Project Questions

Having sent off the final version of my concepts book at the very end of 2023, in 2024 I finally had the space to start fulfilling a long-held aspiration to do some more reading around the topic of agency. Of course, teaching and working in philosophy of mind already makes…

This week, I continue to discuss ideas from participants at the Cheltenham science festival as to what consciousness might be for. Another theme that emerged from discussions is the idea that consciousness facilitates altruistic or social behaviour. Here are some of those suggestions. “Consciousness is why we look out for…

In the first of a series of posts, I discuss ideas from participants at the Cheltenham science festival as to what consciousness might be for. Several participants discussed decision making and problem solving, where some different ideas emerged: Consciousness is for making decisions, otherwise we would be automated. – Chi…

How we characterise the personal/sub-personal distinction has implications for how we understand the moral significance of cognition and its role in action guidance. Our moral and legal practices are committed to the idea that people are sometimes personally responsible for their actions, being then the authors of those actions. Plausibly,…

In discussions about the distinctive features of conscious, personal-level as opposed to sub-personal level representations, it is sometimes proposed that conscious, personal-level representations and information processing are special in that one is aware of them. This enables, the proposal continues, the monitoring and control of one’s own cognition, i.e., it…

A very common suggestion on the distinctive property of conscious, personal-level representations is that they are available in a “central workspace” in the mind/brain, which is thought to be an area across which the different specialist sensory and conceptual systems that are assumed to make up the mind can communicate…

Psychologists often hold that personal-level, conscious processing is crucial for the performance of logical reasoning (e.g., Smith and DeCoster 2000; Lieberman et al. 2002; De Wall et al. 2008; Lieberman 2009). There is experimental support for this. For instance, De Neys (2006) presented subjects with logically valid arguments that had false…

It is a common assumption in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that information processing involving conscious, personal-level representations is required for spontaneous, deliberate action. If so, is it a distinctive feature of such representations that they are needed for spontaneous actions? To motivate an affirmative answer, theorists often invoke ‘blind-sight’,…

Some theorists hold that personal-level, conscious visual representations are for object recognition whereas unconscious visual information is employed for the control of movements. A study by Króliczak, Heard, Goodale, and Gregory (2006) lends support to this view. They used the hollow-face illusion, in which one looks at a hollow mask…

A preliminary issue for the project is to characterise the difference between the personal level and subpersonal levels. We don’t need to take this to be a clear or hard-and-fast distinction. ‘Personal level’ is just shorthand for having one or more of a number of more sophisticated features that we…