Mind & Consciousness
What is it like to be anything?
Experience, perception, selfhood, and the competing accounts of how minds arise.
Subjects
Embodiment & selfhood
Bodily ownership, the witnessing perspective, and the relation between immediate awareness and a personal history.
Perception & the interface
How a useful perceptual world relates to the reality it represents, including Donald Hoffman’s proposal.
Experience & explanation
The relation between descriptions of mental function and the fact that there is something it feels like to experience.
All entries
Does experience make a difference?
Our lives respond to pain, thought, and feeling. Explaining their causal role becomes difficult when experience is treated as something added to an already sufficient physical process.
Hoffman and the useful world
Donald Hoffman's interface theory separates successful perception from faithful depiction. Its challenge reaches beyond ordinary perceptual error.
The brain as a filter
A filter theory treats the brain as a condition of access to consciousness. Its strongest question concerns dependence; its hardest task is explaining what the filter actually does.
The fact of experience
A description of what a mind does leaves a disputed question about why there is anything it feels like to be that mind.
The witness and the biography
The immediate fact of experiencing differs from the story of a particular person. That distinction opens a serious inquiry into selfhood without proving a timeless observer.
What neural intervention shows
Altering brain activity can alter a specific experience. That establishes a causal role for neural processes while leaving the ultimate nature of experience disputed.
What physicalism commits us to
Physicalism makes a claim about the foundations of reality. Its success depends on explaining experience, rather than merely locating the machinery associated with it.
When the body feels like ours
Bodily ownership is part of experience and can be experimentally altered. Its construction helps explain embodiment while leaving the nature of the experiencing subject open.