Phenomenal consciousness—the subjective feel of experience—can be fully explained in naturalistic, scientifically acceptable terms. Peter Carruthers argues against the view that consciousness is inherently mysterious, developing a novel account based on higher-order thought. Drawing on interdisciplinary resources, he shows that this approach explains away extravagant claims about consciousness while substantively accounting for the subjectivity of experience. The book surveys a wide range of extant theories and is aimed at readers in philosophy and psychology.
The paper revisits the debate about cognitive phenomenology, elaborating and defending a proposal that the test for irreducible phenomenology is the presence of explanatory gaps. It argues that the debate should be aligned between non-conceptual and conceptual or propositional phenomenology, rather than between sensory and cognitive phenomenology. The authors defend three varieties of non-sensory, non-conceptual phenomenology: valence, a sense of approximate number, and a sense of elapsed time.
If a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness is correct and fully reductive, then questions about consciousness in nonhuman animals should be abandoned—not because they are too difficult, but because there are no substantive facts to discover. The argument hinges on the idea that global broadcasting is all-or-nothing in humans but framed in terms that imply gradations across species, yet the concept of phenomenal consciousness does not permit mental states to be conscious to some degree. The paper first displays some virtues of global workspace theory to motivate the discussion.