Peter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had
a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now
collected here in revised form. The first half of the volume is
devoted to developing, elaborating, and defending against competitors
one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal
consciousness, which Carruthers now refers to as 'dual-content
theory'. Phenomenal consciousness - the feel of experience - is
supposed to constitute the 'hard problem' for a scientific world view,
and many have claimed that it is an irredeemable mystery. But
Carruthers here claims to have explained it. He argues that
phenomenally conscious states are ones that possess both an 'analog'
(fine-grained) intentional content and a corresponding higher-order
analog content, representing the first-order content of the
experience. It is the higher-order analog content that enables our
phenomenally conscious experiences to present themselves to us, and
that constitutes their distinctive subjective aspect, or feel. The
next two chapters explore some of the differences between conscious
experience and conscious thought, and argue for the plausibility of
some kind of eliminativism about conscious thinking (while retaining
realism about phenomenal consciousness). Then the final four chapters
focus on the minds of non-human animals. Carruthers argues that even
if the experiences of animals aren't phenomenally conscious (as his
account probably implies), this needn't prevent the frustrations and
sufferings of animals from being appropriate objects of sympathy and
concern. Nor need it mean that there is any sort of radical 'Cartesian
divide' between our minds and theirs of deep significance for
comparative psychology. In the final chapter, he argues provocatively
that even insects have minds that include a belief/desire/perception
psychology much like our own. So mindedness and phenomenal
consciousness couldn't be further apart. Carruthers's writing
throughout is distinctively clear and direct. The collection will be
of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive
science.
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Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191535048
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter