For Advaita Vedānta, consciousness is to be distinguished from all contents of consciousness that might be introspectively detectable: It is precisely consciousness of whatever contents it is conscious of and not itself one of these contents. Its only nature is, Advaita holds, prakāśa (manifestation); in itself it is devoid of any content or structure and can never become an object. This paper elaborates on this kind of understanding of consciousness in order to next explain why it might be fruitful for developing a clear understanding of the nature of the so-called problem of consciousness. Today’s philosophy of mind tends to conceive of consciousness in terms of qualia, thereby taking it as a special kind of (introspectively accessible) object. This renders the antimaterialist claim of the distinctness of consciousness from all physical (publicly accessible) features vulnerable to the materialist reply that the difference in question might be a merely epistemological matter, i.e., a matter of different modes of givenness without difference in what is thus given. This move, however – this paper argues –, is impossible without resulting in circularity or infinite regress with regard to consciousness in the sense of givenness (manifestation) itself.

对于Advaita Vedānta，意识要与所有可能被内省检测到的意识内容区分开来：它恰恰是对它意识到的任何内容的意识，而不是这些内容之一。它的唯一性质是，Advaita 持有，prakāśa（表现）; 它本身没有任何内容或结构，永远不可能成为一个对象。本文详细阐述了对意识的这种理解，以便接下来解释为什么它可能有助于对所谓的意识问题的本质进行清晰的理解。今天的心灵哲学倾向于根据感受质来理解意识，从而将其视为一种特殊的（内省可接近的）对象。这使得反唯物主义主张意识与所有物理（可公开访问的）特征的区别容易受到唯物主义回答的影响，即所讨论的差异可能仅仅是认识论问题，即不同的被给予方式的问题，因此给。然而，这一举措——本文认为——