If Saul Steinberg's 1967 New Yorker cover is the metaphorical truth about consciousness, what is the literal truth? What is going on in the world that makes it the case that this gorgeous metaphor is so apt?

In Section 5 of his interesting article, Goldman suggests that the consideration of imaginary cases can be valuable in the analysis of our psychological concepts. In particular, he argues that we can imagine a system that is isomorphic to us under any functional description, but which lacks qualitative mental states, such as pains and color sensations. Whether or not such a being is empirically possible, it certainly seems to be logically possible, or conceptually coherent. Goldman argues from this possibility to (...) the conclusion that our concepts of qualitative mental states cannot be analyzed entirely in functional terms. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a variant of the knowledge argument which is based upon Frank Jackson's Mary thought experiment. Using this argument, Jackson tries to support the thesis that a purely physical – or, put generally: an objectively scientific – perspective upon the world excludes the important domain of `phenomenal' facts, which are only accessible introspectively. Martine Nida-Rümelinhas formulated the epistemological challenge behind the case of Mary especially clearly. I take her formulation of the problem as a starting-point and (...) present a solution which is based solely on the concepts of capability and of metalinguistic beliefs. References to epiphenomenal facts, phenomenal knowledge etc. will be avoided completely. I specify my proposal against the backdrop of Burge's critical reflections about metalinguistic reinterpretation of expressions of belief and the externalist thesis held by Burge, Putnam and others that meanings and mental states are dependent upon the environment. My solution is then compared with Lewis' and Nemirow's ability objection. Finally I argue that the much discussed ``knowing what it is like'' has in its ordinary meaning nothing much to do with `phenomenal knowledge' or knowledge of `epiphenomenal' facts. (shrink)

The explicit aim of Daniel Dennett’s new paper ‘What RoboMary Knows’ is to show that Mary will necessarily be able to come to know what it is like to see in colour, if she fully understands all the physical facts about colour vision. I believe we can establish that Dennett’s line of reasoning is flawed, but the flaw is not as simple as an equivocation on ‘knows’. Rather, it goes to the heart of functionalism and hinges on whether or not (...) Dennett is correct to claim that there is ‘no fact of the matter’ about what subjective experience consists in. (shrink)

Can phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Exponents of an.

This article tackles problems concerning the reduction of phenomenal consciousness to brain processes that arise in consideration of specifically epistemological properties that have been attributed to conscious experiences. In particular, various defenders of dualism and epiphenomenalism have argued for their positions by assuming special epistemic access to phenomenal consciousness. Many physicalists have reacted to such arguments by denying the epistemological premises. My aim in this paper is to take a different approach in opposing dualism and argue that when we correctly (...) examine both the phenomenology and neural correlates of phenomenal consciousness we will see that granting the epistemological premises of special access are the best hope for a scientific study of consciousness. I argue that essential features of consciousness involve both their knowability by the subject of experience as well as their egocentricity, that is, their knowability by the subject as belonging to the subject. I articulate a neuroscientifically informed theory of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the (...) door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance, and a double-aspect theory of information. (shrink)

Cognitive science is shamelessly materialistic. It maintains that human beings are nothing more than complex physical systems, ultimately and completely explicable in mechanistic terms. But this conception of humanity does not ?t well with common sense. To think of the creatures we spend much of our day loving, hating, admiring, resenting, comparing ourselves to, trying to understand, blaming, and thanking -- to think of them as mere mechanisms seems at best counterintuitive and unhelpful. More often it may strike us as (...) ludicrous, or even abhorrent. We are. (shrink)

Contrary to certain rumours, the mind-body problem is alive and well. So argues Joseph Levine in Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness . The main argument is simple enough. Considerations of causal efficacy require us to accept that subjective experiential, or 'phenomenal', properties are realized in basic non-mental, probably physical properties. But no amount of knowledge of those physical properties will allow us conclusively to deduce facts about the existence and nature of phenomenal properties. This failure of deducibility constitutes an (...) explanatory problem - an explanatory gap - but does not imply the existence of immaterial mental properties. Levine introduced this notion of the explanatory gap almost two decades ago. Purple Haze allows Levine to situate the explanatory gap in a broader philosophical context. He engages with those who hold that the explanatory gap is best understood as implying anti-materialist metaphysical conclusions. But he also seeks to distance himself from contemporary naturalistic philosophical theorizing about consciousness by arguing that reductive and eliminative theories of consciousness all fail. Levine's work is best seen as an attempt to firmly establish a definite status for the mind-body problem, i.e. that the mind-body problem is a real, substantive epistemological problem but emphatically not a metaphysical one. Because Levine's work is tightly focused upon contemporary Anglophone analytic philosophy of mind, there is little discussion of the broader conceptual background to the mind-body problem. My aim here is to place Levine's work in a broader conceptual context. In particular, I focus on the relationship between consciousness and intentionality in the belief that doing so will allow us better to understand and evaluate Levine's arguments and their place in contemporary theorizing about mentality and consciousness. (shrink)

You have a rich inner life of conscious experiences. For example, you have pains and other sensations. And you have sensory experiences, such as that produced by chewing on something bitter. Scientists are currently puzzling over how to explain this inner life in scientific terms. Can we, for example, consciousness by appealing to certain facts about our brains?

i l l ustrat es t he di ffi cul t y of providing a purely physical characterisation of phenomenal experi ence wi t ha vi vi d exampl e about a bat ’ s sensory apparatus. Whi l e a number of obj ect i ons have al ready been made to Nagel.

Is there an explanatory gap between raw feels and raw material? Some philosophers argue, and many other people believe, that scientific explanations of conscious experience cannot be as satisfying as typical scientific explanations elsewhere, even in our wildest dreams. The underlying philosophical claims are.

Charles Siewert's _The Significance of Consciousness_ contends that most philosophers and psychologists who have written about "consciousness" have neglected a crucial type or aspect that Siewert calls "phenomenal consciousness" and tries carefully to define. The present article argues that some philosophers, at least, have not neglected phenomenal consciousness and have offered tenable theories of it.

There are two things about Siewert's project that worry me. First, it's not clear to me that by taking Siewert's first-person approach, we can come to grasp what he means by 'consciousness'. And second, even if we are able to come to grasp what he means by this term, it's not clear to me that all the "consciousness-neglectful theoreticians of mind" - for example, Dennett, Rosenthal, and Tye - have failed to give an account of the property which Siewert's term (...) picks out. (shrink)

in Encyclopedia of Consciousness, ed. William P. Banks, Amsterdam: Elsevier, forthcoming in 2009.

consciousness. Such unconscious processing always " Cambridge, UK " tends to re?ect habitual or strong responses. From this.

The distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness arises from the battle between biological and computational approaches to the mind. If P = A, the computationalists are right; but if not, the biological nature of P yields its scientific nature.

In order to understand consciousness one would benefit from developing a more eclectic intellectual style. Consciousness is, as proposed by almost everyone except the stubborn reductionists, a truly mysterious concept. Its study and dissection merits a multidisciplinary approach. Waving this multidisciplinary flag has positively enlarged the discussion and neurologists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, and so on, have moved to the philosophy of mind arena, first with caution and now with a more powerful voice. Identifying what we mean by consciousness is a first (...) step even when we want to deny its existence. The link between consciousness and some other mental activity is a logical next step and there is abundant literature doing this, but not all of them differentiate among associated yet different phenomena. (shrink)

An interactive process model of the nature of representation intrinsically accounts for multiple emergent properties of consciousness, such as being a contentful experiential flow, from a situated and embodied point of view. A crucial characteristic of this model is that content is an internally related property of interactive process, rather than an externally related property as in all other contemporary models. Externally related content requires an interpreter, yielding the familiar regress of interpreters, along with a host of additional fatal problems. (...) Further properties of consciousness, such as differentiated qualities of experience, including qualia, emerge with conscious reflection. In particular, qualia are not constituents or direct properties of consciousness per se. Assuming that they are so is a common and ultimately disastrous misconstrual of the problems of consciousness. (shrink)

The aims of this book are: to explain the notion of phenomenal consciousness in a non-metaphorical way that minimizes controversial assumptions; to characterize the relationship between the phenomenal character and intentionality of visual experience, visual imagery and non-imagistic thought; and to clarify the way in which conscious experience is intrinsically valuable to us. It argues for the legitimacy of a first-person approach to these issues--one which relies on a distinctively first-person warrant for judgments about one's own experience. Thought experiments are (...) employed in which one is asked to conceive of having various forms of blindsight, so as to make consciousness intellectually conspicuous by its absence in such hypothetical scenarios. It is argued that theories of mind that would commit us to denying either the conceptual or the metaphysical possibility of these scenarios neglect the occurrence of consciousness in this phenomenal sense. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness is the property mental states, events, and processes have when, and only when, there is something it is like for their subject to undergo them, or be in them. What it is like to have a conscious experience is customarily referred to as the experience’s phenomenal character. Theories of consciousness attempt to account for this phenomenal character. This article surveys the currently prominent theories, paying special attention to the various attempts to explain a state’s phenomenal character in terms (...) of its representational content. (shrink)

The first claim in the target article was that there is as yet no transparent, causal account of the relations between consciousness and brain-and-behaviour. That claim remains firm. The second claim was that the contents of consciousness consist, psychologically, of the outputs of a comparator system; the third consisted of a description of the brain mechanisms proposed to instantiate the comparator. In order to defend these claims against criticism, it has been necessary to clarify the distinction between consciousness-as-such and the (...) contents of consciousness, to widen the description of the neural machinery instantiating the comparator system, and to clarify the relationship between the contents of consciousness in the here-and-now and episodic memory. (shrink)

Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousness, or revise our conception of nature. In twentieth-century philosophy, this dilemma is (...) posed most acutely in C. D. Broad’s The Mind and its Place in Nature . The phenomena of mind, for Broad, are the phenomena of consciousness. The central problem is that of locating mind with respect to the physical world. Broad’s exhaustive discussion of the problem culminates in a taxonomy of seventeen different views of the mental-physical relation.1 On Broad’s taxonomy, a view might see the mental as nonexistent , as reducible, as emergent, or as a basic property of a substance . The physical might be seen in one of the same four ways. So a four-by-four matrix of views results. At the end, three views are left standing: those on which mentality is an emergent characteristic of either a physical substance or a neutral substance, where in the latter case, the physical might be either emergent or delusive. (shrink)

There are a number of different matters that come under the heading of ‘consciousness’. One of them is phenomenality, the feeling of say a sensation of red or a pain, that is what it is like to have such a sensation or other experience. Another is reflection on phenomenality. Imagine two infants, both of which have pain, but only one of which has a thought about that pain. Both would have phenomenal states, but only the latter would have a state (...) of reflexive consciousness. This entry will start with phenomenality, moving later to reflexivity and then to one other kind of consciousness. (shrink)

The present article discusses shared epistemological characteristics of two distinct areas of research: the field of first-person inquiry and the field of quantum mechanics. We outline certain philosophical challenges that arise in each of the two lines of inquiry, and point towards the central similarity of their observational situation: the impossibility of disregarding the interrelatedness of the observed phenomena with the act of observation. We argue that this observational feature delineates a specific category of research that we call the non-trivial (...) domain. Unlike the trivial domain, non-trivial research cannot assume the view from nowhere on which the observed phenomena could be regarded as existing independently of the process of observation. Presenting first-person inquiry and quantum mechanics as two of its examples, we show that non-trivial research violates several fundamental observational presuppositions of the trivial domain, exemplified in the principles of classical physics. Drawing on Niels Bohr’s philosophy of quantum mechanics and the constructivist notion of enaction, we stress the constructive, participatory, and irreversible nature of observation in the non-trivial domain. We discuss the possibility of developing a non-representationalist epistemology of the non-trivial, and consider the implications of our discussion for research in the non-trivial domain, as well as for the general understanding of the scientific inquiry. (shrink)

This paper offers practical advice about how to interact with machines that we have reason to believe could have minds. I argue that we should approach these interactions by assigning credences to judgements about whether the machines in question can think. We should treat the premises of philosophical arguments about whether these machines can think as offering evidence that may increase or reduce these credences. I describe two cases in which you should refrain from doing as your favored philosophical view (...) about thinking machines suggests. Even if you believe that machines are mindless, you should acknowledge that treating them as if they are mindless risks wronging them. Suppose your considered philosophical view that a machine has a mind leads you to consider dating it. You may have reason to regret that decision should these dates lead on to a life-long relationship with a mindless machine. In the paper’s final section, I suggest that building a machine that is capable of performing all intelligent human behavior should produce a general increase in confidence that machines can think. Any reasonable judge should count this feat as evidence in favor of machines having minds. This rational nudge could lead to broad acceptance of the idea that machines can think. (shrink)

I argue that Byrne & Hilbert (B&H) have not answered Hardin's objection to physicalism about color concerning the unitary-binary structure of the colors for two reasons. First, their account of unitary-binary structure seems unsatisfactory. Second, pace B&H, there are no physicalistically acceptable candidates to be the hue-magnitudes. I conclude with a question about the justification of physicalism about color.

Two theories dominate the current debate on group agency: functionalism, as endorsed by Bryce Huebner and Brian Epstein, and interpretivism, as defended by Deborah Tollefsen, and Christian List and Philip Pettit. In this paper, I will give a new argument to favour functionalism over interpretivism. I discuss a class of cases which the former, but not the latter, can accommodate. Two features characterise this class: First, distinct groups coincide, that is numerically distinct groups share all their members at all time. (...) Second, we have access to the inner mechanisms of the groups agents, because members know what they have decided on. I construct a counterexample with these features allowing me to reject interpretivism about group agency in favour of functionalism. (shrink)

This thesis articulates an analytic version of the ontology of idealism, according to which universal phenomenal consciousness is all there ultimately is, everything else in nature being reducible to patterns of excitation of this consciousness. The thesis’ key challenge is to explain how the seemingly distinct conscious inner lives of different subjects—such as you and me—can arise within this fundamentally unitary phenomenal field. Along the way, a variety of other challenges are addressed, such as: how we can reconcile idealism with (...) the fact that we all inhabit a common external world; why this world unfolds independently of our personal volition or imagination; why there are such tight correlations between measured patterns of brain activity and reports of experience; etc. The core idea of this thesis can be summarized thus: we, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of universal phenomenal consciousness, analogously to how a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) manifests multiple disjoint centers of subjectivity also called ‘alters.’ We, and all other living organisms, are surrounded by the transpersonal phenomenal activity of universal consciousness, which unfolds beyond the dissociative boundary of our respective alter. The inanimate world we perceive around us is the extrinsic appearance—i.e. the phenomenal image imprinted from across our dissociative boundary—of this activity. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other alters. (shrink)

It is well known in contemporary Madhyamaka studies that the seventh century Indian philosopher Candrakīrti rejects the foundationalist Abhidharma epistemology. The question that is still open to debate is: Does Candrakīrti offer any alternative Madhyamaka epistemology? One possible way of addressing this question is to find out what Candrakīrti says about the nature of buddha’s epistemic processes. We know that Candrakīrti has made some puzzling remarks on that score. On the one hand, he claims buddha is the pramāṇabhūta-puruṣa (person of (...) epistemic and moral authority), sarvākārajñatājñānaṃ (omniscient, wise), pratyakṣalakṣaṇam (exclusively perceptual in characteristic) [Candrakīrti (MABh VI.214)], and claims that there are clearly four pramāṇas—epistemic warrants—direct perception (pratyakṣa), inference (anumāna), testimony (āgama) and analogy (upamāna) [Candrakīrti (Pp I.3), cf. MacDonald 2015, pp. 287–288]. On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, Candrakīrti claims that buddhahood is an embodiment of a complete cessation of “mind and mental processes” [Candrakīrti (MABh XI.1, 155a; MAB XI.17d)] Now how are we to make sense of these two seemingly contradictory statements? Do these statements reflect any deeper conflicts within Candrakīrti’s system or is there a coherent way to interpret these statements? The Tibetan Prāsaṅgika interpreters of Candrakīrti’s Madhyamaka largely agree that there is no internal contradiction in Candrakīrti’s system, and agree there is a way to make coherent sense of these statements. Nevertheless, the Tibetans exegetes bring to the table two radically conflicting proposals to approach Candrakīrti’s Mādhyamaka; both claiming to successfully address the apparent tension arising from Candrakīrti’s statements. One proposal is made by Tsongkhapa Losang Dakpa (Tsong kha pa bLo bzang grags pa, 1357–1419), who maintains the tension can be plausibly resolved by demonstrating that Candrakīrti’s unique non-foundationalist epistemological program renders him an epistemological coherentist. In contrast Taktsang Lotsawa Sherap Rinchen (sTag tshang Lo tsā ba Shes rab rin chen, 1405–1477) argues that according to Candrakīrti buddha is a global agnostic, on the ground of the nonexistence of mind and mental processes for those who have attained fully awakening. Taktsang instead proposes the no-mind thesis as a more plausible way to resolve the tension in Candrakīrti’s philosophy, categorically refusing to attribute to buddha any cognitive processes and epistemic warrants. This paper is an analysis of Taktsang’s no-mind thesis—the claim that buddhas utterly lack any knowledge of the world because they do not have epistemic processes and warrants to perceive the world—in what follows a rational reconstruction of his arguments is developed in order to evaluate his thesis. We shall then assess the implications of accepting Taktsang’s no-mind thesis. (shrink)

Free will in intentional consciousness is exposed to skeptics since it was found that subconscious neural activities, what is called readiness potential, precedes the intention to an action. The question of whether free will is an authentic illusion has been argued not only in psychology but physics and philosophy. Most of scientists, however, think that the intentional consciousness who believes to have his/her own free will, is determined by readiness potential in advance, and that free will cannot coexist with determinism. (...) We here point out that knowing to be determined in advance cannot be verified till local event at a local site can be known from a different local site without disturbing the event. That is the assumption of locality. We here show that determinism, free will and locality are three essential elements in consciousness, and show that they constitute trilemma. The fact that one of three elements must be abandoned can lead to three types of consciousness. Absence of free will can constitute type I consciousness which is consistent with symptoms in autism spectrum disorder such as weakened theory of mind. Absence of determinism can constitute type II consciousness which is consistent with symptoms in schizophrenia such as thought insertion, self-other integration. Absence of locality can constitute type III consciousness which is consistent with typical people. We can find the entanglement of intentional consciousness with unconsciousness including readiness potential only in type III consciousness. Finally, we show that sense of agency and free will cannot be established until consciousness as an entanglement is implemented. (shrink)

I am aware of the red and orange autumn leaves. Am I aware of my awareness of the leaves? Not so according to many philosophers. By contrast, many meditative traditions report an experience of awareness itself. I argue that such a pure awareness experience must have a non-sensory phenomenal character. I use Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments for assisting in recognising pure awareness. In particular, I investigate the gap where one cannot see one’s head. This is not a mere gap because (...) I seem to be looking from here. Critically, I claim, the experience of looking from here has a non-sensory phenomenal character. I argue that this sense of being aware cannot be reduced to egocentric visual-spatial relations nor the viewpoint because it continues when I close my eyes. Neither is a multisensory origin sufficient to explain why I seem to be at this central point rather than elsewhere. Traditionally, claims of a pure awareness experience have been restricted to highly trained individuals in very restricted circumstances. The innovation of Harding’s approach is that it reliably isolates a candidate for pure awareness using methods which can be replicated at any time. (shrink)

Illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. This thesis is widely judged to be uniquely counterintuitive: the idea that consciousness is an illusion strikes most people as absurd, and seems almost impossible to contemplate in earnest. Defenders of illusionism should be able to explain the apparent absurdity of their own thesis, within their own framework. However, this is no trivial task: arguably, none of the illusionist theories currently on (...) the market is able to do this. I present a new theory of phenomenal introspection and argue that it might deal with the task at hand. (shrink)

Förståelse kan sägas vara den högsta formen av medveten insikt. Kunskap om ett fenomen behöver inte i sig vara tillräcklig för förståelse - de tidiga människorna visste att solen gick upp i öster, men de förstod inte att detta berodde på att jorden är rund och roterar. Förståelsebegreppet är centralt för all vetenskaplig aktivitet, men har mest studerats och tillämpats inom human- och samhällsvetenskaperna. Inom naturvetenskapen har ”förståelse” fått träda i skymundan för ”förklaring”. Vi skall se att detta är olyckligt (...) och att förståelsebegreppet verkligen är av högsta relevans även för naturvetenskapen. Vi får här ett verktyg för att bedöma de yttersta gränserna för våra insikter i omvärlden. Analysen i detta arbete utgår ifrån en ny teori för förståelse, där de två fundamentala elementen är abstraktion och jämförelse. Ett antal intressanta konsekvenser följer, exempelvis visar vi att vissa fenomen aldrig kommer att kunna förstås och att lärandeprocessen ges nya möjligheter. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Issues concerning the putative perception/cognition divide are not only age-old, but also resurface in contemporary discussions in various forms. In this paper, I connect a relatively new debate concerning perceptual confidence to the perception/cognition divide. The term ‘perceptual confidence’ is quite common in the empirical literature, but there is an unsettled question about it, namely: are confidence assignments perceptual or post-perceptual? John Morrison in two recent papers puts forward the claim that confidence arises already at the level of perception. (...) In this paper, I first argue that Morrison’s case is unconvincing, and then develop one picture on perceptual precision with the notion of ‘matching profile’ and ‘supervaluation’ : 481–495.), highlighting the fact that this is a vagueness account, which is similar to but importantly different from indeterminacy accounts : 156–184.). With this model in hand, there can be rich resources with which to draw a theoretical line between perception and cognition. (shrink)

Many philosophers have tried to defend physicalism concerning phenomenal consciousness, by explaining dualist intuitions within a purely physicalist framework. One of the most common strategies to do so consists in interpreting the alleged “explanatory gap” between phenomenal states and physical states as resulting from a fallacy, or a cognitive illusion. In this paper, I argue that the explanatory gap does not rest on a fallacy or a cognitive illusion. This does not imply the falsity of physicalism, but it has consequences (...) on the kind of physicalism we should embrace. (shrink)

The ethical concerns regarding the successful development of an Artificial Intelligence have received a lot of attention lately. The idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of an AI causing extreme human suffering is important enough to warrant serious consideration. Others look at this problem from the opposite perspective, namely that of the AI itself. Here the idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that (...) it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of humanity causing extreme suffering to an AI is important enough to warrant serious consideration. This paper starts from the observation that both concerns rely on problematic philosophical assumptions. Rather than tackling these assumptions directly, it proceeds to present an argument that if one takes these assumptions seriously, then one has a moral obligation to advocate for a ban on the development of a conscious AI. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to address a well-known dilemma for physicalism. If mental properties are type identical to physical properties, then their causal efficacy is secure, but at the cost of ruling out mentality in creatures very different to ourselves. On the other hand, if mental properties are multiply realizable, then all kinds of creatures can instantiate them, but then they seem to be causally redundant. The causal exclusion problem depends on the widely held principle that realized properties (...) inherit their causal powers from their realizers. While this principle holds for functional realization, it fails on a broader notion of realization that permits the realization of complex qualitative properties such as spatial and temporal patterns. Such properties are best seen as dependent powerful qualities, which have their causal roles in virtue of being the qualities they are, and do not inherit powers from their realizers. Recent studies have identified one such property—neural synchrony—as a correlate of consciousness. If synchrony is also partially constitutive of consciousness, then phenomenal properties are both multiply realizable and causally novel. I outline a version of representationalism about consciousness on which this constitution claim holds. (shrink)

The idea that attention is necessary for consciousness (the “Necessity Thesis”) is frequently advocated by philosophers and psychologists alike. Experiments involving inattentional and change blindness are thought to support the Necessity Thesis, but they do so only if subjects failing to notice the target stimulus are also not conscious of it. This article uses commonsense phenomenological observations supplemented with empirical data to argue that some subjects failing to notice the target stimulus nonetheless experience its color. Since subjects not noticing the (...) target are commonly assumed to be not attending to it, these scenarios would be instances of consciousness without attention: instead of inattentional and change blindness supporting the Necessity Thesis, they would present counterexamples to it. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded in perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the grounding relations (...) found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see how Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception avoids both rationalism and empiricism. Whereas empiricism has argued that all the content of our knowledge is grounded in causal interactions between the world and our senses, and rationalism has held that experience does not suffice as a reason for knowledge, thinking of the relation between experience and knowledge in terms of motivation accommodates the best insights of rationalism and empiricism. Motivation allows us to see how knowledge can be grounded in experience without the content of knowledge being reducible to that of experience. (shrink)