89 papers in the library · 8,182 citations · publishing 1989-2026
The MIT Press eBooks December 12, 2008 Michael Tye 139 citations
Four major puzzles of consciousness philosophical materialism must confront after rejecting the phenomenal concept strategy. We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matter? To defend materialism, philosophical materialists have formulated what is sometimes called "the...
The MIT Press eBooks December 12, 2008 Michael Tye 1 citation
This chapter’s discussion puts to task the views developed in previous chapters in an attempt to solve four famous philosophical puzzles: the Puzzle of Mary, the Explanatory Gap, the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and the Possibility of Zombies. How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what form does the...
The MIT Press eBooks May 30, 2008 Stanislas Dehaene 14 citations
Among the many brain events evoked by a visual stimulus, which ones are associated specifically with conscious perception, and which merely reflect nonconscious processing? Understanding the neuronal mechanisms of consciousness is a major challenge for cognitive neuroscience. Recently, progress has been achieved by contrasting behavior and brain activation in minimally different experimental...
The MIT Press eBooks March 31, 2006 Peter Carruthers 10 citations
Are there different constraints on theories of conscious experience as against theories of conscious propositional thought?Is what is problematic or puzzling about each of these phenomena of the same, or of different, types?And to what extent is it plausible to think that either or both conscious experience and conscious thought involve some sort of selfreference?In pursuing these questions I...
The MIT Press eBooks September 23, 2005
Cover "Issues of subjectivity and consciousness are dealt with in very different ways in the analytical tradition and in the idealistic phenomenological tradition central to continental philosophy. This book brings together analytically inspired philosophers working on the continent with English-speaking philosophers to adress specific isues regarding subjectivity and consciousness. The issues...
The MIT Press eBooks October 25, 2002 David J. Chalmers 156 citations
I will discuss one aspect of the role that neuroscience plays in the search for a theory of consciousness. Whether or not neuroscience can solve all the problems of consciousness singlehandedly, it undoubtedly has a major role to play. Recent years have seen striking progress in neurobiological research bearing on the problems of consciousness. The conceptual foundations of this sort of...
The MIT Press eBooks August 28, 2000 273 citations
This book brings together an international group of neuroscientists and philosophers who are investigating how the content of subjective experience is correlated with events in the brain. The fundamental methodological problem in consciousness research is the subjectivity of the target phenomenon—the fact that conscious experience, under standard conditions, is always tied to an individual,...
The MIT Press eBooks August 28, 2000 Thomas Metzinger 73 citations
Abstract. Before one can even begin to model consciousness and what exactly it means that it is a subjective phenomenon one needs a theory about what a first-person perspective really is. This theory has to be conceptually convincing, empirically plausible and, most of all, open to new developments. The chosen conceptual framework must be able to accommodate scientific progress. Its ba-sic...
The MIT Press eBooks March 26, 1996 David J. Chalmers 1,964 citations
To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with...
The MIT Press eBooks March 26, 1996 Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose 82 citations
Abstract Features of consciousness difficult to understand in terms of conventional neuroscience have evoked application of quantum theory, which describes the fundamental behavior of matter and energy. In this paper we propose that aspects of quantum theory (e.g. quantum coherence) and of a newly proposed physical phenomenon of quantum wave function “self-collapse” (objective reduction: OR -...
The MIT Press eBooks March 26, 1996 Jean E. Burns 1 citation
The possibility of empirical test is discussed with respect to three issues: (1) What is the ontological relationship between consciousness and the brain/physical world? (2) What physical characteristics are associated with the mind/brain interface? (3) Can consciousness act on the brain independently of any brain process?
The MIT Press eBooks November 17, 1995 Michael Tye 1,665 citations
Can neurophysiology ever reveal to us what it is like to smell a skunk or to experience pain? In what does the feeling of happiness consist? How is it that changes in the white and gray matter composing our brains generate subjective sensations and feelings? These are several of the questions that Michael Tye addresses, while formulating a new and enlightening theory about the phenomenal "what...
The MIT Press eBooks April 7, 1994 1,724 citations
Metacognition offers an up-to-date compendium of major scientific issues involved in metacognition. The twelve original contributions provide a concise statement of theoretical and empirical research on self-reflective processes or knowing about what we know. Self-reflective processes are often thought to be central to what we mean by consciousness and the personal self. Without such processes,...
The MIT Press eBooks November 21, 1989 Herbert A. Simon, Craig A. Kaplan 323 citations
Introduction 1. How Not to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness 2. Life and Cognition 3. The Representation of Number in Natural Language Syntax and in the Language of Thought: A Case Study of the Evolution and Development of Representational Resources 4. The View From Here: The Nonsymbolic Structure of Spatial Representation 5. Toward a Cognitive Neurobiology of the Moral Virtues 6....