Online research in philosophy

Consciousness is often rendered causally and functionally inert, something which I deem deeply wrong. The actual cause of this misconception is not Cartesian, but Frege’an Dualism which is owed to the implicit assumption of the type-identity theory of language and cognition which equates cognitive types with linguistic or quasi-linguistic types by isomorphically mapping linguistic types on cognitive types and which is a massive blow in the face of a functionalistic-mechanistic explanation of cognition and everyday-folk phenomenological analysis. If we conceive paradigmatically of conscious (e.g. conceptual) thought linguistically and if we conceive of unconscious (e.g. conceptual) cognition linguistically too, then consciousness, particularly if phenomenal experience is conceived of the way it standardly is by philosophers, is inert. However, this type-identity theory is deeply flawed and I propose a framework which builds on a phenomenology of particularly visual-spatial consciousness, a generic embodied cognition framework and a mechanistic and principle naturalist framework of explanation. As a result, we will encounter a picture of cognition which is strongly bound to consciousness and a complex and dynamic sensori-emotio-motor view of the format of cognition which is able to deal more satisfactorily with a plethora of phenomena which we deem genuinely online and offline cognitive than the linguistic view.

We think the best prospect for a naturalistic explanation of phenomenal consciousness is to be found at the confluence of two influential ideas about the mind. The first is the _computational _ _theory of mind_: the theory that treats human cognitive processes as disciplined operations over neurally realised representing vehicles.1 The second is the _representationalist theory of _ _consciousness_: the theory that takes the phenomenal character of conscious experiences (the “what-it-is-likeness”) to be constituted by their representational content.2 Together these two theories suggest that phenomenal consciousness might be explicable in terms of the representational content of the neurally realised representing vehicles that are generated and manipulated in the course of cognition. The simplest and most elegant hypothesis that one might entertain in this regard is that conscious experiences are identical to (i.e., are one and the same as) the brain’s representing vehicles.

In this paper, we present an account of phenomenal con- sciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is experience, and the _problem _of phenomenal consciousness is to explain how physical processes.

This book maintains that our conception of consciousness and cognition begins with and depends upon a few fundamental errors. Thau elucidates these errors by discussing three important philosophical puzzles - Spectrum Inversion, Frege's Puzzle, and Black-and-White Mary - each of which concerns some aspect of either consciousness or cognition. He argues that it has gone unnoticed that each of these puzzles presents the very same problem and, in bringing this commonality to light, the errors in our natural conception of consciousness and cognition are also reviewed.