Actual Consciousness: Database, Physicalities, Theory, Criteria, No Unique Mystery

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 76:271-300 (2015)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Is disagreement about consciousness largely owed to no adequate initial clarification of the subject, to people in fact answering different questions clarified as actual consciousness. Philosophical method like the scientific method includes transition from the figurative to literal theory or analysis. A new theory will also satisfy various criteria not satisfied by many existing theories. The objective physical world has specifiable general characteristics including spatiality, lawfulness, being in science, connections with perception, and so on. Actualism, the literal theory or analysis of actual consciousness, deriving mainly from the figurative database, is that actual consciousness has counterpart but partly different general characteristics. Actual consciousness is thus subjectively physical. So physicality in general consists in objective and also subjective physicality. Consciousness in the case of perception is only the dependent existence of a subjective external physical world out there, often a room. But cognitive and affective consciousness, various kinds of thinking and wanting, differently subjectively physical, is internal – subjectively physical representations-with-attitude, representations that also are actual. They differ from the representations that are lines of type, sounds etc. by being actual. Thus they involve a subjectivity or individuality that is a lawful unity. Actualism, both an externalism and an internalism, does not impose on consciousness a flat uniformuity, and it uniquely satisfies the various criteria for an adequate theory, including naturalism. Actual consciousness is a right subject and is a necessary part of any inquiry whatever into consciousness. All of it is a subject for more science, a workplace. There is no unique barrier or impediment whatever to science, as often said, no want of understanding of the mind-consciousness connection, no known unique hard problem of consciousness, no insuperable difficulty having to do with physicality and the history of science, no arguable ground at all of mysterianism

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,551

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-07-12

Downloads
65 (#327,127)

6 months
8 (#597,840)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Ted Honderich
University College London

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Facing up to the problem of consciousness.David Chalmers - 1995 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3):200-19.
What is it like to be a bat?Thomas Nagel - 1974 - Philosophical Review 83 (4):435-50.
Minds, brains, and programs.John Searle - 1980 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3):417-57.
On a confusion about a function of consciousness.Ned Block - 1995 - Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2):227-–247.
What is it like to be a bat?Thomas Nagel - 1979 - In Mortal questions. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 435 - 450.

View all 30 references / Add more references