In Consciousness Explained Dan Dennett proposes a deflationary treatment of sensory qualia. He seeks to establish a continuity among both the neural and the conscious phenomena connected with the blind spot and with the perception of repetitive patterns on the one hand and the neutral and conscious phenomena connected with blindsight on the other. He aims to analyze the conscious phenomena associated with each in terms of what the brain ignores. Dennett offers a thought experiment about a blindsight (...) patient who has the sensory information that normals do, but who seems not to have their sensory qualia.What is it that normals know that this blindsight patient does not? Dennett′s answer is "nothing." Dennett′s denial of "filling-in" accounts of repetitive patterns and the blind spot constitute a Rylean intuition pump for this thought experiment. Research by Ramachandran raises important problems for Dennett′s account. Moreover, Dennett′s attempt to discount the significance of "artificial scotomas" inadvertently employs a principle that undermines his case for establishing the continuity between the phenomena in question. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the long‐term implications of exotic activities that can be experienced through Qualia Surfing: how they might seep into every nook and cranny of our culture, redefining what it means to be human. It produces a quick survey of different types and degrees of qualia surfing. Today, even the most utopian visions of the future contain a worm at their heart: the inevitable decline of humanity into a state of boredom and stagnation. The chapter discusses (...) the subject of abstract qualia because there are changes that could be made to uploaded brain that would give sensations of newness over and above simple sensory qualia. The most complete form of qualia surfing would involve a visit to a domain – a place where a group of people go to create some way of life or historical epoch, but with constraint that outside memories are checked at the door. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to defeat some standard anti-reductionist arguments concerning sensory qualia. Initially conditions on intertheoretic reduction in general are established. The standard arguments are then shown to presuppose a false conception of what reduction requires; or to commit a familiar intensional fallacy; or to be unsound; or to equivocate on crucial terms. An exploration of our making direct introspective contact with our neurophysiological states concludes the paper.

Nearly all listeners consider the subjective aspects of music, such as its emotional tone, to have primary importance. But contemporary philosophers often downplay, ignore, or even deny such aspects of experience. Moreover, traditional philosophies of music try to decontextualize it. Using music as an example, this paper explores the structure of qualitative experience, demonstrating that it is multi-layer emergent, non-compositional, enacted, and situation dependent, among other non-Cartesian properties. Our explanations draw on recent work in cognitive science, including blending, image schemas, (...) and sensory memory, as well as on phenomenology. A hierarchical structure transformation based complexity theory is applied to obtain a non-linear dynamical systems explanation of qualia and emotion that respects phenomenological insights about time, including retention and protention. The complexity measure provides both a metric structure and a potential function, on spaces of pieces that are constructed using given elements and transformations, with weights that reflect their cognitive difficulty. However, the approach is not reductionist; using improvisation and the evolution of musical notation as data, we argue that situatedness, especially enactment and social context, are key aspects of musical consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper we wish to bring together two seemingly independent areas of research: synaesthesia and sensory substitution. Synaesthesia refers to a rare condition where a sensory stimulus elicits not only the sensation that stimulus evokes in its own modality, but an additional one; a synaesthete may thus hear the word “Monday”, and, in addition to hearing it, have a concurrent visual experience of a red color. Sensory substitution, in contrast, attempts to substitute a sensory modality (...) that a person has lost by transforming the information it provided so that it can be accessed through another, intact sensory modality. To make visual information accessible to a blind person, for example, data taken by a camera would be transformed into tactile or auditory information. What do synaesthesia and sensory substitution have in common? Research in both of these areas contributes to our understanding both of cross-modal cooperation and of sensory sensations or qualia, asking under what circumstances these can arise in a modality that is not stimulated. Synaesthesia reveals that this “sensory cross-activation” is possible, and sensory substitution research hopes to induce it. In this article, we will review briefly the literature on synaesthesia, and discuss the issue of qualia for this domain of research. We will then address the evidence for synaesthesia and visual qualia in the blind, and the research on sensory substitution, to finally ask whether sensory substitution may induce a ‘synthetic’ form of synaesthesia by taking advantage of the nervous system’s capacity for generating visual images in the absence of retinal input. (shrink)

In this paper we advocate the thesis that qualia are tropes (or qualitons), and not (universal) properties. The main advantage of the thesis is that we can accept both the Wittgensteinian and Sellarsian assault on the given and the claim that only subjective and private states can do justice to the qualitative character of experience. We hint that if we take qualia to be tropes, we dissolve the problem of inverted qualia. We develop an account of (...) class='Hi'>sensory concept acquisition that takes the presence of qualia as an enabling condition for learning. We argue that qualia taken to be qualitons are part of our mechanism of sensory concept acquisition. (shrink)

According to representionalists, qualia-the introspectible properties of sensory experience-are exhausted by the representational contents of experience. Representationalists typically advocate an informational psychosemantics whereby a brain state represents one of its causal antecedents in evolutionarily determined optimal circumstances. I argue that such a psychosemantics may not apply to certain aspects of our experience, namely, our experience of space in vision, hearing, and touch. I offer that these cases can be handled by supplementing informational psychosemantics with a procedural psychosemantics whereby (...) a representation is about its effects instead of its causes. I discuss conceptual and empirical points that favor a procedural representationalism for our experience of space. (shrink)

A standard view in philosophy of mind is that qualia and phenomenal character require consciousness. This paper argues that various experimental and clinical phenomena can be better explained if we reject this assumption. States found in early visual processing can possess qualitative character even though they are not in any sense conscious mental states. This non-standard interpretation bears the burden of explaining what must be added to states that have qualitative character in order to yield states of sensory (...) awareness or sensory experience. I argue that the study of selective attention reveals resources that can be useful in that project. Two traditional objects are briefly considered. (shrink)

A representationalist about qualia takes qualitative states to be aspects of the intentional content of sensory or sensory-like representations. When you experience the redness of an apple, they say, your visual system is merely representing that there is a red surface at such-and-such a place in front of you. And when you experience a red afterimage, your visual system is representing something similar . Your sensory state does not literally have an intrinsic quality of phenomenal redness, (...) just as you do not have a hairy mental state when you occurrently believe that Santa Claus is hairy. Judging by the literature, it is quite plausible to claim that the nature of occurrent beliefs is exhausted by their representational characteristics.1 Why is it that this “pure representation” ploy is so much less plausible in the case of sensory states? Typically, the reason given is that belief states are not qualitative while sensory states are, as revealed by introspection. Qualitativity, it is further maintained, cannot be purely representational – this is the intuition the representationalist must fight. In this paper I want to focus on a feature of sensory states, distinct from but related to their qualitativity, that encourages the anti-representationalist to object to the representational thesis. I shall call this feature “inhereness.” Instances of sensory. (shrink)

According to Frank Jacksonʼs knowledge argument, Mary, who lives in a black-and-white world, has all the physical knowledge about the world, yet she has new information when she sees a red apple. If we accept this, then physicalism – according to which the description of the world can be realised entirely with the help of physical theories – is false. However, even if Jacksonʼs argument about new information is true, we do not have to discard physicalism. Even exclusively physical computer (...) systems are not capable of predicting their own sensory information if they are built using a specific structure and complexity. It can be shown that a specific type of computational system can lead to the creation of decision-related unpredictability of a specific type of sensory information. This investigation takes a charitable position towards the concept of qualia to provide it with a physicalist and computationalist explanation. (shrink)

Can qualia be analyzed by theories that contain only non-qualitative terms? A host of philosophers including Block, Levine, Nagel, and Jackson have argued that, in principle, they cannot. And yet psychophysicists have advanced explanations that seem to account for sensory appearances in terms of the operations of nervous systems. Here are some examples: Mach bands, the assimilation effect, and the Hermann grid illusion all have to do with the look of things, and all are routinely thought to be (...) a consequence of the structure of visual receptive fields. Simultaneous contrast and auditory tuning—both perceptual effects—are lateral inhibition phenomena. That television sets with only three phosphor colors can replicate natural scenes with thousands of distinguishable colors is due to our eyes having just three photopigments. The difference between a three-type receptoral configuration and an array of thousands of receptors with distinct responses accounts for the fact that hues form a closed loop in color space, whereas there are no closed pitch loops in auditory space. (shrink)

One of the central limitations of sensory substitution devices (SSDs) is their inability to reproduce the non-sensory feelings that are normally associated with visual experiences, especially hedonic and aesthetic responses. This limitation is sometimes reported to cause SSD users frustration. To make matters worse, it is unclear that improvements in acuity, bandwidth, or training will resolve the issue. Yet, if SSDs are to actually reproduce visual experience in its fullness, it seems that the reproduction of non-sensory feelings (...) will be of some importance. We offer a novel solution. Researchers can produce hedonic and aesthetic responses by eliciting these feelings artificially, pairing distal objects that should be pleasurable to pleasurable stimulus outputs from the SSD. We outline two strategies for accomplishing this: first, by means of a prefixed, hardwired, association of pleasant distal objects to pleasant stimulus outputs from the SSD; second, by means of a flexible, feedback-based association which creates associations based on a subject-directed matching of distal objects to patterns of stimuli from the SSD which the subject takes to have the corresponding hedonic properties. We evaluate some problems with both strategies, and we argue that the feedback-based strategy is more promising. Researchers can use this strategy to help the blind, allowing them to take pleasure in the objects they perceive using SSDs. (shrink)

What is the difference between the discriminations made by a home appliance able to distinguish salt from sugar, and my sensations of salty and sweet? It is never taken into consideration that, in contrast to the appliance, I can have offline sensations, i.e., phenomenal experiences in the absence of direct environmental stimuli, mainly evoked by words occurring into thought, conversation, reading, etc. If we put this detachment stimuli/sensations in relation with the correlative detachment signs/referents inaugurated by the cognitive revolution of (...) symbolic language , we might rethink the role played by language in our phenomenal experience as a whole. Qualia can be defined as forms of relationship between organisms and environment, given that human environment is extended to the linguistic dimension, and that the latter has ignited a coevolutionary process with human cognition. The very same properties we attribute to qualia, even when conceiving of them as pre-linguistic phenomenal traits, rely on the cognitive resources that language has made available. The substantialist notion of qualia, I argue, is formed by an online sensation on which the focus shifts from the perceived object to the sensory quality by virtue of linguistic modes of thinking, which are systematically neglected. (shrink)

In current histories, C.I. Lewis is credited for bringing the strict concept of qualia – concerned solely with sensory states – into contemporary philosophy. It is this strict notion which is then credited with bringing in worries about inverted spectra, philosophical zombies, and the idea that we can individuate the senses introspectively. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistaken reading of Lewis and the history of qualia. I argue that the strict notion of (...) class='Hi'>qualia stems from the work of Johannes Müller in the mid-nineteenth century and his work on individuating the senses. The structuralist psychologists who followed in his wake, in turn, developed an account where the qualitative character of experience played no causal role. I also show that Lewis adamantly rejects this strict concept of qualia. He instead endorses a pragmatic conception of qualia derived from William James in which evaluative states – such as the painfulness of pain – play an essential, causal role in the life of the organism. The upshot is that Lewis positions himself against the strict conception of qualia, arguing it is phenomenologically false and philosophically wrong-headed. (shrink)

How could neural processes be associated with phenomenal consciousness? We present a way to answer this question by taking the counterintuitive stance that the sensory feel of an experience is not a thing that happens to us, but a thing we do: a skill we exercise. By additionally noting that sensory systems possess two important, objectively measurable properties, corporality and alerting capacity, we are able to explain why sensory experience possesses a sensory feel, but thinking and (...) other mental processes do not. We are additionally able to explain why different sensory feels differ in the way they do. (shrink)

The meta-problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 2018) is the problem of explaining the behaviours and verbal reports that we associate with the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness'. These may include reports of puzzlement, of the attractiveness of dualism, of explanatory gaps, and the like. We present and defend a solution to the meta-problem. Our solution takes as its starting point the emerging picture of the brain as a hierarchical inference engine. We show why such a device, operating under familiar forms of (...) adaptive pressure, may come to represent some of its mid-level inferences as especially certain. These mid-level states confidently re-code raw sensory stimulation in ways that (they are able to realize) fall short of fully determining how properties and states of affairs are arranged in the distal world. This drives a wedge between experience and the world. Advanced agents then represent these mid-level inferences as irreducibly special, becoming increasingly puzzled as a result. (shrink)

Computational neuroscience attributes coloured areas and other perceptual qualia to calculations that are realizable in multiple cellular forms. This faces serious issues in explaining how the various qualia arise and how they bind to form overall perceptions. Qualia may instead be neuroelectrical. Growing evidence indicates that perceptions correlate with neuroelectrical activity spotted by locally activated EEGs, the different qualia correlate with the different electrochemistries of unique detector cells, a unified neural-electromagnetic field binds this activity to form (...) overall perceptions, and this field interacts with sensory circuits to help attentively guide perception. The coloured areas in images may thus be seated in the electrochemistry of unique cells, while constancy mechanisms and other multiply realizable computations just help refine these images behind the scenes. This theory is ultimately testable. (shrink)

I defend the possibility of a functional account of the intrinsic qualities of sensory experience against the claim that functional characterization can only describe such qualities to the level of isomorphism of relational structures on those qualities. A form sensory holism might be true concerning the phenomenal, and this holism would account for some antifunctionalist intuition evoked by inverted spectrum and absent qualia arguments. Sensory holism is compatible with the correctness of functionalism about the phenomenal.

The recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in light of the impressive capabilities of transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), have reignited the discussion in cognitive science regarding whether computational devices could possess semantic understanding or whether they are merely mimicking human intelligence. Recent research has highlighted limitations in LLMs’ reasoning, suggesting that the gap between mere symbol manipulation (syntax) and deeper understanding (semantics) remains wide open. While LLMs overcome certain aspects of the symbol grounding problem through human feedback, they (...) still lack true semantic understanding, struggling with common-sense reasoning and abstract thinking. This paper argues that while adding sensory inputs and embodying AI through sensorimotor integration with the environment might enhance its ability to connect symbols to real-world meaning, this alone would not close the gap between syntax and semantics. True meaning-making also requires a connection to subjective experience, which current AI lacks. The path to AGI must address the fundamental relationship between symbol manipulation, data processing, pattern matching, and probabilistic best guesses with true knowledge that requires conscious experience. A transition from AI to AGI can occur only if it possesses conscious experience, which is closely tied to semantic understanding. Recognition of this connection could furnish new philosophical insights into longstanding practical and philosophical questions for theories in biology and cognitive science and provide more meaningful tests of intelligence than the Turing test. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the issue of the ontological status of qualitative properties. I discuss the prevalent approaches to the problem of qualia in philosophy of mind, in relation to the various attempts at naturalizing the mind and the various theories of perception. I compare these views with Husserl's phenomenology, highlighting the phenomenological distinction between phenomenal contents of mental states and sensory properties of the perceived objects. I present some open issues of this view, in order to (...) show how they can be addressed in the light of some developments of the phenomenological inquiry in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Representationism is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on its representational content. Synaesthesia is a condition in which the phenomenal character of the experience produced in a subject by stimulation of one sensory modality contains elements characteristic of a second, unstimulated sensory modality. After reviewing some of the recent psychological literature on synaesthesia and one of the leading versions of representationism, I argue that cases of synaesthesia, as instances of what I call the extra (...) qualia problem, are counterexamples to externalist versions of representationism. (shrink)

Computationalism treats minds as computations. It hasn't explained how our quite similar sensory circuits encode our quite different qualia, nor how these circuits encode the binding of the different qualia into unifi ed perceptions. But there is growing evidence that qualia and binding come from neural electrochemical substances such as sensory detectors and the strong continuous electromagnetic field they create. Qualia may thus be neural substances, not neural computations (though computations may still help modulate (...) qualia). This neuroelectrical view not only avoids computationalism's empirical issues but also its problematic metaphysics. (shrink)

This review provides a commentary on coloured-hearing arising on hearing music: music-colour synaesthesia. Although traditionally explained by the hyperconnectivity theory (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001a) and the disinhibited feedback theory (Grossenbacher & Lovelace, 2001) as a purely perceptual phenomenon, the review of eight coloured-hearing neuroimaging studies shows that it may not be assumed that these explanations are directly translatable to music-colour synaesthesia. The concept of 'ideaesthesia' (Nikolić, 2009) and the role of conceptual and semantic inducers challenge the likelihood of a single (...) mechanism underlying the cause of synaesthesia and argue for a move away from a purely sensory to sensory explanation. Finally, music-colour synaesthesia forms a challenge for established philosophical theories and the position of synaesthesia is considered within the larger context of musical qualia. (shrink)

Experiences of qualia, subjective sensory-like aspects of stimuli, are central to imagistic representation. Following Raffman , qualia are considered to reflect experiential knowledge distinct from descriptive, abstract, and propositional knowledge; following Jackendoff , objective neural activity is distinguished from subjective experience. It is argued that descriptive physical knowledge does not provide an adequate accounting of qualia, and philosophical scenarios such as the Turing test and the Chinese Room are adapted to demonstrate inadequacies of accounts of cognition (...) that ignore subjective experience. Arguments by Dennett and others that qualia do not exist or that qualia do not provide additional explanatory power are addressed, and it is suggested that consideration of qualia is necessary in order to explain objective behavior. The hypotheses of functional equivalence, second-order isomorphism, and psychophysical complementarity between imagery and perception are discussed, and the ability of analog and schematic models of imagery to account for qualia is examined. (shrink)

Descartes’ accounts of sensory perception have long troubled his interpreters, for their lack of clear and explicit statements on some fundamental issues. His readers have wondered whether he allows spatial sensory ideas (spatial qualia); whether sensory ideas such as color or pain are representations and, if so, what they represent; and what cognitive value Descartes attributed to sense perception. Recent discussions take differing stands on the questions just mentioned, and also disagree over Descartes’ account of the (...) externalization of sensory qualities, on the origin and correct analysis of the “material falsity” he attributes to some sensory ideas, and on the value of the “teachings of nature.” Such disagreement should not be surprising, for although sensory perception was an important topic for Descartes, his treatment of these particular issues is not systematic – or at least not apparently so. Generally, there are no proof texts that unequivocally settle questions about Descartes’ views on spatial qualia, the representationality of sensory ideas, their cognitive value, externalization, material falsity, and the status of the teachings of nature. Yet these questions and topics naturally arise from matters about which Descartes is explicit and (reasonably) consistent, regarding the role of the senses in philosophy and everyday life and concerning the nature of minds and ideas. It is, therefore, worthwhile to ask what his positions might have been. This chapter develops answers by considering Descartes’ systematic doctrines on the nature of the mind and its ideas and by combing his statements on sensation and perception for hints about how to apply such principles. The first section reviews some key texts. Succeeding sections develop positions on representationality, cognitive value, externalization, material falsity, and the teachings of nature. Ultimately, I favor an interpretation in which, for Descartes, all sensory ideas represent by resemblance, different kinds of sensory ideas vary in cognitive value, externalization arises through spatial localization, and, with sensory ideas of color and the like, as materially false they do not intrinsically misrepresent but afford occasion for false judgments, which arise as merely apparent, and so not actually legitimate, teachings of nature. (shrink)

This paper resurrects two discredited ideas in the philosophy of mind. The first: the idea that perceptual illusion might have something metaphysically significant to tell us about the nature of phenomenal consciousness. The second: that the colours and other qualities that ‘fill’ our sensory fields are occurrent properties (rather than representations of properties) that are, nevertheless, to be distinguished from the ‘objective’ properties of things in the external world. Theories of consciousness must recognize the existence of what Daniel Dennett (...) mockingly labels ‘figment,’ but this result—though metaphysically and epistemologically significant—is not incompatible with either physicalism or naturalized semantics. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an explanation of the ineffability (linguistic inexpressibility) of sensory experiences. My explanation is put in terms of computational functionalism and standard externalist theories of representational content. As I will argue, many or most sensory experiences are representational states without constituent structure. This property determines both the representational function these states can serve and the information that can be extracted from them when they are processed. Sensory experiences can indicate the presence of certain (...) external states of affairs but they cannot convey any more information about them than that. So, format- or code-conversion mechanisms that link different systems of representation (linguistic and perceptual) to each other will fail to extract any relevant information from sensory experiences that could be coded in language. They only way to establish specific roles for sensory experiences in communication and the organization of behavior is to attach to them, by associative links, words, or other behavioral responses. If a sensory experience has no linguistic label associated to it in a particular subject, then no linguistic description can token, or activate, that state in the subject. In other words, no linguistic description can cause a subject to undergo an unlabeled perceptual state. On the contrary, complex, or syntactically structured perceptual states can be built up, on the basis of descriptions, by mechanisms of constructive imagination (conceived here as one sort of format conversion). It is this difference between complex and unstructured representational states that gives us an understanding of the phenomenon we call the ineffability of qualia. (shrink)

_In what computational aspect is the brain different from the_ _computer? In what objective measures can the brain said to be_ _“creative”? These are the fundamental questions that concerns the_ _neural basis of human mental activity. Here we discuss several_ _important aspects of the essential computational ingredients of human_ _mind in order to understand the “creative” process going on in the_ _brain. One of the key concepts is the nature of the source of_ _"externality" that adds new ingredients to the (...) system and its output. We_ _argue that in addition to information input and stochasticity, we need to_ _consider a third possibility, namely "dynamics-embedded externality"._ _We discuss how the neural origin of the subjective sensory qualities_ _ is related to this aspect of creativity. The invariance of qualia _ _under a certain class of transformation, and the mapping of discrete,_. (shrink)

In view of the excellent arguments that have been put forth recently in favour of qualia, internal sensory presentations, it would strike an impartial observer - one could imagine a future historian of philosophy - as extremely odd why so many philosophers who are opposed to qualia, that is, sensory experiences internal to the brain, have largely ignored those arguments in their own. There has been a fashionable assumption that any theory of perception which espouses (...) class='Hi'>qualia has long since been overcome by a number of 'formidable' objections, in particular, the Homunculus/Infinite Regress Objection, the Solipsism Objection, Austin's Illusion/Delusion Objection, the Ludicrousness-of-Colours-in-the-Brain Objection, the Indirect-Realist-has-to-assume-Direct-Realism Objection, the Impossibility-of-Comparing-Internal-with-External Objection, the Impossibility of Intrinsic Experience, and several more minor varieties of these. It is uncanny how they continue to be repeated, indeed, with a kind of automatism, evidenced by the fact that none of those who repeat them appear to have taken note of the answers to the objections. Indeed, they only appear to refer to those philosophers with whom they agree: it has long been insisted upon in the study of rhetoric that one of the weakest things to do in an argument is to ignore the main points made by one's opponent: [it is] the wisest plan _to state Objections in their full force_ ; at least, wherever there does exist a satisfactory answer to them; otherwise, those who hear them stated more strongly than by the uncandid advocate who had undertaken to repel them, will naturally enough conclude that they are unanswerable. It is but a momentary and ineffective triumph that can be obtained by man. (shrink)

I am grateful to Laura Gow for her generous and illuminating comments. I will focus on her queries, as this will allow me to elaborate on some points that were treated rather quickly in the book. Gow challenges me on three points. (1) Does my central argument against representationalism about perception commit me to an overly abstract view of properties? (2) What does my view imply about the representational contents of beliefs prompted by sensory experiences? (3) Do I do (...) sufficient justice to the way sensory experience seems representational? I shall consider these in turn. (shrink)

Talk of sensory qualities soon runs into puzzles, both about the nature of properties and about the status of mental predicates. Clark wishes to prepare the way for an eventual reduction of qualia-talk to neurophysiology, while postponing or taking an indirect approach to some of the large philosophical questions involved. Thus, for instance, rather than wading directly into the debate about what color is, he concentrates on the problem of why a particular stimulus looks colored to a particular (...) observer. (shrink)

When a mental state is conscious – in the sense that there is something it is like for the subject to have it – it instantiates a certain property F in virtue of which it is a conscious state. It is customary to suppose that F is the property of having sensory quality. The paper argues that this supposition is false. The first part of the paper discusses reasons for thinking that unconscious mental states can have a sensory (...) quality, for example in cases of absent-minded perception. If unconscious mental states can have a sensory quality, then sensory quality is an insufficient condition for consciousness. The second part of the paper argues that there are even better reasons to think that sensory quality is an unnecessary condition for consciousness. The idea is that mental states can be conscious even when they lack sensory quality, for example, in the case of certain conscious propositional attitudes. In the third part of the paper, an alternative to the rejected supposition, drawn from the phenomenological tradition, is offered: that consciousness is a matter of implicit self-awareness, rather than of sensory quality. According to this alternative, a mental state is conscious when, and only when, it involves implicit self-awareness. (shrink)

The most important clarification we bring in our reply to commentators concerns the problem of the “explanatory gap”: that is, the gulf that separates physical processes in the brain from the experienced quality of sensations. By adding two concepts (bodiliness and grabbiness) that were not stressed in the target article, we strengthen our claim and clarify why we think we have solved the explanatory gap problem, – not by dismissing qualia, but, on the contrary, by explaining why sensations have (...) a “feel” and why “feels” feel the way they do. We additionally clarify our views on: internal representations (we claim internal representations cannot explain why sensation has a feel), on behaviorism (we are not behaviorists), on perception and action (we believe there can be perception without action), and on the brain (we believe the brain does do something important in perception). (shrink)

The main interpretive claim of this book is that both Wittgenstein’s mature philosophical method and his much misunderstood critique of private language have their roots in his critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space–that is, the misleading, figurative analogy between physical space, or space simpliciter, and phenomenal space, or the “space” of appearances. His critique of this metaphor extends from his rejection of sense-data (Chapters 2 and 3), to his investigation of the asymmetry between first- and other-person pronouns in (...) conjunction with psychological vocabulary (Chapter 4), to his discussion of noticing aspects (Chapter 3), and, of course, to his revolutionary critique of the privacy of the mental (Chapter 3) and of the related, but more general, misleading metaphor of the inner and the outer. Wittgenstein’s critique of the idea of phenomenal space is, at the same time, the prototype for his new philosophical method–the method of grammatical investigation, which holds that many of the persistent problems of philosophy arise from failing to command a clear view of the grammar of various regions of our language and finding ourselves, as a result, vulnerable to misleading pictures of our mental lives, of our linguistic practices, of mathematics, and of countless fundamental elements of our world view(s), whose misunderstanding is the locus of the traditional problems of metaphysics (Chapter 3). Chapters 5, 6 and 7 argue for the continued relevance of Wittgenstein's critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space by showing how it applies to contemporary discussions of first-person authority, recent attempts to revive sense-datum theories, and the ongoing debate about sensory qualia. (shrink)

There is an argument whichshows conclusively that if qualia are causallyimpotent we could have no possible grounds forbelieving that they exist. But if, as this argumentshows, qualia are causally potent with respect to thedescriptions we give of them, it is tolerably certainthat they are causally potent in other morebiologically significant respects. The empiricalevidence, from studies of the effect of lesions of thestriate cortex shows that what is missing inthe absence of visual qualia is the ability tocategorize (...) class='Hi'>sensory inputs in the visual modality. This would suggest that the function of privateexperience is to supply what Broadbent callsthe evidence on which the categorization ofproblematic sensory inputs are based. At the sametime analysis of the causal relation shows that whatdifferentiates a causal relation from an accidentalspatio-temporal conjunction is the existence ofreciprocally related dispositional properties of theentities involved which combine to make it true thatif one member of the conjunction, the cause, had notexisted, the other, the effect, would not haveexisted. The possibility that qualia might bedispositional properties of experiences which, as itwere, supply the invisible glue that sticks cause toeffect in this case is examined, but finallyrejected. (shrink)

Raffaella De Rosa discusses the theory of sensory perception, especially color perception, offered by Ren Descartes. She offers a detailed overview of the recent literature on the topic and provides a new reading of Descartes' theory; she also raises questions of great interest in the contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Churchland explores the unfolding impact of the several empirical sciences of the mind, especially cognitive neurobiology and computational neuroscience on a variety of traditional issues central to the discipline of philosophy. Representing Churchland's most recent research, they continue his research program, launched over thirty years ago which has evolved into the field of neurophilosophy. Topics such as the nature of Consciousness, the nature of cognition and intelligence, the nature of moral knowledge and moral reasoning, neurosemantics or world-representation in the brain, (...) the nature of our subjective sensory qualia and their relation to objective science, and the future of philosophy itself are here addressed in a lively, graphical, and accessible manner. Throughout the volume, Churchland's view that science is as important as philosophy is emphasised. Several of the color figures in the volume will allow the reader to perform some novel phenomenological experiments on his/her own visual system. (shrink)

According to contemporary representationalism, phenomenal qualia—of specifically sensory experiences—supervene on representational content. Most arguments for representationalism share a common, phenomenological premise: the so-called “transparency thesis.” According to the transparency thesis, it is difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish the quality or character of experiencing an object from the perceived properties of that object. In this paper, I show that Husserl would react negatively to the transparency thesis; and, consequently, that Husserl would be opposed to at least two versions of contemporary (...) representationalism. First, I show that Husserl would be opposed to strong representationalism, since he believes the cognitive content of a perceptual episode can vary despite constancy of sensory qualia. Second, I then show that Husserl would be opposed to weak representationalism, since he believes that sensory qualia—specifically, the sort that he calls “kinesthetic sensations”—can vary despite constancy in representational content. (shrink)

Non-sensory experiences represent almost all context information in consciousness. They condition most aspects of conscious cognition including voluntary retrieval, perception, monitoring, problem solving, emotion, evaluation, meaning recognition. Many peculiar aspects of non-sensory qualia (e.g., they resist being 'grasped' by an act of attention) are explained as adaptations shaped by the cognitive functions they serve. The most important nonsensory experience is coherence or "rightness." Rightness represents degrees of context fit among contents in consciousness, and between conscious and non-conscious (...) processes. Rightness (not familiarity) is the feeling-of-knowing in implicit cognition. The experience of rightness suggests that neural mechanisms "compute" signals indicating the global dynamics of network integration. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that mental states are conscious when, and only when, they are intentionally directed at themselves. Thus, if for subject x to perceive a tree is for x to harbor an internal state which is intentionally directed at a tree, then for x to have a conscious perception of a tree is for x to harbor an internal state which is primarily directed at the tree and secondarily directed at itself. If so, consciousness (...) is reductively explicable in terms of intentionality. ;The argument of the dissertation proceeds in two phases. First, it is argued that the phenomenological feature common and peculiar to conscious states is intransitive self-consciousness, by which is meant the subtle and implicit self-awareness permanently accompanying the stream of consciousness. The first phase of the argument is to claim that it is this phenomenological feature, and, importantly, not the so-called sensory qualia often exhibited by conscious experiences, that is the mark of the conscious. ;The second phase of the argument is an account of intransitive self-consciousness in terms of the aforementioned sort of self-directed intentionality. It is argued, first, that self-directed intentionality is a necessary condition for intransitive self-consciousness, and second, that a specific kind of self-directed intentionality is also a sufficient condition for intransitive self-consciousness. ;The dissertation ends with a discussion of the prospects for naturalization, or demystification, of self-directed intentionality, and by consequence consciousness. A nomologically possible state of affairs is portrayed, in which physical states of the brain vehicle such self-directed intentionality. The nomological possibility of physically realized self-directed intentionality does not, of course, constitute a naturalization self-directed intentionality, but it does demonstrate the compatibility of self-directed intentionality with a physicalist-naturalist approach to consciousness. (shrink)

O'Shea concludes that Sellars's attempts to preserve the core truths in Kant's theory of experience and to integrate them with an overall scientific naturalist outlook can and should survive the rejection of several central components of Sellars's proposed adaptation of Kant's transcendental idealism: ABSTRACT: "Sellars’ career-long engagement with Kant’s philosophy involved both readings of Kant and appropriations of Kant that are nuanced, original, and related in complex ways to Sellars’ own philosophical views. In some ways similar to Strawson’s classic reading, (...) Sellars defended Kant’s theory of experience and his analysis of human knowledge as essentially correct. This includes various views on the nature of conceptual cognition, the thinking self, practical reason, perceptual experience, and the lawfulness of nature. On the other hand, and again like Strawson, Sellars regarded Kant’s transcendental idealism as involving a strong ontological commitment to unknowable but thinkable (and non-spatiotemporal) ‘things in themselves’. However, whereas Strawson regarded such a position as deeply incoherent, Sellars argues that Kant’s theological conception of things in themselves can coherently be replaced with a scientific realist conception of things in themselves as theoretically postulated imperceptible processes, which play a structurally similar role for Sellars in grounding the Kantian-phenomenal ‘appearances’ in the ‘manifest image’ of the world. Sellars’ highly complex but sophisticated reading of Kant on sensibility and intuition, when combined with Sellars’ own idiosyncratic views on sensory qualia, render it even more difficult to come to terms with Sellars’ engagements with Kant’s idealism. This chapter attempts to provide a concise presentation and evaluation of certain central themes in Sellars’ complex philosophical dialogue with Kant.". (shrink)

The “reward” systems described by Rolls are systems for drive-reinforced associations of contact and distant stimuli and not for emotional behaviours. The neural systems delineated may be associated with distinct categories of “affect,” namely “hedonic feelings,” “moods,” and “emotions.” Awareness of these affects requires external perceptual as well as internal feedback. Levels of feedback in evolution and development suggest sensory qualia may not require language.

Garnett attempts to defend realism while accepting much of what sense-data theorist have had to say. He does this by tracing the origin of our belief in external objects to the finding of "centres of resistance" in the experience of effort and resistance, these centres being symbolized by sensory qualia. Since the centres are found in experience they are not unknowable Lockean substances, and since the resistance is something over and above sensations of pressure they are not phenomenalistic (...) patterns of sense-data. Though a great deal of the book is devoted to the "refutation" of particular arguments of Ryle and Austin, Garnett seems oblivious to the thrust of recent criticism of traditional accounts of the role of sense qualia in perception. All too often he allows assertion to replace argument.—A. E. J. (shrink)

Probably there is no position in Goodman’s corpus that has generated greater perplexity and criticism than Goodman’s “nominalism”. As is abundantly clear from Goodman’s writings, it is not “abstract entities” generally that he questions—indeed, he takes sensory qualia as “basic” in his Carnap-inspired constructional system in Structure—but rather just those abstracta that are so crystal clear in their identity conditions, so fundamental to our thought, so prevalent and seemingly unavoidable in our discourse and theorizing that they have come (...) to form the generally accepted framework for the most time-honored, exact, sophisticated, refined, central, and secure branch of human knowledge yet devised, mathematics itself! Of all the abstracta to question, why sets? Of course, Goodman gave his “reasons”, the unintelligibility of “generating” an infinitude of “constructed objects” automatically from any given object or objects. But critics have been quick to point out that set theory is intended not as a theory of what can be “generated” or “constructed” from given objects in any literal sense but rather as a theory of a certain realm of objects independently existing in their own right. “Construction” is a metaphor. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the enactive theory of color that implies a form of color relationism. I argue that this view constitutes a better alternative to color subjectivism and color objectivism. I liken the enactive view to Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, arguing that both deconstruct the clear duality of subject and object, which is at the basis of the other theories of color, in order to claim the co-constitution of subject and object in the process of experience. I also (...) extend the enactive and phenomenological account of color to the more general topic of the epistemological and ontological status of sensory qualities (qualia), outlining the fields of enactive phenomenology and enactive ontology. (shrink)

Taking inspiration from developments in neurocomputational modeling, Paul Church-land develops his positions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. Concerning the former, Churchland relaxes his eliminativism at various points and seems to endorse a traditional identity account of sensory qualia. Although he remains unsympathetic to folk psychology, he no longer seeks the elimination of normative epistemology, but rather its transformation to a philosophical enterprise informed by current developments in the relevant sciences. Churchland supplies suggestive discussions (...) of the character of knowledge, simplicity, explanation, theory, and conceptual change. Many of his treatments turn on his prototype activation model of neural representation, which looks to the notion of a 'prototype' as it is employed in the psychological literature on concept representation, however, this and other features of Churchland's neurocomputational program do not square well with some of his views about cross-scientific relations. (shrink)

The understanding of the primary-secondary quality distinction has shifted focus from the mechanical philosophers’ proposal of primary qualities as explanatorily fundamental to current theorists’ proposal of secondary qualities as metaphysically perceiver dependent. The chapter critically examines this shift and current arguments to uphold the primary-secondary quality distinction on the basis of the perceiver dependence of color; one focus of the discussion is the role of qualia in these arguments. It then describes and criticizes reasons for characterizing color, smell, taste, (...) sound, and warmth and color as secondary qualities on the basis of our commonsense divisions among sensory modalities; Grice’s proposal for distinguishing among the sensory modalities is focal here. The general conclusion is that reasons for drawing the primary-secondary quality distinction are unconvincing. (shrink)

Often, sensory input underdetermines perception. One such example is the perception of illusory contours. In illusory contour perception, the content of the percept includes the presence of a contour that is absent from the informational content of the sensation. (By “sensation” I mean merely information-bearing events at the transducer level. I intend no further commitment such as the identification of sensations with qualia.) I call instances of perception underdetermined by sensation “underdetermined perception.” The perception of illusory contours is (...) just one kind of underdetermined perception. The focus of this chapter is another kind of underdetermined perception: what I shall call "active perception". Active perception occurs in cases in which the percept, while underdetermined by sensation, is determined by a combination of sensation and action. The phenomenon of active perception has been used by several to argue against the positing of representations in explanations of sensory experience, either by arguing that no representations need be posited or that far fewer than previously thought need be posited. Such views include, but are not limited to those of Gibson (1966, 1986), Churchland. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett and others have suggested that qualia and introspectible phenomena do not exist. Dennett's account of consciousness, along with several related approaches, has been called illusionism by Keith Frankish. Frankish's analysis is helpful and provocative. As currently presented, however, his 'strong' version of illusionism suffers from several basic confusions, particularly regarding its relationship to eliminative materialism. This paper contrasts strong illusionism with an alternative that is easier to understand and more sharply focused -- fallibilist experiential realism, or, less (...) technically, modest realism. Fallibilist realism affirms the existence of experiential states that are commonly considered qualitative and phenomenal, but shares Frankish's agenda of thoroughly re-evaluating our judgments about such experiences. To illustrate the advantages of modest realism, I compare the ways illusionism and modest realism address two challenging puzzles: explaining how qualitative differences among sensory experiences could be constituted by differences among neural states, and explaining how neural states could constitute any conscious experiences whatsoever. (shrink)