papers on consciousness

Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3):200-19, 1995. This is the paper where I introduced the “hard problem” of consciousness. I distinguish between the easy problems and the hard problem, and I argue that the hard problem eludes conventional methods of explanation. I argue that we need a new form of nonreductive explanation, and make some moves toward a detailed nonreductive theory. This paper was based on a talk I gave at the 1994 Tucson conference on consciousness (video here), appeared in 1995 as part of a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 1995. [pdf] [html] [philpapers]

Journal of Consciousness Studies 4(1):3-46, 1995. After "Facing Up…" was published, about 25 articles commenting on it or on other aspects of the "hard problem" appeared in JCS (links to some of these papers are contained in the article). My (lengthy) reply, "Moving Forward…", appeared in JCS vol. 4, pp. 3-46, 1997. All the papers and my reply were collected in the book, Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem (edited by Jonathan Shear), published by MIT Press in July 1997. [html] [philpapers]

Scientific American, December 1995. It is essentially an even less technical version of “Facing Up”, with some pretty pictures. As with most Scientific American articles, much of this article was heavily revised by the editors, and all in all I prefer “Facing Up” as an introduction. But this version can be useful for people coming to the issue for the first time. [pdf] [philpapers]

In (H. Jasper, L. Descarries, V. Castellucci, & S. Rossignol, eds) Consciousness: At the Frontiers of Neuroscience (Advances in Neurology, Vol. 77). Lippincott-Raven Press, 1998. An overview of the problems of consciousness in the context of science. There are a few original bits here but not much that isn’t done better elsewhere. [pdf] [philpapers]

This is an old paper on the meta-problem of consciousness (without using that expression), written when I was a graduate student at Indiana. It talks about the odd fact that even if consciousness is not reductively explainable, our claims about consciousness should be, and discusses various ways in which this tension might be resolved, eventually proposing a proto-theory of consciousness based on the notions of pattern and information. I no longer agree with everything in this paper, and it gets a bit wild toward the end, but it covers some interesting issues. I’ve never tried to publish it, but it is still one of my favorites.[html] [ps] [philpapers]

Journal of Consciousness Studies 25:6-61, 2018. [pdf] [philpapers]

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2020. [pdf] [philpapers]

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2020. [pdf] [philpapers]

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2020. [pdf] [philpapers]

In (S. Stich & F., Warfield, eds) Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell, 2003. Also in (D. Chalmers, ed) Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Oxford University Press, 2002). Reprinted (abridged) in( W. Lycan & J. Prinz, eds) Mind and Cognition: A Reader (Blackwell, 2007). This is an overview paper on the metaphysics of consciousness. It summarizes arguments against materialism, and uses these to give a detailed taxonomy of reductive and nonreductive views (three each). It covers some of the same ground as the first two papers below (although it’s oriented more toward metaphysics than toward science), while also covering some of the more technical material in my book and some new things. [pdf] [philpapers]

Amherst Lecture in Philosophy, 2013. This paper develops an argument for panpsychism as a sort of Hegelian synthesis of materialism and dualism. Along the way it distinguishes many varieties of panpsychism and develops a more general case for panprotopsychism and Russellian monism, while also addressing problems for these views. [pdf]

In (G. Bruntrup and L. Jaskolla, eds.) Panpsychism. Oxford University Press, 2017. This paper was actually written on the same weekend as the other paper on panpsychism, but it was published four years later due to the vagaries of publishing. Where the other paper develops a case for panpsychism and panprotopsychism, this paper develops the case against. It distinguishes a number of versions of the combination problem and tries to turn them into arguments. Panpsychism is still left standing at the end — but perhaps only just. [pdf] [philpapers]

In (W. Seager, ed.) The Routledge Handbook to Panpsychism (Routledge, 2018). A new paper exploring the prospects for idealism, the view that all reality is grounded in the mental. There is some discussion of traditional anti-realist idealism, but the focus is on a “realist” approach grounded in structuralism about the physical and the nonreductionism about the mental. I give the most attention to idealist views that grow out of panpsychism and cosmopsychism, namely micro-idealism and cosmic idealism. [pdf] [philpapers]

In (B. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann, & S. Walter, eds) Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 313-335. Expanded version in The Character of Consciousness (OUP, 2010). This long paper gives the fullest and best-developed version of my version of the conceivability argument against materialism using two-dimensional semantics. The focus is especially on the connection between conceivability and possibility and the issue of strong a posteriori necessities. Many objections are addressed! [pdf] [philpapers]

Philosophical Studies 167:785-800. This paper is a reply to three commentaries by Philip Goff and David Papineau, Geoff Lee, and Joe Levine in a symposium on The Character of Consciousness. All three comments focused on the issue of strong necessities (another symposium on the book focuses on issues about the contents of consciousness), so this leads to a usefully unified and coherent exchange. [pdf] [philpapers]

This paper discusses the agenda for a science of consciousness. I characterize the central task as the systematic integration of first-person data and third-person data, and lay out various concrete projects, discussing recent work in psychology and cognitive science along the way. I also discussed some obstacles, especially those tied to the methods for gathering first-person data. The paper appears in The Cognitive Neurosciences III, edited by Michael Gazzaniga (MIT Press, 2004). [pdf] [philpapers]

This is a constructive analysis of the search for the "neural correlate of consciousness" (or the NCC, as it’s sometimes called). I argue that because we don’t have any way of detecting consciousness directly (i.e., we have no "consciousness meter"), the search is driven by pre-empirical bridging principles instead. I discuss some of these principles and draw some conclusions about the shape of the search. This paper is largely a transcript of my talk at the 1996 Tucson conference on consciousness, although some fun and games with a consciousness meter have been omitted (see the video. It was published in Toward a Science of Consciousness II, edited by Hameroff, Kaszniak, and Scott (MIT Press, 1998). [pdf] [philpapers]

This more recent and longer paper deals with some different aspects of the NCC issue, with reference to recent empirical work in the field (e.g. work in visual neuroscience by Logothetis, Milner and Goodale, and others). In particular it addresses what it means to be a neural correlate of consciousness, distinguishes different sorts of NCCs, and discusses the methodology of the search. It raises some questions about the conclusions that can be drawn from lesion studies. This paper was given at the 1998 ASSC conference on Neural Correlates of Consciousness, and appeared in Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Conceptual and Empirical Questions, edited by Thomas Metzinger (MIT Press, 2000). [pdf] [philpapers]

In this short paper I argue that the task of a science of consciousness is to connect third-person data about brain and behavior to first-person data about conscious experience, and I discuss the difficult question of how we might investigate and represent first-person data. I also discuss some specific issues about emotion. This paper was written for a Tucson online workshop on emotion and consciousness, and appeared in the Fall 1999 Consciousness Bulletin from the Center for Consciousness Studies. [html] [philpapers]

In The Future for Philosophy, edited by Brian Leiter (Oxford University Press, 2004). This paper concerns the relationship between the phenomenal character and representational content of perceptual experience, and the status of representationalism. I argue for a sort of nonreductive, narrow, Fregean representationalism, contrasting with the more common reductive, wide, Russellian representationalism. [pdf] [philpapers]

Perceptual Experience, edited by Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne (Oxford University Press, 2006). This is a sequel to the previous paper. I argue that the phenomenology of perceptual experience grounds not just a sort of Fregean content, but also a more fundamental “Edenic” content, involving the representation of primitive properties that may not be instantiated in the world. Much of the paper concerns the relationship between these two sorts of content. [pdf] [philpapers]

My reply to comments in a symposium on The Character of Consciousness by Benj Hellie, Chris Peacocke, and Susanna Siegel. The three parts focus especially on acquaintance and attention, on spatial experience, and on Edenic perception. [pdf] [philpapers]

Forthcoming in (Pautz and Stoljar, eds.) Themes from Ned Block. This paper focuses on the content of our experience of orientation, size, and shape, and argues that certain sorts of lifelong illusions involving these are impossible. This serves as support for a sort of spatial externalism and spatial functionalism. Thought experiments along the way include Mirror Earth, Doubled Earth, and Lorentz Earth. [pdf]

This long paper has two halves. The first half gives an account of phenomenal concepts and phenomenal beliefs, on which their content is partly constituted by the quality of an experience. The second half applies this account to epistemological issues: e.g. arguing for a limited incorrigibility thesis, defending a sort of foundationalism about phenomenal knowledge, defending the phenomenal realist from certain epistemological problems, and addressing the “Myth of the Given”. The paper was published in Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Quentin Smith and Alexandr Jokic (Oxford, 2003). [pdf] [philpapers]

This paper applies the analysis of phenomenal concepts above to the knowledge argument against materialism. Most of this paper is drawn from with material in other papers, but there is a bit of new material in the second half on replies to the knowledge argument. It is forthcoming in There’s Something About Mary, an anthology of paprs on the knowledge argument, edited by Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar (MIT Press, 2004). [html] [philpapers]

This paper discusses materialist attempts (by e.g. Hill, Loar, Papineau, Tye, and others) to appeal to phenomenal concepts to explain away the explanatory gap and other epistemic gaps. I argue that no such account can work: either the account does not explain the epistemic gap, or the relevant features of phenmenal concepts are themselves not explainable in physical terms. Forthcoming in Torin Alter and Sven Walter, Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism (OUP, 2006). [pdf] [philpapers]

This paper is co-authored with Tim Bayne. We distinguish a number of different senses in which it might be said that a subject’s conscious experiences are unified, and isolate a central notion for which the claim that consciousness is necessarily unified is tenable without being trivial. We then discuss potential counterexamples to this unity thesis, and will consider the implications of the unity thesis for theories of consciousness more generally. This paper appears in The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, Dissociation (Oxford University Press, 2003) edited by Axel Cleeremans. [pdf] [philpapers]

In this paper I use thought-experiments to argue that functional organization fully determines conscious experience. These thought-experiments involve the gradual replacement of neurons by silicon chips, and similar scenarios. I argue that if "absent qualia" or "inverted qualia" are possible, then phenomena I call "fading qualia" and "dancing qualia" will be possible; but I argue that it is very implausible that fading or dancing qualia are possible. The resulting position is a sort of "nonreductive functionalism". This paper appears in the collection Conscious Experience from Ferdinand Schöningh (1995), edited by Thomas Metzinger. (There is also a German version entitled "Fehlende Qualia, schwindende Qualia, tanzende Qualia" (!), but it is not available on the net.) [html] [ps] [philpapers]

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68:182-90. This is a commentary in a symposium on John Perry’s book Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness (MIT Press, 2001), which defends a materialist view against a number of arguments (the zombie argument, the knowledge argument, the modal argument), and addresses the discussion in my book. The online version includes an additional response to John Perry’s reply. [html] [philpapers]

Here I argue that the cognitive correlate of conscious experience is direct availability for global control, and use this to shed light on a few vexing questions. This was written as a commentary on Ned Block‘s paper “On A Confusion about a Function of Consciousness"; Block’s reply is here. The commentary appeared in Behavioral and Brain Sciences and also in the collection The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates from MIT Press, edited by Block, Flanagan, and Guzeldere. This paper overlaps to some extent with “On the search for a neural correlate of consciousness”. [html] [philpapers]

This is a commentary on Alvin Goldman’s piece "The Psychology of Folk Psychology", in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (June 1993). The paper contains a zombie thought-experiment or two, for people who like that sort of thing. [html] [philpapers]

This is a review of the first issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. It appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in November 1994. [html] [philpapers]