Guest Lecture: Tom Roberts (Edinburgh)

“Consciousness and perceptual skills”

A central problem in the philosophy of consciousness is that of the explanatory gap: the apparent impossibility of an intelligible explanation of phenomenal consciousness in physical or functional terms. In this paper, I argue that we can begin to tackle this problem by appeal to the connections between conscious experiences and the skills that they afford for the embodied subject. A subject’s perceptual sensitivity to the world poises her to perform a suite of activities and interventions – both bodily and epistemic – and consciousness, on the view that I endorse, is a non-inferential grasp of this afforded space of actions. http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/students/phd/tomroberts.html All are welcome!

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