Abstract: What is the role of conscious perceptual experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge? My central claim is that a proper account of the way in which perceptual experiences contribute to our understanding of the most basic beliefs about particular things in the mind-independent world around us reveals how such experiences provide peculiarly fundamental reasons for such beliefs. There are, I claim, epistemic requirements upon the very possibility of empirical belief. The crucial epistemological role of experiences lies in their essential contribution to the subject’s understanding of certain perceptual demonstrative contents, simply grasping which provides him with a reason to endorse them in belief. Part I of my book argues that this must be so; Part II explains in detail how it is so

Abstract: Two aspects of consciousness are first considered: consciousness as awareness (phenomenological meaning) and consciousness as strategic control (functional meaning). As to awareness, three types can be distinguished: first, awareness as the phenomenal experiences of objects and events; second, awareness as meta-awareness, i.e., the awareness of mental life itself; third, awareness as self-awareness, i.e., the awareness of being oneself. While phenomenal experience and self-awareness are usually present during dreaming (even if many modifications are possible), meta-awareness is usually absent (apart from some particular experiences of self-reflectiveness) with the major exception of lucid dreaming. Consciousness as strategic control may also be present in dreams. The functioning of consciousness is then analyzed, following a cognitive model of dream production. In such a model, the dream is supposed to be the product of the interaction of three components: (a) the bottom-up activation of mnemonic elements coming from LTM systems, (b) interpretative and elaborative top-down processes, and (c) monitoring of phenomenal experience. A feedback circulation is activated among the components, where the top-down interpretative organization and the conscious monitoring of the oneiric scene elicitates other mnemonic contents, according to the requirements of the dream plot. This dream productive activity is submitted to unconscious and conscious processes

Abstract: O'Regan and Noe declare that the qualitative character of experience is constituted by the nature of the sensorimotor contingencies at play when we perceive. Sensorimotor contingencies are a highly restricted set of input-output relations. The restriction excludes contingencies that don’t essentially involve perceptual systems. Of course if the ‘sensory’ in ‘sensorimotor’ were to be understood mentalistically, the thesis would not be of much interest, so I assume that these contingencies are to be understood non-mentalistically. Contrary to their view, experience is a matter of what mediates between input and output, not input-output relations all by themselves. However, instead of mounting a head-on collision with their view, I think it will be more useful to consider a consequence of their view that admits of obvious counterexamples. The consequence consists of two claims: (1) any two systems that share that highly restricted set of input-output relations are therefor experientially the same and (2) conversely, any two systems that share experience must share these sensorimotor contingencies. Once stated, the view is so clearly wrong that my ascription of it to them might be challenged. At least it is a consequence of a major strand in their view. Perhaps this will be an opportunity for them to disassociate themselves from it. I will limit myself to (1)

Abstract: Consider Susan Hurley's depiction of mainstream views of the mind: "The mind is a kind of sandwich, and cognition is the filling" (p. 401). This particular sandwich (with perception as the bottom loaf and action as the top loaf) tastes foul to Hurley, who devotes most of "Consciousness in Action" to a systematic and sometimes extraordinarily detailed critique of what has otherwise been dubbed "classical" models of the mind. This critique then provides the basis for her alternative proposal, in which perception, action and environment are deeply intertwined

Abstract: In Action in Perception, Alva Noë provides a persuasive account of the “enactive” approach to perception, according to which perception is not simply based on the processing of sensory information, or on the construction of internal representations, but is fundamentally shaped by the motor possibilities of the perceiving body. As John Dewey put it in 1896, in his essay, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”

Abstract: Why is neural activity in a particular area expressed as experience of red rather than green, or as visual experience rather than auditory? Indeed, why does it have any conscious expression at all? These familiar questions indicate the explanatory gap between neural activity and ‘what it’s like’-- qualities of conscious experience. The comparative explanatory gaps, intermodal and intramodal, can be separated from the absolute explanatory gap and associated zombie issues--why does neural activity have any conscious expression at all?. Here I focus on comparative gaps: why is neural activity in a given area expressed as this type of experience rather than that type of experience?