I argue that the feeling that one is the owner of his or her mental states is not an intrinsic property of those states. Rather, it consists in a contingent relation between consciousness and its intentional objects. As such, there are (a variety of) circumstances, varying in their interpretive clarity, in which this relation can come undone. When this happens, the content of consciousness still is apprehended, but the feeling that the content “belongs to me” no longer is secured. I (...) discuss the implications of a mechanism enabling personal ownership for understanding a variety of clinical syndromes as well normal mental function. (shrink)

A core commitment of the reflexive theory of consciousness is that conscious states are themselves necessarily the contents of mental states. The strongest argument for this claim—the necessity of inner-content for consciousness—is the argument from unconscious perception. According to this argument, we find evidence for the necessity claim from cases of alleged unconscious perception, the most well-known and widely discussed of these being blindsight. However, the reflexive theory cannot partake in this argument and therefore, must rely on at least one (...) of the other arguments for the necessity claim. These arguments are significantly less convincing than the argument from unconscious perception, and thus the reflexive theory is left in a dialectically weak position. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 94, Issue 3, pp 359 - 380 In this paper the author discusses and defends a theory of consciousness inspired by Franz Brentano, according to which every conscious experience involves a certain kind of immediate awareness of itself. All conscious experience is in a certain fundamental sense ‘self-intimating’—it constitutively involves awareness of that very awareness. The author calls this ‘the awareness of awareness thesis’, and she calls the phenomenon that it concerns ‘awareness of awareness’. The author attempts (...) to give a substantive description of what AOA consists in in two ways, first, by listing some of its positive features, and second, by comparing it and contrasting it with introspection. The idea is that there are many different ways we can be aware of our experiences, introspection being one way, AOA being another, distinct way. By clarifying the distinction between AOA and introspection, we can get a better grasp of both phenomena. (shrink)

Can we maintain that purple seems composed of red and blue without giving up the impenetrability of the red and blue parts that compose it? Brentano thinks we can. Purple, according to him, is a chessboard of red and blue tiles which, although individually too small to be perceived, are together indistinctly perceived within the purple. After a presentation of Brentano’s solution, we raise two objections to it. First, Brentano’s solution commits him to unperceivable intentional objects (the chessboard’s tiles). Second, (...) his chessboard account fails in the end to explain the phenomenal spatial continuity of compound colours. We then sketch an alternative account, which, while holding fast to the phenomenal compoundedness of the purple and to the impenetrability of component colours, avoids introducing inaccessible intentional objects and compromising on the continuity of the purple. According to our proposal, instead of being indistinctly perceived spatial parts of the purple, red and blue are distinctly perceived non- spatial parts of it. (shrink)

By “Brentanian inner consciousness” I mean the conception of inner consciousness developed by Franz Brentano. The aim of this paper is threefold: first, to present Brentano’s account of inner consciousness; second, to discuss this account in light of the mereology outlined by Brentano himself; and third, to decide whether this account incurs an infinite regress. In this regard, I distinguish two kinds of infinite regress: external infinite regress and internal infinite regress. I contend that the most plausible reading of Brentano’s (...) account is the so-called fusion thesis, and I argue that internal infinite regress turns out to be inherent to Brentanian inner consciousness. (shrink)

In recent years, Brentano’s theory of consciousness has been systematically reassessed. The reconstruction that has received the most attention is the so-called identity reconstruction. It says that secondary consciousness and the mental phenomenon it is about are one and the same. Crucially, it has been claimed that this thesis is the only one which can make Brentano’s theory immune to what he considers the main threat to it, namely, the duplication of the primary object. In this paper, I argue that (...) the identity reconstruction is untenable, and I defend an alternative, which I name the unity reconstruction. According to the unity reconstruction, secondary consciousness is a real part of the mental phenomenon it is about, and hence is distinct from it. I contend that this thesis does not in itself lead to the duplication of the primary object, and that what should be blamed is rather a controversial thesis about the intentional structure of secondary consciousness—a thesis which Brentano ultimately abandoned. (shrink)

In a recent set of articles (Klein et al., 2023; Klein & Loftus, 2024), my colleagues and I used the logic of adaptationism—the application of evolutionary principles to study the functional design of naturally selected systems (e.g., Klein et al., 2002)—to help make sense of the role natural selection played in the evolution of consciousness. To avoid well-known, seemingly intractable problems that accompany efforts to explain “how consciousness is possible in a world that consists in physical objects and their relations” (...) (the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”), we limited investigation to the question of “why natural selection favored consciousness?” In the present article, I try to make amends for this evasion by addressing some of the conceptual challenges posed by the hard problem. Drawing on insights from Klein et al.’s (2023) evolutionary excursion into the why of consciousness, I identify a potential alteration in the referential identity of “subject” and “object” when they are taken as properties of a mental state, and discuss how these changes might offer insight into the how question of consciousness. (shrink)

Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, s/he typically does not know this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012). Specifically, the exogenous nature of the dream narrative is the result of an individual assuming perspectival, but not personal, ownership of content s/he authored (i.e., “The content (...) in my head is not mine. Therefore it must be peripherally perceived”). Situating explanation within a theoretical space designed to address questions pertaining to the experienced origins of conscious content has a number of salutatory consequences. For example, it promotes predictive fecundity by bringing to light empirical generalizations whose presence otherwise might have gone unnoticed (e.g., the severely limited role of mental time travel within the dream narrative). -/- . (shrink)

In this paper I argue that radiological attempts to elucidate the properties of self -- an endeavor currently popular in the social neurosciences -- are fraught with conceptual difficulties. I first discuss several philosophical criteria that increase the chances we are posing the “right” questions to nature. I then discuss whether these criteria are met when empirical efforts are directed at one of the central constructs in the social sciences – the human self. In particular, I consider whether recent attempts (...) to map the neural correlates of self and its assumed properties using brain scanning technology satisfy the conceptual conditions minimally required to ask well-formed, theoretically satisfying questions of nature. I conclude that much theoretical work remains to be done. (shrink)