In the history of life, consciousness of sensory states with 'phenomenal properties'-the basis of 'sentience'-is, arguably, a late evolutionary development, which occurred long after conscious access to a 'global mental workspace' had become widely established as a strategy for cognitive information processing. In this article, I focus on phenomenal consciousness. I propose a step-by-step...
Blindsight refers to the ability to make accurate visual discriminations without conscious awareness of the stimuli. In this study, we present new evidence from naturalistic observations of a patient with bilateral damage to the striate cortex, who surprisingly demonstrated the ability to detect colored objects, particularly red ones. Despite the slow and effortful process, the patient reported...
The hard problem of consciousness is to explain the experience of qualia. But everything gets easier once we realise that what has to be explained is not how qualia can exist as objective entities but rather why the conscious subject should believe that they exist. This essay lays out a programme for doing this. It makes radical proposals as to how the “qualia illusion” is created, and why...