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Thinking about consciousness /

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Thinking About Consciousness is a discussion of recent physicalist ideas about consciousness, written in an accessible style by David Papineau.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Papineau, David, 1947-
Format: eBook
Language:English
Language Notes:English.
Published: Oxford : New York : Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 2002.
Subjects:
Consciousness.
Philosophy.
Consciousness
Philosophy
Conscience.
Philosophie.
philosophy.
PSYCHOLOGY > Personality.
PHILOSOPHY > Mind & Body.
Bewustzijn.
Electronic books.
Online Access:Connect to the full text of this electronic book
Table of Contents:
  • Introduction. Mystery, what mystery?
  • The intuition of distinctness
  • A need for therapy
  • Ontological monism, conceptual dualism
  • Understanding the intuition of distinctness
  • The details of materialism
  • The plan of the book.
  • The case for materialism. The causal argument
  • The ontology of causes
  • Epiphenomenalism and pre-established harmony
  • Accepting overdetermination
  • Functionalism and epiphobia
  • A possible cure for epiphobia
  • Intuition and supervenience
  • An argument from a priori causal roles
  • What is physics?
  • The completeness of physics.
  • Conceptual dualism. Jackson's knowledge argument
  • Denying any difference
  • Imaginative re-creation
  • Introspective classification
  • The ability hypothesis
  • Indexicality and phenomenal concepts
  • The contingency of learning from experience
  • Imagination and introspection
  • Further issues.
  • The impossibility of zombies. Epistemology versus metaphysics
  • The appearance of contingency
  • Explaining the appearance of contingency
  • Referring via contingent properties
  • A different explanation
  • Thinking impossible things
  • conceivability and possibility
  • The intuition of distinctness.
  • Phenomenal concepts. Psychological, phenomenal, and everyday concepts
  • Phenomenal properties provide their own modes of presentation
  • World-directed perceptual re-creation and classification
  • Perceptual concepts
  • How do perceptual concepts refer?
  • The phenomenal co-option of perceptual concepts
  • A quotational model
  • Indexicality and the quotational model
  • The causal basis of phenomenal reference
  • Phenomenal concepts and privacy
  • First-person incorrigibility
  • Third-person uses of phenomenal concepts.
  • The explanatory gap. Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, and intuitions of gaps
  • Reduction, roles, and explanation
  • Does materialism require the physical truths to imply all the truths?
  • An epistemological gap.
  • The intuition of distinctness. Is an explanation already to hand?
  • Does conceptual dualism explain the intuition of distinctness?
  • Nagel's footnote
  • The antipathetic fallacy
  • Do phenomenal concepts resemble their objects?
  • Prospects for the scientific study of phenomenal consciousness. The limitations of consciousness research
  • Phenomenal and psychological research
  • Subjects' first-person reports
  • Consciousness-as-such
  • Methodological impotence
  • Further alternatives
  • Vague phenomenal concepts
  • Vagueness defended
  • Theories of consciousness-as-such
  • Actualist HOT theories
  • Attention
  • The dispositional HOT theory
  • Methodological meltdown
  • Representational theories of consciousness
  • Vagueness and consciousness-as-such.
  • Appendix. The history of the completeness of physics. Descartes and Leibniz
  • Newtonian physics
  • The conservation of energy
  • Conservative animism
  • The death of emergentism.