When looking for an account that explains how pain changes consciousness, one finds that most studies in the phenomenology of pain focus either on the outcome of the change, or on how it affects the self, as a conscious object, and the self’s experiences in the world of objects. This paper focuses on the mechanism of consciousness, exploring the nature of the change that pain creates in consciousness and how exactly that change occurs. The paper provides a systematic, phenomenological inquiry (...) in three phases: one identifies three essential attributes of consciousness, another identifies three essential attributes of pain, and a third analyses the outcome of the integration between both sets of attributes. The paper demonstrates how the change wrought by pain on the self, as a conscious object, allows the self to breach its boundaries as an object, and experience being a non-object, even if only in part and temporarily. (shrink)

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive (...) science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience . From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to Kriegel’s criticism of McGinn’s mysterianism. Kriegel objects to a particular argument for the possibility of human cognitive closure and also gives a direct argument against mysterianism. I intend to show that neither the objection nor the argument is convincing.