Conscious Experience: a Logical Inquiry, by Anil Gupta (original) (raw)
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Learning to Appreciate the Gray Areas: A Critical Notice of Anil Gupta’s “Conscious Experience”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 2019
Anil Gupta’s Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry is an impressive piece of philosophical work. By way of a logical inquiry into the nature of conscious experience, Gupta provides a novel account of rational justification which can be used as a foundation for a new theory of empiricism. In this Critical Notice, I argue that Gupta’s project is fascinating, but is often hampered by a lack of sufficient philosophical justification and clarity regarding some essential features of his project, as well as a lack of engagement with relevant scientific domains that would directly bear on his project, such as computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. I argue that by ignoring the conceptual tools and resources provided by these domains, Gupta limits the sorts of logical inquiry available to him in problematic ways.
The illusion of conscious experience
Illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. This thesis is widely judged to be uniquely counterintuitive: the idea that consciousness is an illusion strikes most people as absurd, and seems almost impossible to contemplate in earnest. Defenders of illusionism should be able to explain the apparent absurdity of their own thesis, within their own framework. However, this is no trivial task: arguably, none of the illusionist theories currently on the market is able to do this. I present a new theory of phenomenal introspection and argue that it might deal with the task at hand.
The Value of Conscious Experience
In this paper, I argue that conscious experience is a basic prudential good: every conscious experience is basically good for the person who experiences it—good for her in its own right, and not merely in the derivative sense of being appropriately related to something else that is good for her—simply in virtue of being a conscious experience of hers. Although experiences are, other things being equal, more basically good for their subjects if they are pleasant, even experiences that are not pleasant are basically good. And although unpleasant experiences are, in virtue of their unpleasantness, basically bad for the people who have them, they are also basically good for those people simply in virtue of being conscious experiences of theirs. My argument’s starting point is a puzzle that has thus far been neglected, so it should be of interest even to those it doesn’t convince. If it succeeds, then all of the major theories of well-being are, at least as they have standardly been developed, mistaken. Well-being is easier to come by than any of those theories recognize: we accrue it at every waking moment, simply in virtue of being conscious.
B.J. Baars (2015) CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCES - for SCHOLARPEDIA.
Conscious experiences While conscious (cs) experience has been discussed throughout history, the late 19th century saw a rise in physicalistic reductionism, which, in its more extreme forms, declared "consciousness" and kindred terms to be unscientific. In the 1920’s B.F. Skinner defined the goal of "radical behaviorism" as the complete elimination of mentalistic concepts from psychology --- about two-thirds of English content words. Skinner's influence dominated well into the 1970s, and during that time it was extremely difficult for scientists to openly study cs cognition, voluntary control, personal identity, and similar questions. By the 1980s philosophers and scientists started to return to consciousness. Philosophers like Daniel Dennett and scientists like Francis Crick strongly supported a return to scientific research. Since the 1980s a large literature has grown, with thousands of findings about visual awareness, coma and wakefulness, direct brain recording of binocular rivalry, and much more. The PubMed database shows almost 20,000 articles for the keywords "conscious brain." Many scientific studies use experimental comparisons between similar cs and uncs events. This “contrastive analysis” approach has been very fruitful. Dozens of techniques now permit cs-uncs comparisons. Any method that permits such comparisons can enlarge our understanding. The resulting empirical harvest has been very large.
Constructivist Foundations. An Interdisciplinary Journal. Volume 6. Number 2. 193-203, 2011
The idea to write this essay sprang up in a casual conversation that led to the question of how the word “experience” would be translated into German. Distinctions between the German “Erleben” and “Erfahren,” and their intricacies with “Erkennen” and “Anerkennen,” soon led to the conviction that this was a thread worth pursuing. And indeed, much has been written about the nature of experience! Yet, to this day, there is little consensus on the role of consciousness in the process of experiencing. While Radical Constructivism acknowledges the significance of tacit or sensorimotor knowledge in the individual’s practical operating, it cannot admit it as a basis to the formation of conceptual structures . Drawing from our backgrounds in epistemology and psychology, and a shared interest in Piaget’s psychogenetic approach, we investigate the origins and development of human experience, in this case the mastery of space, time, causation, and object-permanency. We focus on how “noticeable encounters” are gauged, reflected upon, and ultimately worked through, consciously or unconsciously, by the “experiencer.” A child’s abilities to enact a certain action pattern in a given situation no more demonstrates a representation of the pattern than does recognition in the case of objects. In his studies with children, Piaget has shown that the Kantian categories of space, time, object, and causation are co-constitutive of the child’s own [loco]motion– and its felt impact – as a means to make the world cohere. Of importance here are the concepts of “effective causality,” felicitous encounters, and agency. Understanding the circumstances under which some “lived” events, whether self-initiated or striking as if out of nowhere, become noticeable and able affect a person’s life is a daunting task. This joint essay is no more than a conversation-starter and an invitation to further explore the intricacies between agency and causation, sensation and cognition,—and, yes, motions and emotions— in the emergence of consciousness itself.
Experience and Self-Consciousness
Philosophical Studies, 2009
Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.
Introspective Knowledge of Experience and Its Role in Consciousness Studies
2011
In response to Petitmengin and Bitbol's recent account of first-person methodologies in the study of consciousness, I provide a revised model of our introspective knowledge of our own conscious experience. This model, which I call the existential constitution model of phenomenal knowledge, avoids the problems that Petitmengin and Bitbol identify with standard observational models of introspection while also avoiding an underlying metaphorical misconception in their own proximity model, which misconstrues first-person knowledge of consciousness in terms of a dichotomous epistemic relationship. The end result is a clearer understanding of the unique nature and epistemic properties of our knowledge of consciousness, as well as the epistemic status of subsequent first-person reports on conscious experience .
Consciousness and Intentionality
Velmans/The Blackwell, 2007
This dissertation is about phenomenal consciousness, its relation to intentionality, and the relation of both to issues in the philosophy of perception. My principal aim is (1) to defend an account of what it is for a perceptual experience to be phenomenally conscious and (2) to develop, within the terms set forth by this account, a particular theory of perceptual phenomenal consciousness. Given the way these matters are usually understood, it probably is not obvious why I distinguish two philosophical tasks here. One might ask: "Isn't defending an account of what it is for a perceptual experience to be phenomenally conscious the same thing as developing a particular theory of perceptual phenomenal consciousness?" I argue that it is not. In addition to my principal aim, I have three subsidiary aims. First, to shed some light on what it means for a perceptual experience to be an intentional mental event, one with representational content. Many philosophers regard the notion of perceptual intentionality as utterly unproblematic. Though I accept that experiences almost always have content, I subject this claim to more scrutiny than is usual. Second, to go some way towards better understanding the relationship between perceptual phenomenal consciousness and perceptual intentionality. In particular, I examine recent attempts to explain the former in terms of the latter. My conclusion is that there can be no such explanation. Finally, to show that, by improving our understanding of perceptual phenomenal consciousness, perceptual intentionality, and the relation between them, we can make headway on some very difficult problems in the philosophy of perception. I am especially interested in defending direct realism, the view that, in having perceptual experiences, subjects can be-and usually are-directly aware of material objects.