Abstract not found

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the

The search for neural correlates of consciousness (or NCCs) is arguably the cornerstone in the recent resurgence of the science of consciousness. The search poses many difficult empirical problems, but it seems to be tractable in principle, and some ingenious studies in recent years have led to considerable progress. A number of proposals have been put forward

Abstract (Long) When cognitive scientists apply computational theory to the problem of phenomenal consciousness, as many of them have been doing recently, there are two fundamentally distinct approaches available. Either consciousness is to be explained in terms of the nature of the representational vehicles the brain deploys; or it is to be explained in terms of the computational processes defined over these vehicles. We call versions of these two approaches vehicle and process theories of consciousness, respectively. However, while there may be space for vehicle theories of consciousness in cognitive science, they are relatively rare. This is because of the influence exerted, on the one hand, by a large body of research which purports to show that the explicit representation of information in the brain and conscious experience are dissociable, and on the other, by the classical computational theory of mind – the theory that takes human cognition to be a species of symbol manipulation. But two recent developments in cognitive science combine to suggest that a reappraisal of this situation is in order. First, a number of theorists have recently been highly critical of the experimental methodologies employed in the dissociation studies – so critical, in fact, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that the dissociability of conscious experience and explicit representation has been adequately demonstrated. Second, classicism, as a theory of human cognition, is no longer as dominant in

Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must

Consciousness and intentionality are perhaps the two central phenomena in the philosophy of mind. Human beings are conscious beings: there is something it is like to be us. Human beings are intentional beings: we represent what is going on in the world. Correspondingly, our specific mental states, such as perceptions and thoughts, very often have

What is it like to see a bat? A critique of Dretske’s representationalist

Traditionally, perceptual experiences—for example, the experience of seeing a cat—were thought to have two quite distinct components. When one sees a cat, one’s experience is “about ” the cat: this is the representational or intentional component of the experience. One’s experience also has phenomenal character: this is the sensational component of the experience. Although the intentional and sensational components at least typically go together, in principle they might come apart: the intentional component could be present without the sensational component or vice versa. Recently a number of philosophers have argued that this picture of perception is incorrect. According to them, the sensational component of a perceptual experience cannot vary independently of its intentional component: the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is entirely determined by the experience’s propositional content—that is, by what it represents. Usually this is supposed to hold also of “bodily sensations”: experiences of pain, twinges, tickles, and the like. The phenomenal character of such experiences, it is claimed, is likewise entirely determined by their propositional contents. This view comes in a number of variants, and also goes under a number of names:

Representational theories of consciousness can be understood as supporting Brentano’s thesis, that intentionality is the mark of the mental, since they seek to explain consciousness in terms of the representational features of the brain. Unlike Brentano, however, those who support these theories are generally physicalists.

Before one can even begin to model consciousness and what exactly it means that it is a subjective phenomenon one needs a theory about what a first-person perspective really is. This theory has to be conceptually convincing, empirically plausible and, most of all, open to new developments. The chosen conceptual framework must be able to accommodate scientific progress. Its basic assumptions have to be plastic as it were, so that new details and empirical data can continuously be fed into the theoretical model as it grows and becomes more refined. This paper makes an attempt at sketching the outlines of such a theory, offering a representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-person perspective. Three phenomenal target properties are centrally relevant: “mineness” (phenomenal appropriation; the sense of ownership), “selfhood ” (the conscious experience of being someone), and “perspectivalness ” (a structural feature: phenomenal space as a whole is organized around a center, a supramodal point of view). This contribution analyzes these properties on a representational as well as on a functional level of description. The author introduces new conceptual