Phenomenal consciousness—the subjective feel of experience—can be fully explained in naturalistic, scientifically acceptable terms. Peter Carruthers argues against the view that consciousness is inherently mysterious, developing a novel account based on higher-order thought. Drawing on interdisciplinary resources, he shows that this approach explains away extravagant claims about consciousness while substantively accounting for the subjectivity of experience. The book surveys a wide range of extant theories and is aimed at readers in philosophy and psychology.
The paper revisits the debate about cognitive phenomenology, elaborating and defending a proposal that the test for irreducible phenomenology is the presence of explanatory gaps. It argues that the debate should be aligned between non-conceptual and conceptual or propositional phenomenology, rather than between sensory and cognitive phenomenology. The authors defend three varieties of non-sensory, non-conceptual phenomenology: valence, a sense of approximate number, and a sense of elapsed time.
If a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness is correct and fully reductive, then questions about consciousness in nonhuman animals should be abandoned—not because they are too difficult, but because there are no substantive facts to discover. The argument hinges on the idea that global broadcasting is all-or-nothing in humans but framed in terms that imply gradations across species, yet the concept of phenomenal consciousness does not permit mental states to be conscious to some degree. The paper first displays some virtues of global workspace theory to motivate the discussion.
Global-workspace theory is the best-supported account of the functional and neural correlates of consciousness. The theory is backed by extensive findings in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including experiments that track conscious contents in the brain. Critiques and counter-evidence are addressed, and the use of evidence from nonhuman animals is argued not to beg the question about consciousness.
Global-workspace theory can provide a complete, reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness. By globally broadcasting nonconceptual content, the theory enables higher-order thoughts about that content that lack conceptual connections to physical, functional, or representational facts. This makes zombies conceivable and creates an epistemic explanatory gap. However, those higher-order thoughts themselves can be fully explained naturalistically, so all facts about consciousness can be accounted for. The chapter defends the reality of the phenomenal concepts needed for this account and responds to a dilemma posed by David Chalmers.