In 'Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness', Frankish argues for illusionism: the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, but merely seems to exist. Illusionism, he says, 'replaces the hard problem with the illusion problem -- the problem of explaining how the illusion of phenomenality arises and why it is so powerful'. The illusion of phenomenality is indeed quite powerful. In fact, it is much more powerful than any other illusion, in the sense that we face (...) a very special and unique intuitive resistance when trying to accept that phenomenality is an illusion. This is bad news for illusionists, because this means that they cannot entirely model their explanation of the illusion of consciousness on the explanation of other illusions. Explaining this unique intuitive resistance to illusionism may therefore constitute the hardest aspect of the illusion problem. However, I think that this aspect of the problem is solvable. I will outline a possible solution, which is based on the hypothesis that our (illusory) introspective representations of phenomenal states characterize them as having unique epistemological properties and as playing a special epistemological role. (shrink)

The experience of conscious will is the feeling that we are doing things. This feeling occurs for many things we do, conveying to us again and again the sense that we consciously cause our actions. But the feeling may not be a true reading of what is happening in our minds, brains, and bodies as our actions are produced. The feeling of conscious will can be fooled. This happens in clinical disorders such as alien hand syndrome, dissociative identity disorder, and (...) schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in people without disorders, phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, facilitated communication, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and trance channeling also illustrate anomalies of will – cases when actions occur without will or will occurs without action. This book brings these cases together with research evidence from laboratories in psychology to explore a theory of apparent mental causation. According to this theory, when a thought appears in consciousness just prior to an action, is consistent with the action, and appears exclusive of salient alternative causes of the action, we experience conscious will and ascribe authorship to ourselves for the action. Experiences of conscious will thus arise from processes whereby the mind interprets itself – not from processes whereby mind creates action. Conscious will, in this view, is an indication that we think we have caused an action, not a revelation of the causal sequence by which the action was produced. Key Words: apparent mental causation; automatism; conscious will; determinism; free will; perceived control. (shrink)

The common image of the fully virtuous person is of someone with perfect self‐command and self‐perception, who always makes correct evaluations. However, modesty appears to be a real virtue, and it seems contradictory for someone to believe that she is modest. Accordingly, traditional defenders of phronesis (the view that virtue involves practical wisdom) deny that modesty is a virtue, while defenders of modesty such as Julia Driver deny that phronesis is required for virtue. I offer a new theory of modesty—the (...) two standards account—under which phronesis and modesty are reconciled. Additionally, since the two standards account involves reflection on moral ideals, I provide an account of the proper nature of moral ideals. (shrink)

In the first monograph in this exciting area since then, William Fish develops a comprehensive disjunctive theory, incorporating detailed accounts of the three ...

Tensism holds that the present moment has a special status that sets it apart from the past and the future, independently of perceivers. One of the main objections to this view has been Einstein’s argument from special relativity, which aims at showing that absolute simultaneity is a myth. We argue that the moving observer in a causal variant of Einstein’s original thought experiment is subject to a temporal illusion. Owing to the analogy of the cases, this casts doubt on (...) the conjectures that there is no privileged frame of reference and that special relativity poses a problem for tensism. (shrink)

Could the standard interpretation of Gettier cases reflect a fundamental confusion? Indeed so. How well can epistemologists argue for the truth of that standard interpretation? Not so well. A methodological mistake is allowing them not to notice how they are simply (and inappropriately) being infallibilists when regarding Gettiered beliefs as failing to be knowledge. There is no Gettier problem that we have not merely created for ourselves by unwittingly being infallibilists about knowledge.

The rubber hand illusion is one of the most commonly used paradigms to examine the sense of body ownership. Touches are synchronously applied to the real hand, hidden from view, and a false hand in an anatomically congruent position. During the illusion one may perceive that the feeling of touch arises from the false hand, and that the false hand is one's own. The relationship between referral of touch and body ownership in the illusion is unclear, and (...) some articles average responses to statements addressing these experiences, which may be inappropriate depending on the research question of interest. To address these concerns, we re-analyzed three freely available datasets to better understand the relationship between referral of touch and feeling of ownership in the RHI. We found that most participants who report a feeling of ownership also report referral of touch, and that referral of touch and ownership show a moderately strong positive relationship that was highly replicable. In addition, referral of touch tends to be reported more strongly and more frequently than the feeling of ownership over the hand. The former observations confirm that referral of touch and ownership are related experiences in the RHI. The latter, however, indicate that when pooling the statements one may obtain a higher number of illusion ‘responders’ compared to considering the ownership statements in isolation. These results have implications for the RHI as an experimental paradigm. (shrink)

We argue that the view that we misperceive time as passing is self-undermining.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 6, Page 44-45, June 2012.

The passage of time seems to be a fundamental aspect of experience. However, most descriptions of the passage of time itself are incompatible with the four-dimensional block universe model of space and time, in which time is extended like space, and all states of affairs exist equally and eternally in this varied tapestry of space and time. The tension between temporal passage and the block universe seems to leave one with the option of either abandoning the block universe in favor (...) of a metaphysics that can accommodate our experience, or holding that this experience of passage is illusory. I argue for a third option: that we have certain dynamic experiences, which lend themselves to the view that time passes, those dynamic experiences can be accounted for within the block universe model without any additional mechanism, and those dynamic experiences are not illusory, but veridical. (shrink)

This is a preprint draft. Please cite published version (DOI: 10.1111/mila.12385). The aim of this paper is to provide a novel analysis of anorexia nervosa (AN) in the context of the sense of agency literature. I first show that two accounts of anorexia nervosa that we ought to take seriously— i.e., the first personal reports of those who have experienced it firsthand as well as the research that seeks to explain anorexic behavior from an empirical perspective— appear to be thoroughly (...) in tension with one another in their descriptions of anorexic actions. Rather than proceeding at this point by way of disregarding anorexic testimony as meaningless or insincere, I instead offer a positive account of the sense of agency in anorexia nervosa that renders these two depictions compatible. The resultant picture of anorexic behavior is one that accommodates current empirical findings while also providing valuable insight into how it is that anorexics can sincerely report feeling fully in control over their food restriction. (shrink)

Under normal circumstances, we experience that our center of awareness is located behind our eyes and inside our own body. To learn more about the perceptual processes that underlie this tight coupling between the spatial dimensions of our consciously perceived self and our physical body, we conducted a series of experiments using an ‘out-of-body illusion’. In this illusion, the conscious sense of self is displaced in the testing room by experimental manipulation of the congruency of visual and tactile (...) information and a change in the visual perspective. We demonstrate that when healthy individuals experience that they are located in a different place from their real body, they disown this body and no longer perceive it as part of themselves. Our findings are important because they reveal a relationship between the representation of self-location in the local environment and the multisensory representation of one’s own body. (shrink)

The millionaire’s idle, talentless and self-centered daughter inherits a large sum of money that she does not really deserve. The victim of kidnapping rots in a cell in 1980s Beirut in a captivity that springs not from any wrong he has done but from his ill-fortune in being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The hard-working, brilliant and self-denying Nobel Prize-winning scientist receives a large cheque for his extraordinarily productive labours. The murderer spends decades in jail for the (...) terrible crimes he has freely committed. The first two cases are cases where justice seems ill-served, where someone’s good or ill-fortune reflects not what they deserve but mere luck. The second two are cases where justice seems to be honoured: what befalls Scientist and Murderer reflects not their good or bad luck but their merits and deserts. (shrink)

The Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's first Critique is notorious for two reasons. First, it appears to contradict itself in saying that the idea of the systematic unity of nature is and is not transcendental. Second, in the passages in which Kant appears to espouse the former alternative, he appears to be making a significant amendment to his account of the conditions of the possibility of experience in the Transcendental Analytic. I propose a solution to both of these (...) difficulties. With regard to the first, I argue that Kant does not contradict himself. With regard to the second, I argue that Kant is not making any change to his view of the conditions of the possibility of experience espoused in the Transcendental Analytic. The underlying cause of these apparent problems is also their solution: the transcendental illusion that nature is necessarily systematic. (shrink)

The dissociation Block provides between phenomenal and access consciousness (P-consciousness and A-consciousness) captures much of our intuition about conscious experience. However, it raises a major methodological puzzle, and is not uniquely supported by the empirical evidence. We provide an alternative interpretation based on the notion of levels of representation and partial awareness.

In this paper we introduce a paradigm of experiment which, we believe, is of interest both in psychology and philosophy. There the subject wears an HMD (head-mount display), and a camera is set up at the upper corner of the room, in which the subject is. As a result, the subject observes his own body through the HMD. We will mainly focus on the philosophical relevance of this experiment, especially to the thesis of so-called 'immunity to error through misidentification relative (...) to the first-person pronoun'. We will argue that one experiment conducted in this setting, which we call the bodily illusion experiment, provides a counterexample to that thesis. (shrink)

I review arguments demonstrating how the concept of “particle” numbers arises in the form of equidistant energy eigenvalues of coupled harmonic oscillators representing free fields. Their quantum numbers (numbers of nodes of the wave functions) can be interpreted as occupation numbers for objects with a formal mass (defined by the field equation) and spatial wave number (“momentum”) characterizing classical field modes. A superposition of different oscillator eigenstates, all consisting of n modes having one node, while all others have none, defines (...) a non-degenerate “n-particle wave function”. Other discrete properties and phenomena (such as particle positions and “events”) can be understood by means of the fast but continuous process of decoherence: the irreversible dislocalization of superpositions. Any wave-particle dualism thus becomes obsolete. The observation of individual outcomes of this decoherence process in measurements requires either a subsequent collapse of the wave function or a “branching observer” in accordance with the Schrödinger equation—both possibilities applying clearly after the decoherence process. Any probability interpretation of the wave function in terms of local elements of reality, such as particles or other classical concepts, would open a Pandora’s box of paradoxes, as is illustrated by various misnomers that have become popular in quantum theory. (shrink)

Peter Woolcock, in Ruse's Darwinian Meta-Ethics: A Critique, argues that the subjectivist (nonobjectivist) Darwinian metaethics proposed by Michael Ruse (in Taking Darwin Seriously) cannot work, because the illusion of objectivity that Ruse claims is essential to morality breaks down when it is recognized as illusion, and there then remain no good reasons for acknowledging or following moral obligations. Woolcock, however, is mistaken in supposing that moral behaviour requires rational motivation. Ruse's Darwinian metaethical analysis shows why such objective support (...) for morality is neither plausible nor necessary; and when that is recognized, it can also be seen that Ruse's proposed illusion of moral objectivity is superfluous. (shrink)

It has been claimed that empirical work in psychology requires the attribution of representational content to perceptual states: that is, the attribution of veridicality conditions to those states. This is a claim that can only be evaluated by the examination of actual empirical research. In this paper I argue that talk of ‘representation’ in at least one area of research in the psychology of perception can be reinterpreted so as to avoid the attribution of veridicality conditions. This area is the (...) study of human capacities to perceive the relative numerosities of collections of objects. (shrink)

Eliminativism about intentional content argues for its conclusion from the partial correctness of all three of the theses Hutto and Satne seek to combine: neo-Cartesianism is correct to this extent: if there is intentional content it must originally be mental. Neo-Behaviorism is correct to this extent: attribution of intentional content is basically a heuristic device for predicting the behavior of higher vertebrates. Neo-Pragmatism is right to this extent: the illusion of intentionality in language is the source of the (...) class='Hi'>illusion of intentionality in thought. Eliminativists employ the insights of all three “neo”-theses to explain why there is no such thing and why the systematic illusion that there is intentional content runs so deep. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider various potential challenges to free will from the modern mind sciences. After motivating the importance of considering these challenges, I outline the argument structure for such challenges: they require simultaneously establishing a particular condition for free will and an empirical challenge to that condition. I consider several potential challenges: determinism, naturalism, and epiphenomenalism, and explain why none of these philosophical challenges is bolstered by new discoveries from neuroscience and psychology. I then respond to relevant empirical (...) challenges to the role of consciousness and rationality in action. (shrink)

In this journal, Brogaard and Marlow recently argued that the relativity of simultaneity is an illusion. We claim their argument is fallacious.

Much of the contemporary debate in the philosophy of mind is concerned with the clash between certain strongly held intuitions and what science tells us about the mind and its relation to the world. What science tells us about the mind points strongly towards some version or other of physicalism. The intuitions, in one way or another, suggest that there is something seriously incomplete about any purely physical story about the mind.

ABSTRACT This article advances a critical approach to the analysis of social policy texts drawing on the philosophical perspectives of hyperrealism, surrealism, ethics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on official government texts and speeches on the continuing development of Singapore’s education policy, the paper examines the way metaphors of flexibility, diversity, choice, and opportunity are used within an evolving ideological context that work to continually produce truth conditions as justifications for inequality. In doing this, the analysis foregrounds a functional aspect (...) of policy metaphors as divisive mechanisms of neo-liberalism through associating individuals with the appearance of discriminatory forms of economic materiality which does not in fact exist in reality. (shrink)

Debate on free will with Christian List, Gregg Caruso, and Cory Clark. The exchange is focused on Christian List's book Why Free Will Is Real.

The much larger appearance of the moon near horizon than the perceived size of the moon at zenith has motivated many scientists to develop theories that aim at explaining this puzzling phenomenon. Considering that the size of retinal images of the moon in these positions are very similar, the explanation of difference in their apparent sizes has relied on perceptual cues of distance embedded in the retinal image of their respective contexts. Although this account of the moon illusion is (...) quite popular, it does not explain all aspects of this phenomenon. The theoretical formulation of the moon illusion based on other factors such as size contrast later may have had some advantages but has also created some new problems. Although the moon is perceived in a three-dimensional (3D) environment, the present analysis proposes that an explanation of the moon illusion based on two-dimensional (2D) cues can remove some of the unnecessary problems. The empty space and size contrast that have already been considered in explaining classic geometric-optical illusions play a parallel role in explaining the moon illusion. In other words, the role of open space in interaction with the image of the moon and different objects near horizon, all reflected on the retina, are considered as the main explaining factors. The advantages of this approach will be discussed and some of the facts pertaining to the moon illusion will be explained within this theoretical framework. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag wird für eine Theorie der ästhetischen Erfahrung des Films argumentiert, in der die spezifisch aisthetischen und phänomenologischen Dimensionen einen auch normativen Status für das Filmästhetische zugeschrieben bekommen. Der Begriff des ‚Leihkörpers‘ wird zu diesem Zweck eingeführt und hinsichtlich seines epistemischen Charakters als eine Form von implizitem Wissen ausgewiesen.