New York: Routledge (
2019)
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Abstract
This book aims to show the centrality of a proper ontology of properties in
thinking about consciousness. Philosophers have long grappled with what is
now known as the hard problem of consciousness, i.e., how can subjective or
qualitative features of our experience—such as how a strawberry tastes—arise
from brain states? More recently, philosophers have incorporated what seems
like promising empirical research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology
in an attempt to bridge the gap between measurable mental states on the
one hand, and phenomenal qualities on the other. In Consciousness and the
Ontology of Properties, many of the leading philosophers working on this
issue, as well as a few emerging scholars, have written 14 new essays on this
problem. The essays address topics as diverse as substance dualism, mental
causation, the metaphysics of artificial intelligence, the logic of conceivability,
constitution, extended minds, the emergence of consciousness, and neuroscience
and the unity and neural correlates of consciousness, but are nonetheless
unified in a collective objective: the need for a proper ontology of properties
to understand the hard problem of consciousness, both on non-empirical and
empirical grounds.