The consciousness of visual experience

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] "This monograph mainly concerns two distinctive features of visual experience. First, visual experience has its own phenomenal dimension. Following the familiar terminology in the literature, I refer to this unique experiential feature as phenomenal character. The phenomenal character of a visual experience is typically taken to be the sui generis property that it has in virtue of being a particular kind of conscious mental state. As Thomas Nagel once put it, 'ocean organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism' (1974, p. 436). Since then, the phenomenal character of an experience has often been construed as a subjective feel of some sort that manifests itself to the subject when he undergoes the experience that carries it. Alex Byrne thus proposes that 'the phenomenal character of an experience e is a property, specifically a property of e: that property that types e according to what it's like to undergo e' (2002)."--Chapter 1.