According to a widely shared belief, an explanation of phenomenal experience in terms of neural mechanisms is impossible in principle. The reason for this "Explanatory Gap" is supposed to be a basic incompatibility between phenomenal and neuroscientific knowledge: while the latter is framed in terms of functional relationships, it is impossible to capture phenomenal experience in functional...
One of the reasons why the Neural Correlates of Consciousness Program could appear attractive in the 1990s was that it seemed to disentangle theoretical and empirical problems. Theoretical disagreements could thus be sidestepped in order to focus on empirical research regarding the neural substrate of consciousness. One of the further consequences of this dissociation of empirical and...
Many philosophers have argued that the subjective character of conscious experience results in a fundamental deficit of third-person (henceforth: extrospective) access to first-person experience. By comparing extrospective measurement techniques with measurement techniques in the natural sciences, we will argue that extrospective methods suffer from no such deficit. After a rejection of some...
The recent history of the mind-body problem appears as the history of a philosophical encounter with Descartes. Spinoza seems to play only a subordinate role. Spinoza's key metaphysical presuppositions and background assumptions all diverge radically from those of contemporary theorists. Given these deep-seated differences, any reference to Spinoza in the mind-body debate seems highly...