@article {Clark:2019:1355-8250:60,
title = "Locating Consciousness: Why Experience Can't Be Objectified",
journal = "Journal of Consciousness Studies",
parent_itemid = "infobike://imp/jcs",
publishercode ="imp",
year = "2019",
volume = "26",
number = "11-12",
publication date ="2019-01-01T00:00:00",
pages = "60-85",
itemtype = "ARTICLE",
issn = "1355-8250",
url = "https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2019/00000026/f0020011/art00003",
keyword = "qualia, subjectivity, objectivity, representation, content, phenomenal experience, physicalism",
author = "Clark, T.W.",
abstract = "The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities, but science doesn't find sensory experience in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in the world is a function of our necessarily representational
relation to reality as knowers: we won't discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms. Qualia -- arguably a type of representational content -- will therefore not be found in the physical world as characterized in experience or science.
Instead, consciousness constitutes a subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, and the physical world is a represented objective reality. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the non-objectivity of experience,
and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behaviour-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically instantiated mind-systems. I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness, and suggest that a mature science of
representation may help explain why, perhaps as matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon.",
}