Attempting to understand the ‘hard problem’ of conscious experience through the lens of attention requires a discussion of what we mean by visual attention. This can be challenging since there are many forms of attention that work on several levels, both within and outside of our conscious experience.
We are very grateful to John Schwenkler for inviting us to blog at Brains. Our main claim in Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention is that consciousness and attention must be distinct kinds of mental states. We offer four arguments, each explicated in a separate chapter. The first argument is that a …
For the remainder of my posts here, I’m going to move on to new work, and try out some ideas. This post will continue on the theme of consciousness, but turn to a very different question. The work I will discuss in this post is conducted in collaboration with Will …
I will conclude this series of posts by saying something about why I think cognitive phenomenology is significant. The basic idea is that phenomenology in general is connected to epistemology, value theory, and semantics via the notion of awareness, and cognitive phenomenology in particular is connected to these areas via …
According to Mill “pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.” This does not imply that the good life is a degrading one, fit for swine, however, at least partly because there are “pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral …
According to William James experiences, including conscious thoughts, flow in a stream of consciousness. Peter Geach argued that whatever we say about other experiences, conscious thoughts at least do not flow, but rather occur in discrete sequences. A number of recent arguments against cognitive phenomenology take Geach’s criticisms of James …
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 …
