Rosenthalova teorija svijesti i zombi argumenti
Rosenthal’s Theory of Consciousness and the Zombie Arguments

Summary/Abstract: The nature of consciousness and its subjective and qualitative character present themselves as a hard problem of consciousness for any naturalistic theory that tries to explain this phenomenon in terms of the scientific reductive model. In this paper, I deal with Rosenthal’s theory of consciousness, which is essentially representationalist – i.e., consciousness consists in the form of higher-order thoughts about mental states. The focus of the discussion is on the question of whether this theory can offer an answer to the problem of the explanatory gap, and accordingly, I defend the thesis that Rosenthal’s indirect-reductive approach is ultimately unsuccessful. On that note, I formulate two versions of the zombie argument, in which I propose that: a) we can imagine a being with an identical system of mental representations to ours, but without consciousness, and that b) we can imagine a being with higher-order mental representations like ours, who has never had contact with reality, whose total sum of conscious experiences would be confabulated. Both versions of the zombie argument point to epistemic problems in Rosenthal’s theory.

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