Character Of Conscious Experience Research Articles

THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONTENT. THE STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The paper demonstrates that the problem of explaining naturalistically the content of mental states is the hard problem, similar to the hard problem of consciousness. The greater part of contemporary philosophers believe that we can naturalistically explain content within the functionalist paradigm, using for example the concept of information. However, D. Hutto and E. Myin, whose views are analyzed in the work, show that contemporary naturalistic theories that use various concepts of information miss the most essential characteristics of the content associated with the concepts of reference, truth, implication. Hutto and Myin believe that a naturalistic explanation of the content of basic mental states is impossible. The authors correctly diagnosed the issue, but they did not reveal its full hardness. The paper demonstrates that the hardness of explaining the content of mental states is necessitated by clarifying the normative nature of the content from the standpoint of naturalism. The work also analyzes McDowell’s naturalistic approach to understanding the normative character of conscious experience that people have, and notes that we have to expand McDowell’s position in order to include in the explanation the conscious experience of other living beings. It is exactly the expanded version of McDowell’s naturalism that allows us to see the hardness of the problem of explaining the content of mental states.

The Way Ripe Tomatoes Look: An Argument Against Externalist Representationalism

Representationalist theories of the phenomenal character of conscious experience are attractive because they promise a simpler ‘naturalization’ of the mind. However, I argue that representationalists cannot endorse an otherwise attractive externalist theory of the representational contents of conscious experiences. The combination of representationalism and externalism conflicts with a true principle linking phenomenal character to perceptual indistinguishability.

The Epistemic Relevance of Morphological Content

Morphological content is information that is implicitly embodied in the standing structure of a cognitive system and is automatically accommodated during cognitive processing without first becoming explicit in consciousness. We maintain that much belief-formation in human cognition is essentially morphological: i.e., it draws heavily on large amounts of morphological content, and must do so in order to tractably accommodate the holistic evidential relevance of background information possessed by the cognitive agent. We also advocate a form of experiential evidentialism concerning epistemic justification—roughly, the view that the justification-status of an agent’s beliefs is fully determined by the character of the agent’s conscious experience. We have previously defended both the thesis that much belief-formation is essentially morphological, and also a version of evidentialism. Here we explain how experiential evidentialism can be smoothly and plausibly combined with the thesis that much of the cognitive processing that generates justified beliefs is essentially morphological. The leading idea is this: even though epistemically relevant morphological content does not become explicit in consciousness during the process of belief-generation, nevertheless such content does affect the overall character of conscious experience in an epistemically significant way: it is implicit in conscious experience, and is implicitly appreciated by the experiencing agent.

Some Thoughts About Thinking About Consciousness

David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness tells a skillful, inventive, and plausible story about why, given that the phenomenal character of conscious experience is an unproblematically physical property, we continue to suffer from “intuitions of dualism”. According to Papineau, we are misled by the peculiar structure of the phenomenal concepts we use to introspect upon that phenomenal character. Roughly: unlike physical concepts, phenomenal concepts exemplify the kind of experience they are concepts of; and this creates the mistaken impression that the physical concepts leave something out. I find much of Papineau’s account congenial, though I have some questions about his characterization of phenomenal concepts. I will take up two of these questions here. On Papineau’s view, phenomenal concepts are mental terms that are formed by concatenating an experience operator, namely ‘the experience: —’, together with “an actual state of... perceptual classification” (115). The latter state, itself an experience, fills the blank in the experience operator; and the concept thus formed refers to the type of experience whose instances are relevantly similar to that perceptual filling. Papineau writes: