books — The Brains Blog

5. The Positive Semantic Argument

As I emphasized on Wednesday, phenomenal concepts are, in a sense, private. They are acquaintance-based indexicals that aren’t governed by any set of public norms, and which don’t defer to the expertise of others. Nor do they make any commitment to the underlying nature of the states referred to. When …

4. The Negative Semantic Argument

Peter Carruthers January 16, 2020 January 16, 2020 animal cognition / Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds

It is important to realize that first-personal phenomenal consciousness is all-or-nothing. Any given mental state is either phenomenally conscious or it isn’t. It makes no sense to talk of degrees of phenomenal consciousness, or partial phenomenal consciousness. This is another place where some of the distinctions drawn in Monday’s post …

3. Reducing the Phenomenal

Peter Carruthers January 15, 2020 January 15, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: The Centered Mind / Phenomenal Concepts

The phenomenal concept strategy has been pursued by many different authors. The basic idea is to explain the problematic thought experiments (zombies, Mary, and the explanatory gap) in terms of the distinctive set of concepts we can use when thinking about our own access-conscious nonconceptual mental states. People differ over …

2. The Global Workspace

Peter Carruthers January 14, 2020 January 14, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds

The best theory of phenomenal consciousness is one that equates it with the contents of the so-called global workspace (a.k.a. working memory)—or rather, with a subset thereof. Why a subset? Because although conceptual information can be bound into the contents of perceptual and imagistic states, and made available in the …

1. Consciousness Problems

Peter Carruthers January 13, 2020 January 13, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds

A number of factors make the problem of consciousness seem harder than it is. I will say something briefly about two of them here. One is that people the world over are tacit dualists about the mental, making them much more receptive towards non-physical qualia than they otherwise would be. …

Now Featured

John Schwenkler January 12, 2020 January 21, 2020 books

We are pleased to have Peter Carruthers (University of Maryland) blogging this week on Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (Oxford, 2019). To view all of Peter’s posts on a single page, please click here.

3. Aspects of the Self

Majid D. Beni November 2, 2019 November 9, 2022 Consciousness / Ethics / Majid Davoody Beni: Structuring the Self

In the previous post, I showed how the self-structure could be specified. The self has also some properties, e.g., phenomenal, social, and ethical ones, that are capable of being specified in structural terms. Let us begin with phenomenal aspects, which amount to the capacity to have consciousness and intentional states. …