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...
Relationalism about perception (aka naïve realism) construes the phenomenal character of conscious perception as at least partially constituted by the perceived items. According to the “austere” forms of this view, perceiving does not consist in representing the perceived items as being a certain way. Instead, austere relationalists maintain that representing a perceived item occurs in response...
Mystical religious experiences typically purport to engage with the transcendent and often claim to involve encounters with spiritual entities or a detachment from the material world. Daoism diverges from this paradigm. This paper examines Daoist mystical experiences of bodily transformations and explores their epistemological implications. Specifically, we defend the justificatory power of...
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...
Does consciousness have non-instrumental aesthetic value? This paper answers this question affirmatively by arguing that consciousness is sublime. The argument consists of three premises. (1) An awe experience of an object provides prima facie justification to believe that the object is sublime. (2) I have an awe experience about consciousness through introspecting three features of...
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...
It is well known that Kant distinguishes between two kinds of self-consciousness: transcendental apperception and empirical apperception (or, approximately, inner sense). However, Kant sometimes claims that “I think,” the general expression of transcendental apperception, expresses an indeterminate empirical inner intuition (IEI), which differs in crucial ways from the empirical inner intuition...
The starting point of this paper is the thought that the phenomenal appearances that accompany mental states are somehow only there, or only real, from the standpoint of the subject of those mental states. The world differs across subjects in terms of which appearances obtain. Not only are subjects standpoints across which the world varies, subjects are standpoints that we can moreover ‘adopt’...
It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical...
If I see, hear, or touch a sparrow, the sparrow seems real to me. Unlike Bigfoot or Santa Claus, it seems to exist; I will therefore judge that it does indeed exist. The “sense of existence” refers to the kind of awareness that typically grounds such ordinary judgments of existence or “reality.” The sense of existence has been invoked by Humeans, Kantians, Ideologists, and the phenomenological...
La structure du comportement details consciousness-nature relations by navigating between realist and intellectualist alternatives. A phenomenological reading of form guides its attempt to formulate a view that does not reduce consciousness to matter or perceptual structure to a product of mind. I show that this strategy relies on hitherto overlooked idealist commitments. Forms are perceived...
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...
The concept of dispassion has been an important part of many different ethical traditions, and yet it has received very little direct attention from moral philosophers.In this paper, I try to give an account of the ethical ideal of dispassion, with a particular focus on Buddhism, Stoicism, and Eastern Christianity.I try to show that there is a common core shared between these otherwise very...
What is it that makes a mental state conscious?Recent commentators have proposed that for Kant, consciousness results from differentiation: A mental state is conscious insofar as it is distinguished, by means of our conceptual capacities, from other states or things.I argue instead that Kant's conception of state consciousness is sensory: A mental state is conscious insofar as it is accompanied...
The primary aim of a theory of consciousness is to articulate existence conditions for conscious states, i.e. the conditions under which a mental state is conscious rather than unconscious.There are two main broad approaches: The Higher-Order approach and the First-Order approach.Higher-Order theories claim that a mental state is conscious only if it is the object of a suitable state of...
The trajectory of Merleau-Ponty's career is often seen as a progressive development: he begins by analyzing scientific consciousness in The Structure of Behavior, complements that account with a phenomenological analysis of behavior as lived in Phenomenology of Perception, and then overcomes the "philosophy of consciousness" to which the earlier texts are committed in the turn toward an...