'There's something it's like' and the structure of consciousness

For an experience to be phenomenally conscious is for there to be something it’s like; our talk about phenomenal consciousness accordingly is permeated by the expression ‘there’s something it’s like’. It would be natural for the linguistically inclined philosopher to react to this situation by trying to advance investigations into the nature of phenomenal consciousness by determining what we mean by that expression: after all, if discourse about phenomenal consciousness accurately refl ects the nature of its subject matter, that nature should be at least partly revealed in the meaning of the most central expressions in that discourse. A recent theory of the syntactic and semantic properties of ‘there’s something it’s like’, presented in service of gaining insight into the structure of consciousness itself, appears in Lormand 2004; the twin purposes of the present article are to evaluate Lormand’s story, and thereby to bolster our understanding of the meaning of ‘there’s something it’s like’.1 Lormand’s analysis, as provided in section 2 of his essay, has a startling consequence: the inner sense theory of consciousness is analyti-Thanks for recent discussions to James John, Peter Ludlow, and Jessica Wilson and for helpful comments to an anonymous referee. I have discussed the subject matter in this essay with many over the years, including Carl Ginet, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Harol

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only if the scene before his eyes causes matching visual experi-ence’, where ‘visual experience has informational content about the scene before the eyes, and it matches the scene to the extent that its content is correct’.1 ‘Visual experience’? Lewis presup-poses that this is a sort of state that ‘goes on in the brain ’ (Lewis 1980, 239). And he states that ‘the content of the experience is, roughly, the content of the belief it tends to produce’—more pre-cisely, ‘only if a certain belief would be produced in almost every case may we take its content as part of the content of the visual experience ’ (240). To see the relevance of these views for the question of this vol-ume, let us generalize. Seeing is a kind of ‘perceiving ’ or ‘percep-tion’: other kinds include, at least, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting. Visually experiencing—perhaps—is a kind of ‘sensorily experiencing’: if so, other kinds include, at least, auditorily ex