On Consciousness

Consciousness and the World

When I propose an identity between consciousness and the world, I am following the same explanatory strategy scientists and philosophers have always adopted. I have simply settled on a new candidate for identity: not ideas, not neurons, but the world itself.

January 29, 2018

Where Are Words?

We don’t so much think in a language—English, Italian, whatever—but constantly rearrange our experiences, our world, of which the language we speak is a part. It’s world-ish!

December 27, 2017

The Pizza Thought Experiment

Pleasing, mouth-watering, steamy—these are all adjectives that apply to the pizza or to the body’s reactions to the pizza. But what you like to think of as the thought, when you think about a pizza, is simply the object.

November 26, 2017

Consciousness Object Lesson

What is “an object” in the end? And what is “the world” that these objects make up?

October 9, 2017

Hardening of Consciousness

The idea of “the hard problem” in consciousness has kept us in a stalemate. It insists that we have no solution to the question of consciousness, while simultaneously assuming that the constraints governing in any enquiry into it are already well defined and unassailable.

September 11, 2017

A Test for Consciousness?

Will we ever really know what, or even where, consciousness is? Is there any way to get at it scientifically, conclusively?

July 20, 2017

Who’s at the Wheel?

For any materialist vision of consciousness, the crucial stumbling block is the question of free will.

June 17, 2017

The Body and Us

What is the function of the body in consciousness? Am I my body, or my brain, or a part of my brain?

May 11, 2017

The Reality of Dreams

If dreams offer an access to an unconstrained mental world generated within, why is their content so familiar? If color is produced entirely and exclusively in the brain, why don’t we ever dream of new colors?

April 20, 2017

The Mind in the Whirlwind

To consider experience as one with the object experienced is not perhaps so counterintuitive after all. What we want to do today is flesh out what Riccardo calls the “Mind-Object Identity Theory” and confront some of these immediate objections.

March 16, 2017

The Object of Consciousness

Today we have set ourselves a simple task: to review all the ways philosophers have supposed a subject might relate to and become conscious of an object, setting aside once and for all those hypotheses that have clearly failed and asking, Is there one approach which has not yet been given due attention? Riccardo believes there is.

February 22, 2017

The Ice Cream Problem

We aren’t any closer to accounting for consciousness or even establishing where exactly it “happens.” How have scientists and philosophers dealt with this impasse? A number of them have begun to look outside the head.

January 26, 2017

Does Information Smell?

We remain unsure where or how consciousness happens. Why this apparent consensus in the absence of convincing evidence? And what new ideas are internalists exploring to advance the science?

December 30, 2016

The Color of Consciousness

There are no colors out there in the world, Galileo tells us. They only exist in our heads. Tim Parks asks Riccardo Manzotti, philosopher, psychologist, and robotics engineer, how it comes about that we see color.

December 8, 2016

Consciousness: What Is It?

Tim Parks asks Riccardo Manzotti, philosopher, psychologist, and robotics engineer, What do we mean when we say “consciousness”? Are we talking about perceptive experience, memory, thought, trains of thought, or mental life in general?

November 21, 2016