Prof. Radu Bogdan proposed the following schema in last Friday's philosophy of mind seminar: a mental representation [has a] content [which is about] a target. He suggested that we were conscious of contents, not targets. This seems like a curious claim. Aren't we aware of objects of knowledge - objects that exist with objective properties - rather than our mental representations. For instance, we don't see ellipses when we see coins lying on tables, we see coins which are circular. When we dream in a sense we see only 'mental contents' but when we perceive (successfully) we do not: we see the object of perception. It's like using our hands to feel the shape of something; our eyes are used to inform us of objective properties of our environments.
It's not altogether clear to me how to draw the distinction between contents and targets in fact. There must be research on this: what are we generally aware of: objects and their objective properties, or representations and their content? My feeling is that if we went around being aware of contents and not things, we'd be suffering from something like 'derealisation', the clinical condition.
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“look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself “how blue the sky is!”- when you do it spontaneously- without philosophical intentions- the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of color belongs only to you. and you have no hesitation in exclaiming that to someone else. and if you point at anything as you say the words you point at the sky. i am saying: you have not the feeling of pointing-into-yourself.” Wittgenstein-PI 275
Maybe, since you do not have the feeling of pointing into yourself, you have that instinct that we are conscious of targets not the contents.
You might also enjoy this painting that points to the same idea:
http://studentwww.fullcoll.edu/vrest/08.jpg
Magritte's own explanation of the painting is:
"“i placed in front of a window, seen from inside a room, a painting representing exactly that part of the landscape which was hidden from view by the painting. therefore, the tree represented in the painting hid from view the tree situated behind it, outside the room. it existed for the spectator, as it were, simultaneously in his mind, as both inside the room in the painting and outside the real landscape. which is how we see the world: we see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves.”
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