Abstract

My overall goal in The Consciousness Paradox: Consciousness, Concepts, and Higher-Order Thoughts is to solve what I take to be a paradox with regard to holding a series of interrelated theses, including a version of the higher-order thought theory of consciousness which says that what makes a mental state conscious is that there is a suitable higher-order thought directed at the mental state. Higher-order thoughts are metapsychological or meta-cognitive states, that is, mental states directed at other mental states. This theory is primarily concerned with explaining how conscious mental states differ from unconscious mental states. In The Consciousness Paradox I defend and further develop a metapsychological reductive representational theory of consciousness and then apply it to several importantly related problems including concept acquisition and animal consciousness.