What is Transparency ?

Opacity, in Metzinger’s sense, is access to processed information as processed, while transparency is only access to the content of our phenomenal states. I suspect that transparency conflates different notions. First I show that every conscious experience has a “transparent” core (involving intentionality, directedness and assumption of existence, insensitivity to some unconscious process). Anyway, to be sensitive to earlier processing steps does not imply to take the representation “as modeled by our simulator”. There are other ways of being sensitive to this processing experience: experience of gaps in perceptive synthesis, experience of incompleteness, queerness of experience, phenomenal incoherence, searching consciousness. Many of them implies only to put in abeyance incoherence or incompleteness (to be laterally aware of a conflict without dealing with it), or even to put this abeyance into abeyance (not to take into account the absence of solution). But if the conflict becomes serious, we revise our assumption, and this requires the assumption that the conflict is about existing things. The self has a peculiar property here. Even when I revise one aspect of my self, I have to presuppose a self, in the sense that I put in abeyance other revisions of this presupposed self. Self is not a simulation, even if we have only this peculiar access to it. PSYCHE: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ PSYCHE 2005: VOLUME 11 ISSUE 5 2 Metzinger, in his very impressive book, defines, first tentatively, « transparency » as the property of a phenomenal state such that only its content properties are introspectively accessible to the subject of experience, and then definitively defines it as a quality of phenomenal experience the degree of which is inversely proportional to the introspective degree of attentional availability of earlier processing stages (pp. 163 and 165). He also says that transparency is a special form of darkness, is synonymous of missing information and implies auto-epistemic closure. Phenomenal transparency involves an implication of the existence of the entities represented. On the contrary, Metzinger defines the opposite of transparency, phenomenal opacity, as implying an access to processed information as processed, to our model of the world as a model, and makes us able to represent the distinction between appearance and reality. It is because of transparency that we have difficulty becoming conscious that our representations of the world and ourselves are just models and simulations. In particular, the implicit assumption of the existence of the contents represented is the cause of the deeply entrenched illusion that our self is an existing object, that there are selves in the world. But thanks to opacity, Metzinger has been able to detect this illusion: no such thing as selves exist. I want to question the two notions of transparency and opacity, as they seem to be ambiguous notions. Transparency appears to combine (or to conflate) at least: (T1) intentionality as being directed towards the object of the representation and not towards the representation (hereafter direct intentionality), (T2) directedness, (T3) assumption of existence, (T4) assumption of plain access to content, (T5) insensitivity to the incompleteness of the content of our cognitive experience, (T6) insensitivity to the processed character of our conscious information, (T7) no attentional access to an earlier processing stage. Opacity means: (O1) conscious access to an earlier stage of the cognitive processing, (O2) sensitivity to the processed character of our conscious information; but it may also mean: (O3) second-order intentionality, (O4) consciousness of a presentational aspect as such, (O5) side-consciousness of the type of process by which the information is given (vision or touch, for example), (O6) side-consciousness of the incompleteness of our present cognitive content, (O7) consciousness of our incapacity to have access to a content (the name of a person, for example). I will not try to expend