Some fictions deliberately omit all fictional statements about the mental functioning of fictional agents. This presents an interpretive dilemma, as when we read fiction we ought to reconstruct the fictional minds of characters significant to the plot. Fictions that present the reader with an opaque fictional mind resist the general imaginative project prescribed by fiction-making and seem to demand a novel approach to imagining their fictional entities. Such fictional entities demand the reader commit to one of at least two different (...) ways of imagining nothing about a fictional mind, without explicitly authorizing either. One approach has already been described by H. Porter Abbott. Another can be extracted from Simone De Beauvoir, whose ethics of ambiguity is well suited to dealing with fictional entities about which nothing is fixed nor determined. (shrink)

Panpsychism is the view that every concrete and unified thing has some form of phenomenal consciousness or experience. It is an age-old doctrine, which, to the surprise of many, has recently taken on new life. In philosophy of mind, it has been put forth as a simple and radical solution to the mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996, 2003;Strawson 2006; Nagel 1979, 2012). In metaphysics and philosophy of science, it has been put forth as a solution to the problem of accounting for (...) the intrinsic nature of the physical itself (Strawson 2006, Seager 2006). In this thesis, I show that panpsychism can also be defended on the basis of an argument from our (arguable) acquaintance with the nature of causation in agency. This argument has made frequent appearances throughout the history of philosophy, with philosophers such as Leibniz, Schopenhauer and James, and I construct and defend an updated version of it. Furthermore, I offer a solution to the combination problem: how can complex (human and animal-type) consciousness result from simple (fundamental particle-type) consciousness? This is generally regarded as the most serious problem facing contemporary panpsychism. I propose that mental combination can be construed as kind causal process culminating in a fusion, and show how this avoids the main difficulties with accounting for mental combination. (shrink)

Drawing on the thinking of Donna Haraway and other transdisciplinary thinkers, this paper makes the case for an ‘avian Weird’ by exploring the representation of birds in the New Weird fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. Distinct from the Lovecraftian ‘Old Weird’ of the twentieth century, the New Weird has been defined by VanderMeer himself as “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy”. However, VanderMeer’s oeuvre is also something of a textual aviary, (...) where the avian comes to represent the entangled and monstrous ontologies of the ‘Chthulucene’. A substitute for the human-centred ‘Anthropocene’, Donna Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ indexes the fibrous and squishy bits of the world. Like Haraway, I am unsatisfied with the term ‘Anthropocene’, the planetary effects of which implicate more than only human life-forms: we need new translocal, transspecies, and transbiological ways of thinking. In its chthonic and tentacular etymology, the Chthulucene gestures to the imagery of Weird worlds, as well as the tangled, twiggy body of the nest. What happens when we look at the world through avian eyes? Might these tetrachromats offer a response to Haraway’s call to “see the world in hues of red, green, and ultraviolet”? In VanderMeer’s New Weird fiction, avian epistemologies reveal the possibility of monstrous survival in the Chthulucene. (shrink)

This paper is both systematic and historical in nature. From a historical viewpoint, I aim to show that to establish Wittgenstein’s claim that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” there is an enthymeme in Wittgenstein’s private language argument overlooked in the literature, namely Wittgenstein’s suggestion that both perceptual and bodily experiences are _transparent_ in the relevant sense that one cannot point to a mental state and wonder “What is that?” From a systematic viewpoint, I aim to show (...) that Wittgenstein’s PLA teaches us that the prevailing picture of the nature of phenomenal concepts is upside down: we can only introspectively know what is going on inside our heads, after we learn of what is going on outside. In this regard, I aim to defend two associate claims against the prevailing view of PCs on the basis of PLA. First, by means of transparency, I aim to show that there is no _de re_ awareness of our private sensation that could determine the meaning of sensation-words; for example, I am never aware _of _the phenomenal blueness of my experience of something blue. The second associated claim is that introspective self-knowledge of our private sensation is always _de dicto_. We can only know introspectively that phenomenal blueness is the phenomenal character of the experience we are undergoing after we have learned _that _ blue is the color that usually causes in us that kind of experience. Likewise, we can only introspectively know that pain is the phenomenal character of the experience we are undergoing after we have learned that pain is what usually causes some typical pain behavior. (shrink)

Volume one looks at the language of spirituality to deepen our understanding of the suicidal crisis. Spirituality remains the primary motivation for my work. However, two other significant influences have emerged in my research. The first is the intellectual tradition from the school of philosophy known as phenomenology. The second is only at an embryonic stage as a academic discourse. This is the social change, human rights movement that is becoming known as Mad Culture. The accompanying volume to this exegesis, (...) Thinking About Suicide, gives expression to the lived experience of suicidality as I have lived it and in my own words. Throughout Thinking About Suicide there is a theme of story-telling, a theme that continues here. Two distinct voices are used to tell the stories of Thinking About Suicide - a narrative voice that tells of my personal journey into and out of suicidality, and a commentary voice that reflects on that history. The aim of Thinking About Suicide is to encourage and contribute to a broad community conversation about suicide, so both these voices are in plain language to speak to that audience. In this exegesis, a third voice is heard, an academic voice telling academic 'stories'. These stories are told here through a selection of the academic papers that were written during the research and which represent the three central issues of my thesis and this exegesis: firstly, a phenomenology of the subjective, lived experience of suicidality; secondly, an anthropological or cultural critique of suicidology; and thirdly, a role for spirituality in understanding the suicidal crisis of the self. (shrink)

Quality-space theory (QST) explains the nature of the mental qualities distinctive of perceptual states by appeal to their role in perceiving. QST is typically described in terms of the mental qualities that pertain to color. Here we apply QST to the olfactory modalities. Olfaction is in various respects more complex than vision, and so provides a useful test case for QST. To determine whether QST can deal with the challenges olfaction presents, we show how a quality space (QS) could be (...) constructed relying on olfactory perceptible properties and the olfactory mental qualities then defined by appeal to that QS of olfactory perceptible properties. We also consider how to delimit the olfactory QS from other modalities. We further apply QST to the role that experience plays in refining our olfactory discriminative abilities and the occurrence of olfactory mental qualities in non-conscious olfactory states. QST is shown to be fully applicable to and useful for understanding the complex domain of olfaction. (shrink)

According to perdurantism, objects persist by being spread out over time, just as composite three-dimensional objects are spread out over space. Just as a composite three-dimensional object is spread out over space by having spatial parts, objects persist, according to perdurantism, by having temporal parts. Perdurantism can be stated more precisely by saying what exactly a temporal part is. In the sequel, Theodore Sider's definition of "instantaneous temporal part" shall be assumed: x is an instantaneous temporal part of y at (...) instant t =df. x exists at, but only at, t; x is part of y at t; and x overlaps at t everything that is part of y at t. Much more could be and has been said about how perdurantism should be formulated. Though interesting in their own right, nothing of importance here turns on these matters of formulation. (shrink)

This thesis has, as its primary target, the neo-cartesianism, or property dualism of certain philosophers of mind: David Chalmers, Tim Bayne, and others. All begin with a pre-theoretic commitment to the view that all perceptual states are conscious. They define consciousness by saying that it is synonymous with having ‘qualia’ – a term directed at phenomenal properties which defy reduction to physical states. The thesis argues that this position is challenged by certain neurological conditions, - blindsight, visual form agnosia etc- (...) which we can generalise as ‘dissociations’: conditions in which functions are separated from awareness. The thesis holds that these are examples of unconscious perception, which present the case for a different pre-theoretic position, and a redefinition of concepts used in the vicinity. Insofar as the neo-cartesians recognise the empirical, their inclination to reject the dissociations is challenged with new cases and paradigms which have emerged in recent years. It is contended that the dissociations disrupt Chalmers’ coherence between the phenomenal and the psychological, Bayne’s commitment to the Unity of Consciousness, and Phillips’ campaign against unconscious perception. In addition, synaesthesia is advanced as a problem case for Bayne’s unity contention. I argue that the dissociations are not easily dismissed, and present a real challenge for neo-cartesianism. In exploring this challenge, the thesis contributes to the case for a different philosophy of mind – a Higher Order Thought approach. The notion of unconscious perception – it is contended - much more easily finds an accommodation in HOT theories, so this thesis contributes to existing arguments for that position. HOT theories also have an advantage in being receptive to reduction, in giving a developmental account of consciousness, and in being more open to the accommodation of empirical discoveries. In each respect, there is an advantage over the respective positions taken by Chalmers and Bayne. (shrink)

This report highlights and explores four questions that arose from the workshop on temporal experience at the University of Toronto, May 20th and 21st, 2013.

This paper is an edited transcription of a talk at the 1997 Montreal symposium on "Consciousness at the Frontiers of Neuroscience". There's not much here that isn't said elsewhere, e.g. in "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and "How Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness?"]].

MS, under submission, derived from a Powerpoint presentation at a Conference on Consciousness, Memory, and Perception, in honor of Larry Weiskrantz, City University, London, September 15, 2006.

consciousness. Such unconscious processing always " Cambridge, UK " tends to re?ect habitual or strong responses. From this.

What are "private events" and what is their significance? The term is B. F. Skinner's, but the idea is much older. Before J. B. Watson challenged their methods and their metaphysics, virtually all psychologists assumed that the only way to discover a person's supposedly private states of mind was to ask her about them. Not a believer in minds, Skinner nevertheless agreed that sensations, feelings, and certain unspecified forms of "covert behavior" cannot be observed by others, because they take place (...) inside the body underneath the skin. Then he added that these inner events are of interest only to the physiologist; the concern of the behavior analyst is how intact organisms interact with their environment, not how their inward parts interact with each other. That compromise enabled Skinner to pursue behavior analysis in disregard of neurophysiology, which there was at the time no good way to study anyhow. But Skinner's talk of ineluctably private events was ill considered and ill conceived. There is no well understood sense in which people observe their own sensations, feelings, and "covert behavior," but if these take place inside the body, as it is reasonable to believe, the physiologist can observe them given the sophisticated new machines now available. And since these events inside the body vary with circumstances and influence behavior, the psychologist cannot afford to ignore what the physiologist has to say about them. Black box psychology is out of date. Though it is opaque, the skin is not an epistemological barrier. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness. I consider two broad claims about this relationship: a constitutive claim, according to which all conscious experiences constitutively involve self-consciousness; and a typicalist claim, according to which ordinary conscious experiences contingently involve self-consciousness. Both of these claims call for elucidation of the relevant notions of consciousness and self-consciousness. -/- In the first part of the thesis ('The Myth of Constitutive Self-Consciousness'), I critically examine the constitutive claim. I start by offering an (...) elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish between two concepts of self-consciousness: consciousness of one's experience, and consciousness of oneself (as oneself). Each of these concepts yields a distinct variant of the constitutive claim. In turn, each resulting variant of the constitutive claim can be interpreted in two ways: on a 'minimal' or deflationary reading, they fall within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on a 'strong' or inflationary reading, they point to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary readings of either variant of the constitutive claim are plausible and illuminating, but would ideally be formulated without using a term as polysemous as 'self-consciousness'; by contrast, the inflationary readings of either variant are not adequately supported. -/- In the second part of the thesis ('Self-Consciousness in the Real World'), I focus on the second concept of self-consciousness, or consciousness of oneself as oneself. Drawing upon empirical evidence, I defend a pluralist account of self-consciousness so construed, according to which there are several ways in which one can be conscious of oneself as oneself – through conscious thoughts, bodily experiences and perceptual experiences – that make distinct determinate contributions to one's phenomenology. This pluralist account provides us with the resources to vindicate the typicalist claim according to which consciousness of oneself as oneself – a sense of self – is pervasive in ordinary conscious experiences, as a matter of contingent empirical fact. It also provides us with the resources to assess the possibility that a subject might be conscious without being conscious of herself as herself in any way. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness appears to be particularly normatively significant. For this reason, sentience-based conceptions of ethics are widespread. In the field of animal ethics, knowing which animals are sentient appears to be essential to decide the moral status of these animals. I argue that, given that materialism is true of the mind, phenomenal consciousness is probably not particularly normatively significant. We should face up to this probable insignificance of phenomenal consciousness and move towards an ethic without sentience.

Consciousness is known to be limited in processing capacity and often described in terms of a unique processing stream across a single dimension: time. In this paper, we discuss a purely temporal pattern code, functionally decoupled from spatial signals, for conscious state generation in the brain. Arguments in favour of such a code include Dehaene et al.'s long-distance reverberation postulate, Ramachandran's remapping hypothesis, evidence for a temporal coherence index and coincidence detectors, and Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory. A time-bin resonance model (...) is developed, where temporal signatures of conscious states are generated on the basis of signal reverberation across large distances in highly plastic neural circuits. The temporal signatures are delivered by neural activity patterns which, beyond a certain statistical threshold, activate, maintain, and terminate a conscious brain state like a bar code would activate, maintain, or inactivate the electronic locks of a safe. Such temporal resonance would reflect a higher level of neural processing, independent from sensorial or perceptual brain mechanisms. (shrink)

Many philosophical issues concern questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Of these questions, there are two kinds. The first considers whether something is objective or subjective; the second what it _means_ for something to be objective or subjective.

We generally accept that medicine’s conceptual and ethical foundations are grounded in recognition of personhood. With patients in vegetative state, however, we’ve understood that the ethical implications of phenomenal consciousness are distinct from those of personhood. This suggests a need to reconsider medicine’s foundations. What is the role for recognition of consciousness (rather than personhood) in grounding the moral value of medicine and the specific demands of clinical ethics? I suggest that, according to holism, the moral value of medicine is (...) secured when conscious states are recognized in everyday medical science. Moreover, consciousness fully motivates traditional principles of clinical ethics if we understand respect for autonomy as respect for the dominion of an experiencer in the private, inescapable realm of bodily experience. When medicine’s foundations are grounded in recognition of consciousness, we understand how patients fully command respect even when they lack capacity to exercise their bodily dominion through decision-making. (shrink)

The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) formulated for the first time in 2004 by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, is a theoretical framework aiming to scientifically explain phenomenal consciousness. The IIT is presented in the first part of this work. Broadly speaking, integrated information is an abstract quantitative measure of the causal power a system has on itself. The main claim of IIT is the identity between informational structures and experience. The nature of this identity will be the subject of the second (...) part. One can interpret the IIT as a fundamental law of nature connecting the physical domain to the mental domain. The philosophical implications of such a claim are numerous and they are subject to criticism. This will be the main concern of the third and last part. (shrink)

I start by defining sentience and giving an analysis of the epistemological problems that plague its scientific study; this consists mainly in justifying that the attribution of sentience is underdetermined by the data. Second I show that as a result of this situation of underdetermination, most of the types of arguments used to infer sentience from the data are inconclusive and lead to a stalemate. Third, I argue that the stalemates arise from a foundationalist epistemology which needlessly leads to skeptical (...) conclusions; as an alternative, I propose to adopt a coherentist framework and defend a process of ‘epistemic iteration’ (Chang 2004) within that framework, which I argue gives us a way out of the underdetermination. (shrink)

When performing a skilled action—whether something impressive like a double somersault or something mundane like reaching for a glass of water—you exercise control over your bodily movements. Specifically, you guide their course. In what does that control consist? In this dissertation, I argue that it consists in attending to what you are doing. More specifically, in attending, agents harness their perceptual and perceptuomotor states directly and practically in service of their goals and, in doing so, settle the fine-grained manner in (...) which their bodies will move—details an intention alone leaves unsettled. This requires, among other things, that we reject views on which agents’ control is identical with their practical rationality. When all goes well, agents attentionally prioritize what is motivationally relevant to them to the exclusion of what would otherwise distract them from achieving their goals. However, sometimes agents attend distractedly—i.e., without prioritizing. As the aim of attention is to avoid distraction, this entails the possibility of defective attention. Defective attention, in turn, casts light on scenarios in which agents lose control over what they are doing, as when a skilled practitioner ‘chokes under pressure’. A complaint sometimes levelled against accounts, like mine, that claim to reduce agents’ control of their behaviour to that of causally efficacious mental states or events is that these accounts invariably deprive agents themselves of their rightful role in the generation of behaviour. This is the “Disappearing Agent Problem” for “reductive” or “event-causal” theories of action. I argue that, correctly understood, extant reductive theories do face a genuine Disappearing Agent Problem. However, it is a problem we solve by recognizing the role that conscious attention plays in making an action the agent’s own. Accordingly, I develop and defend an attentional account of action ownership. On this view, allocating conscious attention in service of your goals is sufficient for a kind of conscious perspective (“motivational perspective”), which, when active in controlling your behaviour, constitutes the behaviour as your own doing. As I explain, such perspective also contributes to explaining the subjective structure of your perceptual awareness of the world around you. (shrink)

Thought experiments, one of the most effective ways of acquiring knowledge, are an intellectual tool frequently used by scientists or thinkers in their fields of study. Thought experiments used to respond to scientific issues are considered scientific thought experiments, while thought experiments used for philosophical problems are called philosophical thought experiments. In this context, firstly, the differences between scientific and philosophical thought experiments are determined in the article. In particular, philosophical thought experiments are often needed in discussions within the field (...) of epistemology. For this reason, in the rest of the study, the knowledge argument put forward against the idea of physicalism, which is one of the important views in epistemology and which claims that the natural world is basically physical and that everything can be explained by physical laws is included. The knowledge argument briefly argues that there are non-physical properties and information that can only be discovered through conscious experience. Accordingly, it is argued that someone who has all physical knowledge about another conscious may lack knowledge of what it would feel like to have subjective experiences of that entity such as qualia. Consequently, the main idea of the article is to reveal how an epistemological thesis has been questioned by various philosophers in the context of philosophical thought experiments such as Mary’s room, ‘What is it like to be a Bat’, The Martian and the Philosophical Zombie. - Bilgi edinmenin en etkili yollarından bir tanesi olarak değerlendirilen düşünce deneyleri bilim insanları ya da düşünürler tarafından kendi çalışma alanları içerisinde sıklıkla başvurulan düşünsel bir araçtır. Bilimsel konulara cevap vermek amacıyla gerçekleştirilen düşünce deneyleri bilimsel düşünce deneyleri olarak değerlendirilirken, felsefi sorunlara yönelik kullanılan düşünce deneyleri ise felsefi düşünce deneyleri olarak adlandırılmaktadır. Bu kapsamda makalede ilk olarak bilimsel ve felsefi düşünce deneyleri arasındaki farklılıklar belirlenmektedir. Özellikle, epistemoloji alanı içerisinde yer alan tartışmalarda felsefi düşünce deneylerine sıklıkla ihtiyaç duyulmaktadır. Bu nedenle çalışmanın devamında epistemolojide önemli görüşlerden bir tanesi olan ve doğal dünyanın en temelde fiziksel olduğu ve fiziksel yasalarla her şeyin açıklanabileceği iddiasında bulunan fizikalizm düşüncesine karşı ileri sürülmüş bilgi argümanına yer verilmektedir. Bilgi argümanı kısaca sadece bilinçli deneyim yoluyla elde edilebilen ve fiziksel olarak ifade edilemeyen öznel deneyimlerin ve özelliklerin olduğunu savunmaktadır. Buna göre, başka bir bilinçli varlık hakkında bütün fiziksel bilgiye sahip olan birinin, o varlığın qualia gibi öznel deneyimlerine sahip olmasının nasıl bir his olduğu konusundaki bilgilerden yoksun olabileceği fikri savunulmaktadır. Bu doğrultuda, makalenin temel savı fizikalizm gibi epistemolojik bir teze Mary’nin Odası, ‘Yarasa Olmak Nasıl Bir Şeydir’, Marslı ve Felsefi Zombi gibi felsefi düşünce deneyleri bağlamında çeşitli filozoflarca nasıl itiraz edildiğini ve düşünce deneylerinin bu bağlamda nasıl kullanıldığını ortaya koymaktır. (shrink)

I defend the correspondence theory of truth, according to which a statement’s truth consists in a relation of correspondence with extralinguistic fact. There are well-known objections to this view, which I consider and rebut, and also important rival accounts, principal among which are so-called deflationist theories and epistemic theories. Epistemic theories relate the concept of truth to our state of knowledge, but fail, I argue, to respect the crucial distinction between a criterion of truth and the meaning of truth: the (...) view that one cannot do semantics, or metaphysics, without addressing epistemic issues is rejected by this work. Against epistemic theories, I illustrate how truth is independent of epistemic considerations. Deflationism is the more popular of the rival accounts and has gained considerable momentum over the past two decades. It is therefore dealt with in greater detail by this work. Deflationist theories exploit the paradigmatic ‘“Snow is white” is true iff snow is white’ biconditional to argue for an insubstantialist account, according to which truth is conservative with respect to non-semantical facts. On this view, truth’s raison d’être is merely to perform the useful expressive function of generalising over possibly infinite sets of assertions. Against deflationist theories, I claim that the work done by Jeffrey Ketland and Stewart Shapiro conclusively demonstrates how truth is informationally additive over non-semantic facts, while deflationism itself is also an excessively impoverishing theory, inadequate to the tasks it purports to accomplish. This work also defends the thesis that Alfred Tarski’s well-known theory of truth is an authentic correspondence theory. To say this is to say that the clauses of a Tarskian truth-definition can be interpreted in terms of a relation of correspondence that holds between true sentences and the states of affairs they describe. I provide a precise account of what the correspondence in question consists in, claiming that true sentences are homomorphic images of facts, i.e. a true sentence represents, in a form-preserving manner, the truth-making facts in it. This gives precise expression to Wittgenstein’s thesis that true sentences picture the world. (shrink)

The thesis brings together philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific theories of affect in developing a dual process account of emotion. Philosophers and psychologists who take a cognitivist view claim that emotions in humans and other mammalian species require intentionality, arising as the product of evaluations which bear upon our survival or wellbeing, whereas neuroscientists conclude from their research that emotion has its foundations in subcortical affect mechanisms by which behaviours may arise as spontaneous responses to valuable stimuli. Parts I and II (...) of the thesis examine these two accounts, which are construed as cognitive-evaluative and primitive emotional processes respectively. It is further proposed that both these manifestations of emotion are to be found in mammalian species. Given that cognitive-evaluative and primitive emotional states can be demonstrated to coexist and function separately in mammalian species, how do we explain cases in which the two processes seem to be non-accidentally associated? To exemplify: how does it come about that an appraisal that I have been unfairly treated is accompanied by aggressive feelings and impulses towards the object of my anger? Cognitivists accept that the somatic changes accompanying emotions are associated with appraisals but argue that such changes play no role in emotion as an evaluative process other than that of marking the appraisal as significant for our wellbeing. In contrast, a dual process model of emotion is proposed for the interaction of primitive emotions and emotional appraisals whereby the appraisal process arouses a primitive emotion through the detection of patterns within complex external contexts which have a significance for an individual’s wellbeing. The neurophysiological changes associated with the primitive emotion when so aroused, will in turn, invest the appraisal with feelings, sensations characteristic of those neurophysiologies. These feelings influence evaluation in ways which are fundamental to the successful performance of everyday mental functions. (shrink)

In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively—as a failure or lack of resemblance—and functions to constrain his knowledge of bats. Today, as white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations (...) across North America, might figuring heterogeneity positively, as a condition of creativity, open up new modes of receptivity and responsiveness to species extinctions? This essay turns to philosophies of becoming and to recent research in the biological sciences to explore this possibility. I suggest that attending to the heterogeneity of experience alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendency to understand and experience ourselves as self-contained and closed off from one another and the world we share in common. This may in turn enhance our sense of entanglement with the events, bodies, and forces on the “outside” of experience, including bats and the white-nose syndrome with which they are afflicted today. Such an affirmation of heterogeneity as a condition of creativity holds the greatest promise for multispecies ethics today, I propose, when it is joined to an affirmation of incompatibilities within and between things as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world. (shrink)

Climate change is one of the most contentious issues discussed in the public arena today. Environmental activists contend that the climate change is not an act of nature or God but is a result of human actions. Environmental critics do not see the degradation of the environment as merely a result of wrongheaded or misguided policies. Their critique goes much deeper. For many environmental activists, this degradation of reflects a fundamental flaw that is deeply rooted in our culture. They identify (...) this flaw as anthropocentrism, or a worldview that assigns to humans and human values the primary place in the cosmic order. Their proposed solution is to reject this worldview and adopt a new egalitarian vision in which humans and the rest of nature will have equal value. -/- This article agrees with the view that anthropocentrism presents a real problem for our civilization. However, it takes a much broader approach to this problem that goes beyond the critique of environmentalists. First, it sees that the source of anthropocentrism lies much deeper than the environmentalists think. The source is the pattern in human thinking that emerged when early humans began to walk the face of this earth. Early humans did not see the important role of the process of creation in the way they perceive, interpret, and represent reality. The article explains the importance of the process of creation in the way we think. The article sees the source of anthropocentrism in the failure to recognize the importance of the process of creation and in the way this failure affects our thinking. This failure has resulted in a view of reality that is limited, exclusionary, and ultimately subjective. This failure has left humans no choice but to view reality through the prism of mental constructs that they create, which is the main source of anthropocentrism. Also, environmentalists see the problem of anthropocentrism primarily in its relationship to the environment. This article emphasizes that anthropocentrism is a broad phenomenon that affect many areas of our life. -/- Finally, the article examines major solutions that address the problem of anthropocentrism and offers their critique. It sees their principal common shortcoming in their exclusionary approach and outlines a new and inclusive approach. (shrink)

The use of "levels of abstraction" in philosophical analysis (levellism) has recently come under attack. In this paper, we argue that a refined version of epistemological levellism should be retained as a fundamental method, which we call the method of abstraction. After a brief introduction, in section two we make clear the nature and applicability of the (epistemological) method of levels of abstraction. In section three, we show the fruitfulness of the new method by applying it to five case studies: (...) the concept of agenthood, the Turing test, the definition of emergence, quantum observation and decidable observation. In section four, we further characterise and support the method by distinguishing it from three other forms of "levellism": (i) levels of organisation; (ii) levels of explanation and (iii) conceptual schemes. In this context, we also briefly address the problems of relativism and antirealism. In the conclusion, we indicate some of the work that lies ahead, two potential limitations of the method and some results that have already been obtained by applying the method to some long-standing philosophical problems. (shrink)

This article aims to identify the bundle theory and its influence on the philosophy of mind discussions. The theory was put forward by David Hume, one of the pioneer philosophers of the Enlightenment era, in the context of personal identity. Firstly, a general framework will be drawn about the problem of personal identity. Secondly, it will be explained how the problem is understood in Hume’s epistemology through concepts such as person, identity, self, selfhood. To see the philosophical effects caused by (...) Hume's epistemology, discussions of the philosophy of mind will be exemplified in the existence and knowledge of self through the mindbody understandings of philosophers. Daniel Dennet, John Searle, David Chalmers, and Thomas Metzinger, who have theories about the relationship of self, consciousness, and matter, are the names to be considered under the title of philosophy of mind. Finally, Hume and his theories will be presented with several assessments of the philosophical problems caused by the positions of the aforementioned names on the issue of self. This article aims to reveal the similarities between Hume and philosophers of mind in terms of the existence and knowledge of the self. Except for the evaluation and conclusion section, this article aims to present preliminary work on these approaches. (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)

This paper develops a Fragmentalist theory of Presentism and shows how it can help to develop a interpretation of quantum mechanics. There are several fragmental interpretations of physics. In the interpretation of this paper, each quantum system forms a fragment, and fragment f1 makes a measurement on fragment f2 if and only if f2 makes a corresponding measurement on f1. The main idea is then that each fragment has its own present (or ‘now’) until a mutual quantum measurement—at which time (...) they come (‘become’) to share the same ‘now’. The theory of time developed here will make use of both McTaggart’s A-series (in the form of future-present-past) and B-series (earlier-times to later-times). An example of an application is that a Bell pair of electrons does not take on definite spin values until measurement because the measuring system and the Bell pair do not share the same present (‘now’) until mutual quantum measurement, i.e. until they ‘become’ to share the same A-series. Before that point the ‘now’ of the opposing system is not in the reference system’s fragment. Relativistic no-signaling is preserved within each fragment, which will turn out to be sufficient for the general case. Several issues in the foundations of quantum mechanics are canvassed, including Schrodinger’s cat, the Born rule, modifications to Minkowski space that accommodate both the A-series and the B-series, and entropy. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between consciousness and attention through theoretical considerations about evolution. Specifically, we will argue that the empirical findings on attention and the basic considerations concerning the evolution of the different forms of attention demonstrate that consciousness and attention must be dissociated regardless of which definition of these terms one uses. To the best of our knowledge, no extant view on the relationship between consciousness and attention has this advantage. Because of this characteristic, this paper (...) presents a principled and neutral way to settle debates concerning the relationship between consciousness and attention, without falling into disputes about the meaning of these terms. A decisive conclusion of this approach is that extreme views on the relationship between consciousness and attention must be rejected, including identity and full dissociation views. There is an overlap between the two within conscious attention, but developing a full understanding of this mechanism requires further empirical investigations. (shrink)

Discussions of the mind-body problem often refer to an.

It is possible today to determine, with some precision (according to the most recent studies in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology), the areas of the brain and the neural networks involved when an individual contemplates art, when feeling pleasure, or when judging about aesthetic experience. However, many questions remain open. First, the philosophical question about the subjective nature of this kind of judgments. Then, what happens in the mind (or should it be said, in the brain?) of the beholder when contemplating (...) art or judging in favor (or not) of the beauty of an object. And the ultimate question, if we have an aesthetic brain. Another issue that must be addressed is if bioart and especially neuroart can contribute to this analysis and if they can be effectively quantified as art. Thus, this brief essay seeks to provide some understanding about this questions but most importantly about the existence of an aesthetic brain, which may ultimately contribute to open doors to other problems of philosophy such as the hard brain-mind problem. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience in a world that is purely physical. As the usual theories fail to provide an adequate explanation, many philosophers started looking for alternatives. One of such alternatives is panpsychism, which has been increasingly gaining attention in the past few decades. Panpsychism is the view that fundamental entities of the world—fundamental particles, for example—have some form of very simple consciousness. And, in the theory, it is that (...) spark that allows for the existence of more complex consciousness, such as in humans. However, panpsychism faces a major difficulty with what is called ‘the combination problem’. This is the problem that, even if we accept that fundamental entities have some form of simple consciousness, it is not clear how one could go from a plurality of micro consciousness to a complex unified macro consciousness. If we think that an atom is conscious, for example, this seems to imply that it is a subject, a conscious subject. But how do we get to a human subject, with a complex human brain? It seems difficult to understand how putting together many conscious subjects—e.g. atoms—could lead to a further conscious subject—e.g. a human. In this thesis I discuss panpsychism and some of the arguments that support it. In addition, I explain the combination problem and its different aspects, as well as how it relates to panpsychism and the hard problem of consciousness. Finally, I discuss a solution to the combination problem that I believe has not been given proper attention in contemporary philosophy, which is one provided by the philosopher Ken Wilber. His solution involves changing the conceptual framework of how we understand the relation between macro and micro subjects. I also apply his theory to the variations of the combination problem, discussing how we could approach these issues under a single coherent view. Although Wilber prefers the term pan-interiorism, his theory can be considered a type of holarchical panpsychism. (shrink)

Given that one-million species are currently threatened with extinction and that humans are undermining the entire natural infrastructure on which our modern world depends (IPBES, 2019), this dissertation will show that there is a need to provide an alternative approach to wildlife conservation, one that avoids anthropocentrism and wildlife valuation on an instrumental basis to provide meaningful and tangible success for both wildlife conservation and human well-being in an inclusive way. In this sense, The Value of Being Wild will showcase (...) the concept of eco-phenomenology as an important non-anthropocentric alternative to the current approach to wildlife conservation, namely sustainable development. The problem with this dominant paradigm, as Chapter Two will reveal, is that sustainable development has not only failed to provide humans and future generations of humans with their own needs but, as per the latest IPBES report, failed in arresting the freefall decline of wild species. The situation currently requires a radical overhaul of the current system. As emerged from the later work of French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), eco-phenomenology is particularly well-suited as a practical alternative to sustainable development. The core reason is that eco-phenomenology moves away from a human-centred framework toward a far more inclusive approach that embraces the conservation of wild animals as well the wild environment they dwell in, beyond any human needs (although humans are embraced within the approach too). Merleau-Ponty helps us to move away from anthropocentrism to a more inclusive approach in conserving wildlife, since his phenomenology does not consider the human animal’s relationship in the world as exclusive (to use and exploit wild animals solely for their benefit), but inclusive (as an interconnected biological component in a broad ecological system). The strength of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of phenomenology is that it facilitates an understanding of all living and even non-living entities, such as air, water and soil, as interconnected and interrelated within a broad biosphere. While Merleau-Ponty did not address the concept of wild animals or the biosphere directly, his later work points to the fact that human animals cannot exist outside a world that provides life-giving force to all living beings. Phenomenology, as developed by Merleau-Ponty, is a concept that recognises the axiological qualities of the natural world are inherent and ineliminable from the discipline of traditional phenomenology, hence the term ‘eco-phenomenology’, developed in one reception of his thinking. Eco-phenomenology offers a return to a world that humans have tried hard to alienate themselves from, in that it approaches the natural environment and wild animals, not as a complex set of objects and objective processes, but rather as they are experienced and lived from within by the attentive animal who is entirely a part of the world that he or she experiences. Merleau-Pontian eco-phenomenology thus emphasises a holistic dialogue within a more-than-human world (Abram, 1996: 65). Eco-phenomenology is a concept that points toward an applied strategy but so far this has not been attempted in earnest. This is specifically true when it comes to wildlife conservation. The Value of Being Wild, therefore, sets out to employ the concept of eco-phenomenology in order to provide a new practical wildlife conservation approach that challenges, and potentially replaces, the current prevailing policies as employed by global governmental and inter-governmental agencies. In particular, this alternative frame is posed as a replacement for the failing anthropocentric conservation practices currently in place in South Africa. This dissertation will therefore conclude by exploring strategies where conservation of wildlife is not taken as instrumentally-valued, or even intrinsically-valued, but rather as wild-valued in that the existence of wild animals as wild is conserved within a broader, more inclusive overall ecology that supports the survival and flourishing of all living beings that include plants, wild animals and human beings. (shrink)

Живым существам объективный мир представляется как совокупность чувственно воспринимаемых качеств, воспоминаний, ощущений, мыслей, желаний, убеж- дений и т.д. Почему произошло так, что объективный мир способствовал появлению су- ществ, обладающих субъективным представлением об окружающей их действительности. Почему объективный мир породил существ с субъективным восприятием мира? Эта статья во многом посвящена разрыву между объективным и субъективным, а также проблеме качественного характера феноменального сознания. Я утверждаю, что физиологическое, феноменальное и концептуальное составляют трехуровневую иерархию эмергентных кате- горий. Эти категории каузально и онтологически различны (или (...) разделены). Для каждой характерен уникальный механизм интеракции. Этот механизм создает условия для форми- рования наделенного значением дискурсивного взаимодействия с окружающей средой. Повышение уровня сложности организации в рамках каждой категории неизбежно приво- дит к появлению нового уровня в иерархии. Иначе говоря, существует эмергентная иерар- хия развивающихся категорий, определяемая природой их механизмов взаимодействия с окружающим миром. Что касается первой категории, я утверждаю, что биохимические механизмы склонны в своем развитии идти особым, наделенным значением путем, при котором качественно учитываются характеристики окружающей среды и обеспечивается реакция на них. Говоря о второй категории, я показываю, что эти механизмы дают орга- низму возможность оценки и приоритизации квалитативных ассимиляций. Далее я объяс- няю, почему этот процесс характеризует индивидуальный субъективный феноменальный опыт. Наконец, я говорю об этом с точки зрения уникального взгляда на мир, присущего человеку. (shrink)

Provides a certain conception of the target of a theory of intentionality in terms of five properties (aboutness, non-existence, aspectuality, generality, and semantic normativity) and provides a guided tour of how different styles of theories of intentionality can meet up these requirements.

In this paper I look at a recent proposal from Yujin Nagasawa and Khai Wager to avoid the de-combination problem for the view called ‘cosmopsychism’. The pair suggest that the de-combination problem can be solved in the same way that the problem of heterogeneity for Schaffer’s priority monism can be solved. I suggest that this is not the case. They are not the same problem and the solutions to the heterogeneity problem do not work for the de-combination problem.

This article is an accompaniment to Anthony Freeman’s review of Views into the Chinese Room, reflecting on some pertinent outstanding questions about the Chinese room argument. Although there is general agreement in the artificial intelligence community that the CRA is somehow wrong, debate continues on exactly why and how it is wrong. Is there a killer counter-argument and, if so, what is it? One remarkable fact is that the CRA is prototypically a thought experiment, yet it has been very little (...) discussed from the perspective of thought experiments in general. Here, I argue that the CRA fails as a thought experiment because it commits the fallacy of undersupposing, i.e., it leaves too many details to be filled in by the audience. Since different commentators will often fill in details differently, leading to different opinions of what constitutes a decisive counter, the result is 21-plus years of inconclusive debate. (shrink)

According to the mainstream view in philosophy today, the world is a purely physical system, in which consciousness emerged as a product of increasing biological complexity, from non-conscious precursors composed of non-conscious components. The mainstream view is a beautiful, grand vision of the universe. However, it leaves no real place for consciousness. This paper explains why.

This paper proposes a panpsychist interpretation of Anne Conway’s (1631-1679) metaphysics, as elucidated in 'The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.' Contemporary versions of panpsychism attempt to explain how consciousness is realised in the natural world. They posit that matter is intrinsically experiential, such that when it is arranged into the form of a human brain, it gives rise to human consciousness. Similarly, Conway argues that substance is constituted by both Body and Spirit. The former serves as an (...) explanation of a substance’s material properties, whereas the latter explains how a substance can have various kinds of perceptual experiences, as well as experiencing sensation and emotion. I argue that Conway uses her concept of Spirit to refer to the same set of experiential properties as our contemporary concept of consciousness does. Understood thus, Conway’s metaphysical framework appears to embrace a form of panpsychism. (shrink)

The paper discusses possible roles of consciousness in a semiotic activity of a cognitive agent. The discussion, we claim, is based on two related approaches to consciousness: on Chalmers’ theory of phenomenal and psychological consciousness and on Damasio’s neural theory, which draws a distinction between core and extended consciousness. Two stages of cognitive-semiotic processing are discussed: the moment of perception of a sign as a meaningful entity and the metasemiotic processes understood as the human capacity to reflect on signs and (...) their usage, analyse and control processes of recognition, interpretation of signs and to detect and correct errors in semiotic activity. In the case of the first stage, it is argued that signs as meaningful entities have a distincly experiential character. The feeling of meaningfulness is a result of phenomenal consciousness, in particular a result of the so-called valuation features of phenomenal experience. I claim that this aspect of cognitive-semiotic activity is possible owing to a special neural mechanism called a semiotic marker. It is argued that semiotic systems have to be able to use signs as signs, i.e. they should display some metacognitive capacities, in particular an ability to analyse semiosis at a metalevel. It is argued that such metasemiosis is dependent on psychological consciousness and is realized at the neural level in the form of extended consciousness. The paper is based on a particular understanding of cognitive semiotics as a discipline involving analyses of cognitive processes as semiotic processes, i.e. processes requiring usage of signs. (shrink)