavelength  and motion . Additional studies examined the way in which the presence or absence of consciousness could be indicated as in, for example, having the subject indicate by pressing one of two keys whether he had any experience whatever. There are several natural suggestions of how to apply the concepts of consciousness from the previous section to the case of blindsight. The retention of visual abilities indicates that certain kinds of visual information are represented in the nervous system and that these representational states can guide certain behaviors. However, it seems clear that these representational states are not conscious states. Thus, first and foremost, the kind of consciousness that blindsight subjects seem to lack with respect to vision is state consciousness. Regarding the question of transitive consciousness, note that theorists that regard representation as sufficient for transitive consciousness will attribute transitive consciousness of items in the blind regions of the subjects' visual fields. However, if we take subjects' reports at face value, it seems that they lack transitive consciousness since they report not being conscious of the items in question. One problem with blindsight is that the majority of the readers of the present paper are not themselves blindsight subjects and insofar as introspection is an important source of information regarding the adequacy of theories of consciousness, the reader may find some of the remarks about blindsight difficult to evaluate. It will thus be helpful to look at empirical work on consciousness that the reader may have an easier time relating to. Experiments concerning the phenomenon of motion induced blindness are very useful in this regard. One way of eliciting the phenomenon of motion induced blindness is by having normally sighted subjects look at a computer screen that has a triangular pattern of three bright yellow dots on a black background. Moving behind" the yellow dots is a pattern of blue dots. As subjects stare at the screen, exactly on the midpoint between the three dots, they report that one or more of the dots disappear. I've seen the effect several times myself and it is quite salient (readers are encouraged to search the internet for motion induced blindness" and see for themselves). The yellow dots are not really disappearing from the screen although it looks as if they do. Further, there is evidence that the brain continues to represent the presence of the yellow dots and the disappearance" is due to the representations changing from being conscious representations to being unconscious representations as opposed to being due to retinal suppression, sensory masking, or adaptation. Some of the evidence that the yellow dots are still represented in the brain includes the fact that the effect can be influenced by transcranial magnetic stimulation to parietal cortex (a relatively late stage of visual processing in the brain). Other evidence is that motion induced blindness is sensitive to object grouping so that, for example, when the stimuli are, instead of the three yellow dots, a pair of partially overlapping circles, one yellow and one pink, sometimes an entire circle will disappear leaving the other behind even though some of their contours are very close in the visual field. The brain mechanisms thought to mediate such object groupings are relatively late in the visual processing hierarchy. Thus, information concerning the yellow dots is represented at many levels of processing prior to consciousness. To relate motion induced blindness to the kinds of consciousness described above, there are several compelling and plausible ways of describing the changes in consciousness. First, I think it is clear to anyone who has experienced the phenomenon that at one moment you are conscious of a yellow dot and then at another moment you are not. Since the consciousness in question here is \consciousness of" this is to describe the case in terms of transitive consciousness. Second, the combination of first-person introspective evidence and third-person empirical evidence indicates that in the course of a motion induced blindness experiment there is, under some conditions, a conscious mental state and, under other conditions, an unconscious mental state. When it is obvious to subjects that they are in a state of perceiving the yellow dots this is a conscious state. When the dots disappear, even though there is a brain state that represents the yellow dots, it is not a conscious state. (It is accurate to regard this neural state as a mental state insofar as it is accurate to regard it as an unconscious perception of the yellow dots). Since phenomenal character attaches to states that are conscious, and phenomenal character is the property in virtue of which there is something it is like to be in that state, we are in a position to investigate what the properties are of that state that are relevant for determining what it is like for that person. More can be said later, but for now we can note that what it is like for that person is that it is like seeing a yellow dot appear and disappear. This suggests that at least part of what it is like to be in that state is determined by its representational content: the state represents the presence of a yellow dot. Returning to the question of what makes the state in question a conscious state, we can note one important similarity between various competing theories of state consciousness: namely that they explain state consciousness in terms relations between relatively low level states like sensations and relatively high level states like conceptual thoughts. So, for advocates of the transparency thesis  what makes the representation of the yellow dot a conscious representation is that it is poised to interact with higher level conceptual states like beliefs and desires. Many advocates of the transitivity thesis, like Rosenthal, will require that what makes the representation of the yellow dot conscious is not merely that it is poised to interact with higher level conceptual states, but further, that those conceptual states must be about  that is, representations of | the low level representation of the yellow dot. I propose that these theorists are correct in trying to explain state consciousness in terms of interactions between high-level and low-level states. In the remainder of the discussion, I will be primarily interested in visual consciousness, though I do intend the theory to apply to consciousness generally When we look at visual processing, we can characterize levels in a hierarchy of information processing. More speci¯cally, we can characterize the levels in terms of how much the information has been processed, where the information is being processed, and what the nature of the processing is. The questions of how much and where can be answered simultaneously by tracing the  visual information from the earliest stages of processing in the eyes through to the latest stages of visual processing in the cerebral cortex. More specially, we can trace the  information from retinal ganglia through the optic nerve to the subcortical structures of the lateral geniculate nucleus. Next information is sent to the first stages of cortical processing in occipital cortex in the primary visual area. Later stages of cortical processing involve sending information along two branching path . The first is the dorsal stream that sends information from occipital cortex to posterior parietal cortex. The second is the ventral stream that sends information from occipital cortex to inferotemporal cortex. Still later areas of processing involve areas in frontal cortex  as well as in the hippocampus. It is worth noting that the  information is not strictly feed forward from sensory input to the highest levels of brain processing but also includes many instances of feedback or back-projections of information being sent back from higher levels to lower levels. The where  and how much  questions do not exhaust all there is to say about visual processing: there remains the question of what the nature of the processing is. I propose that one fruitful general way of understanding what is happening to visual information as it progresses through the levels of the processing hierarchy is that what begins as a relatively egocentric (self-centered) representation of visual information becomes increasingly abstracted and increasingly allocentric (other-centered) in the higher levels. We are to ¯nd the most egocentric visual representations in the lateral geniculate nucleus and also in the primary visual areas in occipital cortex. The most allocentric representations are found in frontal areas and hippocampus. Intermediate areas of cortical visual processing contain representations that are intermediate between being egocentric and allocentric. To get a clearer grasp of the proposal that visual processing can be characterized in terms of egocentric to allocentric transformations of represented information, it will be helpful to consider a more detailed discussion of egocentric and allocentric representations. 

 Egocentric Representations and Allocentric Representations

A useful starting place in characterizing egocentric representation is the notion of a receptive field. A good initial definition of  receptive field is area in which stimulation leads to response of a particular sensory neuron. Retinal ganglion cells and neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus have circular ¯elds with either an excitatory center and an inhibitory surround or an inhibitory center and an excitatory surround. The locations of these fields are denied relative to retinal locations, that is, a particular cell in, e.g., lateral geniculate nucleus, is most responsive to a visual stimulus falling on a specific retinal location. The ring of such a cell is thus said to represent the location of a stimulus in a region of retinocentric space. Retinocentric representations are the lowest level representations in a hierarchy from the most egocentric representations to the most allocentric. The progression of information up the hierarchy progressively abstracts away from the particularities of the maximally egocentric representations as in transformations from retinocentric to head-centered and body-centered representations. Such transformations involve neurons in area 7a of posterior parietal cortex. These neurons exhibit different responses depending in part on whether eye-position is fixed. When eye position is fixed, these neurons exhibit retinocentric receptive fields. However, when eye position is not fixed, stimulus of a given retinal region results in a neural response that varies linearly with eye position. The egocentric representations described above involve sensitivity to a spatial location relative to some part of the organism or the organism as a whole. However, egocentricity is not limited only to the responses of sensory neurons, but can be denied for motor neurons as well. For example, reach plans for arms are encoded in eye-centered coordinates. There is more to our mental lives than can be accounted for by egocentric representations. Many of our thoughts have a detached or objective character that abstracts away from peculiarities about us. For instance, my knowledge that Pi is an irrational number is not in any obvious way about me, regardless of how irrational I might be. Similarly, my grasp of the fact that neutrons and protons are more massive than electrons is not particularly a fact about me, in spite of the fact that much of my mass and volume is determined by neutrons, protons, and electrons. Our capability to have detached, objective mental states is grounded in our allocentric representations. Allocentric representations have been postulated to exist in frontal areas as well as in hippocampus. I here focus on research concerning the neural basis of allocentric hippocampal representations. The classic studies in these areas concern the spatial navigational capabilities of rats, especially comparisons of performance of rats with and thout lesions in hippocampus. One representative class of experiments concerns the performance of such rats in the Morris water maze. In typical conditions, rats swim in the water to goal locations consisting of platforms submerged deep enough to not be visible to the rats, but shallow enough to other a place to rest and breathe without having to tread water. In one such study the water maze was set up such that rats had to swim to a platform rendered visible during training trials, but occluded by opaque water during testing trials. Orientation cues consisted of varied visual stimuli positioned around the maze. Intact and hippocampal damaged rats were trained to swim to the platform from a given start location. Test trials involved two general kinds of condition: one in which the starting position was the same as in the training trials and one with novel starting positions. In trials where starting positions were the same in test as in training, both intact and hippocampal damaged rats were able to swim to the platform. However, in trials where starting positions in the test disiered from the training start positions, intact rats out performed  ippocampal damaged rats. Hippocampal damaged rats took much longer to reach the platform, and in some cases never found the platform. Results such as these have led to the hypothesis that the hippocampus functions in spatial navigation by supporting a cognitive map involving allocentric representations of the spatial layout of the creature's environment. Allocentric representations are implicated since the rats' navigational ability does not seemed to be tied to any particular point of view on or orientation within the environment. One especially prominent proposal concerning how allocentric representations in the hippocampus underwrite successful navigation is the slopecentroid system. The basic idea behind the slopecentroid system is that of a polar coordinate system based on the distribution of objects in the animal's environment. The centroid is the point at the center of the collection of objects in the environment. The slope is a line running through the longest axis of the collection of objects. Orientation within the environment is encoded in terms of angles relative to the slope. Position within the environment is encoded in terms of a vector de¯ned by distance from centroid and angle relative to slope. Movements would be encoded in terms of vectors encoding direction and distance. As the animal moves around in the environment, the vector encoding movement is added to the vector for the current location resulting in a vector encoding the location expected at the end of the movement. Upon arrival at a goal location, comparison of sensory inputs to the representation of expected location results in a capability for mismatch detection allowing for continual correction and updating of the memory of the environmental layout. There are thus three major representational components of the slopecentroid system: the representation of place, the representation of heading, and the representation of speed. The hippocampal implementations of these representational capacities are postulated to be the following. Place representations are thought to be implemented by pyramidal cell activity, with highest level of activity in a pyramidal cell corresponding to the animal's current location, irrespective of the animals heading. Representation of heading is thought to be  implemented by activity in cells in nearby brain regions with activity corresponding to the direction the animal is facing irrespective of the animals location within the environment .

Consciousness in the Allocentric-Egocentric

Hierarchy

It is reasonable to ask where in the processing stream conscious states arise. I turn now to considerations that we should regard conscious states as residing neither at the highest most allocentric levels nor at the lowest most egocentric levels. Instead, visual consciousness resides at an intermediate level. We can arrive at this conclusion by first noting that neither fully allocentric representations nor fully egocentric representations are ever conscious states. Purely egocentric representations are not sufficient for conscious states. Egocentric representations count among the most basic and primitive forms of representations. For example, the kinds of spatial representations that arguably underwrite taxes (movement toward or away from a stimulus) in organisms as simple as the nematode worm C. Elegans  represent spatial distances and directions in egocentric terms . While such creatures are complex enough to support egocentric representations, few theorists would regard them ascomplex enough to support phenomenal consciousness. Another consideration against thinking that egocentric representationsare alone sufficient for conscious states comes from the case of  Nonetheless, it can be demonstrated that in spite of this lack of visual consciousness she is able to make use of certain unconscious representations of visual information about the form of objects in order to guide her actions. One demonstration of DF's condition is her performance on a task in which she had to put a card into a slot that could be variously oriented. For a given orientation of the slot, DF was able to orient the card correctly and post into the slot. DF's performance on this task was about as good as normal subjects. However, when asked to not put the card into the slot but instead to merely report on the orientation of the slot by holding the card in a comparable orientation, DF's performance was quite poor compared to normal subjects. The aspect of DF's performance that is relevant for our purposes is that while DF was not conscious of the orientation of the slot, her successful performance on the task indicates that her nervous system had unconscious egocentric representations of the slot. That she was able to correctly post the card into the slot demonstrates not only that she had representations of the orientation of the slot, but also that the orientation was represented relative to her hand and was thus egocentric.  The categorical knowledge that dogs are furry need not encode any information about the current relations of any dogs to oneself. Nonetheless, the way in which conceptual knowledge can be brought to bear on perceptual experience shows that concisions experience is not solely a matter of egocentric representation. Just as consciousness is not solely egocentric, neither is it solely allocentric. One consideration in favor of this view is that visual consciousness is perspectival in the sense of embodying a pictorial perspective. The different features that characterize perspective in paintings and photographs also characterize a key feature of visual consciousness. Another reason for believing that purely allocentric representations are insu±cient for phenomenal consciousness comes when we realize that many propositional attitudes lack phenomenal character. Consider, for example, one's belief that Pi is an irrational number. It is implausible to suppose that this thought has any particular phenomenal character associated with it. As suggests, any apparent phenomenal character of the thought actually is the phenomenal character of associated sensory imagery, not of the thought itself . And leaving the question of phenomenal character to the side momentarily, we can note that one can have a belief without it being a conscious belief. For example, the reader may have believed for many years that ¼ is an irrational number, but this fact was probably not in the forefront of the reader's consciousness until this paragraph. Thus one can have allocentric representations  without those representations thereby being conscious. This is not to say that allocentric contents can never enter into consciousness. Indeed, the point of the above discussion concerning the influence that conceptual knowledge of dogs can have on visual perceptions of dogs was to demonstrate that allocentric contents do enter into conscious experience. The point here is that conscious experience is never solely allocentric. Since conscious experience is never solely allocentric or solely egocentric, it is never to be found at either end of the allocentric-egocentric hierarchy. This lends plausibility to the hypothesis that conscious states are to be identified with representations at an intermediate level of the processing hierarchy. Additional evidence comes from research on the neural correlates of consciousness in binocular rivalry. In binocular rivalry research, human and animal subjects are presented with contradictory stimuli to their eyes, such as horizontal stripes to the left eye and vertical stripes to the right eye. While two stimuli are presented, both stimuli do not enter into the conscious percept but instead compete in the following way. At one moment the subject will see only the vertical stripes and at another moment the subject will see only the horizontal stripes. It is found that among monkey cortex cells associated with the conscious percept, 90% were in inferotemporal cortex whereas only 40% were in extrastriate cortex .

 Phenomenal Consciousness

Further details concerning these issues will come to light in the following discussion of how the EIT theory compares to some of its main philosophical competitors. I turn now to discuss comparisons between EIT and, on the one hand, the First-Order Representational theories of consciousness favored by proponents of the transparency thesis and, on the other hand, Higher-Order Representational theories favored by proponents of the transitivity thesis. First-order representational theories of consciousness attempt to explain consciousness in terms of first-order representations, that is, representations that, whatever they represent, do not represent other representations. Higher-order representations are representations of representations. A representation of a first-order representation is a second-order representation and a representation of one of these is a third-order representation and so on. First-order representationalists are especially fond of the transparency thesis that when one has a conscious experience, all that one is conscious of is what the experience is an experience of. First-order representationalists presuppose the transparency thesis as intuitively obvious and utilize it to justify their claim that conscious states have only first-order representational content and that phenomenal character is identical to the representational content of these first order states. If the transparency thesis turns out to be false then first-order representationalism turns out to be false for the following reason. If one were able to be conscious of something other than what an experience is an experience of (like vehicular properties of the state itself) then what it is like to be in a conscious state  is something other than the just the first-order representational content of that state. Phenomenal character would thus include either the vehicular properties of experiences or the representational contents of the higher-order states in virtue of which one is conscious of the experiences. The entering wedge of a case against the transparency thesis begins by noting the way that allocentric representational content, especially conceptual content, can influence what it is like to have a particular experience.

 However, the possibility that conceptual content can enter into what it is like to have an experience opens up the possibility that higher-order conceptual content can enter into what it is like to have an experience.

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