Category: NYU

6 Bodily Sensations as an Obstacle for Representationism Ned Block Representationism,1 as I use the term, says that the phenomenal character of an experience just is its representational content, where that representational content can itself be understood and characterized without appeal to phenomenal character. Representationists seem to have a harder time handling pain than visual…

Memory Wittgenstein raised the question of how we could distinguish inversion from misremembering, raising the issue of “whether the things stored up mayWittgenstein and Qualia / 101 not constantly change their nature” (Wittgenstein, 1993, p. 204). And Dennett (1988; 1991) has emphasized the issue of the unreliability of memory in arguing against inversion scenarios. Figure…

Inverted Spectra I have made the case for actual shifted spectra. Now I will argue that inverted spectra are possible and perhaps actual. Let us start with a questionbegging description of the scenario. The point of so doing is to highlight the contrast with another description which is not, I will argue, question-begging. See Figure…

Normality So what is the difference between the “innocuous” inverted spectrum case, the one Wittgenstein regards as at least coherent, and the “dangerous” case, the one that he rejects? One difference is that the innocuous case occurs suddenly and “under peculiar circumstances:” the subject agrees that fire and the sky now “look queer”; whereas in…

WITTGENSTEIN AND QUALIA1 Ned Block New York University (Wittgenstein, 1968) endorsed one kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis and rejected another. This paper argues that the kind of inverted spectrum hypothesis that Wittgenstein endorsed (the “innocuous” inverted spectrum hypothesis) is the thin end of the wedge that precludes a Wittgensteinian critique of the kind of inverted…

Sue Ned Block!: Making a better case for P-consciousness doi: 10.1017/S0140525X07002920 Victor A. F. Lamme Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, part of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), 1105 BA Amsterdam, The Netherlands v.a.f.lamme@uva.nl www.cognitiveneuroscience.nl Abstract: Block makes a case for the…

A plug for generic phenomenology doi: 10.1017/S0140525X07002841 Rick Grush Department of Philosophy, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093. rick@mind.ucsd.edu http://mind.ucsd.edu Abstract: I briefly sketch a notion of generic phenomenology, and what I call the wave-collapse illusion– a less radical cousin of the refrigerator light illusion– to the effect that transitions from generic…

. Neural coalitions But there is a problem in the reasoning of the last section. Whenever asubject reports such phenomenology, that can only be via the activation of the frontal neural basis of global access. And how do we know whether those frontal activations are required for– indeed, are part of– theneural basis of the…

Phenomenology overflows accessibility George Sperling (1960) showed subjects arrays of alphanumeric characters; for example, three rows of four characters, for 50 msec, followed by a blank field. Subjects said that they could see all or almost all of the characters and this has also been reported in replications of the experiment (Baars 1988, p. 15).…

Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience Ned Block Department of Philosophy, New York University, New York, NY 10003 ned.block@nyu.edu Abstract: Howcanwedisentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from theneural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We see the problem in stark form if we ask how we…