A tudatosság kortárs elméletei
Contemporary Theories of Consciousness

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I offer a short survey of the main contemporary philosophical theories of consciousness, and compare them. I introduce three fundamental common sense intuitions about consciousness, namely: 1. The Transitivity thesis – which says that a state is conscious if the subject is aware of it; 2. The Transparency thesis– which says that in a conscious state the subject is always aware of something else; and the 3. Non-reductivity thesis – which leans on the fact that the consciousness of a state is always a brute fact, and as such, cannot be reduced to other facts. In the paper I argue that one can associate a theory of consciousness to each of these intuitions. The Higher-Order Representation theories fit nicely to the transitivity thesis, the Representational theories express our intuition about transparency, and the Non-reductionist theories emphasize that consciousness is a brute fact of our mental life. As a result of the comparison, I argue that the first two theories can be plausibly objected to on the ground that they try to reduce consciousness to some functional facts, and that is counterintuitive, while the Non-reductionist theories can be attacked for their weak explanatory power.

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