Thinking about Consciousness

by David Papineau

Overview

The relation between subjective consciousness and the physical brain is widely regarded as the last mystery facing science. This book argues that there is no real puzzle here. Consciousness seems mysterious, not because of any hidden essence, but only because we think about it in a special way. David Papineau exposes the resulting potential for confusion, and shows that much scientific study of consciousness is misconceived. Modern physical science strongly supports a materialist account of consciousness. But there remains considerable resistance to this, both in philosophy and in the way most people think about the mind; we fall back on a dualist view, that consciousness is not part of the material world. Papineau argues that resistance to materialism is groundless. He offers a detailed analysis of the way human beings think about consciousness, and in particular the way in which we humans think about our conscious states by activating those selfsame states. His careful account of this distinctive mode of phenomenal thinking enables him, first, to show that the standard arguments against dualism are unsound, second, to explain why dualism is nevertheless so intuitively persuasive, and third, to expose much contemporary scientific study of consciousness as resting on a confusion. In placing a materialist account of consciousness on a firm foundation, this clear and forthright book lays many traditional problems to rest, and offers escape from immemorial misconceptions about the mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191529481
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/25/2002
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	359 KB

About the Author

David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. His books include Theory and Meaning (Clarendon Press 1979), Reality and Representation (Blackwell 1987), Philosophical Naturalism (Blackwell 1993), and The Philosophy of Science (Oxford Readings in Philosophy 1996).

Table of Contents

	Introduction	1
1	Mystery--What Mystery?	1
2	The Intuition of Distinctness	2
3	A Need for Therapy	3
4	Ontological Monism, Conceptual Dualism	4
5	Understanding the Intuition of Distinctness	6
6	The Details of Materialism	8
7	The Plan of the Book	9
1	The Case for Materialism	13
1.1	Introduction	13
1.2	The Causal Argument	17
1.3	The Ontology of Causes	18
1.4	Epiphenomenalism and Pre-established Harmony	21
1.5	Accepting Overdetermination	26
1.6	Functionalism and Epiphobia	28
1.7	A Possible Cure for Epiphobia	32
1.8	Intuition and Supervenience	36
1.9	An Argument from A Priori Causal Roles	38
1.10	What is 'Physics'?	40
1.11	The Completeness of Physics	44
2	Conceptual Dualism	47
2.1	Introduction	47
2.2	Jackson's Knowledge Argument	50
2.3	Denying Any Difference	51
2.4	Imaginative Re-creation	56
2.5	Introspective Classification	57
2.6	The Ability Hypothesis	59
2.7	Indexicality and Phenomenal Concepts	63
2.8	The Contingency of Learning from Experience	67
2.9	Imagination and Introspection	69
2.10	Further Issues	71
3	The Impossibility of Zombies	73
3.1	Introduction	75
3.2	Epistemology versus Metaphysics	77
3.3	The Appearance of Contingency	77
3.4	Explaining the Appearance of Contingency	79
3.5	Referring via Contingent Properties	81
3.6	A Different Explanation	85
3.7	Thinking Impossible Things	88
3.8	Conceivability and Possibility	91
3.9	The Intuition of Distinctness	93
4	Phenomenal Concepts	96
4.1	Introduction	96
4.2	Psychological, Phenomenal, and Everyday Concepts	97
4.3	Phenomenal Properties Provide their own 'Modes of Presentation'	103
4.4	World-Directed Perceptual Re-creation and Classification	106
4.5	Perceptual Concepts	108
4.6	How Do Perceptual Concepts Refer?	110
4.7	The Phenomenal Co-option of Perceptual Concepts	114
4.8	A Quotational Model	116
4.9	Indexicality and the Quotational Model	122
4.10	The Causal Basis of Phenomenal Reference	125
4.11	Phenomenal Concepts and Privacy	127
4.12	First-Person Incorrigibility	133
4.13	Third-Person Uses of Phenomenal Concepts	139
5	The Explanatory Gap	141
5.1	Introduction	141
5.2	Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, and Intuitions of Gaps	143
5.3	Reduction, Roles, and Explanation	147
5.4	Does Materialism Require the Physical Truths to Imply all the Truths?	150
5.5	An Epistemological Gap	155
5.6	Conclusion	160
6	The Intuition of Distinctness	161
6.1	Introduction	161
6.2	Is an Explanation Already to Hand?	162
6.3	Does Conceptual Dualism Explain the Intuition of Distinctness?	164
6.4	Nagel's Footnote	167
6.5	The Antipathetic Fallacy	169
6.6	Do Phenomenal Concepts Resemble their Objects?	171
7	Prospects for the Scientific Study of Phenomenal Consciousness	175
7.1	Introduction	175
7.2	The Limitations of Consciousness Research	176
7.3	Phenomenal and Psychological Research	179
7.4	Subjects' First-Person Reports	181
7.5	Consciousness-as-Such	184
7.6	Methodological Impotence	187
7.7	Further Alternatives	191
7.8	Vague Phenomenal Concepts	196
7.9	Vagueness Defended	199
7.10	Theories of Consciousness-as-Such	202
7.11	Actualist HOT Theories	204
7.12	Attention	208
7.13	The Dispositional HOT theory	210
7.14	Methodological Meltdown	215
7.15	Representational Theories of Consciousness	221
7.16	Vagueness and Consciousness-as-Such	225
7.17	Conclusion	228
Appendix	The History of The Completeness of Physics	232
A.1	Introduction	232
A.2	Descartes and Leibniz	234
A.3	Newtonian Physics	237
A.4	The Conservation of Energy	243
A.5	Conservative Animism	249
A.6	The Death of Emergentism	253
A.7	Conclusion	255
	References	257
	Index	263