Consciousness, Function, and Representation


Book Description

The first of a planned two-volume collection of Ned Block's writings on philosophy of mind; this volume treats consciousness, functionalism, and representation and can be regarded as Block's most complete statement of his positions on consciousness.




Mental Representation and Consciousness


Book Description

conditions of the possibility of Experience ... must mean nothing else than all that which lies immanently in the essence of Experience ... and therefore belongs to it indispensably. The essence of Experience that phenomenological analysis of Experience elucidates is the same as the possibility of Experience, and all that which is determined in the essence, in the possibility of Experience, is eo ipso 1 condition of the possibility of Experience. Through acquaintance with Husserl's work, then, I developed my way of understand ing what, according to their very possibility, lies in conscious activities of mentally representing something, for example, by imagining or remembering it, or by viewing it in a picture, all these understood as forms of modified perception. As Husserl himself made clear, such reflective and descriptive analyses of the mental activities according to their very possibility are carried out regardless of the way they have actually come to be. However, I was also interested in developmen tal questions, especially with regard to the activity of imagining. Hence I turned to cognitive developmental psychology in order to get acquainted with the neces sary empirical material. Moreover, I conducted a pilot-study with young children that I had conceived according to phenomenologically relevant aspects concerning the difference and yet inner connection of the activities of imagining and viewing 2 pictures.




Consciousness, Function, and Representation, Volume 1


Book Description

This volume of Ned Block's writings collects his papers on consciousness, functionalism, and representationism. A number of these papers treat the significance of the multiple realizability of mental states for the mind-body problem—a theme that has concerned Block since the 1960s. One paper on this topic considers the upshot for the mind-body problem of the possibility of a robot that is functionally like us but physically different—as is Commander Data of Star Trek's second generation. The papers on consciousness treat such conceptual issues as phenomenal versus access consciousness, Dennett's theory of consciousness, and the function of consciousness, as well as such empirical matters as "How Not to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness," and (in an expanded version of a paper originally in Trends in Cognitive Sciences) an argument that there are distinct neural correlates for access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Turning to the mind-body problem, Block defends physicalism against Max Black's argument concerning phenomenal modes of presentation. The papers on representationism consider "mental paint" as well as the "Inverted Earth" thought experiment—a world in which colors are reversed but there is a compensating reversal in the words that are used to describe them. Consciousness, Function, and Representation, bringing together papers that have appeared primarily in journals and conference proceedings, can be regarded as Block's most complete statement of his positions on consciousness.




Consciousness


Book Description

Peter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now collected here in revised form. The first half of the volume is devoted to developing, elaborating, and defending against competitors one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which Carruthers now refers to as 'dual-content theory'. Phenomenal consciousness - the feel of experience - is supposed to constitute the 'hardproblem' for a scientific world view, and many have claimed that it is an irredeemable mystery. But Carruthers here claims to have explained it. He argues that phenomenally conscious states are ones that possess both an 'analog' (fine-grained) intentional content and a corresponding higher-orderanalog content, representing the first-order content of the experience. It is the higher-order analog content that enables our phenomenally conscious experiences to present themselves to us, and that constitutes their distinctive subjective aspect, or feel.The next two chapters explore some of the differences between conscious experience and conscious thought, and argue for the plausibility of some kind of eliminativism about conscious thinking (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness). Then the final four chapters focus on the minds of non-human animals. Carruthers argues that even if the experiences of animals aren't phenomenally conscious (as his account probably implies), this needn't prevent the frustrations and sufferings ofanimals from being appropriate objects of sympathy and concern. Nor need it mean that there is any sort of radical 'Cartesian divide' between our minds and theirs of deep significance for comparative psychology. In the final chapter, he argues provocatively that even insects have minds that include abelief/desire/perception psychology much like our own. So mindedness and phenomenal consciousness couldn't be further apart.Carruthers's writing throughout is distinctively clear and direct. The collection will be of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive science.




Action in Perception


Book Description

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noë. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought—that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception.




Quality and Content


Book Description

Joseph Levine draws together a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive approach to philosophy of mind. He defends a materialist view of the mind against various challenges, and offers illuminating studies of consciousness, phenomenal concepts, mental representation, demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology.




Blockheads!


Book Description

New essays on the philosophy of Ned Block, with substantive and wide-ranging responses by Block. Perhaps more than any other philosopher of mind, Ned Block synthesizes philosophical and scientific approaches to the mind; he is unique in moving back and forth across this divide, doing so with creativity and intensity. Over the course of his career, Block has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of intelligence, representation, and consciousness. Blockheads! (the title refers to Block's imaginary counterexample to the Turing test—and to the Block-enthusiast contributors) offers eighteen new essays on Block's work along with substantive and wide-ranging replies by Block. The essays and responses not only address Block's past contributions but are rich with new ideas and argument. They importantly clarify many key elements of Block's work, including his pessimism concerning such thought experiments as Commander Data and the Nation of China; his more general pessimism about intuitions and introspection in the philosophy of mind; the empirical case for an antifunctionalist, biological theory of phenomenal consciousness; the fading qualia problem for a biological theory; the link between phenomenal consciousness and representation (especially spatial representation); and the reducibility of phenomenal representation. Many of the contributors to Blockheads! are prominent philosophers themselves, including Tyler Burge, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, and Hilary Putnam. Contributors Ned Block, Bill Brewer, Richard Brown, Tyler Burge, Marisa Carrasco, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Hakwan Lau, Geoffrey Lee, Janet Levin, Joseph Levine, William G. Lycan, Brian P. McLaughlin, Adam Pautz, Hilary Putnam, Sydney Shoemaker, Susanna Siegel, Nicholas Silins, Daniel Stoljar, Michael Tye, Sebastian Watzl




Consciousness and Language


Book Description

Publisher Description




The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness


Book Description

This handbook provides a panoramic view of current philosophical research on consciousness. Bringing together contributions from experts in the field, it covers the various types of consciousness, the many related psychological phenomena, and the relationship between consciousness and physical reality.




Subjective Consciousness


Book Description

Uriah Kriegel develops an objective theory of what it is for a mental state to be conscious. The key idea is that consciousness arises when self-awareness and world-awareness are integrated in the right way. Conscious mental states differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they represent, they represent themselves in a very specific way.