Consciousness - phenomenal experience such as sensations, emotions, and other qualitative subjective states - poses an intriguing and as yet unsolved problem for naturalists seeking a unified picture of the world. We know conscious experience arises in conjunction with certain neural goings on in our brains, but there is no consensus in the philo-scientific, naturalist community about why it should arise, or how. Naturalists often gravitate to physicalism in proposed explanations - that consciousness must be essentially physical - but naturalism is not necessarily equivalent to physicalism. Not all phenomena need be spatio-temporal to qualify as naturalistically real, and experience is possibly one example. The papers in this section try to pose the explanatory question clearly, and then explore the possibilities of a trans-physical/mental representationalism in answering it.
Consciousness
Articles in this Section
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Conscious experience understood as a type of representational content may help explain its qualitativeness and subjectivity.
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In his talks on free will, Sam Harris raises the question of the causal role of consciousness.
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Colors are real, just not locatable in the physical world they help to represent.
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On illusionism, there is no qualitative character to experience, so can we continue to talk about how experiences feel?
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Does consciousness emerge as a physical property of mind systems? That there is as yet no story of emergence puts pressure on physicalism.
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A chapter for "Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility."
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Critiques the view that consciousness is likely something extra which accompanies or is produced by neural states, something beyond the functional cognitive processes realized in the brain.
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Lucid dreams show that conscious experience constitutes a virtual reality, and waking experience is no different, just constrained by sensory input from the world.
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To understand consciousness, we must extirpate any lingering notion that we witness experience, or to put it somewhat melodramatically, we must kill the observer.
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Author's final draft of a 2019 paper for Journal of Consciousness Studies, aiming to shed light on the "hard problem" of consciousness.
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The difficulty with dualism has always been how to specify the interaction between two putatively separate realms of existence, mind and body.
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Hal claims to be a zombie - a very smart creature with no conscious experience. In this conversation I try to shake his conviction he's insentient, but to no avail.
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An exchange with Keith Frankish and Tom Clark on illusionism following up on Are Feels Real?
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Because it's a categorically subjective, private phenomenon, conscious experience can't figure in objective, 3rd-person explanations of behavior.
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A representational approach to explaining consciousness.
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Sensory qualities are not, as illusionists claim, non-existent intentional objects of false beliefs, but real non-conceptual contents of consciousness.
Related Content from Other Sections
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The Quality of Consciousness: Thomas Metzinger's "The Elephant and the Blind",
Book Review
In a ground-breaking, open access analysis of deep meditative experience, philosopher Thomas Metzinger demonstrates its relevance for the scientific study of consciousness and argues that cultivating our potential for intrinsically valuable conscious states should be a goal of an enlightened culture.
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Marmite and Metaphysics: Review of "Philosophers on Consciousness" by Jack Symes,
Book Review
In interviews with leading philosophers and scientists, Jack Symes provides us with an entertaining and informative tour of consciousness studies.
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Naturalizing Consciousness: Review of "Being You" by Anil Seth,
Book Review
Neuroscientist Anil Seth explores how the predictive brain might give rise to subjective experience.
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The Cost of Consciousness,
Book Review
A review of Annaka Harris's book Conscious.
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Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity,
Article
Critiques the widespread secular misunderstanding of death as a plunge into oblivion.
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Three Threats to Autonomy: Why Consciousness Does and Doesn't Matter,
Talk
Notes for talk given at Brown University psychology department, 2/17/2012
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Consciousness Revolutions,
Book Review
Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel is a must read for anyone interested in consciousness and the mind-body problem. Metzinger has a well-developed, empirically supported representationalist theory that offers a promising approach to many puzzles about conscious experience.
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Good and Real ,
Book Review
In Good and Real, computer scientist and independent scholar Gary Drescher mounts a mind-bending attack on problems that arise when common sense conflicts with the science-based view that we inhabit a purely physical, mechanistic, deterministic universe.
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Consciousness,
Book Review
A review of three of Susan Blackmore's books on consciousness.
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Hodgson’s Black Box,
Article
This invited reply to David Hodgson's "A Plain Person's Free Will" originally appeared in The Journal of Consciousness Studies.
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Is There an Observing Self?,
External Resource
An article from Science and Conciousness Review, authored by Tom Clark and dated February 1, 2004, containing commentary on Baars et al., "Brain, conscious experience, and the observing self," Trends in Neurosciences, 26 (12), December 2003.
- Debunking Enlightenment, Book Review
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Empirical Constraints on the Concept of Consciousness,
External Resource
An article from Science and Conciousness Review, authored by Tom Clark and dated April 30, 2003, containing editorial commentary on Crick and Koch's "A Framework for Consciousness".
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The Illusion of Conscious Will,
Book Review
In The Illusion of Conscious Will, Wegner sets out to deconstruct, largely from an experimental psychological perspective, the sense we have of consciously willing our actions.