In this study, I argue for the following claims: First, it’s best to think of subjective character as the self-acquaintance of each instance of consciousness—its acquaintance with itself.[1] Second, this does indeed entail that all instances of consciousness have some internal relational property (or intrinsic property) in virtue of which they, and not other things, bear this acquaintance relation to themselves. And, third, this is still compatible with physicalism as long as we accept something like in re structural universals. There is always a price, but in this case it’s arguably no more than the price we pay to be scientific realists.[2]
To make these cases, I must consider some important preliminaries. I give a characterization of subjective character that accounts for the intuition that phenomenal consciousness is relational in some sense (or involves a subject-object polarity), as well as the competing Humean intuition that one of the supposed relata, the subject-relatum, is not phenomenologically accessible. If the latter is true, it is hard to explain how we could have immediate evidence (as opposed to some sort of inferential knowledge) of the existence of this relational structure—evidence we do seem to have. If we identify the subject with the episode or stream of consciousness itself (however we individuate or ontologize these)[3] and maintain that consciousness is immediately self-aware (“reflexively” aware[4]), then the intuition of relationality and the Humean intuition of the missing subject can be reconciled.
I also argue that it is a serious confusion to identify subjective character with one’s individuality or particularity. This will be considered first from a phenomenological point of view, in relation to our tendency to describe subjective character in terms of ownership or “mineness”, and then from an ontological point of view, in relation to the metaphysical individuation conditions of distinct streams of consciousness.
Further, I argue that deeper reflection on the fact that consciousness has only incomplete self-knowledge will allow us to see that certain problems afflicting acquaintance theories, like the one I defend, are not the threats to certain forms of physicalism that they might seem to be. In particular, I briefly consider the Grain Problem[5] and the apparent primitive simplicity of the acquaintance relation itself in this light.
Preliminary to all this, we must first briefly consider the inadequacies of representationalism, and at least adumbrate some of the motivations for the recently renewed interest in the idea of acquaintance (see e.g., Chalmers 2003; Tye 2011, pp. 96–102; Gertler 2011, pp. 87–128, 2012; Balog 2012; Howell 2013, chs. 3 & 4; Goff forthcoming). I argue that, indeed, we need to lose our fear of moving beyond reductive naturalistic representationalisms, especially in regard to subjective character. My conclusions, and in many cases arguments, are not entirely new, but I attempt to cast the material in a new light, in a spirit of synthesis.
The dialectical structure of this study is somewhat circuitous. In section 2, I argue that the most plausible representationalist theory of consciousness is a self-representationalist one (or “Same-Order” representationalism) because it captures subjective character, which I view as essential to consciousness, with the smallest theoretical cost. However, I argue, all forms of representationalism about consciousness are ultimately implausible. This leads to a focused discussion of the notion of subjective character in section 3, the notion that motivates higher-order and same-order representationalisms. In that section, I argue that subjective character should be identified with the self-manifestation or self-appearance of consciousness. Consciousness, the claim goes, appears to itself no matter what else appears to it. This in turn allows us to make sense of the competing relationality and Humean “no-self” intuitions mentioned above. Combining these elements from sections 2 and 3, I argue in section 4 that we should understand self-manifestation in terms of self-acquaintance rather than self-representation. In section 5, I clear up what I regard to be the not uncommon confusion of subjective character with individuation. And in section 6, I argue that though the view espoused here implies that being conscious is a matter of having certain intrinsic properties, this is compatible with a certain type of physicalistically acceptable hylomorphism—the view that complex kinds of physical objects, properties, or processes involve the concrete instantiation of real structures and cannot be properly understood in abstraction from such a “marriage” of form and matter.