# Phenomenal Transparency and Cognitive Self-Reference  ## Metadata - Author: - Full Title: Phenomenal Transparency and Cognitive Self-Reference - Category: #books - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Source File: Phenomenal transparency and cognitive self-reference1 THOMAS METZINGER (2023-12-17 18-46-27).pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > In § 275 of the Philosophische Untersuchungen Wittgenstein pointed to the naïve realism inevitably brought about by transparent, phenomenal experience.2 Interestingly, many authors today have returned to the notion of transparency, employing it as a useful conceptual instrument. Robert van Gulick, in an important early paper, has developed a functionalist analysis of transparency in terms of the speed, reliability, and global interdependence of phenomenal representations in combination with an accompanying lack of access to earlier processing stages.3 For qualia, Sydney Shoemaker has pointed out that we have no introspective access to the nonintentional features of our experience that encode this content.4 Gilbert Harman has defined the transparency of experience as an unawareness of intrinsic non-intentional features.5 Also, Michael Tye now uses the concept at many places in many of his writings,6 making the strong and interesting claim that phenomenal character is actually identical with intentional contents. (Page 3) > The second defining characteristic of phenomenal transparency postulates that, on the functional level of analysis, what makes mental representations transparent is the attentional unavailability of earlier processing stages in the brain for introspection. Transparency results from a structural/architectonic property of the neural information-processing going on in our brains. The notion of “attentional availability for introspection” is here used with reference to a special case, namely that of introspective attention (further analyzed below). (Page 4)