This paper examines what the existence and character of phenomenal experience establish about its metaphysical status. It does not deny phenomenal consciousness, qualitative difference, unity, immediacy, ineffability, or first-person access. Its target is the stronger claim that phenomenal character is metaphysically primitive. The paper distinguishes two principal, potentially interacting...
Consciousness research routinely moves between neural activity, representational content, conscious perception, phenomenal unity, and subject attribution. Yet evidence obtained for one of these analytical positions does not automatically warrant claims at another. This paper formulates this problem as the attribution-transfer problem and proposes the Local Bridge Restraint (LBR) as a...
Consciousness research contains several distinct transfer problems: from reports or neural signals to target states, from target states to consciousness classifications, from coarse to fine grains, and from shared classifications to claims of common underlying structure. This paper argues that these problems instantiate a single methodological restriction, the Non-Inheritance Principle: warrant...