Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective
Peter Carruthers
Abstract
This book is a collection of essays about consciousness and related issues. It focuses mostly on developing, defending, and exploring the implications of one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which the author now refers to as ‘dual-content theory’. But other issues discussed include: the nature of reductive explanation in general; the nature of conscious thought and the plausibility of some form of eliminativism about conscious thought (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness); the appropriateness of sympathy for creatures whose mental states ... More
This book is a collection of essays about consciousness and related issues. It focuses mostly on developing, defending, and exploring the implications of one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which the author now refers to as ‘dual-content theory’. But other issues discussed include: the nature of reductive explanation in general; the nature of conscious thought and the plausibility of some form of eliminativism about conscious thought (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness); the appropriateness of sympathy for creatures whose mental states are not phenomenally conscious ones; and the psychological continuities and similarities that exist between minds that lack phenomenally conscious mental states and minds that possess them.
Keywords:
phenomenal consciousness,
conscious thought,
reductive explanation,
animal suffering,
animal mental states
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2005 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199277360 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2005 |
DOI:10.1093/0199277362.001.0001 |