Representationalism: Consciousness as Representation

Core Idea

Representationalism claims phenomenal consciousness is a matter of representing the world as having certain properties. What it is like to see red is exhausted by representational content—your experience represents the object as red. This connects consciousness to intentionality and offers a strategy for understanding phenomenal properties through representational content.

Explainer

From your study of qualia and phenomenal consciousness, you know that conscious experiences have a distinctive "what-it-is-like" character — philosophers call this phenomenal character. The hard problem is explaining how any physical or functional process could give rise to that felt quality. Representationalism offers a specific answer: the phenomenal character of an experience just *is* its representational content. When you see a red apple, what makes that experience feel the way it does is that it represents the apple as red. There is nothing more to the redness of your experience beyond the fact that your visual system is representing redness in the world.

This connects two threads you have already studied. From intentionality, you know that mental states have aboutness — they point beyond themselves toward objects or properties in the world. From qualia, you know that experiences have intrinsic felt qualities. Representationalism says these are not two separate things. The intrinsic felt quality of an experience is just the property it represents its object as having. A pain experience, for instance, represents your body as being in a damaged-or-threatened state; its phenomenal character is the representation of that bodily condition.

The philosophical payoff is significant. If representationalism succeeds, it transforms the hard problem: instead of explaining how brain states produce a mysterious inner glow, we need only explain how brain states carry representational content — which is a question naturalistic theories of mental content are already equipped to address. Higher-order representationalism goes further, claiming that an experience is conscious when it is represented by a higher-order mental state (a thought or perception of the first-order state). First-order representationalism, associated with Fred Dretske and Michael Tye, says the phenomenal character is simply the first-order representational content itself, without any requirement for higher-order awareness.

The hardest challenge for representationalism comes from cases where phenomenal character and representational content seem to come apart. Consider inverted qualia: two people whose color experiences are systematically inverted (what looks red to you looks green to them) yet whose functional and behavioral dispositions are identical. If representational content is fixed by functional role, both people represent the same thing — yet intuitively their qualia differ. Representationalists typically respond either by denying the intuition is coherent or by appealing to tracking relations to environmental properties that would fix which properties are being represented. This debate leads naturally toward the topics of illusionism (consciousness is a representational illusion) and content externalism (what a state represents depends partly on its external environment), which build directly on the framework you have studied here.