E-Int: “Toward an Any Person’s Account on Consciousness”

MA Presentations:

Toward an Any Person’s Account on Consciousness

Miriam Kyselo
4:30 p.m. 7 June 2007

Note that Martin Morse-Brown will also be presenting.

I wish to put forward an account on consciousness that is based on Max Velmans’ reflexive approach to consciousness (Velmans 1993, 2006). His approach is non-dualistic and non-reductive. It is non-dualistic in that it postulates an ontological (reflexive) monism. However, it does not reduce conscious experience to mere brain activities. In contrast, the reflexive approach puts the phenomenal, subjective experience at the heart of every scientific investigation of consciousness.

Unlike a reductionist view that leaves out the phenomenal realm and recommands a strict 3rd person method to proceed (heterophenomenology, for instance, as described by Dennett 1999, 2001), Velmans emphasises that every conscious experience, be it that of a dream, a bodily sensation or a cat perceived as being located “outside” is the private phenomenal experience of a subject. 3rd-person methods might provide us with information about the causes and possible correlates of consciousness, but in order to know what consciousness is, i.e. what the results of these causes are we have to ask the subject.

CogPhi Reading Announcement

Dear all,

Today we are reading the last part of Chapter 16, ‘Philosophies of Mind as Machine’ from Maggie Boden’s book ‘Mind as Machine’; pages 1407-1443, sections 16viii-16x.

There is a copy on Ron’s door.

Best

Alexander