ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how to understand consciousness in the sense gestured at with talk of "subjective experience"—what has lately been called phenomenal consciousness—while initially remaining neutral on certain basic controversies. Perhaps a Martian mind that refused to address the matters through serious first-person reflection would find no importance in consciousness. The point remains that without consciousness nothing would mean anything to philosophers, and they would, in a nontrivial sense, be literally mindless. Thus, from the objective point of view, consciousness has no great epistemic significance—and likely no moral importance. The essential thing is just that there is a contrast to be made between survival and duplication, and "survival value" vanishes when consciousness does. Indeed on some of them, it is becomes puzzling that the presence or absence of consciousness has the significance one might have thought. Sometimes this is because of the way the theory seems to overintellectualize consciousness.
