A preliminary issue for the project is to characterise the difference between the personal level and subpersonal levels. We don’t need to take this to be a clear or hard-and-fast distinction. ‘Personal level’ is just shorthand for having one or more of a number of more sophisticated features that we could ignore when dealing with subpersonal representations in the brain.
The first feature is consciousness – representations that form part of the experiential life of the subject. There is something that it’s like to see a chair, plan your day or feel thirsty. The fact that these representations are conscious might well make a difference to how they relate to things in the world – to what they are about, what they concern, or what they mean.
Second, these representations typically feature in deliberation. Their contents can be offered by a person when they think of or give reasons for what they believe and how they act. The meanings available at the personal level may also be important for whether a person’s beliefs and choices really are justified – in whether they meet certain normative standards for forming beliefs and for action. When asked why I’m taking an umbrella, I might answer that it is raining outside. That it is raining outside is what I believe and that belief serves me, at the personal level, as a reason for what I’m doing. So beliefs, desires and so on can be reasons for the whole person, not just for a system performing computations in their brain.
A third feature, which may be closely related to the second, is that these representations are available to verbal report, and also to other ‘consuming systems’ in the person, for example to be stored as episodic memories, so that the person can remember an experience later.
We can use ‘personal level’ for representations that have any or all of those three features. Rather than asking directly how those features make a difference to meaning or content, we want to get at the issue more indirectly.
Our central question for this part of the project is: does information-processing work differently when it occurs with personal level representations? For example, are probability calculations, which we know are sometimes performed by subpersonal systems in the brain, performed differently at the personal level? Are they more informationally-integrated with other representations? Are such representations held online for longer? Are there certain sorts of learning that can occur with personal level representations that don’t occur otherwise? And most importantly: which of these differences are important for the way the meaning of mental representations is constituted?
