Philosophy of Mind

Synthesizing decades of research, this book advances a theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. The first part of the book argues that consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and that consciousness depends on attention. Attention changes the flow of information and that gives rise to experience. The resulting account is called the AIR Theory, for attended intermediate-level representations. Objections to the theory are addressed. The second part of the book argues that all consciousness is perceptual: there is no cognitive phenomenology, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self. The conclusions challenge popular theories in consciousness studies: the view that we can directly experience our thoughts, the view that consciousness essentially involves action, and the view that every experience includes awareness of the subject having that experience. The third part of the book explores the neural correlates of consciousness. It argues attention—hence consciousness—arises when populations of neurons fire in synchrony, and the book responds to those who deny that consciousness could be a process in the brain. Along the way, the book also advances novel theories of qualia, the function of consciousness, the unity of consciousness, and the mind-body relation, defending a view called neurofunctionism. Each chapter brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions. Major philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness are surveyed, challenged, and extended.

This book is a collection of essays about consciousness and related issues. It focuses mostly on developing, defending, and exploring the implications of one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which the author now refers to as ‘dual-content theory’. But other issues discussed include: the nature of reductive explanation in general; the nature of conscious thought and the plausibility of some form of eliminativism about conscious thought (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness); the appropriateness of sympathy for creatures whose mental states are not phenomenally conscious ones; and the psychological continuities and similarities that exist between minds that lack phenomenally conscious mental states and minds that possess them.

This book features collection of essays on consciousness. It is intended as a sequel to the author’s 1991 book, The Problem of Consciousness. Although the author has not modified his views in the last decade, he has included his position under the label ‘mysterianism’, in the canon of positions regarding the mind-body problem. Chapters 1-3 focus on the mind-body problem. Chapters 4-6 deal with the concept of matter. Chapter 7 features a dialogue on consciousness and cosmology. Chapter 8 discusses the problem of philosophy. Chapter 9 questions the first person authority theory. Chapter 10 analyses the objects of intentionality.

This book explores how physicalism might best defended and formulated. Two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments are set out. The first draws on the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental states as they are in themselves. More specifically, introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, and it may be that these properties really lack such features. The seriousness of this open possibility is enhanced by an analogy with our perceptual representations of secondary qualities. Our vision represents colors as having certain qualitative natures, and it is an open possibility, widely regarded as actual, that colors actually lack them. If it’s possible that representing phenomenal properties introspectively attributes to them qualitative natures that they actually lack, then the force of the anti-physicalism arguments might well be blunted. The second response exploits the possibility that our ignorance of things in themselves consists in part in our lack of knowledge of the fundamental intrinsic properties of things. This idea has been developed by Bertrand Russell and more recently by David Chalmers into a framework for a unified account of the mental and the physical. Currently unknown or incompletely understood fundamental intrinsic properties provide the categorical bases for the known physical dispositional properties, and would also yield an account of consciousness. While there are non-physicalist versions of this position, some are amenable to physicalism. The book’s third theme is a defense of a nonreductive account of physicalism. The version of the nonreductive view endorsed departs from others in that it rejects the token identity of psychological and microphysical entities of any sort. The deepest relation between the psychological and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity.

This book presents a theory of consciousness, one of the most fascinating but puzzling aspects of human existence. It investigates what consciousness is and how it engages, through perception, with the world. Whatever mystery there may be about origins of consciousness, this book suggests that there is no mystery about what it is. It is the book's contention that consciousness consists in a closely knit complex of occurrent mental phenomena and powers with thinking and self-knowledge at the centre — and nothing else. The book proceeds to give a philosophical elucidation of its nature, analysing it into its constituent psychological parts. It argues that consciousness has a determinate character as an internal but world-oriented phenomenon, and that there exist logically necessary and sufficient conditions for its presence. Though consciousness is an internal state, perception is its very foundation, being the source of the material with which the mind develops, and essential to the processes whereby it does so. The book continues with an extended summary of the phenomena of perception and attention, examining their their component elements and their relations with consciousness and with the world. It demonstrates how close to the heart of consciousness is perception, envisaged already in the very concept. Perception is portrayed as a journey of the attention from the raw date of the senses outwards into physical reality, The different modes of sensory perception are analysed in turn, to give a full picture of how the mind opens out onto its environment and assembles for itself a representation of outer reality. So it is that the gap is closed between the mental and physical domains, and the epistemological basis of mind is established.

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? This book develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. The book starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. It then introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. It then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kind properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. The book goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. The book's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision.

The concept of rationality is a common thread through the human and social sciences — from political science to philosophy, from economics to sociology, from management science to decision analysis. But what counts as rational action and rational behavior? This book explores decision theory as a theory of rationality. Decision theory is the mathematical theory of choice and for many social scientists it makes the concept of rationality mathematically tractable and scientifically legitimate. Yet rationality is a concept with several dimensions and the theory of rationality has different roles to play. It plays an action-guiding role (prescribing what counts as a rational solution of a given decision problem). It plays a normative role (giving us the tools to pass judgment not just on how a decision problem was solved, but also on how it was set up in the first place). And it plays a predictive/explanatory role (telling us how rational agents will behave, or why they did what they did). This book shows, first, that decision theory cannot play all of these roles simultaneously and, second, that no theory of rationality can play one role without playing the other two. The conclusion is that there is no hope of taking decision theory as a theory of rationality.

Eliminativism (or eliminative materialism) has been an important and provocative view in the philosophy of mind since the 1970s. Eliminativism claims that the mental states alluded to in our ordinary talk about the mind – particularly intentional states like beliefs, desires, and thoughts – are the posits of a badly mistaken “folk” theory, and thus, like phlogiston, witches and other posits of badly mistaken theories, they do not exist. This volume is a collection of essays that systematically examine the arguments for eliminativism. Ch. 2 illustrates the way in which connectionist models of belief and memory might be used to support the claim that folk psychology is a radically mistaken theory. Ch. 4 argues against the claim that simulation theory undermines the debate between eliminativists and their opponents. Chs. 3 and 5 argue that the case for the premises of the eliminativist argument is problematic in ways that have not been noted in previous discussions. The long title essay (Ch. 1) argues that, even if the premises are true, they do not support the eliminativist conclusion without the addition of some additional premise, and none of the additional premises that might fill the gap, are defensible. Though many writers rely on the theory of reference to fill the gap between premises and conclusion, it is argued that appeals to the theory of reference cannot do the ontological work required by the eliminativist argument.

While much has been written on Descartes' theory of mind and ideas, no systematic study of his theory of sensory representation and misrepresentation is currently available in the literature. This book is an ambitious attempt to fill this gap. It argues against the established view that Cartesian sensations are mere qualia by defending the view that they are representational; it offers a descriptivist-causal account of their representationality that is critical of, and differs from, all other extant accounts (such as, for example, causal, teleofunctional and purely internalist accounts); and it has the advantage of providing an adequate solution to the problem of sensory misrepresentation within Descartes' internalist theory of ideas. In sum, the book offers a novel account of the representationality of Cartesian sensations; provides a panoramic overview, and critical assessment, of the scholarly literature on this issue; and places Descartes' theory of sensation in the central position it deserves among the philosophical and scientific investigations of the workings of the human mind.

The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of our time on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding — the human condition, philosophically speaking. This book mimes those extensive writings for a conception of the self. And more specifically, the book offers a discussion of Wittgenstein's later writings on language and mind as they hold special significance for the understanding and clarification of the distinctive character of self-descriptive or autobiographical language. The book also undertakes a philosophical investigation of selected autobiographical writings — among the best examples we have of human selves exploring themselves — as they cast new and special light on the critique of mind-body dualism and its undercurrents in particular, and on the nature of autobiographical consciousness more generally. The chapters take up in turn the topics of self-consciousness, what Wittgenstein calls ‘the inner picture’; mental privacy and the picture of metaphysical seclusion; the very idea of our observation of the contents of consciousness; first-person expressive speech; reflexive or self-directed thought and competing pictures of introspection; the nuances of retrospective self-understanding, person-perception, and the corollary issues of self-perception (itself an interestingly dangerous phrase); self-defining memory; and the therapeutic conception of philosophical progress as it applies to all of these issues. The cast of characters interwoven throughout the discussion include, in addition to Wittgenstein centrally, Augustine, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Cavell, among others.