What is a perceiving ‘me’ or ‘soul’ and does it endure, perhaps for eternity, or is it merely one of a sequence of evanescent events? Conscious perception poses several puzzles in relation to subject identity and continuity that Leibniz paid close attention to. Re-applying Leibniz’s principles in a modern context suggests two conclusions. Firstly, his search for fundamental indivisible...
The idea that individual nerve cells might have conscious experiences has been around ever since cells were identified in the seventeenth century, but in the era of modern neuroscience the case for individual human neuronal experience has received little attention. A series of arguments will be presented suggesting that all the human conscious experiences that we talk about are events in...
Giving an account of the relation between evolution and consciousness is painted as posing a dilemma between panpsychism, with minimal consciousness in every grain of matter, and radical emergence, with consciousness appearing as from nowhere in living structures. Panpsychism has been seen as suffering from a combination problem and radical emergence as unjustified in physics. The underpinning...
Abstract An invited workshop on ‘Theories of Consciousness’ was organized in the format of a Nature Network closed group during the second semester of 2009. There were presentations by each of 15 authors active in the field, followed by debate with other presenters and invitees. A week was allocated to each of the theories proposed; general discussion threads were also opened from time to time,...