Abstract: There are both externalist and internalist theories of the phenomenal content of conscious experiences. Externalists like Dretske and Tye treat the phenomenal content of conscious states as representations of external properties (and events). Internalists think that phenomenal conscious states are reducible to electrochemical states of the brain in the style of the type-type identity theory. In this paper, we side with the representationalists and visit a dispute between them over the test case of Swampman. Does Swampman have conscious phenomenal states or not? Dretske and Tye disagree on this issue. We try to settle the dispute in favor of Dretske's theory (to our own surprise)

Abstract: Qualia internalism is the thesis that qualia are intrinsic to their subjects: the experiences of intrinsic duplicates (in the same or different metaphysically possible worlds) have the same qualia. Content externalism is the thesis that mental representation is an extrinsic matter, partly depending on what happens outside the head.¹ Intentionalism (or representationalism) comes in strong and weak forms. In its weakest formulation, it is the thesis that representationally identical experiences of subjects (in the same or different metaphysically possible worlds) have the same qualia.²

Abstract: experience supervene on the intrinsic properties of the experience’s subject. STRONG EXTERNALISM: None of the representational properties of a perceptual experience is fixed by the intrinsic properties of the experience’s subject.¹ The fact that these three theses are jointly inconsistent is one of the emerging problems in the recent literature on the philosophy of perception and consciousness. It’s a _problem_ because the theses are all quite attractive. Our aim here is to make the problem explicit and survey the options for resolving it. First, we need to explain the claims in more detail

Abstract: Many philosophers today believe that what an individual is thinking does not depend entirely on the individual’s physical constitution: physically identical subjects could have different thoughts. However, most philosophers find quite implausible a similar thesis as applied to the phenomenal character of experience. Even if physically identical individuals could have different thoughts, it is said, if one of them has a headache, or a tingly sensation, so must the other. Not everyone finds this implausible, but those that don’t (for instance, some representationalists about perception) are said to have “too much respect for philosophical theory and not enough common sense.”¹ Indeed, many philosophers grant that, if secured, “externalism about phenomenal character” (more on this label below) would help solve a variety of persistent philosophical problems but, they claim, they just can’t see how it could be correct

Abstract: If you want a philosophically diligent exposition of a theory, something that has got through review by conventional peers, go elsewhere (Honderich, 2004). If you want an understanding made more immediate by brevity and informality, read on. The theory is a Radical Externalism about the nature of consciousness. If it is not a complete departure from the cranialism of most of the philosophy and science of consciousness, it is a fundamental departure

Abstract: Since Twin Earth was discovered by American philosophical-space explorers in the 1970s, the domain of “wide” or externalist or extrinsic properties has expanded.Putnam (1975) originally focused just on the meanings of people’s linguistic utterances, arguing that two perfect twins, an Earthling and that person’s molecular duplicate on Twin Earth in parallel physical surroundings, can utter identical sentences that nonetheless have different meanings. Fodor (1980) and Stich (1978) extended this argument to cover the contents of people’s propositional attitudes, so far as those contents comprised concepts of certain sorts, such as natural-kind concepts. Stich (1980) then argued that Fodor had underestimated the range of the wide (“…what Fodor sees as a bit I see as the tip of an iceberg” (p. 97))

Abstract: I am going to develop an argument against Physicalism concerning qualitative mental properties. Unlike most arguments against Physicalism, it is not based on the usual _a priori_ considerations, such as what Mary learns when she comes out of her black and white room or the apparent conceivability of Zombies. Rather, it is based on two broadly _a posteriori_ premises about the structure of experience and its physical basis

Abstract: Intentionalism is very popular. Here I will work with a simple form for con- venience. On this form of Intentionalism, to have an experience is to stand in the sensory representation relation or, as I shall say, the property-awareness relation to a cluster of properties (Dretske 1999). The properties we are aware of are the ostensible properties of external objects or parts of one’s body. In veridical experience these properties are instantiated in one’s environment or body, while in non-veridical experience they are not. In hallucination, for instance, one is aware of properties but not anything that instantiates the properties; one is aware of a cluster of free-floating properties (Dretske 1995, 1999, 2003; Tye 2000). Finally, the qualitative character of experience is determined by the totality of properties one is aware of (the totality of proper- ties one sensorily represents). Roughly speaking, necessarily, if two people are aware of the same properties, then they have the same experience-type

Abstract: In the mid-nineties, Fred Dretske, William Lycan and Michael Tye published books defending an ambitious new reductive program. The program came in two stages. The first was to defend Intentionalism. The second was to reduce the secondary qualities to external physical properties and then to explain sensory representation in terms of tracking under optimal conditions or biological function. The old reductive program was internalist: the idea used to be that we could reduce experiences to brain states. The new reductive program is externalist

Abstract: Right now my conscious experience is directed at part of the world. It takes in some aspects of things around me and not others. Some bits of the world occupy my attention, other worldly goings on condition or colour the character of my current perceptual experience. I experience buildings in view through the window, the clothes in the corner of the room, the colour of the walls, the plate with breads, the coffee mugs, the smell of fresh laundry, the muffled sounds of someone in the kitchen, the sounds from the street: a sequence of things that in turn capture my attention moment to moment. And all the while thoughts occur to me, modulating my conscious awareness. I have no doubt that the world and my place in it, together with my recent past history, explains the particular form my consciousness takes right now. But what shape does that explanation take? Things out there beyond the boundaries of my skin enter into the conscious events I undergo. The inner is in this way shaped and determined by those outer things that impress themselves on the mind. What is it, though, for consciousness of this kind to go on at all?

Abstract: Professor Honderich presents his account of consciousness boldly and informally, and his presentation merits a response in similar terms. I conceive of this response as simply the first move in a conversation, in the course of which misunderstandings might be removed and, just possibly, criticisms sharpened, and positions modified. I want to concentrate on two questions that his very interesting paper prompts me to ask. The first question is; what exactly is the thesis about consciousness that Professor Honderich is proposing? The second question is; what are the main reasons he has for his proposal and are they persuasive? Although there are two questions, I shall mix considerations of them together in a way which I hope it is possible to follow

Abstract: Honderich claims that for a person to be perceptually conscious is for a world to exist. I decide what this means, and whether it could be true, in the opening section Consciousness and Existence. In Honderich's Phenomenology, I show that Honderich's theory is essentially anticipated in the ideas and Ideas of Husserl. In the third section, Radical Interiority, I argue that although phenomenology putatively eschews ontology of mind, and Honderich construes his position as near- physicalism, Honderich's insights are only truths because we are spiritual substances

Abstract: It is usually supposed that the term ‘phenomenal character’ cannot be defined in non-phenomenal terms. To explain the meaning of the term, one typically begins by say- ing something non-reductive of the following sort: the phenomenal character of an ex- perience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience. Then one proceeds to examples. There is something it is like to feel a tickle in an elbow, experience an itch on one’s nose, smell the salty sea air, taste vinegar, have a visual experience of bright red, dangle one’s fingers in running water, feel thirsty, experience fear, feel elated. These ex- periences vary in what it is like to undergo them. Thereby, they differ in their phenome- nal character

Abstract: Dualists believe that experiences have neither location nor extension, while reductive and 'non-reductive' physicalists (biological naturalists) believe that experiences are really in the brain, producing an apparent impasse in current theories of mind. Enactive and reflexive models of perception try to resolve this impasse with a form of externalism that challenges the assumption that experiences must either be nowhere or in the brain. However, they are externalist in very different ways. Insofar as they locate experiences anywhere, enactive models locate conscious phenomenology in the dynamic interaction of organisms with the external world, and in some versions, they reduce conscious phenomenology to such interactions, in the hope that this will resolve the hard problem of consciousness. The reflexive model accepts that experiences of the world result from dynamic organism-environment interactions, but argues that such interactions are preconscious. While the resulting phenomenal world is a consequence of such interactions, it cannot be reduced to them. The reflexive model is externalist in its claim that this external phenomenal world, which we normally think of as the physical world, is literally outside the brain. Furthermore, there are no added conscious experiences of the external world inside the brain. In the present paper I present the case for the enactive and reflexive alternatives to more classical views and evaluate their consequences. I argue that, in closing the gap between the phenomenal world and what we normally think of as the physical world, the reflexive model resolves one facet of the hard problem of consciousness. Conversely, while enactive models have useful things to say about percept formation and representation, they fail to address the hard problem of consciousness