ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that what distinguishes conscious mental activity from un- and subconscious mental activity is indeed second-order representing. The Inner Sense theory has it that conscious awareness is the successful operation of an internal scanner or monitor that outputs second-order representations of first-order psychological states. Nature actually contains a fairly smooth continuum of organisms, ranked roughly by complexity and degree of internal monitoring, integration and efficient control. The Inner Sense view sorts out a longstanding issue about sensations and feeling: Consider pain. for consciousness we should require that our monitor emit a genuine representation, not just physical "information" in the Bell-Telephone sense or a simple nomological "indication" in the Wisconsin sense. The Lockean thesis is a component of a wider project of mine: that of establishing the hegemony of representation. The Inner Sense view of consciousness has a number of advantages, first of which is that it does distinguish awareness from mere psychology, and conscious states/events from mere mentation.
