Is Conscious Awareness Inexplicable? The 'Hard Problem of Consciousness' Further Pinpointed
David Navon
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Key points | Argues that conscious awareness per se can be accommodated by information processing models as open internal access to the most relevant output, while sentience (phenomenal experience) remains inexplicable by customary cognitive science tools, and that the mystery of awareness is misattributed to its phenomenal content. |
Abstract
Some perennial issues regarding conscious awareness – primarily, what it is and what its functions might be – are revisited. It is suggested that there might be a way to resolve at least a bit of the permanent tension between the common conviction that it is extremely puzzling, mysterious in a way, and the prevalent faith that it nonetheless must be somehow accountable by neuroscience, even further than David Chalmers did in delimiting the “easy problems of consciousness” to cognitive tasks underlying abilities or performance: The concept of conscious awareness per se is not as theoretically elusive as it is often portrayed, since it has a simple sense that may be reasonably accommodated by information processing models of the mind – roughly, open internal access of all processes to the output of a process considered at any given moment most relevant. What still is hardly explicable by customary tools of cognitive science is sentience – whatever enables us to have phenomenal experience, a prominent content of conscious awareness (yet qualitatively different from the other prominent content, namely cognition). It is argued that the inexplicability of sentience seems to be misattributed to the carrier of the contents of awareness. Awareness per se may just be colored as inexplicable by one of its content types – phenomenal experience.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on philosophy of mind, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience: a framework linking biology, phenomenology, and pharmacology in schizophrenia. | 2003 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From dopamine to salience to psychosis--linking biology, pharmacology and phenomenology of psychosis. | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How do the brain's time and space mediate consciousness and its different dimensions? Temporo-spatial theory of consciousness (TTC). | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The phenomenology of deep brain stimulation-induced changes in OCD: an enactive affordance-based model. | 2013 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Looking for the Self: Phenomenology, Neurophysiology and Philosophical Significance of Drug-induced Ego Dissolution | 2017 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |