Representational and Real

As far as theories of consciousness go, we are in the Consciousness is Representational and Real camp. The early developers of sense-data theories often made some lesser mistakes, such occasionally thinking sense-data are mind independent objects (we believe sense data are mind dependent objects - the final result of the cause and effect perception process). But aside from these minor errors, the basic doctrines of sense data, including facts such as there is, at least phenomenally speaking, a 'veil of perception' and so on were right on.

sense-data theory is considered to be 'discredited' by many because of various successful arguments against the theory. But that we know of, the only good arguments against sense data theories were against the few mistakes the original proponents of the ideas made.

In general, we accept the phenomenal principle - that If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality. We believe there may be special case exceptions to this, but for the most part, when we see a red strawberry in our right field of vision, and a green strawberry in our left field of vision - which are the initial causes of a perception process - that there is something that is the final result of the perception process, that has a phenomenal red property in the left hemisphere of our brain and something that has a green phenomenal property in our right hemisphere.

We also absolutely believe in the 'common kind assumption' - that the perception is the same as the hallucination. Of course, as in the matrix movie, conscious perceptions could exist in an indistinguishable state, wither or not there was a real strawberry that was the particular initial cause of our phenomenal awareness of such, or some abstracted computer simulation. There need not be 500nm or 700nm light for there to be a red and green phenomenal properties in our brain.

It should also be noted that the members of this camp are definitely believers in the importance of qualia. We are not in the 'Qualia Theory' camp simply because we believe sense-data to be more explicitly definitive of our beliefs. And to the degree that some 'qualia theory' disagrees with these core sense-data ideas, we are not in such a camp.

We are not in the 'Representationalism' camp because we think the whole idea of something being 'transparent' is just silly impossible hand waving, and that saying stuff such as 'Every qualia is a represented property' is a very mistaken and not clear way to talk about what perception is and mechanically how it could work.

And I guess we won't even say what we think of ideas such as direct perception, naive realism, or that qualia don't really exist, such as many people in the disjunctive camp seem so ready to accept as intelligent.