''Thinking about Consciousness'' by

David Papineau David Papineau (; born 1947) is a British academic philosopher, born in Como, Italy. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and previously taught for several y ...

, is a book (published in 2002) about

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

that describes what Papineau calls the 'Intuition of Distinctness'. He does not so much attempt to prove that

materialism Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materiali ...

is right (although he presents his 'Causal argument' for it in the first chapter) as analyse why dualism seems intuitively plausible. He makes various propositions for future research in his book.

Causal argument

In the first chapter of his book, Papineau offers the causal argument as what he considers the best argument for materialism: # Conscious mental occurrences have physical effects # All physical effects are fully caused by purely ''physical'' prior histories # The physical effects of conscious states are not always overdetermined by distinct causes. Materialism follows. Although Papineau recognises that it is possible to reject these premisses, he claims that to do so leads to empirically implausible conclusions.

Conceptual dualism

Not to be confused with

property dualism Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is composed of just one kind of substance— the physical kind—there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties ...

, or ontological dualism, conceptual dualism suggests that we have two different ways of thinking about the properties of a single substance. The distinctness between these different kinds of concepts is what causes the 'intuition of distinctness,' which Papineau suggests is responsible for dualism, and why it is such an attractive hypothesis. Specifically, Papineau says that these two types of concepts are distinct, because the phenomenal concepts possess some part of the actual experience. Our concept of red includes a 'faint copy' of red, whereas our conception of the human perceptual system includes no such faint copy.

Reaction

Susan Blackmore Susan Jane Blackmore (born 29 July 1951) is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known ...

characterized Papineau's book as "definitely written for philosophers rather than psychologists or neuroscientists" because of its focus on abstruse philosophical arguments. She concludes that "Papineau has helped explain why" it's so easy for us to ''think'' there's an

explanatory gap In the philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the proposed difficulty that physicalist philosophies have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel subjectively when they are experienced. It is a ...

for consciousness, though she doubts that Papineau's insistence that consciousness is an inherently vague concept will dampen neuroscientific efforts to understand it better.

References

2002 non-fiction books English-language books Philosophy books {{philo-book-stub