Introduction Current theories suggest that prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an important role in visual awareness (Dehaene 2003). This hypothesis has been supported by a number of brain imaging studies (Rees 2002). However, critics have challenged that there has been a lack of neuropsychological demonstration of the essential role of PFC in visual awareness: PFC damage does not seem to result in...
It is usually taken as given that consciousness involves superior or more elaborate forms of information processing. Contemporary models equate consciousness with global processing, system complexity, or depth or stability of computation. This is in stark contrast with the powerful philosophical intuition that being conscious is more than just having the ability to compute. I argue that it is...
There are (at least) two possible readings of Block’s recent suggestion that consciousness may depend on subcomputational biological mechanisms [1]. First, there could be distinct mechanisms that support the same computations, yet only some biological ones give rise to subjective experiences. These mechanisms may differ functionally in ways that cannot be characterized in purely computational...
I introduce an empirically-grounded version of a higher-order theory of conscious perception. Traditionally, theories of consciousness either focus on the global availability of conscious information, or take conscious phenomenology as a brute fact due to some biological or basic representational properties. Here I argue instead that the key to characterizing the consciousness lies in its...
Whether consciousness is hard to explain depends on the notion of explanation at play. Importantly, for an explanation to be successful, it is necessary to have a correct understanding of the relevant basic empirical facts (i.e. the explanans). We review socio-historical factors that account for why, as a field, the neuroscience of consciousness has not been particularly successful at getting...