Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
Philip Woodward
I review three problems that have historically motivated pessimism about artificial intelligence: (1) the problem of consciousness, according to which artificial systems lack the conscious oversight that characterizes intelligent agents; (2) the problem of global relevance, according to which artificial systems cannot solve fully general theoretical and practical problems; (3) the problem of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
Marco Cavaglià, E. A. Zizzi, S. Dombrowski et al.
General anaesthesia has been used in medical practice since the mid-nineteenth century, but its pharmacological mechanism of action is still not entirely clear. In a top-down approach, investigations probe smaller and smaller scales to shed light on how anaesthetics disrupt or alter neural activity, ultimately resulting in loss of consciousness. In the past few decades, advances in neuroscience...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
June 1, 2022
Harry Cleeveley
The zombie argument against physicalism (Chalmers, 1996; 2010), if successful, shows that one of two things must be true: either zombies are possible (and therefore physicalism is false) or some form of panpsychism is true. Moreover, this is generally understood as an exclusive 'or': the truth of panpsychism at the actual world would be incompatible with the possibility of zombies in the...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
F. Kammerer
43 citations
Phenomenal consciousness appears to be particularly normatively significant. For this reason, sentience-based conceptions of ethics are widespread. In the field of animal ethics, knowing which animals are sentient appears to be essential to decide the moral status of these animals. I argue that, given that materialism is true of the mind, phenomenal consciousness is probably not particularly...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
A. Crump, Jonathan Birch
We consider the relationship between neural and behavioural evidence for animal consciousness. We critically examine two recent studies: one neural and one behavioural. The first, on crows, finds different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus is reported as seen or unseen. However, to implicate this neural activity in consciousness, we must assume that a specific conditioned...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
Jonathan Birch, D. Broom, Heather Browning et al.
A conscious being has a subjective point of view on the world and on its own body. This idea of a ‘point of view’ is easiest to grasp in the case of vision. Ernst Mach, in the Analysis of Sensations, famously attempted to draw his own visual point of view (Figure 1). But there is far more to human subjective experience than vision. Our subjective point of view includes sounds, odours, tastes,...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Christopher F. Masciari
The phenomenal overflow debate is a debate about the richness of phenomenal consciousness. There are two candidate views: the rich view and the sparse view. The rich view says phenomenal consciousness outstrips access consciousness and the contents of working memory. The sparse view denies this. Moreover, according to some conceptions of the sparse view, the subjective impression of richness...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Michael Barkasi
Do perceptual experiences always inherit the content of their neural correlates? Most scientists and philosophers working on perception say 'yes'. They hold the view that an experience's content just is (i.e.is identical to) the content of its neural correlate. This paper presses back against this view, while trying to retain as much of its spirit as possible. The paper argues that type-2...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
November 20, 2021
Lionel Naccache
In this commentary, I discuss my main points of convergence and divergence with Mark Solms' conception of consciousness presented in his very stimulating opus, The Hidden Spring, and then frame two proposals to integrate some of his key concepts into the global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT) of consciousness.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
Damian Aleksiev
Panpsychists aspire to explain human consciousness, but can they also account for the physical world? In this paper, I argue that proponents of a popular form of panpsychism cannot. I pose a new challenge against this form of panpsychism: it faces an explanatory gap between the fundamental experiences it posits and some physical entities. I call the problem of explaining the existence of these...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
C. Rovelli
Twentieth-century physics has revealed a pervasive relational aspect of the physical world. This fact is relevant in view of some of the motivations for panpsychism. In fact, it may be seen as a vindication of the panpsychist idea of a monist continuity where some aspects of consciousness's perspectivalism are universal. On the other hand, this same fact may undermine some of the motivations...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
A. Harris
This paper supports the scientific position that panpsychism is a valid category of possible resolutions to the hard problem of consciousness, and it focuses on a solution to the 'combination problem' in panpsychism. I argue for a new way of thinking about consciousness in which consciousness is not viewed in reference to subjects, and that the concept of a 'subject' is borne of the illusion of...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
Marina Cortês, L. Smolin
We suggest that four of the deepest problems in science are closely related and may share a common resolution. These are (1) the foundational problems in quantum theory, (2) the problem of quantum gravity, (3) the role of qualia and conscious awareness in nature, (4) the nature of time. We begin by proposing an answer to the question of what a quantum event is: an event is a process in which an...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
L. Roelofs
Galileo's Error is a superlative work of public philosophy, particularly as a way of introducing modern academic panpsychism to a broader audience. In this commentary, I reflect on an issue that is prominent, though often with different background concerns, in both academic and popular discourse: what it means to be 'scientific' or 'unscientific'. Panpsychism is not itself a scientific...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
S. Ritchie
This article discusses the potential implications of panpsychism for the study and pursuit of spiritual flourishing, with a focus on emerging scientific and philosophical research on psychedelics. Psychedelics research (1) has the means to reliably and safely produce the conditions in which transformative experiences routinely occur, thereby allowing for robust neuroscientific and psychological...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
A. Morán
This paper presents a novel challenge for the panpsychist solution to the problem of consciousness. It advances three main claims. First, that the problem of consciousness is really an instance of a more general problem: that of grounding the qualitative. Second, that we should want a general solution to this problem. Third, that panpsychism cannot provide it. I also suggest two further things:...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
R.S. Weir
In Galileo's Error, Philip Goff sets out a manifesto for a post-Galilean science of consciousness. Article three of the manifesto says that a post-Galilean science of consciousness should reject dualism. I argue that there is an important sense of 'dualism' whereby Goff's arguments are not only compatible with but entail dualism, and not only dualism but substance dualism. I do not suggest that...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2021
Christof Koch
Panpsychism shares many intuitions with integrated information theory (IIT), in particular that consciousness is an intrinsic fundamental property of reality, is graded, and can be found in small amounts in simple physical systems. Unlike panpsychism, however, IIT clearly articulates which systems are conscious and which ones are not (resolving panpsychism's combination problem) and why...