Abstract: Self-consciousness, many philosophers agree, is essential to being a person. There is not so much agreement, however, about how to understand what self- consciousness is. Philosophers in the field of cognitive science tend to write off self- consciousness as unproblematic. According to such philosophers, the real difficulty for the cognitive scientist is phenomenal consciousness--the fact that we (and other organisms) have states that feel a certain way. If we had a grip on phenomenal consciousness, they think, self-consciousness could be easily handled by functionalist models. For example, recently Ned Block commented, “It is of course [phenomenal] consciousness rather than...self-consciousness that has seemed such a scientific mystery.” (Block, 1995, p. 230) And David Chalmers says that self-consciousness is one of those psychological states that “pose no deep metaphysical enigmas.” (Chalmers, 1996, p. 24) I think that this assumption that self-consciousness can be easily assimilated by science is too quick. For self-consciousness, as I shall try to show, rests on what I shall call ‘the first-person perspective.’ And it is not obvious how to treat the first-person perspective scientifically

Abstract: A number of writers have deployed the notion of a point of view as a key to the allegedly theory-resistant subjective aspect of experience. I examine that notion more closely than is usually done and find that it cannot support the anti-objectivist's case. Experience may indeed have an irreducibly subjective aspect, but the notion of a point of view cannot be used to show that it does

Abstract: In Word and Object, Quine acknowledged the "practical indispensability" in daily life of the intentional idioms of belief and desire but disparaged such talk as an "essentially dramatic idiom" rather than something from which real science could be made in any straightforward way.Endnote 1 Many who agree on little else have agreed with Quine about this, and have gone on to suggest one or another indirect way for science to accommodate folk psychology: Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, Stich, the Churchlands, Schiffer and myself, to name a few. This fainthearted consensus is all wrong, according to Fodor, whose new book is a vigorous--even frantic--defense of what he calls Intentional Realism: beliefs and desires are real, causally involved, determinately contentful states. "We have no reason to doubt," Fodor says, "that it is possible to have a scientific psychology that vindicates commonsense belief/desire explanation." (p.16)

Abstract: Many philosophical issues concern questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Of these questions, there are two kinds. The first considers whether something is objective or subjective; the second what it _means_ for something to be objective or subjective— questions that inquire as to the very essence of objectivity and subjectivity. I call questions of the first kind “questions of application” and questions of the second kind “questions of constitution”

Abstract: Many have urged that the biggest obstacles to a physicalistic understanding of consciousness are the problems raised in connection with the subjectivity of consciousness. These problems are most acutely expressed in consideration of the knowledge argument against physicalism. I develop a novel account of the subjectivity of consciousness by explicating the ways in which mental representations may be perspectival. Crucial features of my account involve analogies between the representations involved in sensory experience and the ways in which pictorial representations exhibit perspectives or points of view. I argue that the resultant account of subjectivity provides a basis for the strongest response physicalists can give to the knowledge argument

Abstract: Philosophical tradition contains two major lines of thought concerning the relative difficulty of the notions of objectivity and subjectivity. One tradition, which we might characterize as “Cartesian”, sees subjectivity as comparatively less problematic than objectivity. On the Cartesian view, what we know best of all are the contents of our own minds and the major problematic is to pierce the veil of appearances and make contact with objective mind-independent reality. In contrast is a line of thought that reverses the order of difficulty. A pervasive materialistic and scientific mind-set takes objectivity as the unproblematic starting point. From this point of view, widespread through much of contemporary philosophy and especially explicit in the philosophy of mind, a world of physical, chemical, and biological events is taken as relatively given. The problematic here then is to make sense of any kind of genuine subjectivity within this physicalistic framework (See Mandik 2001 for an extended discussion of these points.)

Abstract: The so-called subjectivity of conscious experience is central to much recent work in the philosophy of mind. Subjectivity is the alleged property of consciousness whereby one can know what it is like to have certain conscious states only if one has undergone such states oneself. I review neurophilosophical work on consciousness and concepts pertinent to this claim and argue that subjectivity eliminativism is at least as well supported, if not more supported, than subjectivity reductionism

Abstract: ...the problem of...how cognition...is possible at all...can never be answered on the basis of a prior knowledge of the transcendent [i.e. the external, spatio-temporal, empirical]...no matter whence the knowledge or the judgments are borrowed, not even if they are taken from the exact sciences.... It will not do to draw conclusions from existences of which one knows but which one cannot "see". "Seeing" does not lend itself to demonstration or deduction. [Husserl 1964a, pp. 2-3]

Abstract: Before one can even begin to model consciousness and what exactly it means that it is a subjective phenomenon one needs a theory about what a first-person perspective really is. This theory has to be conceptually convincing, empirically plausible and, most of all, open to new developments. The chosen conceptual framework must be able to accommodate scientific progress. Its ba- sic assumptions have to be plastic as it were, so that new details and empirical data can continuously be fed into the theoretical model as it grows and becomes more refined. This paper makes an attempt at sketching the outlines of such a theory, offering a representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-person perspective. Three phenomenal target properties are centrally relevant: “mine- ness” (phenomenal appropriation; the sense of ownership), “selfhood” (the con- scious experience of being someone), and “perspectivalness” (a structural fea- ture: phenomenal space as a whole is organized around a center, a supramodal point of view). This contribution analyzes these properties on a representational as well as on a functional level of description. The author introduces new con- ceptual constraints for phenomenal representations, plus two theoretical entities needed in order to understand what a first-person perspective is: “the phenome- nal self-model” (PSM) and “the phenomenal model of the intentionality rela- tion” (PMIR). A phenomenal self-model is a multimodal representational struc- ture, the contents of which forms the contents of the consciously experienced self. It has two important features: It is the only representational structure which is anchored in the brain by a persistent functional link, namely by a continuous source of internally generated input. Secondly, large parts of the PSM are phe- nomenally transparent: they cannot be recognized as representations by the sys- tem itself. It is therefore caught in what might be called a “naive-realistic self- misunderstanding”

Abstract: A hypothetical evolutionary scenario is offered meant to account for the emergence of mental selves. According to the scenario, mental selves are constructed to solve a source-attribution problem. They emerge when internally generated mental contents (e.g., thoughts and goals) are treated like messages arising from external personal sources. As a result, mental contents becomes attributed to the self as an internal personal source. According to this view, subjectivity is construed outward-in, that is, one's own mental self is derived from, and is secondary to, the mental selves perceived in others. The social construction of subjectivity and selfhood relies on, and is maintained in, various discourses on subjectivity

Abstract: Thomas Nagel argues that the subjective character of mind inevitably eludes philosophical efforts to incorporate the mental into a single, complete, physically objective view of the world. Nagel sees contemporary philosophy as caught on the horns of a dilemma – one either follows phenomenology in making all objective phenomena subjective, or one follows physicalism in making all subjective phenomena objective. He contends that both approaches lead to different but equally untenable forms of idealism and suggests that we currently lack the forms of understanding required to tackle the question of how to relate the subjective and objective aspects of experience. This paper draws a number of positive comparisons between Nagel's position on subjectivity and that of the later Husserl. It is argued that Nagel is wrong to dismiss phenomenology as idealist, thus clearing the way for a plausible Husserlian interpretation of his position. Husserl's more developed treatment of the relationships between subjectivity and objectivity can be employed to clarify, strengthen and elaborate Nagel's claims in a number of ways. However, the comparison also serves to show that Nagel does not go far enough in his critique of physical objectivism. The paper concludes by remarking on the continuing relevance of some central Husserlian themes as a critique of and positive alternative to deeply sedimented objectivist assumptions currently prevalent in Anglo-American philosophy

Abstract: Physics says that it cannot deal with the mind-brain problem, because it does not deal in subjectivities, and mind is subjective. However, biologists (among others) still claim to seek a material basis for subjective mental processes, which would thereby render them objective. Something is clearly wrong here. I claim that what is wrong is the adoption of too narrow a view of what constitutes objectivity, especially in identifying it with what a machine can do. I approach the problem in the light of two cognate circumstances: (a) the measurement problem in quantum physics, and (b) the objectivity of standard mathematics, even though most of it is beyond the reach of machines. I argue that the only resolution to such problems is in the recognition that closed loops of causation are objective; i.e. legitimate objects of scientific scrutiny. These are explicitly forbidden in any machine or mechanism. A material system which contains such loops is called complex. Such complex systems thus must possess nonsimulable models; i.e. models which contain impredicativities or self-references which cannot be removed, or faithfully mapped into a single coherent syntactic time-frame. I consider a few of the consequences of the above, in the context of thus redrawing the boundary between subject and object