This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely (...) tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them. (shrink)

During the Italian Renaissance, artists and anatomists compared man to various mechanical devices, in an attempt to uncover knowledge about the structure and processes of the human body. In so doing, they drew on ancient Greek notions of instrumentality and proportion. During the early Scientific Revolution, the metaphor of Man the machine played a key role in the development of mechanistic philosophy. During the Enlightenment, it served views on materialism and atheism. By the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution was (...) in full swing, a fundamental change in the relationship of man to machine had come about. Whereas, for Protagoras, man had been the measure of all things, now suddenly the machine was the standard by which the capacities and limits of man were judged. Man the machine was a key feature in the development of the totalitarian ideology of Communism. Moreover, for over a century now, the technocratic viewpoint has guided many technological innovations. Tracing a history of this metaphor, through Leonardo, Vesalius, Harvey, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Marx and Wells, places man's relationship with technology and his gradual loss of identity since the Renaissance in a new context. (shrink)