Constructing consciousness

O'Brien & Opie make unnecessary distinctions between vehicle and process th eories and neglect empirically based distinctions between conscious and unc onscious processing. We argue that phenomenal experience emerges, not just as a byproduct of input-driven parallel distributed processing, but as a re sult of constructive processing in recurrent neural networks. Stable networ k states may be necessary, but are not sufficient, for consciousness.