So, as an experiment, I thought I would try recording a rehersal run through of my powerpoint presentation and see if people are more willing to listen to a paper than to read it…any feedback is welcome!
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Richard Brown 
I just finished reading/listening the power point presentation. Thank you for creating that, must have been lot of work!
Don’t have lot to say (probably because I’m not into representational theories in general), but your argument seems fine, and also I agree that 1)one can have pain that one is unconscious of and 2)that thoughts have what-is-it-like to have a thought aspect when we are conscious of them. The connection between that aspect and the illocutionary force of the utterance is also very interesting.
Hi Tanasije, Thanks! It wasn’t actually that hard at all (once the powerpoint presentation is made, that is…but I was already doing that for an upcomming conference)…
Yeah, I don’t know if I am really up for them either, my main goal is to show that people who are up for them are committed to certain claims that they do not realize.
Out of curiosity, do you also agree that a pain that you are unconscious of is one that there is nothing that it is like for you to have?
Yes, I think I would agree with that.
Hey! I just noticed this!
Really? Interesting! And yet you *think* that you don’t like representational views, eh?
Maybe I misunderstood your question.
What I meant is that I might have pain in my finger, but not feel it.
Same as there might be some object in front of me, but occluded by some other object, and I will not see it.
No you did not misunderstand my question…
Hi Richard,
I don’t think that such position necessary implies representationalism. I hope it will be OK with me pasting part of the explanation that I used in one post on my blog:
Yep it’s OK, though I have read that before (didn’t really understand it then either, though)…I just don’t see how this kind of view doesn’t fly in the face of all of brain science…for instance you say that you can have a pain in your finger and yet not feel it, but we know that there are no pains in fingers, pain is in the brain (as evidenced by phantom limb pain) so to have a pain in the finger is to be in a mental state that represents the pain as being somewhere. How do you avoid this conslusion?
Also there is the obvious problem of dreams and hallucinations. I know you have addressed this issue, arguing that it is the imagination that has somethig to do with it, but this answer is no good because we know from brain imaging studies that when you dream about things the actual visual cortex is active but this is not the case for imagining. We also know that we can stimulate the visual cortex directly and generate visual experiences in the absence of objects, so how can objects themselves be the constituents of experiences if we can have experiences in the absence of objects?
Lastly, what I (partially) meant was that you seem to be endorsing a kind of higher-order view of consciousness in that you think that there are pains that are unfelt and that when one is conscious of those pains they will be felt
But at any rate, itcertainly seems as though you endorse the transitivity principle
I posted answer to your objections here