Consciousness * By CHRISTOPHER HILL

Hill was a central-state materialist who kicked qualia upstairs into the brain. In this important and engaging book, he converts to externalist representationalism, kicking qualia downstairs into the extracranial world where they seem to reside. All awareness ‘constitutively involves representations’ (69); and ‘the phenomenal character of an experience is the set of qualia that the experience represents as instantiated by objects of awareness’ (148). Like others, Hill views representationalism as providing a route to reducing experience. He reduces qualia to physical properties of external objects and bodily regions. Without providing a detailed reductive theory of representation, he sometimes assumes that experiences represent such properties by having the function of causally co-varying with them (149, n. 16; 179–80). Let me say at the outset that Hill provides one of the most impressive defences of externalist representationalism to date. He breaks new ground on too many issues to address in a short review. I will focus on his case for representationalism and his representationalist views on the perception of space and pain, leaving to the side his interesting (and often convincing) discussions of introspection, emotion and the explanatory gap.