I will argue that accounts of mineness and pre-reflective self-awareness can be helpful to panpsychists in solving the combination problems. A common strategy in answering the subject combination problem in panpsychism is to deflate the subject, eliminating or reducing subjects to experience. Many modern panpsychist theories are deflationist or endorse deflationist accounts of subjects, such as Parfit’s reductionism of personal identity and G. Strawson’s identity view. To see if there can be deflation we need to understand what the subject/self is. (...) One aspect of consciousness left unexplored and unappreciated by panpsychist theories is pre-reflective self-consciousness/self-awareness. Theories of the self, inspired by phenomenology, that are serious about subjectivity, could be of use in arguing against the deflationary reductionism of the experiencing subject. These theories show that there is more to the subject of experience than just its experiences (qualities). Even without arguing for any precise account of the nature of the self, it can be shown what phenomenology of subjective character of consciousness and pre-reflective self-awareness contributes to the combination problem debate. (shrink)

Buddhism famously denies the existence of the self. This is usually understood to mean that Buddhism denies the existence of a substantial self existing over and above the flow of conscious experience. But what of the purely experiential self accepted by the phenomenological tradition? Does Buddhism deny the reflexive or first-personal character of conscious experience? In this paper, I argue that even the notion of an experiential self is ultimately incompatible with Buddhist teaching—in fact, deeply incompatible. According to Buddhism, I (...) am an objectively existing person (though not irreducibly real). However, when I conceive of myself as myself, I conceive of myself as having a subjective mode of existence. What Buddhism denies, then, is not that I exist, but that I exist in the subjective or first-person manner in which I conceive of myself as existing. The problem I take up in this paper is to understand how Buddhism can simultaneously affirm the reflexivity of conscious experience and yet deny that the experiential self is a self. (shrink)

Buddhism teaches that ‘self’ as a substantial, enduring entity is an illusion. But for self to be an illusion there must be something in our experience that is misinterpreted as self. What is this? The notion of an experiential self plays an important role in phenomenological investigations of conscious experience. Does the illusion of self consist in mistaking a purely experiential self for a substantial self? I argue against this and locate the source of the illusion in time-consciousness. It is (...) the essence of consciousness to flow, but the flow of consciousness presupposes an experiential present. The experiential present — an abiding sense of ‘now’ — is the dimension through which experiences are experienced as streaming. It is this, I argue, that is misinterpreted as an enduring self. I support my account by arguing that the synchronic and diachronic unity of consciousness can be accounted for in terms of impersonal, temporal experience, and that conceiving of consciousness as the presence-dimension rather than as the I-dimension affords a solution to the brain-bisection puzzle. (shrink)

I can be aware of myself, and thereby come to know things about myself, in a variety of different ways. But is there some special way in which I—and only I—can learn about myself? Can I become aware of myself by introspecting? Do I somehow show up in my own conscious experiences? David Hume and most contemporary philosophers say no. They deny that the self shows up in experience. However, in this paper I appeal to research on schizophrenia—on thought insertion, (...) in particular—to argue that Hume and his follows are wrong: The self does, in fact, show up in experience. (shrink)

The realm of intentionality is definitive of phenomenology as a reflective methodology. Yet it is precisely the focus on the intentionalgiventhat has been condemned recently.Speculative realism argues that phenomenology is unsatisfactory since the reduction to the intentional realm excludes the ‘external’, i.e. reality independent of consciousness. This criticism allows me to clarify the nature of intentionality.Material phenomenologyfinds, in contrast, that the intentional realm excludes the ‘inner’. This criticism allows me to discuss the way in whichipseityenters as an element of experience. (...) Intentionality, viewed psychologically, is rightly the distinct arena of phenomenological psychology. However, there is no doubting the difficulty of maintaining a research focus precisely on the realm of intentionality; there areaporiasof the reduction. I discuss some of the difficulties. (shrink)

The Two Selves takes the position that the self is not a "thing" easily reduced to an object of scientific analysis. Rather, the self consists in a multiplicity of aspects, some of which have a neuro-cognitive basis (and thus are amenable to scientific inquiry) while other aspects are best construed as first-person subjectivity, lacking material instantiation. As a consequence of their potential immateriality, the subjective aspect of self cannot be taken as an object and therefore is not easily amenable to (...) treatment by current scientific methods. -/- Klein argues that to fully appreciate the self, its two aspects must be acknowledged, since it is only in virtue of their interaction that the self of everyday experience becomes a phenomenological reality. However, given their different metaphysical commitments (i.e., material and immaterial aspects of reality), a number of issues must be addressed. These include, but are not limited to, the possibility of interaction between metaphysically distinct aspects of reality, questions of causal closure under the physical, the principle of energy conservation. -/- After addressing these concerns, Klein presents evidence based on self-reports from case studies of individuals who suffer from a chronic or temporary loss of their sense of personal ownership of their mental states. Drawing on this evidence, he argues that personal ownership may be the factor that closes the metaphysical gap between the material and immaterial selves, linking these two disparate aspects of reality, thereby enabling us to experience a unified sense of self despite its underlying multiplicity. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper we focus on what is referred to as the ‘mineness’ of experience, that is, the intimate familiarity we have with our own thoughts, perceptions, and emotions. Most accounts characterize mineness in terms of an experiential dimension, the first-person givenness of experience, that is subsumed under the notion of minimal self-consciousness or a ‘minimal self’. We argue that this account faces problems and develop an alternative account of mineness in terms of the coherence of experiences with what we (...) label an ‘embodied biography’. Building on a near consensus among consciousness researchers over the function of consciousness as integrating infor- mation, we argue that the phenomenology of mineness consists in the absence of any further thought on top of the experience itself. Finally we argue that this non-phenomenological account of mineness fits well with existing data on pathologies of mineness such as delusions of thought insertion. (shrink)

I investigate the status of subjectivity in Integrated Information Theory. This leads me to examine if Integrated Information Theory can answer the hard problem of consciousness. On itself, Integrated Information Theory does not seem to constitute an answer to the hard problem, but could be combined with panpsychism to yield a more satisfying theory of consciousness. I will show, that even if Integrated Information Theory employs the metaphysical machinery of panpsychism, Integrated Information would still suffer from a different problem, not (...) being able to account for the subjective character of consciousness. (shrink)