I was interviewed for a column appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal on an intriguing case of possible conscious states in a vegetative patient (“There May Be More To a Vegetative State Than Science Thought” by Sharon Begley). In the case in question, scientists recorded brain activity in a vegetative …
In a recent post, I noticed that the debate over representationalism about consciousness is often conducted by discussing putative counterexamples, i.e., experiences that some philosophers find to be intuitively different even though according to some representationalist theories, they have the same representational content. These examples are usually met by representationalists who …
This is the kind of question that might appear in the extended mind literature. Here is a quick and dirty kind of empirical argument. (Maybe this kind of argument has already been considered somewhere. If so, I’d be glad to hear.) Suppose that the properties and relations of lower-level entities …
Various arguments in contemporary philosophical work on consciousness boil down to alleged conceptual connections between ‘conscious’ and ‘conscious of’. To wit, some philosophers hold as pre-theoretically obvious what we can call “The Transparency Thesis”: When one has a conscious experience all that one is conscious of is what the experience …
Greg Frost-Arnold has two interesting posts (first, second) on Sue Barry, a real neuroscientist who recently acquired stereoscopic vision. Her story is told in the latest New Yorker.
(Strong, Reductive) Representationalism about phenomenal consciousness is, roughly, the view that the phenomenal properties of experience can be explained by a combination of representational and functional properties.The literature is full of putative counterexamples to representationalism (e.g., examples of putatively different experiences that represent the same thing, or examples of experiences …
Adam Pautz, “Sensory Awareness is not a Wide Physical Relation,” Nous, 2006. (The link is to an extended version of the paper.)Today, at the NEH seminar in Mind and Metaphysics, we discussed Pautz’s paper, which is an attack on wide naturalistic representationalism about phenomenal consciousness. (Wide (or externalist) reductive representationalism …
