Abstract Central parts of the debate between theories of consciousness concern the proposed mechanism rendering a previously unconscious state X conscious. Here, I introduce a question that comes immediately before, namely why it is X – rather than some other unconscious state Y – that gets to enter the mechanism and become conscious. This is the selection problem: accounting for the mechanism...
Abstract A spectre of anti-physicalism haunts philosophy of mind: we seem unable to explain how the phenomenal arises from the physical. Rather than repeat clichés about the profundity of this explanatory gap, in this paper, I defend a set of Trivialisms, which suggest the phenomenal explanatory gap may not be as special as widely assumed. I start with surveying Schaffer’s modest Trivialism,...
Abstract In this paper, I present a conception of individual religiousness in terms of religious experience. Using ideas of the early Friedrich Schleiermacher, I will claim that religious experiences are contemplative experiences of the totality of being. This understanding of religious experiences presents an alternative to how religious experience is often epistemologically thought about in...
Abstract Here I assess Damasio's conceptual model of consciousness based mainly on the concepts of emotion, feeling, and consciousness by analyzing its conceptual implications and its theoretical and scientific problems. One of the conceptual implications of the direct interaction between the concept of \feeling" and the concept of ‘consciousness" is the concept of consciousness as \feeling a...