A commonly endorsed assumption about experience – a.k.a. ‘phenomenal consciousness’ – is what I call the intrinsic epistemicity thesis (‘the IE thesis’), according to which an experience E exists only if the subject is epistemically related to it. I argue that the IE thesis is unstable. It entails a worrisome circular ontological dependency relationship between an experience E and the subject’s...
This paper identifies a structural deficiency in Radical Enactivism called ‘the Content-Binding Problem’. REC distinguishes sharply between contentless basic cognition and content-involving sociolinguistic practices. This separation creates a difficulty in explaining how disparate cognitive formats integrate into a coherent whole. The integration process is often invisible during healthy...
This paper links mathematical consciousness science, particularly Integrated Information Theory (IIT), to Immanuel Kant's philosophy. Skeptics of IIT's theoretical foundation often target its fundamental identity between an experience and Φ-structure. My account brings in the Kantian notion that this identity is a constitutive a priori principle and responds to some objections by drawing on...