The nature of consciousness / Mark Rowlands.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 236-241) and index.

The problem of phenomenal consciousness. What is phenomenal consciousness? The scope of 'There is . . .' . What is the problem of phenomenal consciousness? Explaining consciousness. Vertical strategies I: the mind-body problem. Vertical Strategies II: the mind-mind problem. Horizontal strategies. The shape of things to come -- Consciousness and supervenience. Logical supervenience : ontological and epistemological interpretations. (Merely) natural supervenience. The incoherence of (Chalmers' versions of) supervenience. Natural supervenience and weak supervenience. Natural supervenience as an epistemological concept. More on 'reading off'. Logical supervenience and reductive explanation -- The explanatory gap. Intuitions and arguments. Analysing the intuition. Truth and adequacy. Explanatory adequacy and epistemic satisfaction. Proto-epistemic satisfaction. Mechanistic explanations and correlations. Explaining consciousness -- Consciousness and higher-order experience. HOR models of consciousness. The structure of HOP theories. Presuppositions of the HOP model. The independence condition. The explanatory primacy of vehicles. The primacy of transitive consciousness. What has gone wrong? -- Consciousness and higher-order thoughts. HOT models. The problem of circularity. The problem of regress -- The structure of consciousness. Introduction. Consciousness as object of consciousness : empirical apperception . Transcendental apperception. Consciousness as experiential act. What it is like. The ubiquity of objectualism. Summary -- What it is like. Against objectualism. What it is like as a phenomenal particular. What it is like as a phenomenal property. What it is like as a representational property. For actualism. Phenomenology by proxy. Objections and replies. Summary -- Against objectualism II : mistakes about the way things seem. Introduction. Three mistakes about experience. The objectualist gloss : qualia. Perceptual completion and neural filling in. Dennett's criticism of filling in. Change blindness and the richness of experience. Category (2) mistakes : how an experience seems and how it really is. Mistakes of category (3). Why the way an experience seems cannot be explained as awareness of qualia -- Consciousness and representation. Brentano's thesis. Consciousness as revealing and as revealed. Phenomenal revealing. Consciousness of and consciousness that. Representationism. Object representationism. Mode representationism. Actualism and representationism -- Consciousness and the natural order. What it is like and reductive explanation. Consciousness and materialism. Consciousness and causality. The epiphenomenalist suspicion. The standard problem of epiphenomenalism. The epiphenomenalist suspicion allayed.

Print version record.

In The Nature of Consciousness, Mark Rowlands develops an innovative account of the nature of phenomenal consciousness, one that has significant consequences for attempts to find a place for it in the natural order. The most significant feature of consciousness is its dual nature: consciousness can be both the directing of awareness and that upon which awareness is directed. Rowlands offers a clear and philosophically insightful discussion of the main positions in this fast-moving debate, and argues that the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience are aspects that exist only in the directing of experience towards non-phenomenal objects, a theory that undermines reductive attempts to explain consciousness in terms of what is not conscious. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the philosophy of mind and language, psychology and cognitive science.

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