Petrus Hispanus Lectures 2003. The harder problem of consciousness

2002

TH Huxley'famously said:" How it is that anything so re-markable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp"(ibid., p. 19). We do not see how to explain a state of consciousness in terms of its neurological basis. This is the hard problem of consciousness. 2 My aim here is to present another problem of consciousness. The harder problem, as I shall call it, is more epistemological than the hard problem.

Studia Humana, Volume 8:4 (2019), pp. 27—33, 2019

This article demonstrates that certain issues of philosophy of mind can only be explained via strict observance of the logical law of identity, that is, use of the term "consciousness" in only one meaning. Based on the understanding of consciousness as space in which objects distinguished by the subject are represented, this article considers problems such as the fixation of the consciousness level, correlation between consciousness and thought, between the internal and the external, and between consciousness and the body. It demonstrates the insufficiency of the reactive conception of action for the resolution of the hard problem of consciousness and the necessity of a transition to an active paradigm in which many issues in philosophy of mind would be formulated differently.

There has been much said about consciousness, but too often the right questions are not being asked. In this paper, the author sets out to press certain "limit questions" that raise both matters of epistemological constraints in the inquiry and issues in metaphysical speculations about this thing called consciousness (and whether it names anything real at all?). Various candidates for a partial or (doubtfully) complete

Topoi, 2017

Springer eBooks, 1988

Western philosophers since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness. Starting in the 1980's, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called "Consciousness studies". First, this paper will take a quick look to these approaches and we will underline that if consciousness is by essence subjective, it cannot be properly studied using the objective methodology of science. Then we will present our Theory of consciousness which's originality is to call into question the Postulate of objectivity on which science is based.

This paper is a response to the commentaries in the Journal of Consciousness Studies on my paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness." I have written it so that it can be understood independently of the commentaries, however, and so that it provides a detailed elaboration and extension of some of the ideas in the original paper.

2007

Abstract Those who are optimistic about the prospects of a science of consciousness, and those who believe that it lies beyond the reach of standard scientific methods, have something in common: both groups view consciousness as posing a special challenge for science. In this paper, we take a close look at the nature of this challenge.

What Consciousness Is, 2019

The key link in understanding the whole of consciousness is the explanation from physics to the much higher level of qualia, at the bottom edge of the mind. The described model shows a conceptual solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

In A.E. Cavanna, A. Nani, H. Blumenfeld & S. Laureys (Eds) The Neuroimaging of Consciousness, 2013

This chapter reviews some of the central theoretical challenges confronting the search for the brain basis of consciousness and develops a conceptual framework for tackling these challenges. At the heart of the search for the neural basis of consciousness is the notion of a neural correlate of consciousness. Identifying the neural correlates of consciousness requires that we acknowledge the various aspects of consciousness, for each of the aspects of consciousness raises its own set of methodological challenges. We examine the question of whether an account of the neural correlates of consciousness can be used to ascribe consciousness to creatures that lack the capacity to report their experiences, and we ask whether it is possible to go beyond the neural correlates of consciousness by providing neurally-based explanations of consciousness.