Category: Consciousness and Qualia
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Galen Strawson and Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness
Alex Kealy (Institute of Art and Ideas, London) writes: I'm getting in contact from the Institute of Art and Ideas in Britain as we've just released a video I thought you might be interested in. Called "The Mind's Eye", the video is of a discussion that took place at our philosophy festival HowTheLightGetsIn last year.…
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Eben Alexander: “We Are Conscious in Spite of Our Brains”
I am at the moment listening to Dennis Prager interview Dr. Eben Alexander. Prager asked him whether he now maintains, after his paranormal experiences, that consciousness is independent of the brain. Alexander made a striking reply: "We are conscious in spite of our brains." And then he made some remarks to the effect that the brain…
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Suppose You Build a Conscious Robot. . .
. . . would that solve the mind-body problem? One aspect of the mind-body problem is the problem of the subjectivity of conscious experience. As I have argued on numerous occasions, the subjectivity of conscious experience and the manner in which it connects to its physical substratum in the brain cannot be rendered intelligible from an…
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Can Consciousness Be Explained? Dennett Debunked
To answer the title question we need to know what we mean by 'explain' and how it differs from 'explain away.' 1. An obvious point to start with is that only that which exists, or that which is the case, can be explained. One who explains the phenomenon of the tides in terms of the gravitational…
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The Problem of the Existence of Consciousness
I tend to the view that all philosophical problems can be represented as aporetic polyads. What's more, I maintain that philosophical problems ought to be so represented. You haven't begun to philosophize until you have a well-defined puzzle, a putative inconsistency of plausibilities. When you have an aporetic polyad on the table you have something…
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Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?
An abbreviated version of the following paper was published under the same title in The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 9, ed. Stephen Voss (Ankara, Turkey), 2006, pp. 29-33. ………………. According to Buddhist ontology, every (samsaric) being is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and devoid of self-nature. Anicca, dukkha, anatta: these are the famous…
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Posits or Inventions? Geach and Butchvarov on Intentionality
One philosopher's necessary explanatory posit is another's mere invention. In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1994), Panayot Butchvarov rejects epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like.…
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Consciousness: What Evolutionary Good Is It?
Bear in mind that the word 'consciousness' has several distinct meanings. 'Consciousness' can refer to the state of being awake, to the ability to introspect internal states, and to the phenomenon of attention. But 'consciousness' insofar as it poses a 'hard problem' for physicalists is the subjective quality of experience. These subjective qualities can be…
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Consciousness Without Self-Consciousness
Just over the transom: A friend of mine and I have ongoing discussions about consciousness. Some of his beliefs I have a hard time accepting. He believes for example that his cat doesn't have conscious experience. I can't put my finger on why I have such a hard time accepting this, but I do. One issue that…
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An Analogy for the Categorial Difference Between Consciousness and Matter
Some people pin their hopes on future science for a solution of the problem of consciousness as if hope, which has a place in religion, has any place in a strictly scientific worldview. If we only knew enough about the brain, these people opine, we would understand how consciousness arises from it. But consider an…
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A Sense/Reference Objection to the Irreducibility of Phenomenally Conscious States
I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then…