Pike's phenomenology of mystical experiences identifies precisely where theological content can appear within the structure of Christian mystics' experiences. This analysis extends to Buddhist and other accounts of "pure" or "nibbanic" consciousness reached through deep meditation. A contemporary "modal" model of inner awareness is examined, proposing that a form of pure consciousness underlies and encompasses additional content in various types of consciousness, including mystical experiences across different traditions and experiences of "full union" with God.
This paper examines the motivations behind the Immediacy thesis, which is the main premise supporting essential representationalism about perceptual experience (ER). ER holds that every phenomenal property necessarily entails a representational property. The Immediacy thesis states that the phenomenal relation to an experience's qualitative profile inherently involves a representational relation to the qualitative profile of the represented object, with both profiles being type-identical. The author clarifies ER's commitments and analyzes the role of the Immediacy thesis in four arguments for representationalism: transparency, inference to the best explanation, perceptual seemings, and perceptual capacities. The conclusion synthesizes these analyses and elaborates on the Immediacy thesis's dialectical role.
A critical commentary on Neil Mehta's pluralist theory of conscious perception, which claims that conscious perception involves two distinct kinds of sensory awareness, including 'deep awareness.' The author raises three objections. First, Mehta argues that deep awareness explains how conscious states infallibly reveal essences of sensory quality universals; the author undermines part of that defense and argues that such revelation is false. Second, Mehta's 'E theory' uses deep awareness to explain hard problems of consciousness; the author argues this theory is false. Third, Mehta claims that being deeply aware of a universal partly constitutes an experience's phenomenal character; the author argues this is false.