Recently, there have been several attempts to provide an account of our ability for self-conscious thought in terms of nonconceptual forms of (self-)representation (most prominent among these is perhaps the account offered by Bermúdez (1998)). Proponents of nonconceptual content assume that there are ways of representing the world that are …
Many thanks to John for inviting me to blog about my book, Thinking about Oneself, this week. The book is concerned with self-consciousness, understood as the ability to think about oneself. A paradigmatic expression of this ability is the ability to think “I”-thoughts (as in the thought “I am hungry”, …
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 …
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 …
As we move from wakefulness into sleep onset and through the different stages of sleep, there are concerted changes in brain activity, the way we process external stimuli from the environment, and in the contents and structure of conscious experience. At the same time, the exact relationship between these changes …
We all dream every night, and most of us feel reasonably certain that we know what it is like to dream. But how well do we really know the phenomenology of dreaming? Can we really be certain that in describing our dreams, we are not merely projecting implicit, pretheoretical assumptions …
CFP: Workshop “Collective Self-Awareness” September 10-12, Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna Submission deadline: May 3 There has been a growing philosophical interest in Collective Intentionality in recent decades, but the topic of collective self-awareness is still in its infancy. How do we experience ourselves as acting and perceiving jointly? …
