What are the relations between preattentive feature-placing and states of perceptual awareness? For the purposes of this paper, states of "perceptual awareness" are confined to the simplest possible exemplars: states in which one is aware of some aspect of the appearance of something one perceives. Subjective contours are used as an example. Early visual processing seems to employ independent, ...

This article re-examines Ned Block‘s (1997, 2007) conceptual distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. His argument that we can have phenomenally conscious representations without being able to cognitively access them is criticized as not being supported by evidence. Instead, an alternative interpretation of the relevant empirical data is offered which leaves the li...

We propose the notion of phenomenal computing as a dynamical pair of a computing system and the environments of executing computation. It is expressed as a formal model of observational heterarchy inheriting robustness against structural crisis. Observational heterarchy consists of two different categories connected by pre-adjoint functors where inter-categories operations are defined as pre-fu...

The paper challenges the assumption, common amongst philosophers, that the reality described in the fundamental theories of microphysics is all the reality we have. It will be argued that this assumption is in fact incompatible with the nature of such theories. It will be shown further that the macro-world of three-dimensional bodies and of such qualitative structures as colour and sound can be...

The cognitive experience view of thought holds that the content is determined by its cognitive-phenomenal character. Adam Pautz argues extensionally inadequate: it entails possibility mix-and-match cases, where properties determine are combined with different sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. Because cases metaphysically impossible, argues, should be rejected. This paper defends fro...

The epistemological situation of a single cell is considered. In chemotaxis, the relation between perception and action is found to be lawful and bidirectional. Consideration of the perception/action relation allows a characterization of the phenomenal world of the cell. This phenomenal world is grounded in perceptual distinctions that are relevant to the sustained viability of the cell. Moving...

I explore the prospects for overcoming the prima facie tension in the following four claims, all of which I accept: (1) the phenomenal character of experience is narrow; (2) virtually all aspects of the phenomenal character of experience are intentional; (3) the most fundamental kind of mental intentionality is fully constituted by phenomenal character; and yet (4) introspection does not by its...

At the very heart of the mind-body problem is the question of the nature of consciousness. It is consciousness, and in particular phenomenal consciousness, that makes the mind-body relation so deeply perplexing. Many philosophers hold that no defi nition of phenomenal consciousness is possible: any such putative defi nition would automatically use the concept of phenomenal consciousness and thu...

Fundamental approaches bypass the problem of getting consciousness from non-conscious components by positing that consciousness is a universal primitive. For example, the double aspect theory of information holds that information has a phenomenal aspect. How then do you get from phenomenal information to human consciousness? This paper proposes that an entity is conscious to the extent it ampli...

Recent work in neuroimaging suggests that some patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state are actually conscious. In this paper, we critically examine this new evidence. We argue that though it remains open to alternative interpretations, it strongly suggests the presence of consciousness in some patients. However, we argue that its ethical significance is less than many peo...