Reducing Consciousness by Making it Hot A Review of Peter Carruthers' Phenomenal Consciousness

Our conscious experiences are said to possess a unique property called phenomenal consciousness. Why these and only these states of us have this property has proved to be an exceedingly difficult question for philosophers and scientists to answer. In fact, some have claimed that this question constitutes the hard problem of the mindbody problem, one which cannot be solved by the standard methods of contemporary science. In his most recent book, Phenomenal Consciousness, Peter Carruthers offers a bold, original and scientifically acceptable solution to this hard problem: the dispositional higher-order thought (HOT) theory. I describe the main line of argument in Phenomenal Consciousness for Carruthers' dispositional HOT theory and present three places where the argument seems most vulnerable. I end the review with a very positive endorsement of Phenomenal Consciousness, recommending it as compulsory reading for anyone interested in the contemporary philosophical and scientific debate over the nature of phenomenal consciousness.