Conscious Awareness and (self-)representation

1. Consciousness certainly is connected with awareness. In fact, some people would say the two terms are synonyms. To be conscious of something is to be aware of it. Conscious mental states are those we are aware of. From these simple platitudes comes the motivation, or intuitive support for theories of consciousness built on the notion of representation, whether it be representation of the conscious states themselves or of their objects. Of course a crucial element linking the platitudes about awareness with representationalist theories is the thought that awareness can be captured, or understood in terms of representation. I don't deny that awareness-conscious awareness, that is-entails representation; how could it not? What would it mean to be aware of something without somehow representing it? What I am suspicious of, however, is the idea that awareness is exhausted by representation. It seems to me that there is something going on with awareness that takes us beyond mere representation-or maybe it's a matter of a special kind of representation-that leaves every version of representationalist theory I know of inadequate as a theory of consciousness. The plan for the paper is as follows. In sections 2 & 3 I will characterize how the notion of representation has been employed in theories of consciousness, identifying two sources of motivation for appealing to a notion of self-representation in the process. In section 4 I will describe three levels at which conscious awareness operates, and speculate concerning ways of formulating an integrated account of all three involving the notion of self-representation. In sections 5 & 6, I'll try to vindicate the suspicion just mentioned in the paragraph above. 2. The simplest way of reducing awareness to representation is what can be called " externalist representationalism ". Consider a paradigm conscious mental state, such as seeing a ripe tomato sitting on the kitchen counter. One natural way to characterize the state is this: one is (visually) conscious of the tomato. What this amounts to on the representationalist theory is that one's visual system is representing (something to the effect) that there is a red figure of a certain shape and texture in one's visual field. Now there are two features of conscious sensory states that require theoretical elucidation: " qualitative character " and " subjectivity ". The former is implicated in the distinction between sensory states and non-sensory cognitive states like thoughts and beliefs, while the latter …