Non-player characters, or “NPCs,” are characters in video games and in tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons who are controlled by the game itself or by the storyteller, rather than by one of the players. NPCs in the real world would appear as normal living creatures, yet they would lack phenomenal consciousness. According to a popular theodical approach, God enables evil to...
The Mental Problem of the Many suggests that Materialism implies Mental Manyism: if human beings are material objects, then there are millions of conscious human subjects wherever we thought there was just one. Previous discussions of this problem focus on Mental Manyism, and whether it is substantially harder to live with than ordinary Manyism (about clouds, chairs, trees, etc.). But even if...
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...
Hutto and Myin have proposed an account of radically enactive (or embodied) cognition (REC) as an explanation of cognitive phenomena, one that does not include mental representations or mental content in basic minds. Recently, Zahidi and Myin have presented an account of arithmetical cognition that is consistent with the REC view. In this paper, I first evaluate the feasibility of that account...
Illusionists about consciousness boldly argue that phenomenal consciousness does not fundamentally exist—it only seems to exist. For them, the impression of having a private inner life of conscious qualia is nothing more than a cognitive error, a conjuring trick put on by a purely physical brain. Some phenomenal realists have accused illusionism of being a byproduct of modern Western scientism...
Illusionists about phenomenal consciousness claim that phenomenal consciousness does not exist but merely seems to exist. At the same time, it is quite intuitive for there to be some kind of link between phenomenality and value. For example, some situations seem good or bad in virtue of the conscious experiences they feature. Illusionist views of phenomenal consciousness then face what I call...