Online research in philosophy

This paper is built around a single, simple idea. It is widely agreed that there is a distinctive kind of awareness each of us has of his own bodily actions. This action-awareness is different from any perceptual awareness a subject may have of his own actions; it can exist in the absence of such perceptual awareness. The single, simple idea around which this paper is built is that the distinctive awareness that subjects have of their own mental actions is a form of action-awareness. Subjects’ awareness of their own mental actions is a species of the same genus that also includes the distinctive awareness of bodily actions. More specifically, I claim.

In a pair of recent papers and his new book, Christopher Peacocke (2007, 2008a, 2008b) takes up and defends the claim that our awareness of our own actions is immediate and not perceptually based, and extends it into the domain of mental action.1 He aims to provide an account of action-awareness that will generalize to explain how we have immediate awareness of our own judgments, decisions, imaginings, and so forth. These claims form an important component in a much larger philosophical edifice, with many implications for the philosophy of mind and for epistemology. The present paper advances multiple criticisms of Peacocke's account. In particular, it shows that he has given insufficient grounds for thinking that we have non-perceptual awareness of our own actions; and it shows that the account of action-awareness that he provides does not, in any case, generalize to mental actions of the sort that he intends.

In recent years, much work has been dedicated by logicians, computer scientists and economists to understanding awareness, as its importance for human behaviour becomes evident. Although several logics of awareness have been proposed, little attention has been explicitly dedicated to change in awareness. However, one of the most crucial aspects of awareness is the changes it undergoes, which have countless important consequences for knowledge and action. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal model of awareness change, and to derive from it logics of awareness change. In the first part of the paper, the model of epistemic states of bounded agents proposed in Hill (Stud Log 89(1):81–109, 2008a ) is extended with operations modelling awareness change. In the second part of the paper, it is shown how this model naturally extends the “standard” logic of awareness to yield a logic of awareness change.

In this paper, a theoretical account of the functional role of consciousness in the cognitive system of normal subjects is developed. The account is based upon an approach to consciousness that is drawn from the phenomenological tradition. On this approach, consciousness is essentially peripheral self-awareness, in a sense to be duly explained. It will be argued that the functional role of consciousness, so construed, is to provide the subject with just enough information about her ongoing experience to make it possible for her to easily obtain as much information as she may need. The argument for this account of consciousness' functional role will proceed in three main stages. First, the phenomenological approach to consciousness as peripheral self-awareness will be expounded and endorsed. Second, an account of the functional role of peripheral perceptual awareness will be offered. Finally, the account of the functional role of peripheral self-awareness will be obtained by straightforward extension from the functional role of peripheral perceptual awareness.

If one looks at the current discussion of self-awareness there seems to be a general agreement that whatever valuable philosophical contributions Husserl might have made, his account of self-awareness is not among them. This prevalent appraisal is often based on the claim that Husserl was too occupied with the problem of intentionality to ever really pay attention to the issue of self-awareness. Due to his interest in intentionality Husserl took object-consciousness as the paradigm of every kind of awareness and therefore settled with a model of self-awareness based upon the subject-object dichotomy, with its entailed difference between the intending and the intended. As a consequence, Husserl never discovered the existence of pre-reflective self- awareness, but remained stuck in the traditional, but highly problematic reflection model of self-awareness.

In this paper, I argue that later Nishida's analysis of self-awareness (jikaku) provides a new perspective on the nature of self-awareness as understood in the philosophical literature today. I argue that the contemporary literature deals with two kinds of self-awareness; the higher-order theory understands self-awareness to be an objectified awareness and the phenomenological tradition generally understands self-awareness to be, at least primarily, a non-objectified awareness. In light of this, I first give an account of Nishida's ?acting-intuition? with reference to the ?historical body.? Then I argue that later Nishida's analysis of self-awareness depicts the inadequacy of the two kinds of self-awareness as both being stuck in the subject-object dichotomy which, according to Nishida, is but one mode of experience, namely the mode of difference. Nishida provides an account that ultimately foregrounds the experiential mode of unity that negates any sense of differentiation between the subject and object.

Objections to functional explanations of awareness assert that although functional systems may be adequate to explain behavior, including verbal behavior consisting of assertions of awareness by an individual, they cannot provide for the existence of phenomenal awareness. In this paper, a theory of awareness is proposed that counters this assertion by incorporating two advances: (1) a formal definition of representation, expressed in a functional notation: Newell's Representation Law, and 2) the introduction of real time into the analysis of awareness. This leads to the definition of phenomenal awareness as existing whenever an object contains an autonomously updated configuration satisfying the Representation Law with respect to some aspects of its environment. The relational aspect of the Representation Law permits the development of multiple levels of awareness, which provides for the existence of illusions and hallucinations, and permits the identification of a new measure, accuracy of awareness . The relational perspective also permits the incorporation of referential concepts into the framework. Qualia can then be identified with referentially opaque elements of awareness. The functional form of the Representation Law is linked to neurophysiology and the underlying phenomena of chemistry and physics by phenomena involving activity-dependent connectivity.

In the first chapter, I explain the concept of awareness and the distinction between direct and indirect awareness. Direct awareness of x is understood as awareness of x which is not based on awareness of anything else, and the "based on" relation is understood as a particular way in which one state of awareness can be caused by another state of awareness when the contents of the two states are logically related.