Abstract: commentary on Block, “Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2007)

Abstract: In my book _The Conscious Mind_ , I deny a number of claims that John Searle finds "obvious", and I make some claims that he finds "absurd". But if the mind/body problem has taught us anything, it is that nothing about consciousness is obvious, and that one person's obvious truth is another person's absurdity. So instead of throwing around this sort of language, it is best to examine the claims themselves and the arguments that I give for them, to see whether Searle says anything of substance that touches them

Abstract: Aristotle sometimes draws analogies between perceiving and thinking. In this essay, I’ll argue that the role of the active intellect in thought is analogous to the role of perceiving that we see and hear in perception. The paper comes in two parts. In the first part, I’ll rehearse an argument for the conclusion that perceiving that we see and hear isn’t the office of a faculty separate from the special senses of seeing and hearing: rather, perceiving that we see and hear is a turning of one’s attention to the affection of the sense organs. Drawing the analogy with perceiving that we see and hear, I’ll argue in the second part of the essay that the agent intellect isn’t a faculty separate from the passive intellect. Rather, the activity of the active intellect is a of turning of one’s attention to the intelligible objects contained in the passive intellect. The activity of the agent intellect is, for Aristotle, a kind of consciousness. The picture of Aristotle’s account of consciousness which emerges from the argument of this paper suggests comparison between Aristotle and a contemporary view of consciousness as a higher-order representation. I’ll urge for caution in making this comparison

Abstract: For a solid quarter century Paul Churchland and I have been wheeling around in the space of work on consciousness, and though from up close it may appear that we =ve been rather vehemently opposed to each other =s position, from the bird =s eye view, we are moving in a rather tight spiral within the universe of contested views, both staunch materialists, interested in the same phenomena and the same empirical theories of those phenomena, but differing only over where the main chance lies for progress

Abstract: _The Significance of Consciousness_ . Princeton: Princeton University Press. $42.50 hbk. x + 374pp. ISBN: 0691027242. ABSTRACT: I discuss three issues about the relation of phenomenal consciousness, in the sense Siewert isolates, to

Abstract: Charles Siewert's _The Significance of Consciousness_ contends that most philosophers and psychologists who have written about "consciousness" have neglected a crucial type or aspect that Siewert calls "phenomenal consciousness" and tries carefully to define. The present article argues that some philosophers, at least, have not neglected phenomenal consciousness and have offered tenable theories of it

Abstract: How are the states of consciousness intrinsically so that they all qualify as “feelings” in William James’s generic sense? Only a small, propaedeutic part of what is required to address the intrinsic nature of such states can be accomplished here. I restrict my topic mainly to a certain characteristic that belongs to each of those pulses of mentality that successively make up James’s stream of consciousness. Certain statements of James’s are intended to pick out the variable “width” belonging to a stream of consciousness as it flows. Attention to this proposed property brings me to a discussion of (a) the unitary character of each of the states of consciousness however complex they may frequently be and (b) how to conceive of their complexity without recourse to a misleading spatial metaphor

Abstract: Siewert identifies a special kind of conscious experience, phenomenal consciousness, that is the sort of consciousness missing in a variety of cases of blindsight. He then argues that phenomenal consciousness has been neglected by students of consciousness when it should not be. According to Siewert, the neglect is based at least in part on two false assumptions: (i) phenomenal features are not intentional and (ii) phenomenal character is restricted to sensory experience. By identifying an essential tension in Siewert's characterization of phenomenal consciousness, I argue that his case for denying (i) and (ii) is at best incomplete

Abstract: profile deforms as we move about it. As perceivers we are masters of the patterns of sensorimotor contingency that shape our perceptual interaction with the world. We expect changes in such things as apparent size, shape and color to occur as we actively explore the environment. In encountering perspective-dependent changes of this sort, we learn how things are quite apart form our particular perspective. Our possession of these skills is constitutive of our ability to see (and generally to perceive). This is confirmed by the fact that we can disrupt a person’s ability to see by causing changes in the patterns of sensorimotor contingency, even as we leave the rest of the perceptual apparatus intact. This is what occurs, for example, when one puts on inverting lenses of the sort used by Stratton 1897] and Kohler 1951] in their well-known experiments. Eventually one masters the new patterns — one accommodates — and vision is restored. Or consider the effects of cataract surgery to restore sight in the congenitally blind. Patients acquire relatively functioning eyes, but they are not yet able fully to see. In case studies patients are described whose eyes move around aimlessly in their sockets, unintegrated with the exercise of attention, or with the guidance of thought and movement ( e.g. by Gregory and Wallace 1963/1969]). Sight is only fully regained when the perceptual apparatus, the eye/head/body system, is successfully integrated into a sensorimotor framework. It is also noteworthy that one post-operative patient expressed astonishment at the way, for example, a round coin appears to change its shape when rotated [cited in Helmholtz 1909/1925]. These examples illustrate the ways in which the ability to see (or to perceive) depends on the

Abstract: I am lucky to have two such penetrating commentators as Robert Kirk and Andrew Melnyk. It is also fortunate that they come at me from different directions, and so cover different aspects of my book. Robert Kirk has doubts about the overall structure of my enterprise, and in particular about my central commitment to a distinctive species of phenomenal concepts. Andrew Melnyk, by contrast, offers no objections to my general brand of materialism. Instead he focuses specifically on my discussion of the anti-materialist 'intuition of distinctness', raising questions about my attempt to explain this intuition away, and offering alternative suggestions of his own

Abstract: This paper examines some of the central arguments of John McDowell's Mind and World, particularly his treatment of the Kantian themes of the spontaneity of thought and of the nature of self-consciousness. It is argued that in so far as McDowell departs from Kant, his position becomes less plausible in three respects. First, the space of reason is identified with the space of responsible and critical freedom in a way that runs together issues about synthesis below the level of concepts and at the level of complete judgements. This leads to the unwarranted exclusion of animal minds from the space of reasons. Second, McDowell draws no essential distinction between apperception and inner sense, a distinction which is important to a defensible Kantian view and to the very idea of a sui generis transcendental knowledge of the mind that is consistent with Kant's critical principles. McDowell does not take into account some of Kant's developed arguments about the inherently reflective nature of consciousness which is interpreted as an adverbial theory of the nature of conscious experience, a mode of being in a mental state (so neither an intrinsic nor extrinsic property of it). Third, McDowell endorses a standard treatment of Kant's approach to the mind in which a merely formal account of mind needs to be anchored outside consciousness on the physical body. The arguments for this conclusion, both in Mind and World and in related work by Bermudez and Hurley, is shown to be very inconclusive as a criticism of Kant. The capacity to self-ascribe thoughts that are already conscious shows, but does not say, a truth about the unity of our conscious experience that does not require further anchoring on a physical body; at that stage of the Critique Kant is describing conditions for conscious experience in general, not the conscious experience of spatio-temporally located makers of judgements. The alleged lacuna in Kant's arguments is no lacuna at all