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

Right.

And, you know, I think she's kind of looking at it going, hmm, you know, puzzled.

Right.

I asked the child, well, does is she thinking about anything?

What might she be thinking about?

And they're completely poor at answering this type of question, both for themselves and for others.

We're talking about four or five year old children.

They seem to have pretty poor knowledge of their stream of experience.

And that, right, maybe it completely changes radically, and we're just absolutely perfect or incredibly good about our own experience when we're adults.

But I guess I wasn't so sure of that, and I didn't think it had been studied very carefully, either in psychology or in philosophy.

So I started getting interested in that.

And one of the things that led me into this, one of the first things I started thinking about was our knowledge of our dreams.

Well, it's a fun case that gets people's attention, that people tend to have opinions about, and it's one of the first ones I had been thinking of.

And I think it fits because it really is about conscious experience or phenomenology in the sense that those terms are generally used in contemporary philosophy of mind, right?

Yeah.

In ordinary parlance, we'll sometimes say that someone who's asleep is not conscious.

But if consciousness is having, as I think most philosophers mean it, something like having a stream of experience, having something that's like to be you, having things like imageries and perceptions that are experienced, then...

I think we probably do have those while we're dreaming.

I mean, I think the ordinary conception of dreaming is that it involves something like sensory or quasi-sensory experiences or imagery experiences or something like that, emotional experiences.

So to the extent it has that kind of stuff in it, then it would be an example of consciousness or phenomenology in the sense that I intend it and I think is the mainstream sense in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind.

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