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4. The Negative Semantic Argument

It is important to realize that first-personal phenomenal consciousness is all-or-nothing. Any given mental state is either phenomenally conscious or it isn’t. It makes no sense to talk of degrees of phenomenal consciousness, or partial phenomenal consciousness. This is another place where some of the distinctions drawn in Monday’s post …

3. Reducing the Phenomenal

Peter Carruthers January 15, 2020 January 15, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: The Centered Mind / Phenomenal Concepts

The phenomenal concept strategy has been pursued by many different authors. The basic idea is to explain the problematic thought experiments (zombies, Mary, and the explanatory gap) in terms of the distinctive set of concepts we can use when thinking about our own access-conscious nonconceptual mental states. People differ over …

2. The Global Workspace

Peter Carruthers January 14, 2020 January 14, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds

The best theory of phenomenal consciousness is one that equates it with the contents of the so-called global workspace (a.k.a. working memory)—or rather, with a subset thereof. Why a subset? Because although conceptual information can be bound into the contents of perceptual and imagistic states, and made available in the …

1. Consciousness Problems

Peter Carruthers January 13, 2020 January 13, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds

A number of factors make the problem of consciousness seem harder than it is. I will say something briefly about two of them here. One is that people the world over are tacit dualists about the mental, making them much more receptive towards non-physical qualia than they otherwise would be. …

Now Featured

John Schwenkler January 12, 2020 January 21, 2020 books

We are pleased to have Peter Carruthers (University of Maryland) blogging this week on Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (Oxford, 2019). To view all of Peter’s posts on a single page, please click here.

A Couple of Venues

Gualtiero Piccinini January 6, 2020 November 25, 2022 Mindcraft / Uncategorized

Just a quick reminder about two venues for good work in the philosophy of neuroscience: Synthese used to publish a yearly Special Issue in the philosophy of neuroscience. The format has changed slightly, in that the papers are now published as they are accepted, but they are collected together online …

Manolo Martinez’s “Information Theory is a Formal Theory of Representation”

Nick Byrd January 6, 2020 January 2, 2020 Neural Mechanisms Online / NM Webinar

We are excited about the next Neural Mechanisms webinar this Friday (10th). As always, it is free. You can find information about how and when to join the webinar below or at the Neural Mechanisms website—where you can also join sign up for the mailing list that notifies people about …