Why isn’t a lucid dream just a dream within a dream? Suppose I’m having a flying dream and I think, “I must be dreaming.” I’m in a dream state, so why I am not just dreaming that I’m dreaming? To put the question another way, if there’s a difference between …
In 1890 William James introduced the metaphor of the “stream of consciousness” into Western psychology: “Consciousness… is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, …
Thanks to John Schwenkler and The Brains Blog for giving me this opportunity to tell you about my work. In this first post I’d like to describe the themes and ideas of my most recent book, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. In later posts …
I am glad to kick off our latest Mind & Language symposium on Jean-Rémy Martin and François Le Corre‘s “Sensory Substitution Is Substitution ,” from the journal’s April 2015 issue, with commentaries by Kevin Connolly (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn), Ophelia Deroy (Center for the Study of the Senses/Institute of Philosophy, University of London), Julian Kiverstein (Amsterdam), and Michael Proulx (Bath).
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 …
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 …
In part three of Self and Other, which carries the title The Interpersonal Self, I return to the earlier established contrast between the experiential self and the normatively enriched and narratively extended self. We are here dealing with two notions placed at each end of a scale. On the one …
