I have argued that the best way to characterize subjective character is in terms of self-acquaintance and not, for various reasons, in terms of Higher-Order, Same-Order, or Privileged-Object representation. I argued that every episode or stream of consciousness is acquainted with itself, and not with a self in some other sense—a homunculus, substance, or haecceity. This is, I maintain, the best way to make sense of the intuition of subject-object polarity and the Humean intuition that we do not find a self-entity. Moreover, one’s sense of being an individual is a consequence of self-acquaintance and concrete existence and not to be conflated with subjective character as such. Such conflation leads to potentially misleading descriptions of subjective character (as “mineness”) and, if taken literally, to metaphysically and epistemologically undesirable consequences. We are individuated and self-acquainted, and that is enough to allow us to derive the sense of self or “mineness”; but self-acquaintance is not itself what individuates us, nor does it necessarily make us aware of what does.
Nevertheless, I conceded to Henrich, Frank, Henry, and Zahavi (among others) that consciousness must have some intrinsic (or internal relational) property in virtue of which it is self-acquainted. But I argued that this does not nullify the appropriateness of describing subjective character as being a matter of a very complex relation, though it does not seem to be so complex.
Finally, I argued that the position advanced here is not incompatible with a form of (hylomorphic) physicalism. Sensory hyle, the acquaintance relation itself, the self-manifesting episodes, could all be brain processes and properties. On the phenomenological side, this gains plausibility once we take to heart the incompleteness of introspection (and of pre-reflective self-awareness as well): not seeming complex and relational does not entail not being complex and relational. On the ontological side, I argued that even some form of computational functionalism could be true. But, generally, the important thing to remember is that consciousness is the marriage of form and matter. It cannot be simply equated with either. This opens up space for multiple realizability, but it might also mean that not just any old substrate will do. It’s an open question. The metaphysical commitment behind this position is just some form of realism about structural universals and their mind-independent instantiation conditions, which is arguably a commitment of scientific realism in any case. Absent dualism, panpsychism, or idealism, that is what we will have to accept, I believe. (Eliminativism is, of course, a non-starter.)
We do not need a theory of the Methexis, however, in order to attempt to find the neural correlates (correlation conceived of as indicating identity here) of consciousness by building mathematical models of the phenomenology and figuring out how the brain might implement the structures so modeled. In fact, just such an approach is quite in line with scientific practice generally: We know that the world we investigate with our relatively crude means is, in multiple ways, a play of matter and form even if we do not really know what the Matter ultimately is, what Forms are, and how the latter come to live in the former.
Acknowledgements
Different parts of this material were presented at many places over several years. I would like to thank audiences at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (seventeenth meeting of the MIND Group), the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, the Institut Jean Nicod, ZiF, SMU, the SSPP, TCU, and Tucson TSC for relevant discussions. I would like to thank these institutions and the symposia organizers (and in particular, Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer Windt; Manfred Frank, Marc Borner, Andreas Heinz and Anna Strasser; Brad Thompson and Philippe Chuard; Pete Mandik, Rik Hine, and Blake Hestir; and David Chalmers). Thanks to the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Texas-Arlington for research and travel funding in this connection. I should thank (in alphabetical order) Katalin Balog, Daniel Bennequin, Jacob Berger, Alexandre Billon, Marc Borner, Philippe Chuard, Christian Coseru, Justin Fisher, Manfred Frank, Brie Gertler, Robert Howell, Tomis Kapitan, Bob Kentridge, Chad Kidd, Alex Kiefer, Uriah Kriegel, Greg Landini, Stefan Lang, Pete Mandik, Thomas Metzinger, Charles Nussbaum, David Papineau, Gerhard Preyer, Harry Reeder, David Rosenthal, Amber Ross, David Rudrauf, Susan Schneider, Miguel Sebastian, Charles Siewert, Anna Strasser, Brad Thompson, Keith Turausky, Michael Tye, Josh Weisberg, and Dan Zahavi for discussions, questions, criticisms, suggestions, etc., that were in one way or another of help to me in relation to the material presented here. In the same regard, I should thank two anonymous reviewers from the MIND Group for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this article; their feedback helped me to see some of my less-than-admirable tendencies as a writer of philosophy, even if it did not enable me to correct all their manifestations. Special thanks to Ying-Tung Lin of the MIND Group for her help. Special thanks to Trish Mann, Swathi Prabhu, Emma Nwokonko, and Anya Williford for help with the references. And very special thanks, once again, to Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer Windt for launching and managing this unique and ambitious project and to the Barbara-Wengeler-Stiftung for its support.