To recapitulate: (1) I do not see what is gained, either in relation to the individuation problem or the unity and integration problems, by regarding the organism as the phenomenological subject of consciousness. (2) I understand how P-theories attempt to do this by making the organism part of the representational content of every episode of consciousness, but I do not find those theories plausible or helpful, even if we stress the integration aspect of the theories (which does not make them cease to be P-theories). (3) I was less clear on how Schlicht thinks that an integration theory could account for subjective character if it deviates from the Damasio-style theory or from Van Gulick’s HOGS model, which latter I have also always found a little hard to understand, though I am in sympathy with it. (4) I would emphatically deny the existence of Zeki-style micro-consciousnesses; rather, I believe there is (normally) only one stream of consciousness per brain—and that stream can “expand and contract” as more or less gets integrated into it. (5) We do need an account of how unconscious processes get integrated into consciousness and of both diachronic and synchronic unity; but I am not prepared to offer such an account at present. (6) Regardless of how such an account goes, I take reflexivity (self-acquaintance) to be an essential structural feature of all consciousness; and I take it to be a phenomenological datum. All streams of consciousness are immediately aware of themselves, and that is the foundation of all other forms of self-representation, autobiographical cognition, and so on. (7) This reflexivity is subjective character (for-me-ness), but it is a mistake to turn this structural feature into a kind of entity or homunculus. Thus in saying that the episode is the phenomenological subject, I am offering a non-homuncular account of the subject of consciousness. This ought to reduce a little bit of the weirdness of my claim that the episode is the phenomenological subject. (8) In other senses of “subject”, it is undoubtedly correct to say that the subject of consciousness is the organism, since it is (so far) organisms that have consciousness. However, strictly speaking, consciousness is a sub-process of the organism and lives in one of its organs—the brain. (9) Since we could, in principle, have conscious, functioning brains without the rest of the organism, it seems to follow that the organism is not the phenomenological subject—unless one adopts a P-theory according to which the privileged object we represent is just the organism we happen to be; but see (2) above.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer Windt and the MIND team, once again, for organizing this volume. Thomas and Jennifer also gave me very valuable feedback on a draft of this reply—thank you both for that! I would also like to thank Tobias Schlicht for writing such a gracious, challenging, and stimulating commentary. I hope he knows that I honestly do not think he is irrationally allergic to reflexivity or that he embraces a fetishistic externalism! Cheers, Tobias!