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...
AJOB Neurosci
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...
J Philos
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...
Philos Psychol
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...