The Subject of Consciousness, Higher-Order Thought, and Bodily Representation

As a conscious human being, my conscious experience has some phenomenological structure. One putative aspect of this phenomenological structure concerns for-me-ness. For-me-ness is construed as the relation between some phenomenal character (what-it-is-like-ness) and the subject of consciousness; more specifically, the former is for the latter. Some philosophers argue that for-me-ness is constitutive of the phenomenological structure of consciousness. Among them, one prominent group of philosophers defends Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories of consciousness, which include David Rosenthal’s actualist HOT theory, Peter Carruthers’s dispositionalist HOT theory, and Uriah Kriegel’s self-representational HOT theory. In this chapter, I analyse the ways in which these HOT theorists explain for-me-ness. I argue that they make similar assumptions regarding the functions of HOTs, and that these assumptions, in conjunction with an empirical consensus in cognitive neuroscience, commit them to the claim that, as far as human beings are concerned, HOTs are instantiated by some cortical mechanism. Having identified the assumptions, I present a case study of children born without a cortex, i.e., the condition known as hydranencephaly, to challenge the assumptions. Finally, I present another representational approach to defend the claim that for-me-ness is constitutive of the phenomenological structure of consciousness. This view employs a set of body-mapping processes to ground for-me-ness. Having shown that, I argue that it can accommodate the challenge from the case study I have presented.