Deutsche Gesellschaft
für phänomenologische Forschung

Buch | Kapitel

184100

Unconscious subjectivity

Joseph U. Neisser

pp. 38-60

Abstrakt

Because the notion of unconscious thought plays a crucial explanatory role in cognitive neuroscience (and philosophy of mind generally), it deserves careful scrutiny. But the nature of unconscious mental states is rarely considered problematic today. Unconscious thoughts are widely understood to be information states that cause behavior. Consciousness, by contrast, is considered a hard problem because it exhibits features that information functions do not. Consciousness is qualitative, subjective, and strongly connected with agency. These dimensions of conscious thought are not found in the Swiss Army knife assortment of specialized computational mechanisms featured in mainstream cognitive neuroscience. Roughly, consciousness resists explanation because information can always be processed without it, as any zombie will surely tell you (Chalmers, 1996 & 1998; Levine, 2001).

Publication details

Published in:

Neisser Joseph U. (2015) The science of subjectivity. Dordrecht, Springer.

Seiten: 38-60

DOI: 10.1057/9781137466624_3

Referenz:

Neisser Joseph U. (2015) Unconscious subjectivity, In: The science of subjectivity, Dordrecht, Springer, 38–60.