Phenomenal Properties And The Intuition Of Distinctness
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Phenomenal Properties and the Intuition of Distinctness
Author: Andrew Melnyk
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2024-12-13
This book investigates in unprecedented detail what David Papineau has called "the intuition of distinctness"--its seeming to us, when we attend introspectively to a phenomenal property of a current sensation, that this property couldn't literally be an electro-chemical property of neural activity in a certain tiny region of our brain. This book argues that the intuition of distinctness is no mere curiosity, since it plausibly underlies much of the widespread feeling both inside and outside philosophy that phenomenal properties (or qualia) constitute an insuperable obstacle to physicalism (or materialism) about the mind. It goes on to argue against the natural suggestion that this feeling is warranted because the intuition of distinctness somehow gives us genuine reason to reject physicalism about phenomenal properties and to adopt property dualism instead; it argues that there is no plausible way in which it could. The volume develops a positive view of what phenomenal properties are, defending an unorthodox version of representationalism, and sketching accounts of what makes our introspective knowledge of phenomenal properties special, how introspection could tell us that an introspected property is physical, and what the subjectivity of phenomenal properties could be. The volume critically surveys previous attempts to explain consistently with physicalism how the intuition of distinctness arises in us. Finally, it elaborates an explanation of the intuition of distinctness.
Thinking about Consciousness
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.