Philosophy of Mind Seminar (Friday - Week 6, HT25)

Abstract: Discrimination and informative identity, construed as someone’s coming to know that things are distinct or identical, are standard scientific and philosophical measures of conscious perception and the thoughts it makes possible. These measures conflate the identity of experiences or thoughts with knowledge about identity. As a result, I argue, these measures systematically underestimate consciousness, lending false support to the influential contemporary view that much of human perception and action occurs non-consciously. In both the science of consciousness and the philosophy of perception-based thought, conflating psychological identity with knowledge about identity forces theorists to adopt metacognitive measures: measures that depend on subjects’ capacity to discriminate their own psychology. By distinguishing the identity of perceptual experiences and of perception-based thoughts from knowledge about identity, I show that these metacognitive measures are gratuitously demanding, and I sketch how to defend the view that human action on perceived stimuli is an essentially conscious achievement.