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77Consciousness and the "causal paradox"Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (3): 538-542. 1996.Viewed from a first-person perspective consciousness appears to be necessary for complex, novel human activity - but viewed from a third-person perspective consciousness appears to play no role in the activity of brains, producing a "causal paradox". To resolve this paradox one needs to distinguish consciousness of processing from consciousness accompanying processing or causing processing. Accounts of consciousness/brain causal interactions switch between first- and third-person perspectives. H…Read more
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100Psychophysical NatureIn Harald Atmanspacher & Hans Primas (eds.), Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli's Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science. Springer, Springer-verlag. 2009.There are two quite distinct ways in which events that we normally think of as “physical” relate in an intimate way to events that we normally think of as “psychological”. One intimate relation occurs in exteroception at the point where events in the world become events as-perceived. The other intimate relationship occurs at the interface of conscious experience with its neural correlates in the brain. The chapter examines each of these relationships and positions them within a dual-aspect, refl…Read more
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54Understanding consciousness: A collaborative attempt to elucidate contemporary theoriesJournal of Consciousness Studies 17 (5-6): 5-6. 2010.Nature Network Groups hosted an invited workshop on 'Theories of Consciousness' during the second semester of 2009. There were presentations by each of 15 authors active in the field, followed by debate with other presenters and invitees. A week was allocated to each of the theories proposed; general discussion threads were also opened from time to time, as seemed appropriate. We offer here an account of the principal outcomes. It can be regarded as a contemporary, 'state of the art' snapshot of…Read more
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63Introduction to Monist Alternatives to PhysicalismJournal of Consciousness Studies 19 (9-10): 7-18. 2012.This Introduction to a Journal of Consciousness Studies Special Issue on Monist Alternatives to Physicalism summarises some of the basic problems of Physicalism and common fallacies in arguments for its defence that are found in the philosophical and scientific literature. It then introduces six monist alternatives: 1) a form of emergent panpsychism developed by William Seager; 2) a novel introduction to the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead by Anderson Weekes; 3) a review of current developm…Read more
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66What makes a conscious process conscious?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (1): 43-44. 2014.This is an open-peer commentary on Newell, B.R. & Shanks, D.R. (2014) Unconscious influences on decision making, BBS, 37:1, pp. 1-61. Newell and Shanks’ critical review considers only a very limited sense in which mental processes can be thought of as either conscious or unconscious and consequently gives a misleading analysis of the role of consciousness in human information processing. This commentary provides an expanded analysis of conscious processing that also reveals the various ways in w…Read more
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61Is consciousness integrated?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (2): 229-230. 1992.In the visual system, the represented features of individual objects (shape, colour, movement, and so on) are distributed both in space and time within the brain. Representations of inner and outer event sequences arrive through different sense organs at different times, and are likewise distributed. Objects are nevertheless perceived as integrated wholes - and event sequences are experienced to form a coherent "consciousness stream." In their thoughtful article, Dennett & Kinsbourne ask how thi…Read more
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137The relation of consciousness to the material worldJournal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 255-265. 1995.Within psychology and the brain sciences, the study of consciousness and its relation to human information processing is once more a focus for productive research. However, some ancient puzzles about the nature of consciousness appear to be resistant to current empirical investigations, suggesting the need for a fundamentally different approach. In Velmans I have argued that functional accounts of the mind do not `contain' consciousness within their workings. Investigations of information proces…Read more
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375Goodbye to reductionism: Complementary first and third-person approaches to consciousnessIn Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & A. C. Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness II, Mit Press. pp. 45-52. 1998.To understand consciousness we must first describe what we experience accurately. But oddly, current dualist vs reductionist debates characterise experience in ways which do not correspond to ordinary experience. Indeed, there is no other area of enquiry where the phenomenon to be studied has been so systematically misdescribed. Given this, it is hardly surprising that progress towards understanding the nature of consciousness has been limited. This chapter argues that dualist vs. reductionist d…Read more
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56Can Evolutionary Theory Explain the Existence of Consciousness? A Review of Humphrey, N.(2010) Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. London: Quercus, ISBN 9781849162371Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (11-12): 243-254. 2011.This review summarises why it is difficult for Darwinian evolutionary theory to explain the existence and function of consciousness. It then evaluates whether Humphrey's book Soul Dust overcomes these problems. According to Humphrey, consciousness is an illusion constructed by the brain to enhance reproductive fitness by motivating creatures that have it to stay alive. Although the review entirely accepts that consciousness gives a first-person meaning to existence, it concludes that Humphrey do…Read more
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14Reply to Gillett's consciousness, intentionality and internalismPhilosophical Psychology 5 (2): 181-182. 1992.This reply to Grant Gillett appeared in the first symposium on Velmans' Reflexive Model of Perception (the departure point for Reflexive Monism) initially presented in "Consciousness, Brain and the Physical World" (1990) in Philosophical Psychology. The symposium begins with Velmans' summary of the main arguments in that paper, followed by critiques from two psychologists--Robert Rentoul and Norman Wetherick. Velmans replies to the critiques and the entire treatment is further critiqued by the p…Read more
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80A reflexive science of consciousnessIn Gregory Bock & Joan Marsh (eds.), Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness: Ciba Foundation Symposium 174, John Wiley & Sons. pp. 81-99. 1993.Classical ways of viewing the relation of consciousness to the brain and physical world make it difficult to see how consciousness can be a subject of scientific study. In contrast to physical events, it seems to be private, subjective, and viewable only from a subject's first-person perspective. But much of psychology does investigate human experience, which suggests that classical ways of viewing these relations must be wrong. An alternative, Reflexive model is outlined along with it's consequ…Read more
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91Making sense of causal interactions between consciousness and brainJournal of Consciousness Studies 9 (11): 69-95. 2002.My target article (henceforth referred to as TA) presents evidence for causal interactions between consciousness and brain and some standard ways of accounting for this evidence in clinical practice and neuropsychological theory. I also point out some of the problems of understanding such causal interactions that are not addressed by standard explanations. Most of the residual problems have to do with how to cross the “explanatory gap” from consciousness to brain. I then list some of the reasons…Read more
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54Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness: New Methodologies and Maps. Advances in Consciousness Research, Vol. 13 (edited book)John Benjamins. 2000.How can one investigate phenomenal consciousness? As in other areas of science, the investigation of consciousness aims for a more precise knowledge of its phenomena, and the discovery of general truths about their nature. This requires the development of appropriate first-person, second-person, and third-person methods. This book introduces some of the creative ways in which these methods can be applied to different purposes, e.g. to understand the relation of consciousness to brain, to examini…Read more
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28Understanding Consciousness, Edition 2Routledge/Psychology Press. 2009.A current, comprehensive summary of Velmans' theoretical work that updates and deepens the analysis given in Edition 1. Part 1 reviews the strengths and weaknesses of all currently dominant theories of consciousness in a form suitable for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers focusing mainly on dualism, physicalism, functionalism and consciousness in machines. Part 2 gives a new analysis of consciousness, grounded in its everyday phenomenology, which undermines the basis of the dualism v…Read more
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155How to separate conceptual issues from empirical ones in the study of consciousnessIn Rahul Banerjee & Bikas K. Chakrabarti (eds.), Models of brain and mind: physical, computational, and psychological approaches, Elsevier. pp. 1-9. 2008.Modern consciousness studies are in a healthy state, with many progressive empirical programmes in cognitive science, neuroscience and related sciences, using relatively conventional third-person research methods. However not all the problems of consciousness can be resolved in this way. These problems may be grouped into problems that require empirical advance, those that require theoretical advance, and those that require a re-examination of some of our pre-theoretical assumptions. I give exam…Read more
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368The Co-Evolution of Matter and ConsciousnessSynthesis Philosophica 22 (2): 273-282. 2007.Theories about the evolution of consciousness relate in an intimate way to theories about the distribution of consciousness, which range from the view that only human beings are conscious to the view that all matter is in some sense conscious. Broadly speaking, such theories can be classified into discontinuity theories and continuity theories. Discontinuity theories propose that consciousness emerged only when material forms reached a given stage of evolution, but propose different criteria for…Read more
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62Consciousness and the Physical WorldIn Michel Weber & Will Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Volume 1, Ontos Verlag. pp. 371-382. 2008.Physicalists commonly argue that conscious experiences are nothing more than states of the brain, and that conscious qualia are observer-independent, physical properties of the external world. Although this assumes the ‘mantle of science,’ it routinely ignores the findings of science, for example in sensory physiology, perception, psychophysics, neuropsychology and comparative psychology. Consequently, although physicalism aims to ‘naturalise’ consciousness, it gives an unnatural account of it.…Read more
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100Physical, psychological and virtual realitiesIn John Wood (ed.), The Virtual Embodied: Presence, Practice, Technology, Routledge. pp. 45-60. 1998.This chapter examines the similarities and differences between physical, psychological and virtual realities, and challenges some conventional, implicitly dualist assumptions about how these relate to each other. Virtual realities are not easily understood in either dualist or materialist reductive terms, as they exemplify the reflexive nature of perception. The chapter summarises some of the evidence for this “reflexive model”—and examines some of its consequences for the “hard” problem of cons…Read more
University of London
PhD, 1974
London, London, City of, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |