Eric Schwitzgebel

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445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2011 last heard Jun 2011

Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) · 15 Jun 2011 podcast

Rather, the perceptual knowledge somehow flows from

more directly from the input into the eye than that.

Well, yeah.

I need a chalkboard because I think, I mean, you can draw various, I think there are various options that are available about how, say, the causal arrows would work.

In general, though, I am somewhat inclined generally to see the mind as having lots of feedback and looping mechanisms.

So, yes, to the extent that you're talking about, you know,

feedback mechanisms between the experience and our knowledge of the experience and our judgments about the outside world and those all being entangled with each other.

I'm pretty sympathetic to that.

But what I definitely don't want to do is ground our knowledge of the outside world in a prior knowledge of our experience of that world.

Right.

So I am skeptical of all general theories of consciousness.

I think that we, we can have kind of localized theories of, uh, you know, I'm not sure I call them theories of consciousness, but we can have localized knowledge about the relationship between conscious states and neural states.

But these kind of general grand sweeping theories, uh, I think are, well, probably one of them is right or some, some, some version of something like what we have might be right.

But,

I don't think we have solid epistemic ground for accepting any of them.

And that's because I think that, just think about the neural correlates type case first.

In order to discover what the neural correlates of consciousness are, you have to have at least a vague idea, at least a general idea, a first approximation of what

mental states are the conscious ones, right?

If it turns out that consciousness is super abundant, right, so that all kinds of early visual processing is conscious even without attention, if ants are conscious and frogs and termites or whatever, right, if consciousness is super abundant, then you're going to have one kind of view of the neural correlates of consciousness and one kind of view of the metaphysics of consciousness, right?

If consciousness is super sparse, so that really you only get consciousness, say, maybe even just only in human beings, or only in relatively cognitively sophisticated animals.

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