[midenginedcoupe]

Flippin' eck, I've just tried reading the opening sentence:

> A number of philosophers endorse, without argument, the view that there’s something it’s like consciously to think that p, which is distinct from what it’s like consciously to think that q.

I've re-read it umpteen times and by brain still refuses to parse it. This is not, IMHO, articulating anything clearly or precisely.

[wunderlust]

Fair enough! I'll admit, there are a number of somewhat unwieldy idioms in philosophy, but I think in a lot of cases they do serve to pick out a distinct notion.

For what it's worth, in the expression "to think that p", "p" is meant to designate any arbitrary proposition; e.g., if p is the proposition "it is raining", then "to think that p" expands to "to think that it is raining". (Likewise q is some other arbitrary proposition.) "There's something it's like to X" is a conventional way of saying that (under normal circumstances) X causes or corresponds with a conscious experience. In the quoted sentence "consciously" is a little superfluous, but the paper is dealing with phenomenology (the study of first person conscious experience), so I'm assuming the author added it for emphasis.

It's a pretty technical paper and there's a lot of terminology and assumptions of background knowledge. I definitely find myself reading sentences over and over, but I tend to assume that those issues are more the result of my lack of understanding than of clarity of writing.

[blep_]

Ah, another victim of the nonsense "rule" against infinitive splitting. It gets somewhat clearer if you rewrite both occurrences of "consciously to think" to "to consciously think".

The other part is the "there is something that it's like to" thing, which is kind of a set phrase/idiom in philosophy, meaning "this is a thing that can be experienced". Sentience is often defined that way: there is something, even if you can't describe it any more precisely, that is "this is what it's like to be a human", but not "this is what it's like to be a rock".

(This comment is intended as an explanation of that mess of a sentence, not a defense of it.)

[t7893478134]

For a start there is an implicit assumption that p does not equal q. If you are going to use variables (instead of 'something' and 'something else') then you should use them precisely.