This paper has two quite different parts. The first is a consideration of arguments corresponding more or less to the arguments you’ve seen in Jackson while the second offers some suggestions about the functional role of consciousness. I’ve assigned only the first of these because discussing it seems likely to take up most of the class and the second would probably require a very substantial amount of time to work through, both in your reading and in our discussion. I won’t discourage you from reading the whole paper, but the second part might be easier going after you read the paper by Lycan that is the first assignment after the break.
• Van Gulick offers a compact but thorough discussion of responses to Jackson’s knowledge argument (pp. 664-667), and discussing this part of his paper is likely to take much of the class.
• The second argument considered by van Gulick (the “explanatory gap” argument, pp. 667-669) doesn’t correspond exactly to anything in Jackson, but it is related to one aspect of the ideas of Nagel that Jackson discusses in his §3.
• The third argument van Gulick considers (the “absent qualia” argument, p. 670) is fairly close to the “modal argument” considered by Jackson in his §2, but van Gulick and Jackson look at this argument from what may seem (and, to some extent, are) different points of view.
Van Gulick’s explicit discussion of the argument is much shorter than his discussion of the other two, but it leads him to the second part of his paper, and that can be seen to form part of his discussion of this third argument (see the brief conclusion, p. 675, for his own account of how the second part of the paper is tied to the first).