Abstract

This study attempts to show how our phenomenally conscious states can causally affect those physical behaviors for which we normally say we chose to behave in that way---our choice behaviors. After identifying phenomenal character with its being like something to have an experience, it is first argued that phenomenal states should not be understood in terms of our awareness of them but rather as being, for the most part, awarenesses of the outer or inner environment. It is then argued that our experience of ourselves as causal agents rests largely on our experience of our phenomenal states rationally necessitating our choice behaviors. ;It is further argued that despite this experience, epiphenomenalism threatens because traditional identity, functionalist, and property dualist theories do not satisfactorily explain how states with phenomenal character can be causally related to our physical behaviors. Representationist theories, however, it is argued, offer substantial promise for dealing with this problem, and a representationist theory of phenomenal consciousness is outlined, using the concept of information as a key to understanding how phenomenal states relate to physiological states. In the process it is argued that information should not be considered a third kind of phenomenon different from but related to phenomenal consciousness and brain states, but rather that phenomenal states are, for the most part, identical to awarenesses consisting of bits of instantiated information encoded in brain states. The encoding of such information in a brain state is thus the encoding of a phenomenal state. ;On this account, phenomenal states cannot be viewed as efficient causes of our physical behaviors; but they can be seen as the formal, organizational causes of brain states that are members of chains of efficient causes that produce our choice behaviors and thus as sine qua nons of those behaviors. It is argued that this account agrees well with our experience of the causation of our choice behaviors by phenomenal states: we experience such causation as crucially involving information, and the account clarifies just how information enters the causal process and enables it to be played out.