This dissertation defends the reliability of first-person methods for studying consciousness, and applies first-person experiments to two philosophical problems: the experience of size and of the self. In chapter 1, I discuss the motivations for taking a first-person approach to consciousness, the background assumptions of the dissertation and some methodological preliminaries. In chapter 2, I address the claim that phenomenal judgements are far less reliable than perceptual judgements (Schwitzgebel, 2011). I argue that the main errors and limitations in making phenomenal (...) judgements are due to domain-general factors, which are shared in the formation of perceptual judgements. Phenomenal judgements may still be statistically less reliable than perceptual judgements, though I provide reasons for thinking that Schwitzgebel (2011) overstates the case for statistical unreliability. I also provide criteria for distinguishing between reliable and unreliable phenomenal judgements, hence defending phenomenal judgements against general introspective scepticism. Having identified the main errors in making phenomenal judgements, in chapter 3, I discuss how first-person experiments can be used to control for these errors. I provide examples, and discuss how they overcome attentional and conceptual errors, minimise biases, and exhibit high intersubjective reliability. In chapter 4, I investigate size experience. I use first-person experiments and empirical findings to argue that distant things looking smaller cannot be explained as an awareness of instantiated objective properties (visual angle or retinal image size). I also discuss how an awareness of uninstantiated objective properties cannot adequately account for the phenomenal character of size experience. This provides support for a subjectivist account of variance in size experience. In chapter 5, I investigate the sense of self. I distinguish between a weak sense of self (for-me-ness) and a strong sense of self in which there is a polarity between subject and object. I use first-person experiments from Douglas Harding to demonstrate an explicit strong sense of self, specifically when I point at where others see my face. I also argue that this sense of self is not explained by inference, thoughts, feelings, imagination nor the viewpoint. Rather, it is part of the structure of experience that I seem to be looking from here. Even if there is a sense of self, there may be no self. The question of chapter 6 is whether there can be a direct experience of the self. I argue that to function as a bearer of experience the subject must be single and lack sensory qualities in itself. I use Harding’s first-person experiments to investigate the visual gap where I cannot see my head. I argue that it conforms to the above criteria, and hence is a candidate for being the subject. This finding, in conjunction with the fact that I seem to be looking from the same location, provides prima facie evidence for the reality of the subject. I hold then that contrary to Hume and most philosophers since, that there can be a direct self-experience, if one knows which direction to attend. (shrink)

From the perspective of many philosophers of mind in these early years of the 21st Century, the debate between dualism and physicalism has seemed to have stalled, if not to have come to a complete standstill. There seems to be no way to settle the basic clash of intuitions that underlies it. Recently however, a growing number of proponents of Russellian monism have suggested that their view promises to show us a new way forward. Insofar as Russellian monism might allow (...) us to break out of the current gridlock, it's no wonder that it's become "hot stuff." To my mind, however, the excitement about Russellian monism is misplaced. Though some version of Russellian monism might well be true, I do not believe that it enables us to break free of the dualism/physicalism divide. As I will argue, once we properly understand what's required to flesh out an adequate monistic story, we will see that we are in an important way right back where we started. (shrink)

Response to commentaries on keynote article.

Certain contemporary philosophers have thought that the first-person, qualitative aspect of conscious experience should be taken seriously when it comes to our thinking about personal identity through time. These philosophers have thus argued that experiential continuity is essential to a person’s ability to persist identically through time. This is what I will call ‘the phenomenological theory’. In this thesis I describe the phenomenological theory and then discuss three problems that have plagued the history of this theory: the bridge problem, the (...) token problem, and the ontological problem. I will argue that a recent version of the phenomenological theory proposed by Barry Dainton and Timothy Bayne provides satisfactory answers to two of these problems, but not the third. I will conclude this thesis by proposing a superior version of the phenomenological theory—one that can handle all three problems. (shrink)

The inherently subjective nature of consciousness severely limits our ability to make progress on the problem of consciousness. The inability to acquire objective, publicly available data on the phenomenal aspect of consciousness makes evaluating alternative theories very difficult, if not impossible. However, the anomalous nature of subjective states with respect to our conventional theories of the physical world suggests the possibility of considering other anomalous data around consciousness that happen to be objective. For such purposes, I propose that we examine (...) the psi data gathered under laboratory conditions, which generally receive little attention. I wish to consider whether we have theories or frameworks of consciousness that attempt to account for subjective qualia but also fit the psi data. I argue that Russellian monism can be combined with an argument regarding quantum holism to arrive at a version of cosmopsychism that fits very well with the psi data. While I do not argue that such a framework exhausts the theoretical possibilities, I do suggest we can move forward with a framework that has attractive theoretical features and is also consistent with objective data currently on the table. (shrink)

In this thesis I present a phenomenological investigation of our experience of time – of things as they fall within time – and suggest that something important goes missing in recent debates. This is the notion of a point of view. I believe that articulating the sense in which we have a point of view in time, and what this is a point of view upon, is crucial to an account of how things are for an experiencing subject. In the (...) first chapter, I elucidate the specious present. I argue that theorists appeal to the specious present under two guises without explicitly distinguishing between them; yet these two conceptions are not identical, while one entails the other the reverse is not true. In the second chapter I defend an appeal to the specious present against proponents of what I refer to as snapshot models of temporal experience. I argue that perceptual experience minimally presents something of some non-zero temporal extent as such. In the third chapter I discuss how we are to characterise experience over intervals of time of a greater extent than the specious present. I offer a proposal on which a subject is invariably presented with a positive temporal extent, with this interval marking the partition between the past and the future for the subject. In the fourth chapter I compare and contrast our experience of objects and events, and our experiential point of view in space and in time. Among other things, I argue that getting right how things are for the subject requires an appeal to the subject’s asymmetrical awareness of times either side of the specious present. In fifth and final chapter I demonstrate that appeal to an experiencing subject’s tensed temporal perspective can explain the sense in which time seems to pass. (shrink)

When I say that I am a lot of things, I mean it literally and metaphysically speaking. The Self, or so I shall argue, is a plurality (notwithstanding the fact that ordinary language takes "the Self" to be a singular term – but, after all, language is only language). It is not a substance or a substratum, and it is not a collection or a bundle. The view I wish to advocate for is a kind of reductionism, in line with (...) some – but not all – broadly Humean ideas. In short, I will defend the view there are the experiences and mental states we have, and that's it: no additional substances, and no bundles. This does not mean, however, that there is no Self – the Self simply is the experiences. I will try to articulate and defend this view by showing that it can accommodate what I take to be the three main desiderata for any theory of the Self to satisfy: first, that the Self is the subject of experience (a subject of mental states, in general); second, that there is a unity to the Self in the sense that our (conscious, phenomenal) experience is at least partly continuous or 'stream-like'; and third, that we do not die when we go to sleep or when we otherwise don't have any (conscious, phenomenal) experiences. (shrink)

Physicalism is the most widely accepted metaphysical view today. The thesis of physicalism, however, seems unable to adequately explain the existence and nature of consciousness. Moreover, the thesis is not itself a scientific finding but must be characterized as a metaphysical assumption. Hence, there are strong reasons to explore alternatives to the physicalist view. While metaphysical theses based on classic idealistic views like subjective or absolute idealism have been largely absent from the philosophical debate during most of the 20th century, (...) in the last few decades theses of this kind have been advocated, most notably by John Foster and Timothy Sprigge. Russell’s and Moore’s influential refutations of idealism have been severely questioned by recent scholarship, which means that conventional arguments against absolute idealism appear to be significantly less well-founded than what is usually assumed. With Sprigge’s panpsychistic absolute idealistic metaphysical system as the basis and by incorporating key elements in Foster’s thinking, the present paper outlines an idealistic thesis which, it is argued, first of all escapes the problem of consciousness inherent in physicalism and secondly counters important arguments raised against Sprigge’s views, including the question of personal identity and the problem of the one and the many. In addition, this thesis can be seen as naturalistic in a broad sense, thereby potentially being of existential relevance also within the framework of modernity. Thus, it is the aim of the present paper to argue – although sketchily – that despite its controversial character in the light of contemporary mainstream views, panpsychistic absolute idealism demonstrates a significant explanatory power and is therefore of philosophical interest as a subject for further study. (shrink)

To the great puzzlement of his readers, Berkeley begins by arguing that nothing exists other than minds and ideas, but concludes by claiming to have defended the existence of bodies. How can Berkeley's idealism amount to such a defense? I introduce resources from Berkeley's philosophy of language, and especially his analysis of the discourse of physics, to defend a novel answer to this question. According to Berkeley, the technical terms of physics are meaningful despite failing to designate any reality; their (...) meaningfulness derives from the useful role they play in organizing and predicting our experience. I argue that Berkeleian bodies have the same status as these theoretical entities: they are mere 'quasi-entities' introduced by our ways of speaking and thinking in order to serve our practical purposes. Berkeley nevertheless considers this to be a defense of the existence of bodies because he endorses a radically deflationary semantics for 'exists.'. (shrink)

I assess a number of connected ideas about temporal experience that are introspectively plausible, but which I believe can be argued to be incorrect. These include the idea that temporal experiences are extended experiential processes, that they have an internal structure that in some way mirrors the structure of the apparent events they present, and the idea that time in experience is in some way represented by time itself. I explain how these ideas can be developed into more sharply defined (...) views, and then argue that these views are inconsistent with certain empirical facts about how time is represented in the brain. These facts instead support a kind of atomic view, on which temporal experiences are temporally unstructured atoms. (shrink)

Metaphysicians eager to engage with substantive, thoughtful, and provocative issues will be happy with John Heil’s From an Ontological Point of View. The book represents not only a sustained defence of a specific metaphysical theory, but also of a specific way of doing metaphysics. Put ontology first, Heil urges us, in order to remember that the original fascination of metaphysics wasn’t the question ‘what must the world be like in order to correspond neatly to our use of language?’, but rather (...) the altogether more fundamental ‘what must the world be like?’. (shrink)

This paper proposes a critical examination of the wholism that Cartwright contemplates. The first part spells out the consequences of this position – notably our principled ignorance of nature as a whole. The second part considers that physical theory which is widely claimed to exhibit some sort of wholism, namely quantum physics. I sketch a wholistic model of quantum physics and compare this model to the wholism that Cartwright considers. The result is that – contrary to what Cartwright suggests – (...) we do not have to see ourselves as being ignorant of nature as such and our scientific view of nature can be quite systematic instead of being a patchwork. Finally, Cartwright’s wholism is confronted with confirmation wholism and semantic wholism. The result is again that these sorts of wholism speak against a patchwork view of our knowledge. (shrink)

So selbstverständlich es klingt, vom Geist, der Psyche oder auch der Seele eines Menschen zu reden, und so vertraut uns wissenschaftliche Disziplinen sind, die sich philosophisch oder empirisch damit beschäftigen, so schwer fällt es, ein einheitliches Merkmale dafür anzugeben, wann etwas ein psychisches Phänomen ist. Viele der potentiellen Merkmale decken eben nur einen Teil des Spektrums dessen ab, was wir gewöhnlich als psychisch bezeichnen würden, und sind damit bestenfalls hinreichende, aber sicher keine notwendigen Bedingungen des Psychischen. Im Mittelpunkt des folgenden (...) Artikels wird dagegen ein Merkmal stehen, von dem feststeht, daß es nicht hinreichend ist, von dem man aber vermuten kann, es sei zumindest notwendig: die Individualität psychischer Phänomene. Die Frage, mit der ich mich beschäftigen werde, ist, ob sich diese Vermutung mit Bezug auf eine Grnppe paradigmatisch psychischer Phänomene aufrecht erhalten läßt, die intentionalen Einstellungen. (shrink)