Abstract The book offers solutions to two related puzzles. One is about the place of phenomenal—or felt—consciousness in the natural order. Consciousness is shown to comprise fine-grained nonconceptual contents that are “globally broadcast” to a wide range of cognitive systems for reasoning, decision making, and verbal report. Moreover, the so-called “hard” problem of consciousness results merely from the distinctive first-person concepts we can use when thinking about such contents. No special non-physical properties—no qualia—need to be introduced. The second puzzle concerns the distribution of phenomenal consciousness across the animal kingdom. Here the book shows that there is, in fact, no fact of the matter. This is because thinking about phenomenal consciousness in other creatures requires us to project our first-person concepts into the mind of another; but such projections fail to result in determinate truth-conditions when the mind of the other is significantly unlike our own. This upshot, however, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter for science, because no additional property enters the world as one transitions from creatures that are definitely incapable of phenomenal consciousness to those that definitely are (namely, ourselves). And on many views it doesn’t matter for ethics, either, since concern for animals can be grounded in sympathy, which requires only third-person understanding of the desires and emotions of the animal in question, rather than in first-person empathy
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