A widely held picture of consciousness is that (1) there is a deep divide in nature between conscious being and the rest - for some the inner light shines, for others there is only darkness within; (2) there is a legitimate philosophical/scientific project of figuring out the nature of this deep divide; and (3) this project is also of great normative significance, because consciousness is greatly significant both morally/practically and epistemically. This paper presents part of my case for a different, more pluralistic, way of understanding things. On this alternative vision, there is no deep natural divide between conscious beings and the rest. There are many kinds of “inner light”, not united by any deep common thread, and what we call “consciousness” is only one of them. Some may matter more than others, but none is uniquely significant: morally, epistemically, or metaphysically. The paper focuses particularly on the moral significance of consciousness, and defends a pluralistic view of the concept of “phenomenal consciousness”, as well as a pluralism at the metaphysical level.

This paper argues that there is a non-standard but theoretically important notion of “veridicality”, on which perception is only veridical if it does not scramble the objective physical structure of the environment. I argue that non-veridicality in this sense is compatible with veridicality in more familiar senses, and motivate the importance of the notion. For example, I think a certain kind of realism about the scientific enterprise (that it can uncover nature’s natural structure by inference from the manifest image), assumes that perception is veridical in this sense. I think the best reconstruction of Hoffman, Singh and Prakah’s “Interface Theory” is as the view that perception is non-veridical in this non-standard sense – a view that I think is reasonably understood as a kind of transcendental idealism, because it makes the objective structure of the world unknowable to us. They offer debunking arguments against perceptual veridicality (in this special sense). I respond to these arguments, and sketch a realist alternative.

In recent work, Christopher Peacocke has argued for a kind of realism (or anti-reductionism) about magnitudes such as temperature and spatial distance. Peacocke’s argument is that magnitudes are an ineliminable commitment of scientific and everyday explanations (including high-level explanations), and that they are the natural candidates for semantic values of our ordinary magnitude talk, and for contents of our mental states. I critique these arguments, in particular focusing on whether the realist has a satisfactory account of how high-level magnitude facts are grounded in lower-level facts. I argue that a less realist (i.e., more reductionist approach) is preferable, or at least viable. I also aim to substantially clarify what is at stake in the debate.

It is increasingly common in cognitive science and philosophy of perception to regard perceptual processing as a probabilistic engine, taking into account uncertainty in computing representations of the distal environment. Models of this kind often postulate probabilistic representations, or what we will call probabilistic states. These are states that in some sense mark or represent information about the probabilities of distal conditions. It has also been argued that perceptual experience itself in some sense represents uncertainty (Morrison, Analytic Philosophy 57 (1): 15–48, 2016 ). In this article, we will first consider three models of sensory activity from perceptual neuroscience, namely signal detection theory (SDT), probabilistic population codes (PPC), and sampling. We will then reflect on the sense in which the probabilistic states introduced in these models are probabilistic representations. To sharpen this discussion, we will compare and contrast these probabilistic states to credences as they are understood in epistemology. We will suggest that probabilistic representation, in an appropriately robust sense, can be understood as a form of analog representation. In the last part of the paper, we apply this to the issue of whether conscious experience represents uncertainty—we will interpret this as the claim that there are phenomenal features of experience that serve as analog probabilistic representations.

This chapter discusses Andy Clark’s recent explorations of Bayesian perceptual models and predictive processing. In the first part, the chapter discusses the predictive processing (PP) framework, explicating its relationship with hierarchical Bayesian models in theories of perception. In the second part, it examines the relationship between perception and action in the PP model. The overarching goal is twofold: first, to get clearer on the picture of mental activity that Clark is presenting, including what exactly is represented at the levels of the perception/action hierarchy, and the nature of the information processing it postulates; second, although the framework presented by Clark certainly has interesting novel features, some of his glosses on it are misleading. In particular, Clark’s interpretation of predictive processing as essentially a top-down, expectation-driven process, on which perception is aptly thought of as “controlled hallucination,” exaggerates the contrast with the traditional picture of perception as bottom-up and stimulus-driven. Additionally, despite the rhetoric, Clark’s PP model substantially preserves the traditional distinction between perception and action.

I argue that reductive materialism supports a deflationary view of consciousness I call “Deflationary Pluralism”. The Deflationary Pluralist believes that a creature that lacked phenomenal consciousness could have “quasi-conscious” states that have a similar functional profile to our conscious states, and which are just as significant as conscious states, in various senses: their quasi-consciousness is just as deep a joint in nature as our consciousness, and is just as epistemically and morally important.

This paper discusses a neo-Humean view on which the experiences within a single stream of consciousness can be understood without reference to a self, in a certain sense. More specifically, it discusses what I call the ‘Subject Non-identity Thesis’. If conscious experiences are understood as instantiations of experiential properties, we can define the “logical subject” of an experience as the object instantiating the relevant property. According to the Subject Non-identity thesis, different experiences within a stream of consciousness, even those occurring at the same time, may not have the same logical subject; for example, their logical subjects might be different brain regions. I explain why this is a plausible view, and defend it against a number of objections.

Overview of some of the key philosophical problems encountered making sense of the notion of "subjective time", with a focus on the experience of duration. The paper unpacks some of the assumptions behind an intuitive picture of duration experience I call the "simple flow" view, highlighting the availability of alternative models. It then considers a number of obstacles to providing an account of the individuation of subjective features of duration experience.

What assumptions are built into the claim that experience has “phenomenal properties,” and could these assumptions turn out to be false? I consider the issue specifically for the similarity relations between experiences: for example, experiences of different shades of red are more similar to each other than an experience of red and an experience of green. It is commonly thought that we have a special kind of epistemic access to experience that is more secure than our access to the external environment. In the first part of the paper, I argue than one way of elucidating this claim is especially plausible—that systematic error, of the kind subjects make about the external environment in traditional “skeptical” scenarios, is not conceivable for introspection of experience, including for our knowledge of similarity relations. I argue that focusing on similarity relations gives us a more interesting version of the argument than for other forms of experiential introspection. Then in the second part of the paper I describe an example, inspired by a similar case due to Sydney Shoemaker, in which a subject, despite being fully rational and attentive, apparently is systematically mistaken about the character of their experience in a surprising way. I argue that the example calls into question whether there are properties of experience satisfying the epistemic access constraint, and therefore whether experience has “phenomenal properties” in the intuitive sense.

This paper is part of a symposium on David Chalmers’ book “The Character of Consciousness”.

This paper defends the Atomic view I argue for in “Temporal Experience and the Temporal Structure of Experience” from objections against it that can be found in the literature. I focus in particular on Phillips’ objection that Atomism is inconsistent with the correct account of how we are introspectively aware of experience changing over time, and Dainton’s objection that Atomism is inconsistent with the felt continuity of experience.

I assess a number of connected ideas about temporal experience that are introspectively plausible, but which I believe can be argued to be incorrect. These include the idea that temporal experiences are extended experiential processes, that they have an internal structure that in some way mirrors the structure of the apparent events they present, and the idea that time in experience is in some way represented by time itself. I explain how these ideas can be developed into more sharply defined views, and then argue that these views are inconsistent with certain empirical facts about how time is represented in the brain. These facts instead support a kind of atomic view, on which temporal experiences are temporally unstructured atoms.

I give an account of the difference between "Holistic" and "Atomistic" views of conscious experience. On the Holistic view, we enjoy a unified "field" of awareness, whose parts are mere modifications of the whole, and therefore owe their existence to the whole. There is some tendency to saddle those who reject the Holistic field model with a (perhaps) implausible "building block" view. I distinguish a number of different theses about the parts of an experience that are suggested by the "building block" metaphor, but which can be rejected by those who also reject the holistic field view.

This is a companion piece to “Alien Subjectivity and the Importance of Consciousness”. It argues that if Reductive Materialism is true, this gives us a reason to doubt that conscious experience is unique in its epistemic features: epistemically, being a zombie could be just as good as being conscious.

I offer some responses to Prosser’s ‘Experiencing Time’, one of whose goals is to debunk a view of temporal experience somewhat prevalent in the metaphysics literature, which I call ‘Perceptualism’. According to Perceptualism: it is part of the content of perceptual experience that time passes in a metaphysically strong sense: the present has a metaphysically privileged status, and time passes in virtue of changes in which events this ‘objective present’ highlights, and moreover this gives us evidence in favor of strong passage. Prosser argues that perception cannot be sensitive to whether the strong passage obtains, and therefore cannot represent strong passage in a way that gives us evidence of its truth. Although I accept this conclusion, I argue that Prosser’s argument for it is problematic. It threatens to over-generalize to rule out uncontroversial cases of perceptual knowledge, such as our knowledge that we live in a spatial world. Furthermore, a successful argument ruling out perceptual evidence for strong passage would have to give constraints on the theory/observation distinction of a kind not provided by Prosser’s discussion. I also comment on several other parts of the book.