Until recently, mental imagery has largely been regarded as an exclusively conscious phenomenon. However, recent empirical results suggest that mental imagery can also occur unconsciously. People who report having no experiences of mental imagery often perform similar to controls on behavioural tasks thought to require imagery. A surprising number of them also display significant levels of...
Detecting introspective errors about consciousness presents challenges that are widely supposed to be difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. This is a problem for consciousness science because many central questions turn on when and to what extent we should trust subjects’ introspective reports. This has led some authors to suggest that we should abandon introspection as a source of...
A central project for the neuroscience of consciousness is to reveal the neural basis of consciousness. For the past 20-odd years, this project has been conceptualized in terms of minimal sufficiency. Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the project is better conceived in mechanistic terms as the search for difference-makers. In this paper, I (i) motivate this mechanistic...
The notion of a global state (or level) of consciousness is an increasingly important construct in the science of consciousness. However, exactly what a global state of consciousness is remains poorly understood. In this paper I offer an account of global states of consciousness as consciousness-related capacity modulations. On this view global states are not themselves phenomenal states – they...