Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T02:19:39.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Consciousness

from Part II - Aspects of cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Keith Frankish
Affiliation:
The Open University, Milton Keynes
William Ramsey
Affiliation:
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Get access

Summary

William James famously held that we consciously experience all and only those stimuli that we attend to. A theoretical and only mildly philosophical question is that of state/event consciousness. Higher-order theorists (HOT) resist the perceptual model, and maintain that merely having a thought about the first-order state will suffice for consciousness, provided that the thought arose from the state itself without benefit of (person-level) inference. This chapter discusses some philosophical issues. Sensory qualities ("qualia" in the strict sense) are the first-order qualitative features of which we are aware in sensory experience: colors, pitches, smells, textures. The second problem is the intrinsic perspectivalness, point-of-view-iness, and/or first-personishness of experience, as discussed by K. Gunderson, T. Nagel, and others. The third problem is the existence of funny facts and/or special phenomenal knowledge. The last problem is the explanatory gap called to our attention by J. Levine.
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×