Cognitive Phenomenology: The Role of Introspection

In my first post I isolated Irreducibility as the main thesis in dispute about cognitive phenomenology: Irreducibility: Some cognitive states put one in phenomenal states for which no wholly sensory states suffice. In this post I am going to write about the role introspection should play in helping us decide …

Cognitive Phenomenology: What is the Issue?

First off, thanks to John Schwenkler for inviting me to write a few posts about my new book, Cognitive Phenomenology, and also for inviting other authors to write about their new books. I’ve really enjoyed following this series on the Brains Blog. In this post I will isolate what I …

Participation: Normative Demands and the Explanatory Role of the Emotions

To be immersed, I said in the last post, is for there to be something it is like for me to be in a mental state–it is the phenomenology of a first-person stance. Yet the question “What is it like for me to be in a mental state?” and the …

Immersion: The Sense of Mineness

In the previous post I argued that the self is a unity of immersion, participation, and coordination, the first-person stance at once lived, engaged, and underwritten.  In this post I will say more about the concept of immersion. What is sometimes called a first-person perspective can consist of nothing more …

The Natural Self

Many thanks to John Schwenkler for inviting me to outline here at The Brains Blog the main ideas in my book The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance (Oxford University Press, new in paperback 2015). I’ll sketch the overall picture in this blog and follow up with two more in which I’ll draw …

The Normative and the Descriptive

The network theory explains well-being in purely descriptive terms. But well-being is normative. Tim’s well-being is intrinsically valuable for Tim. Can a purely descriptive theory of well-being account for normativity, for the value of well-being? I’m going to assume that the evidence of science and intuition strongly support the network …

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