In recent years, the science and the philosophy of consciousness has seen growing interest in structural questions about consciousness. This is the Editorial Introduction for a special volume for Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on “Structuralism in Consciousness Studies.”.

Abstract: According to a higher-order theory of consciousness, you are in a conscious (psychological) state if and only if you are conscious of being in that state. This paper develops and discusses a Euthyphro dilemma for theories of this sort; that is, a dilemma which asks whether the state is conscious because you are conscious of being in it, or, alternatively, whether you are conscious of being in it because it is conscious. I focus on two different versions of the (...) higher-order theory: the higher-order thought theory, defended by David Rosenthal, Hakwan Lau and Richard Brown, among others, and the higher-order acquaintance theory, defended by Brie Gertler, Martine Nida-Rümelin and David Chalmers, among others. I argue that both versions of the view face a Euthyphro dilemma though the issue takes a different form in each case. (shrink)

Critics have charged constitutive panpsychism with inconsistency. Panpsychists reject physicalism for its seeming inability to explain consciousness. In making this argument, they commit themselves to the idea of "revelation": that we know, in some especially direct way, the nature of consciousness. Yet they then attribute properties to ourconsciousness---like being constituted out of trillions of simpler experiential parts---that conflict with how it seems introspectively. This seems to pose a dilemma: either revelation is false, and physicalism remains intact, or revelation is true, (...) and constitutive panpsychists are hoist by their own petard. But this is too simplistic. Constitutive panpsychists can say that our minds contain innumerable phenomenal states that are "confused" with one another: immediately present to introspection only en masse, not individually. Accepting revelation does not require ignoring the attentional, conceptual, and interpretive limitations of introspection, and these familiar limitations remove the tension between panpsychism and relevation. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel argument against one theoretically attractive form of panpsychism. I argue that “idealist panpsychism” is false since it cannot account for spacetime’s structure. Idealist panpsychists posit that fundamental reality is purely experiential. Moreover, they posit that the consciousness at the fundamental level metaphysically grounds and explains both the facts of physics and the facts of human consciousness. I argue that if idealist panpsychism is true, human consciousness and the consciousness at the fundamental level will have the (...) same metrical structure. However, as I demonstrate, human consciousness does not exhibit the same metrical structure as spacetime. Consequently, the idealist panpsychist faces an explanatory gap between the fundamental consciousness she posits and spacetime. Idealist panpsychism is incompatible with the existence of such an explanatory gap. Thus, idealist panpsychists must close this explanatory gap (which I argue they lack the resources to do), or idealist panpsychism is false. (shrink)

I argue that it is metaphysically necessary that: (i) every fundamental entity is conscious, and (ii) every fundamental property is a phenomenal property.

In consciousness science, several promising approaches have been developed for how to represent conscious experience in terms of mathematical spaces and structures. What is missing, however, is an explicit definition of what a 'mathematical structure of conscious experience' is. Here, we propose such a definition. This definition provides a link between the abstract formal entities of mathematics and the concreta of conscious experience; it complements recent approaches that study quality spaces, qualia spaces or phenomenal spaces; it provides a general method (...) to identify and investigate structures of conscious experience; and it may serve as a framework to unify the various approaches from different fields. We hope that ultimately this work provides a basis for developing a common formal language to study consciousness. (shrink)