William Robinson

Stimulations of our sense organs are events that cause brain events that cause our experiences, which are also events. The first part of this paper explains commitments required for the best form of dualism that keeps these facts clearly in view. The second part of this paper addresses two matters that may seem to threaten the viability of the view established in the first part: unity of consciousness and alleged pre‐reflective self‐consciousness. It is shown how to account for these matters in a way that is consistent with the dualism described in the first part of the paper. The resulting view supports fundamental clarifications in our understanding of consciousness.

Contemporaries often reject epiphenomenalism (EPI) out of hand, while Russellian Monism (RM) is regarded as worthy of further development. It is argued here that this difference of attitudes is indefensible, because the easy rejection of EPI is due to its violating a certain Causal Intuition, and RM implicitly violates that same intuition. An enriched version of RM mitigates the violation, but the same mitigation results if we make a parallel enrichment of EPI. If RM and EPI are approached on a level playing field, it is not obvious which will prove to be the better view.

Im Rahmen seiner Verteidigung der physikalistischen Sichtweise der Erfahrung bot David Papineau 2002 die Erklärung an, dass bei der Intuition die erfahrungsmäßigen Eigenschaften anders geartet seien als neuronale Eigenschaften. Nach einer Schilderung des notwendigen Kontextes vertritt der Autor die These, dass Papineaus Erklärung zur Intuition der Gewissheit nicht die beste sei. Angeboten wird eine alternative, mit dem Dualismus kompatible Erklärung. Im Unterschied zu Papineaus Standpunkt setzt diese Alternative nicht die Annahme voraus, dass die Intuition der Gewissheit auf trugschlüssigen Gedankengängen beruhe. Es wird das Verhältnis der angeführten alternativen Sichtweise zum Repräsentationalismus sowie zu Fällen erörtert, in denen eine Identität angeborener Eigenschaften vorliegt

Abstract: Receptivity is a foundational concept in the analysis of causation given in Gregg Rosenberg’s A Place for Consciousness and it enters, directly or indirectly, into the definitions of a host of other terms in the book. This commentary raises a problem (which I call “the triviality problem”) about how we are to understand receptivity. Search for a solution proceeds by examination of several contexts in which the concept of receptivity is used. Although a satisfactory solution remains elusive, it is hoped that making the problem clear will lead to its eventual resolution.

Some philosophers have regarded the connection between hues and certain arousal or affective qualities as so intimate as to make them inseparable, and this “necessary concomitance view” has been invoked to defend functionalism against arguments based on inverted spectra. Support for the necessary concomitance view has sometimes been thought to accrue from experiments in psychology. This paper examines three experiments, two of which apparently offer support for the view. It argues that careful consideration of these experiments undermines this appearance of support. General lessons are drawn concerning the problem that individual differences present for functionalism, and the difficulty of supporting strong conclusions about concomitance by using the methods of experimental psychology

A thought experiment focuses attention on the kinds of commonalities and differences to be found in two small parts of visual cortical areas during responses to stimuli that are either identical in quality, but different in location, or identical in location and different only in the one visible property of colour. Reflection on this thought experiment leads to the view that patterns of neural activation are the best candidates for causes of qualitatively conscious events . This view faces a strong objection, namely, that patterns can be realized in many media, and thus candidates for patterns that cause qualia might be realized in ways that would not plausibly result in consciousness. It is argued that this objection can be overcome if qualia-causing patterns of events must be realized within small spatial and temporal regions. Much more importantly, it is argued that this restriction on region size need not be ad hoc. The key concept needed to establish this important point is ‘natural salience’, i.e., distinction from background noise that does not depend on application of a criterion of selection. It is explained how natural salience could figure in an empirically-based theory that would entail size restrictions for qualia-causing neural activation patterns. The question is then raised as to how the resulting view diverges from Chalmers’ account, which relies on the Principle of Organizational Invariance. A second thought experiment envisages replacement of neurons by computer chips with synaptic interfaces. Reflection on this thought experiment enables us to conceptually, and possibly empirically, separate the two views. An argument for preferring the patterns- as-causes , or PACQ, view is given. Because natural salience does not plausibly produce strictly discontinuous boundaries between pattern and noise, questions naturally arise as to the relation of the PACQ view to panpsychism and to ‘emergence’. The PACQ view is distinguished from panpsychism, and it is explained how the former avoids what Seager calls ‘the combination problem', and is thus preferable to panpsychism. The relation of the PACQ view to ‘emergence’ is explained. The conclusion of the paper is that the PACQ view is a philosophically defensible and potentially scientifically fruitful view that offers qualia realists the best hypothesis concerning the neural causes of qualia

Peter Carruthers offers a model that embraces first order representations and higher order representations or higher order thoughts . His model stipulates certain features of FORs and HOTs. Carruthers agrees with qualia realists that the FORs of his model are not adequate for phenomenal consciousness, and invokes HOTs to supply the required addition. It is argued that Carruthers' HOTs fail to provide anything that will enable him to account for phenomenal consciousness, i.e., that his model fails to include phenomenal consciousness and thus provides no help in understanding human consciousness, animal consciousness, or the "hard problem". In "Natural Theories of Consciousness" Peter Carruthers describes a model that he claims will show the "hard problem" to be not so hard after all. To evaluate this claim, we should begin with the model, which contains the following elements and stipulations