The starting point for this commentary on Williford’s article is the commitment to subjective character as a defining feature of consciousness. Subjective character is what makes a conscious experience conscious, i.e., what all conscious experiences have in common in virtue of which we call them conscious. Kriegel (2009, p. 1) has offered a distinction between the qualitative character and the subjective character as two important aspects of any conscious experience. If you have a phenomenally conscious sensation of red, then there is something that it is like for you to have it. On the one hand, having this experience feels like this (where this quality distinguishes it from feeling a sensation of pain, say). On the other hand, it feels like something for you (i.e., it is subjective in the same sense that all of your other conscious experiences are subjective). Qualitative character is the distinguishing mark of conscious experiences with regard to each other; subjective character is the common mark of all my conscious experiences. This latter aspect has also often been referred to as the me-ishness, ipseity or mine-ness of consciousness (Block 1995; Zahavi 1999).
Williford recognizes that, sadly, not all philosophers theorizing about consciousness share this commitment to subjective character, and that some formulations of it in terms of mine-ness are misleading in giving rise to objectionable implications about essential entities (Metzinger 2011). But for the purposes of this commentary we can leave aside such controversies and instead start with a shared commitment to this feature, on which this commentary will exclusively focus.[1] As a constraint on a theory of subjective character, Williford maintains that it has to respect (1) the relational structure of consciousness, and (2) the Humean intuition that one of the relata, the subject, remains somewhat invisible and is at least not constituted by a special (additional) entity. His solution, in short, is to peacefully combine these two intuitions by identifying the subject with (an episode of or) the stream of consciousness, which is itself reflexively self-aware. A further claim is that this account is supposedly “compatible with physicalism” (Williford this collection, p. 1). I do not address this aspect of Williford’s rich paper in this commentary, mostly for reasons of space but also because I think that the putative truth of physicalism should not put any a priori constraints on a theory of consciousness.
My commentary is thus structured as follows. In the second section, I will recapitulate Williford’s take on subjective character and point to problems with his identification of the subject with the stream (or episodes) of consciousness. In the third and fourth sections, I will present an alternative way of conceptualizing the subject in the context of a theory of consciousness that also satisfies the constraints mentioned above. On this alternative view, a mental representation is conscious (i.e., it exhibits subjective character) if it is integrated in the right way into the overall conscious state of the organism. This overall state includes representations of the state of the organism. By way of integration, all conscious representations are something for the organism that is identified as the subject of experience. This alternative, which is an instance of an integration-theory, has the advantage both of bypassing the problems that seem to beset Williford’s account and of being not only compatible with but also supported by the best empirical hypotheses about consciousness currently available. I will sketch an argument for this view and attempt to answer possible objections to the premises of this argument.