Behavioral and Brain Sciences
June 25, 2026
Joshua Shepherd
Determining the functions of consciousness is difficult, in part because the term "consciousness" subsumes many different sensory modalities and aspects of cognitive processing. Fleming and Michel make an excellent start by forwarding compelling arguments regarding functions for conscious vision. I consider how their picture might generalize beyond vision, by looking at two areas: conscious...
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
January 4, 2026
Joshua Shepherd, Tim Bayne
1 citation
A foundational issue for the science and philosophy of consciousness concerns the function(s) of consciousness—what consciousness does for any particular aspect of psychological or neural processing. In spite of progress in consciousness science, false assumptions and a lack of clarity regarding how best to approach the functions of consciousness represent an ongoing and serious roadblock to...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
March 1, 2024
Tim Bayne, Anil K. Seth, Marcello Massimini et al.
Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness ('C-tests') are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural...
Ai & Society
2024
Joshua Shepherd
34 citations
Many think that a specific aspect of phenomenal consciousness-valenced or affective experience-is essential to consciousness's moral significance (valence sentientism). They hold that valenced experience is necessary for well-being, or moral status, or psychological intrinsic value (or all three). Some think that phenomenal consciousness generally is necessary for non-derivative moral...
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science
March 2023
Joshua Shepherd
Cognitive effort is thought to be familiar in everyday life, ubiquitous across multiple variations of task and circumstance, and integral to cost/benefit computations that are themselves central to the proper functioning of cognitive control. In particular, cognitive effort is thought to be closely related to the assessment of cognitive control's costs. I argue here that the construct of...
AJOB Neuroscience
December 7, 2022
Joshua Shepherd
38 citations
Consciousness-based approaches to non-human moral status maintain that consciousness is necessary for (some degree or level of) moral status. While these approaches are intuitive to many, in this paper I argue that the judgment that consciousness is necessary for moral status is not secure enough to guide policy regarding non-humans, that policies responsive to the moral status of non-humans...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Joshua Shepherd, Neil Levy
4 citations
This chapter considers three connections between consciousness and issues in ethics: first, the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding an entity’s moral status; second, the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding moral responsibility for action; and third, the relevance of consciousness for the acquisition of moral knowledge. This is a disparate set of connections,...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness
July 9, 2020
Myrto I. Mylopoulos, Joshua Shepherd
This chapter reflects on questions about the nature and sources of agentive phenomenology—that is, the set of those experience-types associated with exercises of agency, and paradigmatically with intentional actions. The discussion begins with pioneering work in psychology and neuroscience that dates to the early 1980s. Much of the current work on agentive phenomenology in both psychology and...
May 23, 2018
Joshua Shepherd
1 citation
In this chapter, the author examines the thought that phenomenal consciousness is somehow valuable. Consciousness is polysemous. One way to get a sense of this is to read the entry for &s;consciousness&s; in the Oxford English Dictionary. The kind at issue is what philosophers and psychologists call &s;phenomenal consciousness.&s; In the philosophy and science of consciousness psychologists say...
May 23, 2018
Joshua Shepherd
Charles Siewert proposes various versions of an interesting thought experiment. It involves conceiving of one&s;s own mental life as lacking a certain feature – that of phenomenal consciousness. Siewert compares the loss of phenomenal consciousness to the loss of colour vision; it is akin to moving from a coloured world to a black-and-white world. Neil Levy is not denying that phenomenal...
May 23, 2018
Joshua Shepherd
It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in Permanent Vegetative State (PVS); debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness; controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia; and arguments...
Journal of Medical Ethics
March 13, 2018
Joshua Shepherd
49 citations
In this interesting paper, Lavazza and Massimini draw attention to a subset of the ethical issues surrounding the development and potential uses of cerebral organoids. This subset concerns the possibility that cerebral organoids may one day develop phenomenal consciousness, and thereby qualify as conscious subjects—that there may one day be something it is like to be an advanced cerebral...
The Journal of Philosophy
August 1, 2017
Joshua Shepherd
26 citations
I offer an account of the experience of acting that demonstrates how agentive aspects of experience associated with the execution of intentions are richly integrated with perceptual aspects associated with parts of action taking place in the publicly observable world. On the view I elucidate, the experience of acting is often both an engagement with the world and a type of intimate acquaintance...
European Journal of Philosophy
February 2, 2017
Joshua Shepherd
In this paper, I examine the claim that self-consciousness is highly morally significant, such that the fact that an entity is self-conscious generates strong moral reasons against harming or killing that entity. This claim is apparently very intuitive, but I argue it is false. I consider two ways to defend this claim: one indirect, the other direct. The best-known arguments relevant to...
Mind & Language
June 1, 2015
Joshua Shepherd
The extensive involvement of nonconscious processes in human behaviour has led some to suggest that consciousness is much less important for the control of action than we might think. In this article I push against this trend, developing an understanding of conscious control that is sensitive to our best models of overt (that is, bodily) action control. Further, I assess the cogency of various...
Philosophical Psychology
October 3, 2014
Joshua Shepherd
33 citations
In this paper, I offer evidence that folk views of free will and moral responsibility accord a central place to consciousness. In sections 2 and 3, I contrast action production via conscious states and processes with action in concordance with an agent's long-standing and endorsed motivations, values, and character traits. Results indicate that conscious action production is considered much...