Consciousness and experience

by William G. Lycan

This sequel to Lycan's Conciousness (1987) continues the elaboration of his general functionalist theory of conciousness, answers critics of his earlier work, and expands the range of discussion to deal with the many new issues and arguments that have arisen in the intervening years, an extraordinarily fertile period for the philosophical investigation of conciousness. Lycan not only uses the numerous arguments against materialism, and functionalist theories of mind in particular, to gain a more detailed positive view of the structure of the mind; he also targets the set of really hard problems at the center of the theory of consciousness: subjectivity, qualia, and the felt aspect of experience. The key to his own enlarged and fairly argued position, which he calls the "hegemony of representation," is that there is no more to mind or conciousness than can be accounted for in terms of intentionality, functional organization, and, in particular, second-order representation of one's own m