Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order PerspectivePeter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now collected here in revised form. The first half of the volume is devoted to developing, elaborating, and defending against competitors one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which Carruthers now refers to as 'dual-content theory'. Phenomenal consciousness - the feel of experience - is supposed to constitute the 'hard problem' for a scientific world view, and many have claimed that it is an irredeemable mystery. But Carruthers here claims to have explained it. He argues that phenomenally conscious states are ones that possess both an 'analog' (fine-grained) intentional content and a corresponding higher-order analog content, representing the first-order content of the experience. It is the higher-order analog content that enables our phenomenally conscious experiences to present themselves to us, and that constitutes their distinctive subjective aspect, or feel. The next two chapters explore some of the differences between conscious experience and conscious thought, and argue for the plausibility of some kind of eliminativism about conscious thinking (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness). Then the final four chapters focus on the minds of non-human animals. Carruthers argues that even if the experiences of animals aren't phenomenally conscious (as his account probably implies), this needn't prevent the frustrations and sufferings of animals from being appropriate objects of sympathy and concern. Nor need it mean that there is any sort of radical 'Cartesian divide' between our minds and theirs of deep significance for comparative psychology. In the final chapter, he argues provocatively that even insects have minds that include a belief/desire/perception psychology much like our own. So mindedness and phenomenal consciousness couldn't be further apart. Carruthers's writing throughout is distinctively clear and direct. The collection will be of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive science. |
Contents
1 | |
Reductive Explanation and the Explanatory Gap | 18 |
Natural Theories of Consciousness | 36 |
HOP over FOR HOT Theory | 61 |
Phenomenal Concepts and HigherOrder Experiences | 79 |
DualContent Theory the Explanatory Advantages | 98 |
Conscious Thinking Language or Elimination? | 115 |
Conscious Experience versus Conscious Thought | 134 |
Sympathy and Subjectivity | 157 |
Suffering without Subjectivity | 177 |
Why the Question of Animal Consciousness Might not Matter Very Much | 195 |
On Being SimpleMinded | 215 |
233 | |
243 | |
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Common terms and phrases
account of phenomenal actualist appropriate objects argue argument awareness bees behavior blindsight Carruthers causal role chapter claim cognitive color concepts of experience confabulation conscious thinking constitutive consumer semantics creature deductive-nomological distinctive Dretske dual analog dual-content theory eliminativism example experience of red explain explanatory gap fact feel first-order analog content first-order perceptual first-order theories frustrations of desire functional harm higher-order analog content higher-order experience higher-order perception higher-order thought faculty higher-order thought HOT higher-order thought theory human inferential inferential role semantics inner speech inner-sense theory intentional content interpretation intrinsic lack Lycan mental Mentalese mind-reading mysterian natural language natural-language sentence non-conscious non-human animals non-inferential objects of sympathy pain parietal lobes perceptual contents phenomenal consciousness phenomenally conscious experiences phenomenology possess present volume priori conditional processes properties psychological purely recognitional concepts qualia question reason reductive explanation representations self-interpretation sense sort Swampman target theorist theory of phenomenal virtue visual system
References to this book
The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and ... Shaun Gallagher,Dan Zahavi No preview available - 2008 |
God and Phenomenal Consciousness: A Novel Approach to Knowledge Arguments Yujin Nagasawa No preview available - 2008 |