About this topic
Summary Qualia are sometimes taken to pose a significant barrier to physicalism about the mental. Because qualia are usually thought of as intrinsically qualitative properties that are immediately apprehensible in consciousness, and also sometimes as being essentially first-personal (and hence essentially private), epiphenomenal, and ineffable (richer than any possible conceptual scheme), the postulation of qualia is a prima facie challenge to the project of giving a naturalist account of the conscious mind.
Key works Chalmers 1996 and Kim 2005 present two different lines of argument for the conclusion that qualia are a challenge to thorough-going physicalism. Some representative responses to the qualia challenge to materialism are Lewis 1995Clark 1985Hardcastle 1996 and Hardin 1987.
Introductions Block 2004; Nagel 1974; Levine 1983; Chalmers 1995McGinn 1989
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272 found
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  1. The Mind/Brain Identity Theory: A Critical Appraisal.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    The materialist version of the mind/brain identity theory has met with considerable challenges from philosophers of mind. The author first dispenses with a popular objection to the theory based on the law of indiscernibility of identicals. By means of discussing the vexatious problem of phenomenal qualities, he explores how the debate may be advanced by seeing each dualist and monist ontology through the lens of an evolutionary epistemology. The author suggests that by regarding each ontology as the core of a (...)
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  2. Can Science Explain consciousness? Toward a solution to the 'hard problem'.Dan J. Bruiger - manuscript
    For diverse reasons, the problem of phenomenal consciousness is persistently challenging. Mental terms are characteristically ambiguous, researchers have philosophical biases, secondary qualities are excluded from objective description, and philosophers love to argue. Adhering to a regime of efficient causes and third-person descriptions, science as it has been defined has no place for subjectivity or teleology. A solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness will require a radical approach: to take the point of view of the cognitive system itself. To facilitate (...)
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  3. Causal-logical Ontology.Johan Gamper - manuscript
    In this paper we begin categorizing a plurality of possible worlds on the basis of permitting or not permitting ontologically different things to be causally connected. We build the work on the dual principle that all universes are causally closed either because no universe causes anything outside itself or because no universe has anything in it that is caused by another universe.
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  4. Deconstructing the Physical World.Brendon Hammer - manuscript
    Some metaphysics are provided showing that what is commonly called ‘the physical world’ can be deconstructed into three ‘levels’: a single, unified ‘noumenal world’ on which everything supervenes; a ‘phenomenal world’ that we each privately experience through direct perception of phenomena; and a ‘collective world’ that people in any given ‘language using group’ experience through learning, using and adapting that group’s language. This deconstruction is shown to enable a clear account of qualia and of how people can hold some things (...)
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  5. Color may be the phenomenal dual aspect of two-state quantum systems in a mixed state.Tal Hendel - manuscript
    I show that the mathematical description of opponent-colors theory is identical to the mathematical description of two-state quantum systems in a mixed state. Based on the dual-aspect theory of phenomenal consciousness, which suggests that one or more physical entities in our universe have phenomenal aspects that are dual to their physical aspects and therefore predicts an exact correspondence between a system’s phenomenal states and the objective states of its underlying physical substrate, I hypothesize that color sensations are phenomenal dual aspects (...)
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  6. The purpose of qualia: What if human thinking is not (only) information processing?Martin Korth - manuscript
    Despite recent breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) – or more specifically machine learning (ML) algorithms for object recognition and natural language processing – it seems to be the majority view that current AI approaches are still no real match for natural intelligence (NI). More importantly, philosophers have collected a long catalogue of features which imply that NI works differently from current AI not only in a gradual sense, but in a more substantial way: NI is closely related (...)
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  7. The meta-problem and the transfer of knowledge between theories of consciousness: a software engineer’s take.Marcel Kvassay - manuscript
    This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly, the ability of sophisticated agent architectures with a purely physical implementation to support certain functional forms of qualia or proto-qualia appears to entail the possibility of machine consciousness with qualia, not only for reductive theories but also for the nonreductive ones that regard consciousness as ubiquitous in Nature. Secondly, analysis (...)
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  8. Towards a scientific account of experience.Dennis Nicholson - manuscript
    I outline and develop a particular physicalist perspective on qualia, and suggest that it may be the basis of a correct account of the relationship of mental states to the physical world. Assume that a quale is a perspective on a physical state in the organism – the reality as known as distinct from the reality as such – but that the perspective, though it entails irreducible experiential knowledge, has no physical substance over that encompassed in the physical state itself. (...)
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  9. How qualia can be physical.Dennis Nicholson - manuscript
    Assume that a quale as we experience it is a perspective on an underlying physical state, rather than the physical state as such – the reality as known as distinct from the reality as such. Assume, further, that this inner perspective is integral to, and materially co-extensive with, the physical state itself. Assume, finally, that the physical state in question is known as a brain state of a particular kind by an external observer of the brain in which it occurs. (...)
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  10. Non-eliminative Reductionism: Reconciling Qualia and Physicalism.Dennis Nicholson - manuscript
    A physicalist view of qualia labelled non-eliminative reductionism is outlined. If it is true, qualia and physicalism can co-exist without difficulty. First, qualia present no particular problem for reductionist physicalism - they are entirely physical, can be studied and explained using the standard scientific approach, and present no problem any harder than any other scientists face. Second, reductionist physicalism presents no particular problem for qualia – they can be encompassed within an entirely physicalist position without any necessity, either to reduce (...)
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  11. Explaining Colour Phenomenology: Reduction versus Connection.Nicholas Unwin - manuscript
    A major part of the mind–body problem is to explain why a given set of physical processes should give rise to qualia of one sort rather than another. Colour hues are the usual example considered here, and there is a lively debate between, for example, Hardin, Levine, Jackson, Clark and Chalmers as to whether the results of colour vision science can provide convincing explanations of why colours actually look the way they do. This paper examines carefully the type of explanation (...)
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  12. On perception and ontology in the context of subjectivity and modern physics.Piotr Witas -
    I argue that our direct experience and some physical facts do not go well with an understanding of perception as a mechanism producing a representation of a ''truly'' outer world. Instead, it is much more coherent to treat what is traditionally considered an image in this context as a closed structure equipped in its own ontology, replacing the ''truly'' outer one from the point of view of an agent possessing it. In such a framework, the notion of existence is taken (...)
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  13. Different aspects of consciousness explained by distinct biophysical processes.Wieslaw L. Galus - forthcoming - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.
    The great task of cognitive science is to explain the phenomenal, first-person experience through the brain’s biophysical processes. This articles takes up this challenge by presenting the theory of how to reconcile the distinguishable properties of a material and mental processes. For this purpose, I describe how knowledge representations arise and how they can correlate with the emotions that accompany their formation. These associations can lead to first-person sense impressions, that is, qualia, which are the gist of phenomenal awareness. I (...)
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  14. Deflating the hard problem of consciousness by multiplying explanatory gaps.Işık Sarıhan - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):1-13.
    Recent philosophy has seen a resurgence of the realist view of sensible qualities such as colour. The view holds that experienced qualities are properties of the objects in the physical environment, not mentally instantiated properties like qualia or merely intentional, illusory ones. Some suggest that this move rids us of the explanatory gap between physical properties and the qualitative features of consciousness. Others say it just relocates the problem of qualities to physical objects in the environment, given that such qualities (...)
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  15. The Abolition of Phenomena: a Voyage among the Zombies.Katalin Balog - 2023 - Klesis 55.
    Illusionism claims that we are not conscious, that there is nothing it is like, in the usual sense of the word, to feel sad, or to smell lavender. According to Illusionists, we are, in a technical sense, zombies. Instead of arguing for the falsity of Illusionism directly, I will explain why the main philosophical motivations for it are mistaken – and I trust the rest will be taken care of by the extreme implausibility of the view. I want to spread (...)
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  16. Causalità del mentale: dall'argomento di Kim ai qualia in una prospettiva fisicalista.Leonardo Capitaneo - 2023 - Dissertation, Università Degli Studi di Torino
    Lo scopo dell’elaborato è presentare il problema della causalità del mentale e cercare di dare una soluzione fisicalista al problema che possa includere anche i qualia, da sempre considerati come l’ultima difesa a favore dell’irriducibilità della mente al fisico. Il primo capitolo ha il compito di trovare la teoria metafisica del mentale migliore che riesca sia a rendere conto della causalità del mentale e sia a resistere all’argomento di Kim. Dopo aver esposto in dettaglio l’argomento di Kim sono affrontati i (...)
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  17. The Empirical Correlation of Mental and Bodily Phenomena.Grace Andrus de Laguna & Joel Katzav - 2023 - In Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers. Springer. pp. 209-215.
  18. Qualia share their correlates’ locations.Neil Sinhababu - 2023 - Synthese 202 (2):1-14.
    This paper argues that qualia share their physical correlates' locations. The first premise comes from the theory of relativity: If something shares a time with a physical event in all reference frames, it shares that physical event’s location. The second premise is that qualia share times with their correlates in all reference frames. Having qualia and correlates share locations makes relations between them easier to explain, improving both physicalist and dualist theories.
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  19. Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness: A Meta-Causal Approach.John A. Barnden - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (2):397-425.
    I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness, arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation. The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any conscious (...)
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  20. Arrangements in Science and Mind.Richard Davies Gill - 2022 - Seatle: Amazon.
    This book is about trying to comprehend the mind from both scientific and philosophical standpoints. In recent years interest has revived in the difficult problem of consciousness. The many difficulties of understanding our minds have been considered in the past, mainly from philosophical or religious viewpoints, but only more recently from scientific perspectives. The book charts the landscape and proposes that the fundamental thing in the world is an arrangement, and this concept can encompass both material objects and things of (...)
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  21. Familiar Properties and Phenomenal Properties.Thomas Raleigh - 2022 - Analytic Philosophy.
    Sometimes when we describe our own sensory experiences we seem to attribute to experience itself the same sorts of familiar properties – such as shape or colour – as we attribute to everyday physical objects. But how literally should we understand such descriptions? Can there really be phenomenal elements or aspects to an experience which are, for example, quite literally square? This paper examines how these questions connect to a wide range of different commitments and theories about the metaphysics of (...)
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  22. Qualitative Consciousness: Themes From the Philosophy of David Rosenthal.Josh Weisberg (ed.) - 2022 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    Qualitative consciousness is conscious experience marked by the presence of sensory qualities, like the experienced painfulness of having a piano dropped on your foot, or the consciousness of seeing the brilliant reds and oranges of a sunset. Over his career, philosopher David Rosenthal has defended an influential theoretical approach to explaining qualitative consciousness. This approach involves the development of two theories – the higher-order thought theory of mental state consciousness and the quality space theory of sensory quality. If the problem (...)
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  23. Science and Philosophy of Color in the Modern Age.Jacob Browning & Zed Adams - 2021 - In Anders Steinvall & Sarah Streets (eds.), Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 21-38.
    The study of color expanded rapidly in the 20th century. With this expansion came fragmentation, as philosophers, physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and others explored the subject in vastly different ways. There are at least two ways in which the study of color became contentious. The first was with regard to the definitional question: what is color? The second was with the location question: are colors inside the head or out in the world? In this chapter, we summarize the most prominent answers (...)
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  24. Closing (or at least narrowing) the explanatory gap.Katalin Farkas - 2021 - In David Braddon-Mitchell & Peter Anstey (eds.), Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 125-142.
    In this chapter, I revisit the issue of the explanatory gap that is supposed to open when considering identity statements between physical and mental phenomena. I show that the question asked in the original formulation of the explanatory gap was this: ʻwhy this phenomenal character, rather than any other, is attached to this physiological process?ʼ I argue that this question can be answered, because there is a natural fit between the phenomenal character of experiences and their functional roles. For example, (...)
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  25. Phenomenal roles: a dispositional account of bodily pain.Simone Gozzano - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8091-8112.
    In this paper I argue that bodily pain, as a phenomenal property, is an essentially and substantial dispositional property. To this end, I maintain that this property is individuated by its phenomenal roles, which can be internal -individuating the property per se- and external -determining further phenomenal or physical properties or states. I then argue that this individuation allows phenomenal roles to be organized in a necessarily asymmetrical net, thereby overcoming the circularity objection to dispositionalism. Finally, I provide reasons to (...)
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  26. Thoughts on the Scientific Study of Phenomenal Consciousness.Stan Klein - 2021 - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 8 (74-80).
    This Target paper is about the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness (i.e., how is subjective experience possible given the scientific presumption that everything from molecules to minerals to minds is wholly physical?). I first argue that one of the most valuable tools in the scientific arsenal (metaphor) cannot be recruited to address the hard problem due to the inability to forge connections between the stubborn fact of subjective experience and physically grounded models of scientific explanation. I then argue that adherence (...)
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  27. Revelation and the intuition of dualism.Michelle Liu - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11491-11515.
    In recent literature on the metaphysics of consciousness, and in particular on the prospects of physicalism, there are two interesting strands of discussion. One strand concerns the so-called ‘thesis of revelation’, the claim that the essences of phenomenal properties are revealed in experience. The other strand concerns the intuition of dualism, the intuition that consciousness is nonphysical. With a particular focus on the former, this paper advances two main arguments. First, it argues that the thesis of revelation is intuitive; it (...)
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  28. Posibilidades de una interpretación fisicalista de la conciencia. Algunas ideas aclaratorias.Diego Llontop Céspedes - 2021 - Revista Filosofía Uis 21 (1):103-128.
    En el presente texto se evalúan las posibilidades conceptuales de una interpretación fisicalista de la conciencia. Con dicho fin se toman en cuenta posiciones representativas en el ámbito de la filosofía, así como investigaciones neurocientíficas recientes. Ambas líneas de investigación suponen el cuestionamiento de los acercamientos de sentido común al tema de la conciencia. No obstante, no suponen una completa eliminación de lo que dicho acercamiento puede representar. En este sentido, se propone una interpretación epistemológica de la perspectiva intuitiva de (...)
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  29. Controversa „Ignorabimus” în România secolului al XIX-lea: Conștiința ca limită a cunoașterii științifice.Mona Mamulea - 2021 - Studii de Istorie a Filosofiei Românești 17:87-103.
    Du Bois-Reymond’s Ignorabimus could have been a game changer in the last decades of 19th century, but it wasn’t. The sound argument of the German physiologist concerning the limits of natural science, although it was indeed taken seriously and confronted by all means, was in fact so severely distorted by opponents that one could hardly recognize it in the straw men generated in the process. By scrutinizing three less known approaches dug up from 19th century Romanian literature, the present paper (...)
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  30. Phenomenal transparency and the transparency of subjecthood.Kevin Morris - 2021 - Analysis 81 (1):39-45.
    According to phenomenal transparency, phenomenal concepts are transparent where a transparent concept is one that reveals the nature of that to which it refers. What is the connection between phenomenal transparency and our concept of a subject of experience? This paper focuses on a recent argument, due to Philip Goff, for thinking that phenomenal transparency entails transparency about subjecthood. The argument is premissed on the idea that subjecthood is related to specific phenomenal properties as a determinable of more specific determinates. (...)
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  31. Modal arguments against materialism.Michael Pelczar - 2021 - Noûs 55 (2):426-444.
    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 imagination. However, unlike traditional modal arguments, the argument developed here delivers only the conclusion that we should not believe that materialism is true, not that we should believe that it is false.
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  32. The Philosophy of Westworld.Paul Skokowski - 2021 - In Cybermedia: New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media. New York, NY, USA: pp. 207-222.
    What exactly does an android experience? Could an android have experiences as rich as humans, or are there limits? The Westworld T V series (Jonathan Noland, 2016- ) offers the opportunity to explore philosophical questions related to human and android experiences through its depiction of a fictional Wild West theme park with androids playing the main characters. Among the most fascinating scenes in the Westworld TV series are the interviews between the android characters Bernard Lowe and Dolores Abernathy. These interviews (...)
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  33. Fizikalizm, Bilgi Argümanı ve Felsefi Düşünce Deneyleri.Alper Bilgehan Yardımcı & Atilla Volkan Çam - 2021 - Nosyon: Uluslararası Toplum Ve Kültür Çalışmaları Dergisi 1 (8):1-11.
    Thought experiments, one of the most effective ways of acquiring knowledge, are an intellectual tool frequently used by scientists or thinkers in their fields of study. Thought experiments used to respond to scientific issues are considered scientific thought experiments, while thought experiments used for philosophical problems are called philosophical thought experiments. In this context, firstly, the differences between scientific and philosophical thought experiments are determined in the article. In particular, philosophical thought experiments are often needed in discussions within the field (...)
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  34. What is a pain in a body part?Murat Aydede - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (2):143–158.
    The IASP definition of 'pain' defines pain as a subjective experience. The Note accompanying the definition emphasizes that as such pains are not to be identified with objective conditions of body parts (such as actual or potential tissue damage). Nevertheless, it goes on to state that a pain "is unquestionably a sensation in a part or parts of the body, but it is also always unpleasant and therefore also an emotional experience." This generates a puzzle that philosophers have been well (...)
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  35. Hard, Harder, Hardest.Katalin Balog - 2020 - In Arthur Sullivan (ed.), Sensations, Thoughts, and Language: Essays in Honor of Brian Loar. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 265-289.
    In this paper I discuss three problems of consciousness. The first two have been dubbed the “Hard Problem” and the “Harder Problem”. The third problem has received less attention and I will call it the “Hardest Problem”. The Hard Problem is a metaphysical and explanatory problem concerning the nature of conscious states. The Harder Problem is epistemological, and it concerns whether we can know, given physicalism, whether some creature physically different from us is conscious. The Hardest Problem is a problem (...)
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  36. The Meta-Dynamic Nature of Consciousness.John A. Barnden - 2020 - Entropy 22.
    How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...)
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  37. Revelation and Phenomenal Relations.Antonin Broi - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (278):22-42.
    Revelation, or the view that the essence of phenomenal properties is presented to us, is as intuitively attractive as it is controversial. It is notably at the core of defences of anti-physicalism. I propose in this paper a new argument against Revelation. It is usually accepted that low-level sensory phenomenal properties, like phenomenal red, loudness or brightness, stand in relation of similarity and quantity. Furthermore, these similarity and quantitative relations are taken to be internal, that is, to be fixed by (...)
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  38. Reductive Model of the Conscious Mind.Wieslaw Galus & Janusz Starzyk (eds.) - 2020 - Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
    Research on natural and artificial brains is proceeding at a rapid pace. However, the understanding of the essence of consciousness has changed slightly over the millennia, and only the last decade has brought some progress to the area. Scientific ideas emerged that the soul could be a product of the material body and that calculating machines could imitate brain processes. However, the authors of this book reject the previously common dualism—the view that the material and spiritual-psychic processes are separate and (...)
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  39. Dualism: How Epistemic Issues Drive Debates About the Ontology of Consciousness.Brie Gertler - 2020 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
    A primary goal of this chapter is to highlight neglected epistemic parallels between dualism and physicalism. Both dualist and physicalist arguments employ a combination of empirical data and armchair reflection; both rely on considerations stemming from how we conceptualize certain phenomena; and both aim to establish views that are compatible with scientific results but go well beyond the deliverances of empirical science. -/- I begin the chapter by fleshing out the distinctive commitments of dualism, in a way that illuminates the (...)
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  40. Representationalism, Double Vision, and Afterimages: A Response to Işık Sarıhan.René Jagnow - 2020 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 20 (6):435-451.
    In his paper “Double Vision, Phosphenes and Afterimages: Non-Endorsed Representations rather than Non-Representational Qualia,” Işık Sarıhan addresses the debate between strong representationalists and qualia theorists. He argues that qualia theorists like Ned Block and Amy Kind who cite double-vision, afterimages, etc., as evidence for the existence of qualia are mistaken about the actual nature of these states. According to Sarıhan, these authors confuse the fact that these states are non-endorsed representational states with the fact that they are at least partly (...)
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  41. Explaining the Intuition of Revelation.Michelle Liu - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6):99-107.
    This commentary focuses on explaining the intuition of revelation, an issue that Chalmers (2018) raises in his paper. I first sketch how the truth of revelation provides an explanation for the intuition of revelation, and then assess a physicalist proposal to explain the intuition that appeals to Derk Pereboom’s (2011, 2016, 2019) qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis.
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  42. Phenomenal Consciousness: A Critical Analysis of Knowledge Argument Inverted Spectrum Argument and Conceivability Argument.Manas Kumar Sahu - 2020 - Journal of Advances in Education and Philosophy 4 (4):160-166.
    The objective of this paper is to defend the non-reductive thesis of phenomenal consciousness. This paper will give an overview of the arguments for the non-reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness and justify why the reductionist approach is implausible in the context of explaining phenomenal subjective experience. The debate between reductionist and non-reductionist on the project of demystifying and mystifying phenomenal consciousness is driven by two fundamental assumptions-1) Reductive-Naturalistic Objectivism, 2) Phenomenal Realism. There are several arguments for the irreducibility of phenomenal (...)
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  43. Illusionism Helps Realism Confront the Meta-Problem.R. C. Schriner - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6):166-173.
    Chalmers (2018) maintains that even if we understood every physical process in the brain we could still wonder why these processes give rise to conscious experience. The meta-problem is the challenge of explaining why we think this 'hard problem' exists. This response to the target paper endorses illusionist accounts of three 'problem intuitions' about consciousness: duality, presentation, and revelation. Subject–object duality is explained in terms of a clash between two compelling but contradictory convictions about consciousness. Phenomenal presence is understood in (...)
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  44. Denialism: What Do the so-called Consciousness Deniers Deny?Orly Shenker - 2020 - Iyyun 68:307-337.
    Some philosophers consider that some of their colleagues deny that consciousness exists. We shall call the latter ‘deniers’, adopting a term that was initially meant pejoratively. What do the deniers deny? In order to answer this question, we shall examine arguments, both of some deniers and of their critics, and present denialism as a systematic highly non-trivial position that has had some interesting achievements. We will show that the denialist project concerns the epistemology of the mind and specifically of consciousness: (...)
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  45. Information and Mind.Paul Skokowski - 2020 - Stanford, CA, USA: CSLI Press.
    This volume examines a selection of topics that Fred Dretske addressed in his philosophical career. The topics range from one of the earliest problems Dretske analyzed, the nature of seeing an object, to epistemological issues that he worked on from mid-career onwards, to issues he focused on later in his career, including information, mental representation, and conscious experience. The papers in the volume are by former colleagues and students from the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University, and celebrate Dretske’s life (...)
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  46. The Epistemic Approach to the Problem of Consciousness.Daniel Stoljar - 2020 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford, UK:
  47. Panpsychism and Non-standard Materialism: Some Comparative Remarks.Daniel Stoljar - 2020 - In William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. New York, NY, USA:
    Much of contemporary philosophy of mind is marked by a dissatisfaction with the two main positions in the field, standard materialism and standard dualism, and hence with the search for alternatives. My concern in this paper is with two such alternatives. The first, which I will call non-standard materialism, is a position I have defended in a number of places, and which may take various forms. The second, panpsychism, has been defended and explored by a number of recent writers. My (...)
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  48. Chalmers v Chalmers.Daniel Stoljar - 2020 - Noûs 54 (2):469-487.
    This paper brings out an inconsistency between David Chalmers's dualism, which is the main element of his philosophy of mind, and his structuralism, which is the main element of his epistemology. The point is ad hominem , but the inconsistency if it can be established is of considerable independent interest. For the best response to the inconsistency, I argue, is to adopt what Chalmers calls ‘type‐C Materialism’, a version of materialism that has been much discussed in recent times because of (...)
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  49. Panpsychism and Cosmopsychism.Khai Wager - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    This collection of papers centres around a novel approach to the problem of phenomenal consciousness called cosmopsychism. A simple version of cosmopsychism says that the cosmos as a whole is conscious. In this collection, I focus on a comparison between arguably the most promising versions of cosmopsychism and panpsychism, called constitutive cosmopsychism and constitutive panpsychism, respectively. -/- The first paper, ‘A Blueprint for Cosmopsychism’ offers a blueprint for a cosmopsychist approach, comparing it to the panpsychist approach. It highlights how following (...)
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  50. The Hard Problem Isn’t Getting any Easier: Thoughts on Chalmers’ “Meta-Problem”.Ben White - 2020 - Philosophia 49:495-506.
    Chalmers’ meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining “problem reports”; i.e. reports to the effect that phenomenal consciousness has the various features that give rise to the hard problem. Chalmers suggests that solving the meta-problem will likely “shed significant light on the hard problem.” Against this, I argue that work on the meta-problem will likely fail to make the hard problem any easier. For each of the main stances on the hard problem can provide an account of problem reports, (...)
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