Aphantasia is a recently discovered disorder characterised by the total incapacity to generate visual forms of mental imagery. This paper proposes that aphantasia raises important theoretical concerns for the ongoing debate in the philosophy and science of consciousness over the nature of dreams. Recent studies of aphantasia and its neurobehavioral correlates reveal that the majority of aphantasics, whilst unable to produce visual imagery while awake, nevertheless retain the capacity to experience rich visual dreams. This finding constitutes a novel explanandum for (...) theories of dreaming. Specifically, I argue that the recent dream reports of aphantasics constitute an empirical challenge to the emerging family of views which claim that dreams are essentially imaginative experiences, constitutively involving the kinds of mental imagery which aphantasics, ex-hypothesi, lack. After presenting this challenge in the context of Jonathan Ichikawa’s recent arguments for this view, I argue that this empirical challenge may be overcome if the imagination theorist abandons Ichikawa’s account of dreaming in favour of a modified version. This involves the claim that dreams are essentially inactive and constitutively involve non voluntary forms of imagination. I conclude with a suggestion for further research which can test the viability of this alternative hypothesis, and move the debate forward. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a detailed examination of Margaret Macdonald's response to the Cartesian sceptical argument from dreaming. I show that Macdonald's views were not well understood by her contemporaries, and I suggest that this misunderstanding has led to her omission from subsequent discussions of this subject. I end with a brief demonstration of the fact that Macdonald's central claims have re-emerged in contemporary epistemology.

This paper addresses the following questions: what account should be given of the state of wakeful consciousness, and what explanatory roles should be assigned to that state? Those questions are taken up after some discussion of the related but distinct question of what it is to be awake. On the view proposed here, in seeking to provide an account of the state of wakeful consciousness one should be aiming to provide an account of a point of view that is associated (...) with the distinctive form of awareness to which one surfaces when one wakes up. Our specification of that point of view should appeal to the awake subject’s temporal point of view, and the epistemic orientation and agential perspective it embodies. The explanatory roles that can be assigned to the state of wakeful consciousness are the explanatory roles that can be assigned to that point of view. (shrink)

The problem of dream skepticism – i.e., the problem of what can justify one’s belief that they are not dreaming – is one of the most famous problems in philosophy. I propose a way of responding to the problem which is available if one subscribes to the theory that the sensory experiences that we have in dreams consist of images (as opposed to false percepts). The response exploits a particular feature of imagination, viz., that it is not possible to simultaneously (...) have two separate imagistic experiences in the same modality. (shrink)

First-person reports of Major Depressive Disorder reveal that when an individual becomes depressed a profound change or ‘shift’ to one’s conscious experience occurs. The depressed person reports that something fundamental to their experience has been disturbed or shifted; a change associated with the common but elusive claim that when depressed one finds oneself in a ‘different world’ detached from reality and other people. Existing attempts to utilise these phenomenological observations in a psychiatric context are challenged by the fact that this (...) experiential ‘shift’ characteristic of depression appears mysterious and resists analysis in scientific terms. This paper offers a way out of this predicament. The hypothesis proposed is that when an individual becomes depressed, the individual departs from a state of ordinary wakeful consciousness and enters a distinctive global state of consciousness akin to dreaming and the psychedelic state. After unpacking and motivating this hypothesis in the context of research in consciousness science, I outline two of its important implications for the neurobiology of depression and psychedelic psychiatry. The upshot is a promising and conceptually well-motivated hypothesis about depression which is apt for empirical uptake and development. (shrink)