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)

I identify one particular strand of thought in Thomas Nagel's ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, which I think has helped shape a certain conception of perceptual consciousness that is still prevalent in the literature. On this conception, perceptual consciousness is to be explained in terms of a special class of properties perceptual experiences themselves exhibit. I also argue that this conception is in fact in conflict with one of the key ideas that supposedly animates Nagel's argument in (...) ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?', which is the idea of an intimate connection between the idea of consciousness and that of a point of view. (shrink)

This article discusses, from a theoretical and philosophical perspective, the meaning and the importance of basic literacy training for education in an age in which digital technologies have become ubiquitous. I discuss some arguments, which I draw from the so-called literacy hypothesis approach, in order to understand the significance of a ‘traditional’ initiation into literacy. I then use the work of Bernard Stiegler on bodily gestures and routines, related to different technologies, in order to elaborate and criticize the claims the (...) literacy hypothesis makes. Bringing together insights from both the literacy hypothesis approach and Stiegler's work, I defend the view that there exists an essential difference between traditional and digital literacy, and I try to argue for the introduction of a spelling and grammar of the digital in the educational curriculum. (shrink)

Can one pay attention to objects without being conscious of them? Some years ago there was evidence that had been taken to show that the answer is 'yes'. That evidence was inconclusive, but there is recent work that makes the case more compellingly: it now seems that it is indeed possible to pay attention to objects of which one is not conscious. This is bad news for theories in which the connection between attention and consciousness is taken to be an (...) essential one. It is good news for theories (including mine) in which the connection between attention and agency is taken to be essential. (shrink)

Dissociation thought experiments like Zombie and Inverted Spectrum cases play an essential role in the qualia debate. Critics have long since argued that these cases raise serious epistemic issues, undermining first person access to phenomenal states also in normal subjects. Proponents have denied this because, due to their phenomenal experience, normal subjects have epistemic abilities that Zombies don’t have. Here I will present a modified version of these thought experiments: Part-time Zombies and Part-time Inverts switch between normal and abnormal states (...) every now and then. Thus they provide insight into their epistemic situation showing that the mere possibility of Zombies and Inverts has consequences which undermine essential epistemic features of phenomenal properties even in normals. This line of reasoning will be corroborated by theoretical considerations on the epistemic requirements of phenomenal states. All this provides support for the “functional mapping hypothesis.” According to this hypothesis, any significant phenomenal difference can be mapped to a specific functional difference which is accessible from the third person perspective as well. (shrink)

The question of our place in nature has long been with us. One answer lies in comparing humans with other animals , thereby highlighting the uniquely human. To this end, I examine the distinction between humans and brutes as delineated by Descartes, Kant, and the Chicago pragmatist George Mead. This selection not merely assures a wide-spectrum of opinion still alive today, it marks a general historical shift from the metaphysical dualism of Descartes' mechanical world and spiritual self, to the epistemic (...) dualism of Kant and his double sense of self, finally to Mead's naturalistic monism, in which consciousness emerges naturally from the non-conscious. Apart from illuminating issues current in the animal-rights literature, examining this single topic casts a new light on these figures, especially Kant and Mead . Descartes' dualism is understandable simply given his scientific commitments, and the chasm he found in the human/brute gap was as much a result of this scientific motivation as any religious or moral one. For Kant, brutes lack the power to judge, understand, or reason. But more importantly, they lack autonomy and are therefore without moral worth. The unbridgeable chasm, metaphysical for Descartes, became for Kant primarily moral. Brutes do have representations and desires, however, and, by virtue of being alive, an immaterial principle; Kant consequently rejected Descartes' animal-machine hypothesis. Darwin's account of the human/brute gap and Mead's Darwinistic psychology are discussed. Selfhood and consciousness are unique to humans, although brutes are conscious in another sense. Mead's different uses of 'consciousness' are separated in order to clarify this difference as well as the role of language in the emergence of mind. Mead argued that humans perceive social objects prior to physical objects while brutes perceive none of these, lacking the capacities of universalization and object-manipulation. Like Descartes and Kant, Mead minimized brute experience, thereby maintaining a wide gulf between humans and brutes despite his Darwinian naturalism. (shrink)

The book presents the various theories of intentionality from Brentano and Husserl to present day (1997) theories on mental content, narrow and broad.

In this paper, I defend Husserl against Derrida's critique that Husserl's phenomenology is of a piece with the "the metaphysics of presence." I show much of Derrida's critique can be met by what Husserl calls "genetic phenomenology.".

This dissertation explores issues in the philosophy of psychology and metaphysics through the lens of the emotion of disgust, and its corresponding property, disgustingness. The first chapter organizes an extremely large body of data about disgust, imposes two constraints any theory must meet, and offers a cognitive model of the mechanisms underlying the emotion. The second chapter explores the evolution of disgust, and argues for the Entanglement thesis: this uniquely human emotion was formed when two formerly distinct mechanisms, one dedicated (...) to monitoring food intake and protecting against poisons, the other dedicated to protecting against parasitic infection, where driven together until they became functionally integrated. The third chapter explores the sorts of acquisition mechanisms that could give rise to the patterns of individual and cultural level variation we find with disgust elicitors. It argues for the Empathic Acquisition thesis, which holds that one important route for the social acquisition and transmission of disgust elicitors is linked to empathic recognition of facial expressions of the emotion. The fourth chapter builds on the Entanglement thesis, and embeds the emotion of disgust in gene-culture coevolutionary theory and the tribal instincts hypothesis. The Co-opt thesis is defended, which maintains that disgust was co-opted to play an important role in our moral psychology, particularly in our cognition of social norms and ethnic boundary markers. In doing so, however, it brings to bear many features initially linked to poisons and parasites. This explains the puzzling and troublesome character of moral judgments linked to disgust. After shifting gears from psychology to metaphysics, the fifth chapter recasts the Humean tradition of projectivism in the terminology of cognitive science. Using examples such as disgust, I argue that a psychologized projectivism is able to make sense of the idea that some properties are projected onto the world, rather than found there to begin with. The final chapter criticizes three other accounts of the property of disgustingness, two inspired by functionalism in the philosophy of color, one inspired by fittingness accounts in metaethics. I argue that none provide nearly as satisfactory account of the property as the psychologized projectivism articulated previously. (shrink)

Homo deceptus is a book that brings together new ideas on language, consciousness and physics into a comprehensive theory that unifies science and philosophy in a different kind of Theory of Everything. The subject of how we are to make sense of the world is addressed in a structured and ordered manner, which starts with a recognition that scientific truths are constructed within a linguistic framework. The author argues that an epistemic foundation of natural language must be understood before laying (...) claim to any notion of reality. This foundation begins with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the relationship of language to formal logic. Ultimately, we arrive at an answer to the question of why people believe the things they do. This is effectively a modification of Alfred Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. The second major issue addressed is the ‘dreaded’ Hard Problem of Consciousness as first stated by David Chalmers in 1995. The solution is found in the unification of consciousness, information theory and notions of physicalism. The physical world is shown to be an isomorphic representation of the phenomenological conscious experience. New concepts in understanding how language operates help to explain why this relationship has been so difficult to appreciate. The inclusion of concepts from information theory shows how a digital mechanics resolves heretofore conflicting theories in physics, cognitive science and linguistics. Scientific orthodoxy is supported, but viewed in a different light. Mainstream science is not challenged, but findings are interpreted in a manner that unifies consciousness without contradiction. Digital mechanics and formal systems of logic play central roles in combining language, consciousness and the physical world into a unified theory where all can be understood within a single consistent framework. (shrink)

The problem of animal consciousness has profound implications on our concept of nature and of our place in the natural world. In philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience the problem of animal consciousness raises two main questions (Velmans, 2007): the distribution question (“are there conscious animals beside humans?”) and the phenomenological question (“what is it like to be a non-human animal?”). In order to answer these questions, many approaches take into account similarities and dissimilarities in animal and human behavior, e.g. (...) the use of language or tools and mirror self-recognition (Allen and Bekoff, 2007), however behavioral arguments don’t seem to be conclusive (Baars, 2005). Cognitive neuroscience is providing comparative data on structural and functional similarities, respectively called “homologies” and “analogies”. Many experimental results suggest that the thalamocortical system is essential for consciousness (Edelman and Tononi, 2000; Tononi, 2008). The argument from homology states that the general structure of thalamocortical system remained the same in the last 100-200 million years, for it is neuroanatomically similar in all the present and past mammals and it didn’t change much during phylogeny (Allen and Bekoff, 2007). The argument from analogy states that the key functional processes correlated with consciousness in humans are still present in all other mammals and many other animals (Baars, 2005). These processes are information integration through effective cortical connectivity (Massimini et al., 2005; Rosanova et al., 2012) and elaboration of information at a global level (Dehaene and Changeux, 2011). On this basis, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness states that all mammals, birds, and many other animals (such as octopuses) possess the neurological substrates of consciousness (Low et al., 2012). Conscious experience is private (Chalmers, 1995; Nagel, 1974) therefore the answer to the phenomenological question may be impossible. Nevertheless, cognitive neuroscience may provide an answer to the distribution question, showing that conscious experience is not limited to humans since it is a major biological adaptation going back millions of years. (shrink)

Persons are not just mechanical systems of instinctual animalistic proclivities, but also language-producing, existentially aware creatures, whose experiences and actions are drenched in subjective meaning. To understand a human being as a person is to understand him or her as a rational system that wants, fears, hopes, believes, and in other ways imbues the world with meaning, rather than just a mechanical system that is subject to the same chains of cause and effect as other animals. But contemporary personality psychology (...) has, to a great extent, focused on the behavioral side of personality, while neglecting its meaning side, failing to realize that subjective meanings are part of the very constitution rather than just causes of personality. My overarching purpose with this dissertation is, consequently, to contribute to the establishment of a genuinely non-reductive science of personality that systematically studies the systems of meaning that comprise a person’s worldview in their own right, as sources of meaning in personality. I both establish conceptual and theoretical foundations for the psychology of worldviews and present empirical research on worldviews. The conceptual and theoretical issues are addressed in the introductory chapters and the first paper. I begin by explicating a non-reductive realist philosophy of personality that steers between reductionism and social constructionism, and by suggesting that we need a more coherent understanding of personality and a richer study of it, rather than a radically new methodology. I continue by discussing the limitations of, and conceptual issues with, previous approaches to personality, and by outlining the conceptual foundations for a psychology of worldviews to remediate their weaknesses, demarcating worldview constructs as referring to presuppositions, concepts, and narrative scripts that, by working as the substrata, or background, for intentional thought, feeling, and action, form the most central sources of meaning. I continue by discussing the structure and dynamics of worldviews in terms of the relationship between innate meaning-making mechanisms and the universal features of the existential condition that they address. I conclude the introductory chapters by describing the background of the empirical research and by discussing limitations with the present thesis and directions for future theory and research. I continue, in the first paper, to argue that the study of traits and the study of worldviews form mutually irreducible parts of personality psychology and that worldviews are not inherently less universal in terms of structure, or in other ways less basic, than traits. I conclude this paper by emphasizing the need to address coherence not just in behavior, but also within worldviews and between traits and worldviews, and to complement traditional individual differences research with personalistic methodology. The empirical research is presented in the second and third papers included in this thesis. This research addresses Humanism and Normativism, which are arguably the two broadest and potentially most important worldview constructs in the research literature today, representing whether human beings are thought of as intrinsically valuable and ontologically important or as acquiring value and reality only through the attainment of external norms and ideals . Although originally thought to be opposites, previous research has suggested that they are uncorrelated. In the first empirical paper, I introduce a hierarchical model of their structure, develop scales to measure their facets, and demonstrate through confirmatory factor analysis that they are, contrary to previous wisdom, negatively related in terms of view of human nature, attitude to affect, and interpersonal attitude, but unrelated in terms of epistemology and political values. I present evidence also of discriminant and predictive validity in relation to other worldview variables, life goals, educational field, political and religious orientation, and the Big Five aspects. In the second empirical paper, I use humanism and normativism to explain the broad systems of meaning that potentially underlie, and intersect with, variables from the most important models of the underpinnings of political ideology today, through path modeling. The results suggest that humanism is related to political ideology through preference for equality, as mediated by moral concern with fairness and the avoidance of harm, emotionality, and honesty-humility, and that normativism is related to political ideology through conservative attitudes in general, as mediated by system justification, moral concern with authority, loyalty, and purity, and low openness. Both of the empirical articles provide ample evidence of broad systems of meaning cutting across different aspects of the worldview and of their explanatory power with regards to other psychological phenomena. These studies thereby help to substantiate the viability of the psychology of worldviews. (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)

Existentialist accounts maintain that visual phenomenal content takes the logical form of an existentially quantified sentence. These accounts do not make phenomenal content specific enough. Singularist accounts posit a singular content in which the seen object is a constituent. These accounts make phenomenal content too specific. My account gets the specificity of visual phenomenal content just right. My account begins with John Searle's suggestion that visual experience represents an object as seen, moves this relation outside the scope of the existential (...) quantifier and then replaces it with the relation of objects being ‘present as accessible’, as described by Alva Noë. (shrink)

Anti-naturalists share the conviction that something is wrong with the naturalistic conceptual frame and with the idea that in principle all events are explainable by using the means of physics. Physicalist naturalism is the modern form of old fashioned materialism. And there is no doubt that naturalism is still going strong notwithstanding its critiques. In ethics the boom of present-day Kantian constructivism can be understood as the last and maybe the most sophisticated “naturalist” answer to the realist challenge in ethics. (...) Assuming that our language of morals is objectivist as John Mackie conceded , the project of analytical philosophy to transform ethics into philosophy of language showing that the ordinary language use of normative predicates like ought or good can and should be interpreted as expressing subjective attitudes, collapsed.To be sure analytical metaethics produced a broad spectrum of quite different subjectivits theories from Ayer’s and Stevenson’s emot .. (shrink)

Higher-order thought theories maintain that consciousness involves the having of higher-order thoughts about mental states. In response to these theories of consciousness, an attempt is often made to illustrate that nonhuman animals possess said consciousness, overlooking an alarming consequence: attributing higher-order thought to nonhuman animals might entail that they should be held morally accountable for their actions. I argue that moral responsibility requires more than higher-order thought: moral agency requires a specific higher-order thought which concerns a belief about the rightness (...) or wrongness of affecting another’s mental states. This “moral thought” about the rightness or wrongness is not yet demonstrated in even the most intelligent nonhuman animals, thus we should suspend our judgments about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of their actions while further questioning the recent insistence on developing an animal morality. (shrink)

I discuss here the nature of nonconscious mental states and the ways in which they may differ from their conscious counterparts. I first survey reasons to think that mental states can and often do occur without being conscious. Then, insofar as the nature of nonconscious mentality depends on how we understand the nature of consciousness, I review some of the major theories of consciousness and explore what restrictions they may place on the kinds of states that can occur nonconsciously. I (...) close with a discussion of what makes a state mental, if consciousness is not the mark of the mental. (shrink)

In 2002, Luciano Floridi published a paper called What is the Philosophy of Information?, where he argues for a new paradigm in philosophical research. To what extent should his proposal be accepted? Is the Philosophy of Information actually a new paradigm, in the Kuhninan sense, in Philosophy? Or is it only a new branch of Epistemology? In our discussion we will argue in defense of Floridi’s proposal. We believe that Philosophy of Information has the types of features had by other (...) areas already acknowledge as authentic in Philosophy. By way of an analogical argument we will argue that since Philosophy of Information has its own topics, method and problems it would be counter-intuitive not to accept it as a new philosophical area. To strengthen our position we present and discuss main topics of Philosophy of Information. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the concept of cross-temporal personal identity (diachronicity). This particular form of identity has vexed theorists for centuries -- e.g.,how can a person maintain a belief in the sameness of self over time in the face of continual psychological and physical change? I first discuss various forms of the sameness relation and the criteria that justify their application. I then examine philosophical and psychological treatments of personal diachronicity(for example,Locke's psychological connectedness theory; the role of episodic memory) (...) and find each lacking on logical grounds, empirical grounds, or both. I conclude that to achieve a successful resolution of the issue of the self as a temporal continuant we need to draw a sharp distinction between the feeling of the sameness of one's self and the evidence marshaled in support of that feeling. (shrink)

Though the brain and its neuronal states have been investigated extensively, the neural correlates of mental states remain to be determined. Since mental states are experienced in first-person perspective and neuronal states are observed in third-person perspective, a special method must be developed for linking both states and their respective perspectives. We suggest that such method is provided by First-Person Neuroscience. What is First-Person Neuroscience? We define First-Person Neuroscience as investigation of neuronal states under guidance of and on orientation to (...) mental states. An empirical example of such methodological approach is demonstrated by an fMRI study on emotions. It is shown that third- and first-person analysis of data yield different results. First-person analysis reveals neural activity in cortical midline structures during subjective emotional experience. Based on these and other results neural processing in cortical midline structures is hypothesized to be crucially involved in generating mental states. Such direct linkage between first- and third-person approaches to analysis of neural data allows insight into the "point of view from within the brain", that is what we call the First-Brain Perspective. In conclusion, First-Person Neuroscience and First-Brain Perspective provide valuable methodological tools for revealing the neuronal correlate of mental states. (shrink)

O presente trabalho efetua um exame do problema mente-corpo por meio do seu rastreamento no campo da Psicologia e, em especial, na Filosofia da Mente contemporânea. O trabalho mostra que o problema mente-corpo é determinado pela forma como uma dada teoria concebe a noção de qualidade e que as abordagens dualistas da mente tratam desta noção em termos de propriedades intrínsecas, ao passo que os materialistas adotam uma teoria da propriedade extrínseca. São exploradas as características das duas abordagens, bem como (...) suas implicações para o problema da possibilidade de um tratamento científico dos processos mentais conscientes.The mind-body problem is examined, taking into consideration its recentpsychological history, especially its contemporary discussions in the Philosophy of Mind. It is argued that the mind-body problem is determined by the way that the notion of quality is theoretically conceived, and that the dualistic approaches of the mind conceive of this notion in terms of intrinsic properties, whereas the materialist approaches embrace an extrinsic properties theory. The dualist and materialist approaches are characterized, as well as their implications to the problem of the possibility of scientific treatment of conscious mental processes. (shrink)

Higher-order theories of consciousness, such as those of Armstrong, Rosenthal and Lycan, typically distinguish sharply between consciousness and phenomenal character, or qualia. The higher-order states posited by these theories are intended only as explanations of consciousness, and not of qualia. In this paper I argue that the positing of higher-order perceptions may help to explain qualia. If we are realists about qualia, conceived as those intrinsic properties of our experience of which we are introspectibly aware, then higher-order perception might have (...) an explanatory role as the means by which we are aware of these properties. This would also allow us to treat qualia as the inner appearances resulting from inner perceptions, and therefore to treat them as intentional objects. (shrink)

Delineating the framework for a fundamental model of long-range coherence in biological systems is said to rely on principles beyond parameters addressed by current physical science. Just as phenomena of quantum mechanics lay beyond tools of classical Newtonian mechanics we must now enter a 3rd regime of unified field, UF mechanics. In this paper we present a battery of nine empirical protocols for manipulating long-range coherence in complex self-organized living systems (SOLS) in a manner surmounting the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum (...) uncertainty (space-quantization) thereby allowing empirical access to underlying coherent biophysical principles driving self-organization. Interestingly, while the UF is not indicative of a 5th fundamental force in the usual phenomenal sense of quantal transfer during field interactions; it does however provide an inherent ‘force of coherence’ in an energyless ontological sense by a process called ‘topological switching’ of higher dimensional (HD) brane dynamics. It is this putative inherent property that produces long-range coherence and leads to the possibility of its direct experimental mediation. (shrink)

In “What is it like to be boring and myopic?” Kathleen Akins offers an interesting, empirically driven, argument for thinking that there is nothing that it is like to be a bat. She suggests that bats are “boring” in the sense that they are governed by behavioral scripts and simple, non-representational, control loops, and are best characterized as biological automatons. Her approach has been well received by philosophers sympathetic to empirically informed philosophy of mind. But, despite its influence, her work (...) has not met with any critical appraisal. -/- It is argued that a reconsideration of the empirical results shows that bats are not boring automatons, driven by short input-output loops, instincts, and reflexes. Grounds are provided for thinking that bats satisfy a range of philosophically and scientifically interesting elaborations of the general idea that consciousness is best understood in terms of representational functions. A more complete examination of bat sensory capabilities suggests there is something that it is like after all. -/- The discussion of bats is also used to develop an objection to strongly neurophilosophical approaches to animal consciousness. (shrink)

In 1980 grey-headed flying-foxes, a species now listed as "vulnerable to extinction," made camp at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne (RBGM). In May 2000 the RBGM started to kill bats. The killing was halted when Humane Society International (HSI) filed for the bats’ protection under federal and state conservation laws. Over the next 13 months, conservationists, garden officials and scientists, politicians, animal activists, and others all played a part in a chain of events that demonstrates the tangled web of scientific (...) involvement in politics and how different views within the scientific community may lead to conflicting positions on conservation strategies. (shrink)

This selective overview of the history of American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century begins with certain enduring themes that were developed by the two main founders of classical American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) and William James. Against the background of the pervasive influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, pragmatism and related philosophical outlooks emphasizing naturalism and realism were dominant during the first three decades of the century. Beginning in (...) the 1930s and 1940s, however, the middle third of the century witnessed the rising influence in America of what would become known as “‘analytic philosophy’,” with its primary roots in Europe: in the Cambridge philosophical analysis of Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein; logical empiricism and positivism on the continent; and linguistic analysis and ordinary- language philosophy at Oxford. This overview stresses the persistence of pragmatist themes throughout much of the century, while emphasizing the mid-century transformations that resulted from developments primarily in analytic philosophy. These combined influences resulted at the turn of the millennium in the flourishing, among other developments, of distinctively analytic styles of pragmatism and naturalism. (shrink)