Anil and Others, (2019) Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness. Nature Human Behaviour, 3 (2). pp. 104-107.

An important objection to the ''higher-order'' theory of consciousness turns on the possibility of higher-order misrepresentation. I argue that the objection fails because it illicitly assumes a characterization of consciousness explicitly rejected by HO theory. This in turn raises the question of what justifies an initial characterization of the data a theory of consciousness must explain. I distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic characterizations of consciousness, and I propose several desiderata a successful characterization of consciousness must meet. I then defend the particular extrinsic characterization of the HO theory, the ''transitivity principle,'' against its intrinsic rivals, thereby showing that the misrepresentation objection conclusively falls short.

Ned Block argues that the higher order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is 'defunct' because a prominent objection (the 'misrepresentation objection') exposes the view as 'incoherent'. What's more, a response to this objection that I've offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it 'amounts to abusing the notion of what-it's-like-ness' (Block 2011: 427). 1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block's notion of what-it's-like-ness. After doing so, I will argue that the HO approach accounts for the sense of what-it's-like-ness that matters in a theory of consciousness. I will also argue that the only incoherence present in the HO theory is that generated by embracing Block's controversial notion of what-it's-like-ness, something no theorist of any stripe ought to do. Block is famous for (among other things) having introduced the notion of 'phenomenal consciousness' into contemporary philosophy of mind (Block 1995). This term is widely employed in the philosophical literature and it even appears in the empirical literature. But widespread usage has brought about divergent interpretations of the term. We can distinguish a 'moderate' and a 'zealous' reading of 'phenomenal consciousness'. On the moderate reading, 'phenomenal consciousness' just means 'experience'. Many people have embraced this sense of the term and use it to roughly pick out conscious experience involving sensory quality (states like conscious visual experiences or conscious pains, for example). 2 On the zealous reading, however, phenomenal consciousness is held to be 'distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional property' (Block 1995: 234). That is, any explanation of phenomenal consciousness in exclusively cognitive, intentional or functional terms will fail to capture, without remainder, what is really distinctive about phenomenal consciousness. Block, of course, is fully clear about embracing the zealous reading; indeed, his initial introduction of the notion is in those terms. The same ambiguity occurs with the much-used (and abused) idea of 'what-it's-like-ness'. The notion has its origins in Nagel's famous 1974 'Bat' paper where he writes that 'an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it's like to be that organism-something it's like for the organism' (1974: 436, emphasis in original). Here, again, there

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The same-order representation theory of consciousness holds that conscious mental states represent both the world and themselves. This complex representational structure is posited in part to avoid a powerful objection to the more traditional higher-order representation theory of consciousness. The objection contends that the higher-order theory fails to account for the intimate relationship that holds between conscious states and our awareness of them-the theory 'divides the phenomenal labor' in an illicit fashion. This 'failure of intimacy' is exposed by the possibility of misrepresentation by higher-order states. In this paper, I argue that despite appearances, the same-order theory fails to avoid the objection, and thus also has troubles with intimacy.