66 min listen
Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011)
Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011)
ratings:
Length:
63 minutes
Released:
Jun 15, 2011
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skepticism regarding our knowledge of the phenomenology of conscious experience. We don’t know if we dream in color or black and white, we don’t know whether tilted coins look elliptical or round, and we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abundant. Schwitzgebel’s position is based on close examination of historical philosophical texts and current psychological experiments that show radical variability in reports of experience that seem unlikely to reflect radical differences in the experiences themselves. In this wide-ranging interview, Schwitzgebel considers whether psychologist Edward Titchener was on to something with his training of expert introspectors, why current theories of the neural correlates of consciousness are question-begging, and how reports of conscious experiences may be grounded in analogies to familiar media.
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Released:
Jun 15, 2011
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Kristin Andrews, “Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology” (MIT Press, 2012): The ability to figure out the mental lives of others – what they want, what they believe, what they know — is basic to our relationships. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this ability by accurately simulating the thought processes of suspects in order to so... by New Books in Psychology