Imagine a zombie world that looks “from the outside” just like ours, but where there is no phenomenal consciousness. Creatures look us move about as we do and make same noises do, nobody experiences or feels anything. How much of epistemic value that's exemplified in our survives one? The short answer is: any kind requires occurrence consciousness for its exemplification cannot exist world, doe...

Abstract The cognitive phenomenology debate centers on two questions. (1) What is an apt characterization of the conscious thought? And (2), what role does this play? I argue that answers to former question bear significantly latter question. In particular, show conservatism about not compatible with view explains constitution thought. proceed as follows: To begin with, analyze our sensory expe...

Philosophers traditionally recognize two main features of mental states: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. To a first approximation, intentionality is the aboutness of mental states, and phenomenal consciousness is the felt, experiential, qualitative, or “what it’s like” (Nagel 1974) aspect of mental states. In the past few decades, these features have been widely assumed to be disti...

Thomas Metzinger argues that phenomenal selves are appearances produced by the ongoing operations of a “self-model” that simulates, emulates, and represents aspects of the system’s states to itself – and not substantial things. In this essay, I explain the nature of phenomenal selfhood and then describe the most important problem that arises in connection with explaining phenomenal selfhood. I ...

Michael Tye has recently argued that the phenomenal character of conscious experiences is “one and the same as” (1) Poised (2) Abstract (3) Non-conceptual (4) Intentional Content (PANIC). Tye argues extensively that PANIC Theory accounts for differences in phenomenal character in representational terms. But another task of a theory of phenomenal consciousness is to account for the difference be...

This paper describes how early designs of dynamic weightless neural systems were developed to enable some of the states of a state structure to have a phenomenal character. Such states reflect the features of a sensory reality and allow the storage of aspects of sensory experience and access to it. The ‘machine consciousness’ paradigm is summarised in this paper. The paper concludes with a desc...

To Kevin, tireless organizer of philosophical research, tremendously generous supporter of young people, delightful host, brilliant philosopher (in random order). With herzlichen Dank, for the great sympathy and encouragement he has given me. I hope he will forgive me for dedicating to him this paper, which seems not to be much concerned with his philosophical work; but I am comforted by the fa...

Recent work in experimental psychology and neuroscience has revealed a rather surprising architecture for early (or preattentive) perceptual processes. This paper will describe some of the surprising features of that architecture, and how they bear on recent philosophical debates about the notion of phenomenal consciousness. I will argue that the common sense idea that states of phenomenal cons...