12 found
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  1. The unity of consciousness, within subjects and between subjects.Luke Roelofs - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (12):3199-3221.
    The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many experiences of a single subject. I investigate whether this relation could hold between the experiences of distinct subjects, considering three major arguments against the possibility of such ‘between-subjects unity’. The first argument, based on the popular idea that unity implies subsumption by a composite experience, can be deflected by allowing for limited forms of ‘experience-sharing’, in which the same token experience belongs to more (...)
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  2. Longings in Limbo: A New Defence of I-Desires.Luke Roelofs - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3331-3355.
    This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, (...)
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  3. Phenomenal Blending and the Palette Problem.Luke Roelofs - 2014 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):59-70.
    I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the relative qualitative homogeneity of the brain's basic constituents, a discrepancy that has been raised as a problem for identity theorists by Maxwell and Lockwood (as one element of the ‘grain problem’), and more recently as a problem for panpsychists (under the heading of ‘the palette problem’). The challenge posed to panpsychists by this discrepancy is to make sense of how a relatively small ‘palette’ of basic qualities could (...)
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  4. Panpsychism, intuitions, and the great chain of being.Luke Roelofs & Jed Buchanan - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):2991-3017.
    Some philosophical theories of consciousness imply consciousness in things we would never intuitively think are conscious—most notably, panpsychism implies that consciousness is pervasive, even outside complex brains. Is this a reductio ab absurdum for such theories, or does it show that we should reject our original intuitions? To understand the stakes of this question as clearly as possible, we analyse the structured pattern of intuitions that panpsychism conflicts with. We consider a variety of ways that the tension between this intuition (...)
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  5. Combining Minds: A Defence of the Possibility of Experiential Combination.Luke Roelofs - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of, and relations among, its parts. We have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the physical properties of, and relations among, its parts. But a long­standing intuition holds that consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me. I ask why: (...)
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  6. Why Imagining Requires Content: A Reply to a Reply to an Objection to Radical Enactive Cognition.Luke Roelofs - 2018 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 7 (4):246-254.
    ‘Radical enactivism’ (Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017) eschews representational content for all ‘basic’ mental activities. Critics have argued that this view cannot make sense of the workings of the imagination. In their recent book (2017), Hutto and Myin respond to these critics, arguing that some imaginings can be understood without attributing them any representational content. Their response relies on the claim that a system can exploit a structural isomorphism between two things without either of those things being a semantically evaluable (...)
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  7. What are the Dimensions of the Conscious Field?Luke Roelofs - 2014 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (7-8):88-104.
    I analyse the meaning of a popular idiom among consciousness researchers, in which an individual's consciousness is described as a 'field'. I consider some of the contexts where this idea appears, in particular discussions of attention and the unity of consciousness. In neither case, I argue, do authors provide the resources to cash out all the implications of field-talk: in particular, they do not give sense to the idea of conscious elements being arrayed along multiple dimensions. I suggest ways to (...)
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  8. Seeing the Invisible: How to Perceive, Imagine, and Infer the Minds of Others.Luke Roelofs - 2017 - Erkenntnis 83 (2):205-229.
    The psychology and phenomenology of our knowledge of other minds is not well captured either by describing it simply as perception, nor by describing it simply as inference. A better description, I argue, is that our knowledge of other minds involves both through ‘perceptual co-presentation’, in which we experience objects as having aspects that are not revealed. This allows us to say that we perceive other minds, but perceive them as private, i.e. imperceptible, just as we routinely perceive aspects of (...)
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  9. Introduction to Special Issue on “Enactivism, Representationalism, and Predictive Processing”.Krzysztof Dołęga, Luke Roelofs & Tobias Schlicht - 2018 - Philosophical Explorations 21 (2):179-186.
    The papers in this special issue make important contributions to a longstanding debate about how we should conceive of and explain mental phenomena. In other words, they make a case about the best philosophical paradigm for cognitive science. The two main competing approaches, hotly debated for several decades, are representationalism and enactivism. However, recent developments in disciplines such as machine learning and computational neuroscience have fostered a proliferation of intermediate approaches, leading to the emergence of completely new positions, in particular (...)
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  10. Rational Agency without Self‐Knowledge: Could ‘We’ Replace ‘I’?Luke Roelofs - 2017 - Dialectica 71 (1):3-33.
    It has been claimed that we need singular self-knowledge to function properly as rational agents. I argue that this is not strictly true: agents in certain relations could dispense with singular self-knowledge and instead rely on plural self-knowledge. In defending the possibility of this kind of ‘selfless agent’, I thereby defend the possibility of a certain kind of ‘seamless’ collective agency; agency in a group of agents who have no singular self-knowledge, who do not know which member of the group (...)
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  11. There is No Biotic Community.Luke Roelofs - 2011 - Environmental Philosophy 8 (2):69-94.
    It has been suggested that the biosphere and its component ecological systems be thought of as “communities”; this is often invoked as a reason to attribute it moral significance. I first disambiguate this claim, distinguishing the purely moral, social-factual, and biological-factual senses of this term, as well as distinguishing primary from derived meanings, drawing on material from philosophy, sociology, psychology, and ecology. I then argue that the ethically important sense of the term is one that does not apply to ecological (...)
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  12. Panpsychism: Contemporary perspectives Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig jaskolla, eds. New York: Oxford university press, 2017, 414 pp., $78.00. [REVIEW]Luke Roelofs - 2018 - Dialogue 57 (3):639-641.
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