It is argued that experiences are complex events that befall their subjects. Each experience has a single subject and depends on the state or the event that it is of. The constituents of an experience are its subject, its grounding event or state, and everything that the subject is aware of during that time that's relevant to the telling of the story of how it was to participate in that event or be put in that state. The experience occurs where (...) the person having the experience is. An experience of an event or state occurs when that event or state makes a difference to its possessor's conscious life, where this difference is either a matter of really knowing what's happening or merely a matter of being affected. (shrink)

The paper contains four arguments to show that experiences don't represent. The first argument appeals to the fact that an experience can't occur without what the experience is of; the second appeals to the fact we can have an experience without having any awareness of what it is of, the third argument appeals to the fact that long experiences, such as the experience of being kidnapped, don't represent anything; and the fourth appeals to the fact that experiences often leave physical (...) traces. The author rebuts several arguments for the conclusion that experiences represent. The author also considers some of the pitfalls involved in stipulating that experiences represent in a technical sense of “experience” or “represent”. (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)

Brain-centered theories of consciousness seem to face insuperable difficulties. While some philosophers now doubt that the hard problem of consciousness will ever be solved, others call for radically new approaches to conscious experience. In this article I resurrect a largely forgotten approach to consciousness known as neorealism. According to neorealism, consciousness is merely a part, or cross-section, of the environment. Neorealism implies that all conscious experiences, veridical or otherwise, exist outside of the brain and are wholly independent of being perceived (...) or not; nonveridical perceptions of the environment over an arbitrarily short period of time are supposed to be objective constituents of the environment over a more extended time scale. I argue here that neorealism fares at least as well as brain-centered theories of consciousness on a number of fundamental issues. On one fundamental issue—the nature of the relation between veridical and nonveridical perceptions—neorealism outperforms its competitors. (shrink)