Consciousness

Consciousness - phenomenal experience such as sensations, emotions, and other qualitative subjective states - poses an intriguing and as yet unsolved problem for naturalists seeking a unified picture of the world. We know conscious experience arises in conjunction with certain neural goings on in our brains, but there is no consensus in the philo-scientific, naturalist community about why it should arise, or how. Naturalists often gravitate to physicalism in proposed explanations - that consciousness must be essentially physical - but naturalism is not necessarily equivalent to physicalism. Not all phenomena need be spatio-temporal to qualify as naturalistically real, and experience is possibly one example. The papers in this section try to pose the explanatory question clearly, and then explore the possibilities of a trans-physical/mental representationalism in answering it. 

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