ISSN 0029-4624
9 papers in the library · 565 citations · publishing 1994-2025
Noûs May 15, 2025 Tobias Schlicht
The popular predictive processing (PP) framework posits prediction error minimization (PEM) as the sole mechanism in the brain that can account for all mental phenomena, including consciousness. I first highlight three ambitions associated with major presentations of PP: (1) Completeness (PP aims for a comprehensive account of mental phenomena), (2) Bayesian realism (PP claims that PEM is...
Noûs July 2, 2023 Jack Shardlow 3 citations
Abstract We regularly talk of the experience of time passing. Some theorists have taken the supposed phenomenology of time passing to provide support for metaphysical accounts of the nature of time; opposing theorists typically granted that there is a phenomenology of time passing while seeking to dispute that any metaphysical conclusions about time can be drawn from this. In recent debates...
Noûs August 4, 2022 Andrew Y. Lee 56 citations
Abstract Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it's oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are...
Noûs June 18, 2022 P. Epstein
: A recurring theme dominates recent philosophical debates about the nature of conscious perception: naïve realism’s opponents claim that the view is directly contradicted by empirical science. I argue that, despite their current popularity, empirical arguments against naïve realism are fundamentally flawed. The non-empirical premises needed to get from empirical scientific findings to...
Noûs March 1, 2022 Jonathan Birch 227 citations
There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory-heavy, theory-neutral and theory-light. Theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory-light approach. At the core of the...
Noûs October 30, 2019 Michael Pelczar
We review existing strategies for bringing modal intuitions to bear against materialist theories of consciousness, and then propose a new strategy. Unlike existing strategies, which assume that imagination (suitably constrained) is a good guide to modal truth, the strategy proposed here makes no assumptions about the probative value of imag-ination. However, unlike traditional modal arguments,...
Noûs July 28, 2016 Christian List 179 citations
Abstract The existence of group agents is relatively widely accepted. Examples are corporations, courts, NGOs, and even entire states. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? I give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate and sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness ( pace Schwitzgebel ). In...
Noûs September 1, 1996 Michael Tye 46 citations
To many philosophers, it is a remarkable fact there is any such thing as consciousness. Typically, this attitude stems from a sense of bewilderment as to how consciousness could be generated in the brain. But it is also hard to fathom why Mother Nature went to the trouble of installing consciousness in so many of her creatures. What was consciousness selected for? What biological purpose or...
Noûs June 1, 1994 Michael Tye 54 citations
L'A. developpe un argument d'ordre intentionnaliste contre l'application de la notion de qualia au domaine des experiences de la perception, et rejette a la fois la theorie du contenu de la perception et l'hypothese classique du spectre inverse dans un monde inverse